Five receive Provost's 2004 Award for Distinguished Scholarship
(from the Cornell Chronicle, April 1, 2004)
Cornell Provost Biddy Martin has announced the five faculty winners of the Provost's 2004 Award for Distinguished Scholarship.
Established by a generous gift from Ronay and Richard Menschel, the awards are given to recognize outstanding research and scholarship being done by recently tenured Cornell faculty, and they are an opportunity for the university to recognize its own talented researchers. This year's winners are Johannes Gehrke, Department of Computer Science, for his work in data mining and distributed query processing; Kevin Kornegay, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, for his work in radio frequency and wireless system devices; Kelvin Lee, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, for his work in protein analysis; Scott MacDonald, Department of Philosophy, for his work in medieval philosophy and in philosophy of religion; and Stephen Morgan, Department of Sociology, for his work on class and mobility, using advanced modeling techniques.
The deans of the colleges nominate faculty from their colleges, and the final decision for the awards is made by a committee made up of the provost and the vice provosts.
works on data mining and distributed data management for new applications, such as sensor networks and peer-to-peer networks, and his group has developed some of the fastest existing data-mining algorithms. He also is very interested in the application of data-management and data-mining techniques to the sciences. He is collaborating with researchers from the Cornell astronomy department and the Arecibo Observatory on a system for online data access and analysis and with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on the analysis of citizen science data. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1999.
Kornegay is the founder and director of the Cornell Broadband Communications Research Laboratory, which conducts research related to the design of high frequency integrated circuits for high data rate wireless and optical communication systems. Working with silicon carbide, he also develops integrated circuits for harsh environments that remain functional under high pressure or high temperature. In addition, he is adviser to the Cornell Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team, which won the 2003 autonomous underwater vehicle international competition. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1998.
is a specialist in proteomics and leader of a research team that develops new protein-expression profiling tools, including microfluidic devices, to study pharmaceutical, chemical engineering and human health problems -- among them, diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and studies of protein secretion in bacteria. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1997. In 2003 Lee organized the first New York State Proteomics Symposium for more than 200 academic and corporate researchers, business representatives, students and legislators. The year before, he was named one of the world's "Top 100 Young Innovators in Technology and Business" by Technology Review magazine for his development of a protein-analysis technique that allows early diagnosis of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or "mad cow disease") and one of its human variants, sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
MacDonald, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1995, is the Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies in the Sage School of Philosophy. He specializes in medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion. His interests also include ethics, philosophy of action and Aristotle. He is editor of the journal Medieval Philosophy and Theology. MacDonald also is the author of numerous articles that have appeared in scholarly journals and anthologies, and he has served as editor and-or translator of several important works in his field.
Morgan specializes in the sociology of education, social stratification, economic sociology and quantitative methodology. His current research interests include changes in inequality over the past two decades, with a focus on the integration of economic and sociological theory on labor market processes, as well as a joint household and enterprise survey, focusing on apprenticeship education, network-based patronage relationships between households and the organization of the 1,000-year-old market economy of Kano, a city in northern Nigeria. He joined the Cornell faculty in 2000 as an assistant professor of sociology, was named associate professor with tenure two years later and served as acting chair of the Department of Sociology in fall 2003.