The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has announced the 2022 cohort of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering.

Launched in 1988, the program  provides 20 early-career scientists and engineers with unrestricted awards of $875,000 over five years to pursue their research. This year’s recipients include Kellie Jurado (University of Pennsylvania), whose lab leverages emerging viruses as biological probes to uncover fundamental immune mechanisms that underlie and regulate immune responses; Harriet Lau (University of California, Berkeley), who investigates the evolution of the Earth to better understand the implications of Earth’s broad-spectrum deformation on our past and future climate; Carl Rodriguez (Carnegie Mellon University), who works to computationally model how the gravitational pull of objects in the universe conspire to create the universe we see; and Brian Weeks (University of Michigan), who uses museum specimens and field biology to understand how bird morphology responds to changing temperatures.

“The Packard Fellows embody the Foundation’s commitment to science as vital to progress and cross-fertilization across academic disciplines,” said Walt Reid the foundation’s vice president of environment and science. “The breakthroughs we see in the Packard Fellows community provide not just hope for the future, but also real paths forward for some of the most critical challenges we face in healthcare, climate change, technology, and more.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Motortion)