Cornell faculty members Peng Chen, Liam McAllister and Adam Siepel have been selected as 2009 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellows. The awards are intended to enhance the careers of the best young faculty members in specified fields of science.

Chen, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, uses single molecule imaging techniques to characterize and understand the properties of biological systems and nanoscale materials, in particular in bioinorganic chemistry and nanocatalysis.

Recently, Chen and colleagues described a new microscopic method to observe the behavior of single nanoparticles of a catalyst, down to the resolution of single catalytic events. The observations showed that similar nanoparticles can carry out their reactions in very different ways and that every nanoparticle changes the speed of its catalytic reaction over time.

McAllister, assistant professor of physics, studies string theory and its potential for answering longstanding questions about the early universe. He has developed scenarios of cosmological inflation in string theory and has shown how these ideas can be tested by near-future observations. Most recently, he has focused on understanding the role of primordial gravitational waves as a probe of physics at extremely high energies.

Siepel, assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology, works at the intersection of statistics, computer science, evolutionary biology and genomics. Siepel's recent work has focused on comparative analyses of primate genomes, the identification of previously unannotated human genes and the detection of rapidly evolving mammalian genes.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards 118 fellowships annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.

Grants of $50,000 for a two-year period are administered by each fellow's institution; research fellows are permitted to employ those funds in a wide variety of ways to further their research aims.