Two members of the Cornell University faculty have been awarded prestigious Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships. They are Fernando Escobedo and Rasmus Nielsen, assistant professors of chemical engineering and biometrics, respectively.

The two are among 116 young scientists and economists selected as 2004 Sloan fellows, representing faculty from 51 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. The fellowships, totaling $4.64 million this year, allow scientists to continue their research with awards of $40,000 each over two years. Fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them.

Escobedo received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the Universidad de San Agustin, Peru, in 1986, his M.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1993, and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1999, the same year he won the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation new faculty award. In 2001 he won a Faculty Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation.

His research is focused on computational molecular science, particularly in the formulation and application of modeling and simulation methods to elucidate the structure-property relationship in systems containing polymers, bipolymer and colloids, with the goal of providing guiding principles for the development of novel soft materials and processes.

Nielsen received his Cand. Scient. (master's degree equivalent) in biology from the University of Copenhagen in 1994 and his Ph.D. in population genetics from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998. Nielsen joined the Cornell faculty in 2000 as an assistant professor in biological statistics and computational biology. His work focuses on genomics and genetics, particularly molecular evolution and population genetics. He has worked on numerous theoretical and data analysis projects. With Cornell colleagues, he recently analyzed almost all human and chimpanzee genes in order to elucidate the molecular evolutionary processes that have been important in human evolution.