Cornell researchers Peter Wittich, Carlos Bustamante and Garnet Chan are among 118 scientists, mathematicians and economists to receive research fellowships this year from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The award, which recognizes promising researchers early in their careers, carries an award of $45,000 over two years to be used for any purpose that advances the scientists' research.

Wittich, who joined Cornell's faculty as assistant professor in the Laboratory of Elementary-Particle Physics in 2005, is part of an international collaboration preparing the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, one of two large detectors to operate at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also a collaborator in the collider detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. His research is aimed at better understanding the basic building blocks of matter and at answering such fundamental questions as the nature of space-time, the origin of mass and whether the four known forces (gravity, strong, weak and electromagnetic) are actually manifestations of a single unified force.

Bustamante, assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology at Cornell since 2002, works on developing statistical methods for inference in population and comparative genomics. His research group works with a wide variety of organisms, including humans, dogs, monkeys, rice and fruit flies, to test evolutionary hypotheses regarding natural selection and demographic history in patterning genetic variation. He is involved in developing population genetic theory as well as applying tools to make inferences from genomewide data sets; he also studies methods for association mapping in natural and domesticated populations.

Chan, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, joined the Cornell faculty in 2004. A recent recipient also of a National Science Foundation CAREER award and a Packard Research Fellowship, Chan studies the electronic structure of complex systems, in particular the development of polynomial time algorithms to solve the quantum many-particle problem.

In the 52 years that the Sloan Foundation has awarded research fellowships, 35 recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.