Vice Provost for the Life Sciences Stephen Kresovich welcomed nine new graduate students selected as this year's Presidential Life Sciences Fellows at a reception in Cornell's Biotechnology Building on Aug. 29.

Kresovich announced that due to the program's impact, the Cornell administration will increase the number of fellowships to 20 from nine in the 2009-10 academic year.

Now in its sixth year, the program provides first-year funding and exposes first-year graduate students to a broad range of disciplines in the life sciences, both through presentations by faculty and through rotations in various laboratories across campus. After getting exposure to diverse scientific opportunities, fellows will choose at the end of their first year whether to remain in their initial graduate field or whether to pursue a different field. The program aims to help form integrative new disciplines within the life sciences.

"We believe these fellows have the potential to shape the future of life sciences research and education through taking advantage of the novel research/learning structures being built at Cornell," said Kresovich.

The new fellows are: Rayna Bell (ecology and evolutionary biology), Laura Byrnes (biophysics), Elizabeth Craig (zoology), Christine Endicott (chemical engineering), Lei Huang (genetics and development), Casey Kraning (biomedical engineering), Hojoong Kwak (biochemistry, molecular and cell biology), Carolyn Mead (microbiology) and Ian Welsh (computational biology).

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