Soon there will be enough Cornell University alumni at Cambridge University's Churchill College to start a small Cornell Club. Two of the 11 American students selected this year for the prestigious Winston Churchill Scholarships are Cornell undergraduates: William K. Cornwell, a senior majoring in natural resources in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Michael A. Seidman, a senior biochemistry major in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The scholarships, funded by the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States, provide for a year of graduate study in engineering, mathematics or the sciences for students with exceptional academic records and research proposals that can be carried out at Cambridge University.

Cornellians have won 16 Churchill Scholarships since 1974, but two in one year is highly unusual, said Beth Fiori, fellowship coordinator in the Cornell Career Services office. "That the foundation awarded two, speaks to the extraordinary talent of these two students," Fiori said, noting that candidates from 50 other U.S. higher education institutions compete for the honor.

Cornwell, from San Anselmo, Calif., said he plans to use the scholarship in the botany department at Cambridge to study the effect of drought and nutrient stress on plant communities in southern Spain. After earning a master's degree abroad, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in biological sciences and natural resources for training as a scientific adviser to policymakers on conservation issues.

During his undergraduate career at the university, Cornwell has conducted research in Venezuela on stream ecology and fish-population densities, in Oregon with the U.S. Forest Service on the effects of cattle grazing on streamside vegetation and in Ithaca on plant-fungus symbiosis. He also has served as a naturalist, a U.S. Park Service volunteer and an English teacher in Costa Rica.

A 1995 graduate of San Francisco's University High School, Cornwell is a Cornell Tradition fellow and a two-time winner of a Morris K. Udall Scholarship, in 1998 and 1999.

"The Churchill Scholarship is a great honor and one that could not have been possible without the support and instruction of the faculty members who helped me here at Cornell," Cornwell said. He was recommended for the scholarship by Barbara Bedford and Thomas Gavin of theDepartment of Natural Resources and Alex Flecker, Robert Howarth and Peter Marks of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Seidman, from Erdenheim, Pa., will use his Churchill Scholarship to study human physiology at Cambridge, hoping to target gene therapy to the pancreas as a treatment for diabetes. Then he will enter a simultaneous M.D./Ph.D. program offered by Rockefeller University, the Weill Medical College of Cornell and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, aiming for a career in biomedical research. He is a 1996 graduate of Pennsylvania's Springfield Township High School.

Undergraduate research at Cornell took Seidman to New York Hospital, where he studied the cell biology of the adenovirus used in gene transfer, to Polyprobe Inc. in Philadelphia, where he helped develop an enhanced DNA probe assay, and back to Ithaca, where he worked with John Lis, professor of molecular biology and genetics, to study gene regulation and chromatin structure.

Lis recommended Seidman for the scholarship, as did Dr. Ronald Crystal and Dr. Philip Leopold, his research supervisors at Weill Cornell Medical College. Also a Cornell Tradition fellow, Seidman's previous honors include a Barry Goldwater Scholarship in 1999 and selection to present a scientific paper at the second annual meeting of the American Society of Gene Therapy.

Seidman said he hopes his study at Cambridge with Dr. W.H. Colledge, together with his previous research in biotechnology and his forth coming study in genetic medicine, "will enable me to stimulate collaboration and intellectual sharing between several of the world's premier research groups, hopefully leading to significant breakthroughs for biomedical science worldwide."