Cornell has announced that 10 new graduate students were selected for this year's Presidential Life Sciences Fellowships, a program intended to help form integrative new disciplines within the life sciences and to expand and support students' interdisciplinary interests.

Now in its seventh year, the program provides first-year funding for new graduate students and exposes them to a broad range of disciplines in the life sciences through presentations by faculty and rotations in various laboratories across campus. At the end of the year, the fellows will choose whether to remain in their initial graduate field or to pursue a different one. The fellows were selected "because of their interdisciplinary interests, so they will be the glue that holds our departments and faculty labs together," said Kelly Zamudio, faculty program chair and associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

The new fellows are: Nicholas Horton (applied physics), Bailey Cooper and Yue Geng (biomedical engineering), Kimberly Morrell, (ecology and evolutionary biology), Tawny Cuykendall and Pei Xin Lim (genetics and development), Joyanna Gilmour (nutrition), Simon Gunner and Rachel Mertz (plant biology), and Lindsay Wyatt (plant breeding).

The program is a part of the New Life Sciences Initiative, a universitywide collaboration aimed at enhancing and supporting life sciences research and education.