The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has named sixteen scientific researchers from universities across the country as recipients of the 2011 Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. Each fellow will receive an unrestricted five-year grant of $875,000.

Established in 1988, the fellowship program enables the nation's most promising professors to pursue science and engineering research early in their careers with few funding restrictions and limited reporting requirements. Since its inception, the program has awarded 473 fellowships totaling $302 million to support research in a broad range of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, astronomy, computer science, earth science, ocean science, and all branches of engineering.

This year's recipients are Bogdan Bernevig (Princeton University), Dino Di Carlo (University of California, Los Angeles), Michael Fischbach (University of California, San Francisco), Woodward Fischer (California Institute of Technology), Naomi Ginsberg (University of California, Berkeley), Seth Herzon (Yale University), Michael Jewett (Northwestern University), Takaki Komiyama (University of California, San Diego), Jared Lewis (University of Chicago), Peter McIntyre (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Xiaoliang Qi (Stanford University), Cindy Regal (University of Colorado, Boulder), Charles Schroeder (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Alicia Soderberg (Harvard University), Brent Waters (University of Texas, Austin), and Junrong Zheng (Rice University).

"It is the Packard Foundation's honor to support some of the nation's most talented scientific researchers," said Lynn Orr, chair of the Packard Fellowship Advisory Panel and Keleen and Carlton Beal professor at Stanford University. "These talented professors are tackling some of the critical scientific questions of our time. Their cutting edge research has the ability to profoundly impact our lives."