Seven Women Awarded Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has announced the 2014 Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. Each of the 18 new Packard Fellows will receive $875,000 over five years for them to use to pursue their research interests. Since the founding of the program 26 years ago, 523 scientists have been awarded $346 million.

Packard Fellows must be within their first three years of the faculty careers. They can be in the fields of physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, astronomy, computer science, earth science, ocean science, or engineering.

“The Packard Fellowships are an investment in an elite group of scientists and engineers who have demonstrated vision for the future of their fields and for the betterment of our society,” said Lynn Orr, the Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor at Stanford University, and chair of the Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel. “Through the Fellowships program, we are able to provide these talented individuals with the tools and resources they need to take risks, explore new frontiers and follow uncharted paths.”

Of this year’s 18 Packard Fellows, seven are women.

(L to R) Trisha L. Andrew, Lena F. Kourkoutis, Karin Oberg, Sabine Petry,
Agnel Sfeir, Alison Sweeney, and Laura Waller

Trisha L. Andrew is an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is focused on improving the performance of electronic devises and enhancing data and energy storage. She has been on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin since 2012. Dr. Andrew is a graduate of the University of Washington. She holds a Ph.D. in organic and material chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lena F. Kourkoutis is an assistant professor and Rebecca Q. and James C. Morgan Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Dr. Kourkoutis joined the Cornell University faculty in 2013. She is a graduate of the University of Rostock in Germany and earned a Ph.D. at Cornell University.

Karin Oberg is an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University. She is an astrochemist and uses radio astronomy to explore the chemical makeup of planet formation. Dr. Oberg joined the Harvard faculty in 2013 after teaching at the University of Virginia. She is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. from Leiden University in The Netherlands.

Sabine Petry is an assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton University in New Jersey. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Petry holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She earned a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Cambridge in England.

Agnel Sfeir is an assistant professor at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at New York University. Her research focuses on mitochondrial DNA. Dr. Sfeir holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center and conducted postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University in New York.

Alison Sweeney is an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Sweeney is a magna cum laude graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, where she majored in biology and Russian. She holds a Ph.D. in biology from Duke University.

Laura Waller is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a lecturer at Princeton University. Dr. Waller holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.