Jiwoong Park, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and David Bindel, assistant professor of computer science, have been named 2010 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows for outstanding early career success.

The awards are intended to enhance the careers of the best young faculty members in specified fields of science.

Park, who joined the Cornell faculty in 2006, received a B.S. degree in physics from Seoul National University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California-Berkeley in 2003.

His research explores fundamental physics and chemistry at the nanometer scale by investigating electrical, optical and thermal properties of individual nanostructures, including single molecules, nanocrystals, nanowires, carbon nanotubes and their arrays. In particular, he studies how fundamental physical quanta -- electrons, photons and phonons -- are coupled to each other in the nanometer scale.

Park's research has applications in materials synthesis and design, the creation of novel electronic and optical devices, advanced nanoscale characterization of electrical and optical properties, and improved measurement strategies, along with others in fields including materials science, physical sciences, electrical engineering and bioengineering.

Bindel, who joined the Cornell faculty in fall 2009, received B.S. degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland in 1999 and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California-Berkeley in 2006.

His research focuses on computer simulations that can be used by engineers and designers in areas ranging from microelectromechanical systems and photonic circuits to musical instruments.

"I do simulations of things that vibrate, and there's lots of the world that has things that vibrate that you wouldn't think of," he said.

Those range from the micron-sized tuning forks that vibrate at radio frequencies and generating signals in a cell phone to light waves in an optical waveguide and air in a music instrument. He also works on the computer science questions underlying these simulations, looking for ways to make the computations faster and more accurate.

In other work, he examines the tomography of networks. As with medical tomography, this involves trying to infer things about a network by looking at it from the outside.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards 118 fellowships annually in seven scientific fields. 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.