Two Cornell University assistant professors have been awarded David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowships for Science and Engineering, designed to support young researchers.

Yuri Suzuki, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Rey-Huei Chen, assistant professor in the Section of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology in the Division of Biological Sciences, each will receive research grants of $125,000 a year for five years.

Each year the Packard Foundation invites 50 universities each to submit two nominations and, from this list, the foundation awards 24 fellowships.

"We are gratified that the foundation has chosen to support these innovative researchers," said Provost Don M. Randel, whose office submitted the two Cornell nominations, "and especially pleased that it has accepted both of our nominations this year. Their work further strengthens Cornell's long tradition of appointing extraordinarily talented young people to its faculty."

Chen received her B.S. degree from the National Taiwan University in 1987 and her Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1993. She joined the faculty of the Cornell Department of Molecular and Cell Biology in 1997 as an assistant professor.

"I decided early on that I wanted to do basic medical research," Chen said. "Here at Cornell I have a wonderful group of close colleagues working on related research."

Her work concerns the process of cell division and focuses on understanding the "checkpoint" mechanism that enables genetic information to be transmitted accurately to both daughter cells when chromosomes divide.

"The reason we get cancer is that chromosomes don't divide correctly," Chen said. "We're working on the real basic mechanisms, so understanding this mechanism contributes to our understanding of cancer." Some of her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"I feel honored by this fellowship," she said. "It means that people understand how important our research is."

Chen teaches senior and graduate level courses, including "Oncogenes and Cancer Virus" and "Eukaryotic Cell Proliferation."

Suzuki received her B.A. from Harvard in 1989 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1995. After doing postdoctoral research at AT&T Bell Labs (now Lucent Technologies), she joined the Cornell faculty in January 1997 as an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Her research focuses on thin films of magnetic materials similar to the thin films of silicon and other materials used in nanotechnology, and tiny structures -- as small as a hundred-millionth of a meter in size -- that can be made out of these materials. Magnetism in these nanometer-size samples can behave very differently than it does in the larger world, she said.

One aspect of the work is to make and study tiny "islands" of magnetic material, that might be used to store and retrieve data more quickly than is currently possible on computer disks. "One of the interesting problems is trying to space these islands uniformly," she said. "There's some interesting physics in looking at the properties of a very small nanomagnet, and you can imagine that if you make them close together they're going to interact."

"I was really excited [about the grant]," Suzuki said. "It's not like usual government funding. It gives me freedom to look at things that are a little bit riskier."

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation was created in 1964 by David Packard and Lucile Salter Packard. In 1988, the foundation established the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering to allow the nation's most promising young professors to pursue their science and engineering research with few funding restrictions and limited paperwork requirements. The fellowships are aimed at researchers working in areas that are not generously funded by government agencies.

Three other Cornell faculty members have received Packard fellowships: Eva Tardos, professor of operations research and industrial engineering, in 1990; Daniel Ralph, professor of physics, in 1997; and Veit Elser, associate professor of physics, in 1989.