10 life science fellows are chosen, based on potential to shape future research

For the ninth year, Cornell has named 10 graduate students as Presidential Life Science Fellows.

The awards are intended to reflect the broad range of life science fields at Cornell and aim to promote collaborative and integrative research that crosses disciplines including, for example, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering and computer sciences.

Fellows receive funding in their first year of graduate school, and are exposed to a broad range of research approaches in the life sciences through faculty presentations and rotations in various laboratories across campus. At the end of their first year, fellows will have an opportunity to switch their graduate fields, should they choose, based on their experiences.

The selections were based on the students’ potential to bridge fields and thus help develop novel integrative programs of research that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries.

The new fellows are: Kaileigh Ahlquist (plant breeding), Lena Bradley (applied and engineering physics), Eric Fich (plant biology), Feng Gao (biophysics), Frank He (biomedical engineering), Hidetoshi Inamine and Holly Lutz (ecology and evolutionary biology), McKenna Kelly (neurobiology and behavior), Sarai Meyer (chemical engineering) and Monica Ramstetter (computational biology).

"Graduate students are the glue that hold us all together, and the Presidential Life Science Fellowships seem to be doing a fine job of putting excellent graduate students in an ideal position to shape the life sciences of their future careers," said Kelly Zamudio, faculty coordinator of the program and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Close to 100 graduate students have received fellowships since the program began in 2003.