Two members of Cornell University's faculty on Feb. 10 were among 60 scientists honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). They are H. Kern Reeve, an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior, and Venugopal Veeravalli, an assistant professor of electrical engineering.

The coveted awards, the highest honors bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding young scientists at the beginning of their careers, were presented in a ceremony at the White House.

In a statement, President Clinton noted, "These talented young men and women show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Their passion for discovery will spark our can-do spirit of technological innovation and drive this nation forward and build a better America for the twenty-first century."

The PECASE program, established by the Clinton administration in February 1996, recognizes demonstrated excellence and promise of future success in scientific or engineering research and the potential for eventual leadership of the recipients in their respective fields. The winners were nominated by nine participating federal agencies. The National Science Foundation (NSF) selected its 20 nominees from the most meritorious recipients of Faculty Early Career Development (Career) awards, which Reeve and Veeravalli won in 1998. The PECASE awardees nominated by the NSF will receive $500,000 each over a five-year period to further their research and educational efforts.

Reeve earned his Ph.D. in animal behavior from Cornell in 1990 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Harvard University's Society of Fellows before joining the Cornell faculty in 1993. His teaching duties include an undergraduate-graduate class in modeling behavioral evolution.

Reeve's research focuses on the evolution of cooperation and conflict in animal societies. His animal-model systems are found in both the world of insects and of mammals -- social wasps commonly found in North America and the naked mole-rats of Africa. His research is aimed at developing and testing general evolutionary models of animal societies, including models of reproductive transactions and conflict within social groups.

Veeravalli teaches and conducts research in mobile and wireless communication systems and related topics in communication theory. The primary goal of his research program is to develop techniques for optimizing the quality and capacity of wireless communication systems. He also is working to develop a theoretical framework for the analysis of large-scale decentralized dynamic decision-making problems, which could have applications not only in communications but also in other areas such as power systems and economic systems.

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, an assistant professor at the City College of New York and a visiting assistant professor at Rice University. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1996.