For Immediate Release
Contact: Stephanie Foster
(650) 917-7142
Packard Foundation Marks 20 Years of No-Strings-Attached Funding for Scientific Discovery
LOS ALTOS, California — Twenty scientists and engineers at top U.S. universities received $17.5 million in grant funding today to advance innovative research projects through the David and Lucile Packard Foundation's Fellowships for Science and Engineering program.
The 2008 Packard Fellows include faculty members at universities across the United States. These fellows are addressing some of the most important research questions today in science and engineering on topics such as Alzheimer’s disease, stem cell function, evolutionary theory and the relationship between disease and environment.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Fellowship Program, which provides each recipient with an $875,000 grant over five years. The Fellowship Program has limited paperwork and administrative requirements, ensuring that young researchers across the country can dedicate their resources toward breakthroughs on vexing scientific problems.
"The Fellowship Program provides significant funding for the fellows to advance their research to new levels at a critical period early in their careers," said Lynn Orr, Packard Foundation Trustee, Chairman of the Fellowship Advisory Panel and Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor at Stanford University. "These talented scientists will use this funding to find innovative solutions to major scientific challenges."
The new class of fellows joins a distinguished group of researchers working across science and engineering disciplines, many of whom have gone on to win other distinguished awards including MacArthur Fellowships and the Nobel Prize. In the past 20 years, Packard fellows have contributed significantly in areas ranging from early universe observations to genetics of the human population, from quantum mechanics to ancient climates, from cryptography to rapid identification of viruses, and many more.
The recipients of the 2008 Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering are:
Doris Bachtrog
Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology: to combine comparative, computational and functional genomics approaches with evolutionary theory and modeling to study evolutionary and functional aspects of sex chromosome differentiation.
Gill Bejerano
Department of Developmental Biology and Computer Science, Stanford University
Biological Sciences: to study the origins and evolution of human regulatory regions, and understand how they encode their individual and synergistic roles, and how they contribute to human disease and species adaptation.
Steven Furlanetto
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles
Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology: to study innovative data analysis algorithms to measure cosmological information optimally, allowing even the relatively modest first generation of 21 cm telescopes to study the rich astrophysics and cosmology of the "dark ages" of cosmic history.
Margaret Gardel
Department of Physics, University of Chicago
Physics: to research how shape change and force generation at the single protein level can be variably transmitted through biological matter to determine forces and shape change at cellular length scales.
Song-I Han
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chemistry: to develop state-of-the-art biophysical instrumentation and address questions from what drives Alzheimer’s-related proteins to aggregate as brain deposits to how proteins fuel marine bacteria using sunlight.
Steven Jacobsen
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University
Geosciences: to use a new experimental method of determining atomic-scale, physical properties of superhard materials targeted for future technological applications.
Pieter Johnson
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology: to identify how environmental changes affect disease and, reciprocally, how changes in disease feed back to influence ecosystems.
Munira Khalil
Department of Chemistry, University of Washington
Chemistry: to gain a microscopic understanding of how light energy is transformed into chemical and mechanical motion on the femtosecond timescale.
Chay Kuo
Department of Cell Biology, Duke University
Biological Sciences: to understand how biological environments are constructed on a cellular level and to explore the architecture of specialized environments, also called niches, that house and regulate stem cell function.
John Lupton
Department of Physics, University of Utah
Physics: to develop and apply optical techniques in the study of the physical properties of nanoscale structures.
Assaf Naor
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
Mathematics: to develop a structure theory for metric spaces and the applications of geometry and analysis to the theory of computing.
Celeste Nelson
Department of Chemical Engineering, Princeton University
Engineering - Chemical or Biological: to examine the relative roles of biochemical and mechanical gradients in branching morphogenesis and fibrosis of the mammary gland.
Jason Petta
Department of Physics, Princeton University
Physics: to isolate single quantum mechanical states in artificially structured semiconductor nanostructures, controlling the quantum degrees of freedom and studying the physical processes that lead to decoherence.
Daven Presgraves
Department of Biology, University of Rochester
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology: to use complementary genetic, molecular and comparative genomic approaches to study the special role of the X chromosome during speciation in fruitflies (Drosophila).
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology: to study the interplay between black holes, neutron stars and other objects in a dense environment to allow observations that draw firm conclusions about the properties of extreme forms of matter.
Gil Refael
Department of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology
Physics: to investigate the breakdown of superfluidity in low-dimensional systems, such as disordered chains of interacting Bosons and amorphous metallic thin films.
Pardis Sabeti
Department of Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University
Evolutionary Biology: to study the effect of natural selection on the human genome and on the genomes of other organisms, and uncover the traits that have emerged over time.
Rebecca Saxe
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Neuroscience: to understand the circuits — that is, the neural wiring diagram — in the human brain that give rise to the high-level aspects of human thought.
Yun Song
Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley
Ecology, Evolutionary Biology: to characterize quantitatively the effects of various evolutionary mechanisms on shaping the pattern of variation in genomes.
Latha Venkataraman
Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University
Materials Science, Nanotechnology: to measure fundamental properties of single molecule devices, seeking to understand the interplay of physics, chemistry and engineering at the nanometer scale.
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About the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering
The Fellowship Program has awarded 424 fellowships, totaling approximately $260 million, to faculty members at 50 top national universities. It is among the nation's largest nongovernmental program designed to support unusually creative researchers early in their careers. The Fellowship Program funds research in a broad range of disciplines including physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, astronomy, computer science, earth science, ocean science and all branches of engineering.
The 2008 Fellows were nominated by presidents of 50 invited universities. Each year, an Advisory Panel of nationally recognized scientists and experts reviews applications and recommends 20 fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees.
About the David and Lucile Packard Foundation
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private family foundation created in 1964 by David Packard (1912–1996), cofounder of the Hewlett-Packard Company, and Lucile Salter Packard (1914–1987). The Foundation provides grants to nonprofit organizations in the following program areas: Conservation and Science; Population; and Children, Families, and Communities. The Foundation makes national and international grants and also has a special focus on the Northern California Counties of San Mateo, San Benito, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Monterey. Foundation grantmaking includes support for a wide variety of activities including direct services, research and policy development, and public information and education. The Foundation does not make grants intended to influence legislation or support candidates for political office. The Foundation’s endowment was approximately $6.6 billion as of December 31, 2007. General program grant awards totaled approximately $304 million in 2007. The Foundation has a grantmaking budget of approximately $300 million in 2008.
