<p>The Packard Foundation has just announced its 20 Packard Fellows for 2008. These are among the brightest young stars in science and engineering and each is awarded $875,000.00 in grants for their research.</p>
<p>Princeton led the nation this year with two of its faculty members being honored. No other school in the country had more than one winner.</p>
<p>In the northeast, Columbia, Harvard, MIT and NYU each had one winner.</p>
<p>California, the home of the foundation, had the largest number of winners with six faculty members made fellows in that state including one each at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz. </p>
<p>At Princeton, Prof. Celeste Nelson in chemical engineering and Prof. Jason Petta in physics each won the award.</p>
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<p>Princeton</a> University - Nelson, Petta awarded prestigious Packard Fellowships</p>
<p>Celeste Nelson, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Jason Petta, an assistant professor of physics, have been chosen to receive the highly selective David and Lucile Packard Foundation's Fellowships for Science and Engineering. </p>
<p>The fellowship program was founded in 1988 to help promising early-career professors pursue science and engineering research with few restrictions and little paperwork. Each year a panel of distinguished scientists and engineers selects 20 researchers to receive $875,000 each over a period of five years.</p>
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<p>From the Packard Foundation website:</p>
<p>LOS ALTOS, California Twenty scientists and engineers at top U.S. universities received $17.5 million in grant funding today to advance innovative research projects through the David and Lucile Packard Foundation's Fellowships for Science and Engineering program.
The 2008 Packard Fellows include faculty members at universities across the United States. These fellows are addressing some of the most important research questions today in science and engineering on topics such as Alzheimers disease, stem cell function, evolutionary theory and the relationship between disease and environment.</p>
<p>The new class of fellows joins a distinguished group of researchers working across science and engineering disciplines, many of whom have gone on to win other distinguished awards including MacArthur Fellowships and the Nobel Prize. In the past 20 years, Packard fellows have contributed significantly in areas ranging from early universe observations to genetics of the human population, from quantum mechanics to ancient climates, from cryptography to rapid identification of viruses, and many more.</p>