The Siebel Scholars Foundation has announced that Andrew Chambers, Luis Pedro Coelho, Preethi Raju, Stephanie Rosenthal and Robert Simmons are among the 85 members of the 2012 class of Siebel Scholars. Each will receive a $35,000 award for their final year of studies.

The Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science is one of 17 partner institutions in the Siebel Scholars program, which was established in 2000. Other graduate computer science schools in the program include Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Tsinghua, UC-Berkeley, and Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Five Siebel Scholars from each partner institution are selected annually from among graduate students at the top of their class. They are chosen based on outstanding academic achievement and demonstrated leadership.

Chambers and Raju are master's students in the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute, respectively. Rosenthal and Simmons are both PhD students in the Computer Science Department. Coelho is a PhD student in the Lane Center for Computational Biology.

"We are proud to support the Siebel Scholars Class of 2012 as they collaborate and forge lifelong ties with this engaged community of leaders," said Karen Roter Davis, Executive Director of the Siebel Scholars Foundation. "They are joining an exceptional group of talented individuals working together with the Siebel Foundation to address critical societal issues in health, food, and energy."

Today, 700 Siebel Scholars are active in the program. They will convene October 14-16 at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Va., to explore the science, applications, benefits, and risks of synthetic biology with world-renowned scientific, industry, ethics, and policy experts. Those include Craig Venter, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute and of Synthetic Genomics Inc.; Jay Keasling, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Labs Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center and CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute; and Ed Penhoet, former CEO of Chiron Corp. and a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.