(Cornell Chronicle, April 3, 2003)
Three members of Cornell's faculty, two from the Ithaca campus and one from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, have been named Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellows. They are among 117 outstanding young researchers from 50 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada to receive awards of $40,000 over two years.
The three fellows are Johannes Gehrke, assistant professor of computer science, and David Lin, assistant professor of biomedical sciences, both on the Ithaca campus, and Diana Murray, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology and director of the Computational Genomics Core Facility at Weill Cornell.
The Sloan Research Fellowship Program is one of the oldest such programs in North America. Fellows, who are selected from among hundreds of scientists in the early stages of their careers on the basis of their exceptional promise, are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them.
Gehrke's award will support research on privacy-preserving data mining and distributed database systems. His research is focusing on the design and implementation of a database system for sensor networks. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. He joined the Cornell faculty in the same year.
Lin's award will support his study of neuronal connectivity in the mouse olfactory system. He is focusing on determining the mechanisms that enable olfactory sensory neurons to form connections in the mouse brain. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1994 and joined Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine faculty in 2001.
Murray studies how the recruitment of proteins to different cellular membranes is achieved and regulated. Her goal is to use computational methods to characterize the structural and energetic basis for the binding of lipid-interacting domains to phospholipid membranes and, in turn, to better understand the underlying forces that govern signal transduction and retroviral assembly. She earned her Ph.D. in physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1994. She joined the Weill Cornell faculty in 2001.