Two Cornell faculty members have been chosen as 1997 Guggenheim Fellows, the Guggenheim Foundation has announced.

They are Persis S. Drell, associate professor of physics, and Terence H. Irwin, the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters and chair of the philosophy department. Drell and Irwin are among only 164 artists, scholars and scientists from 2,876 applicants for Guggenheim Fellowship awards this year.

Guggenheim Fellows are selected on the basis of unusually distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Drell will use her award to work on "Experimental prospects for strong electroweak symmetry-breaking." Irwin will use his award for a research project on "The development of ethics."

Drell came to Cornell in 1988 and was a recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1988. She is working on the CLEO experiment, a collaboration of more than 200 high-energy physicists from 24 universities studying the production and decay of heavy quarks and leptons produced in the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR). Armed with the versatile and powerful CLEO II detector, and the world's largest sample of

B mesons, the collaboration makes some of the most sensitive tests of the Standard Model of elementary particles, key to understanding the origin and evolution of the universe.

Irwin joined the Cornell faculty in 1975 and has been chair of the Department of Philosophy since 1994. His six books include Plato's Ethics (1995) and Classical Thought (1988). Irwin has served on several committees of the American Philosophical Association and as co-editor of Philosophical Review. Irwin's primary research and teaching interests are Greek philosophy and the history of ethics.