Three Cornell researchers receive Sloan Fellowships

Dichtel

Foster

Snavely

William Dichtel, Nate Foster and Noah Snavely are among 126 researchers selected from 51 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada to receive Sloan Research Fellowships for 2012.

Awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars — the next generation of scientific leaders.

"Today's Sloan research fellows are tomorrow's Nobel Prize winners," said Paul Joskow, president of the foundation. "These outstanding men and women are responsible for some of the most exciting science being done today. The foundation is proud to support them during this pivotal stage of their careers."

Dichtel, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, uses tools of synthetic and supramolecular chemistry to address fundamental challenges in the assembly and integration of nanostructured materials. One of Dichtel's research efforts focuses on improving the efficiency of organic photovoltaic devices by organizing light-absorbing molecules into ordered networks known as covalent organic frameworks. He has also pioneered methods for assembling molecules onto graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms with exceptional conductivity and mechanical strength, in such a way that these properties are not disrupted.

Foster, assistant professor of computer science, seeks to make computer networks more efficient, trustworthy and secure. If they are not, he suggests, it may be because the software that manages them is written in programming languages designed to work with just one machine at a time. With colleagues at Cornell and Princeton, he has created a new programming language, called FreNETic, to write software for the routers and switches that run networks, and has used it to create new programs to manage and troubleshoot networks. Other projects include a language that translates data bidirectionally between two formats, used to create a system that can access an existing collection of files as if it were a formally structured database.

Snavely, assistant professor of computer science, specializes in computer image analysis. He has developed software that finds matching features in many images of the same scene and stitches them together to create 3-D renderings, and has created renderings of many famous locations worldwide. He has launched an online game, "PhotoCity," in which players contribute photos of various parts of a location until a complete rendering is formed. An ongoing project is consolidating all the images that exist online into a "worldwide camera" that will let anyone see almost anything anywhere.

The Sloan Research Fellowships were established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. Six Cornell faculty members received Sloan Fellowships in 2011.

Candidates must be nominated by their peers and are then selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Fellows receive $50,000 to further their research.

 

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