Celeste Nelson, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, has been chosen for the 2008 Fellowship in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The fellowship was founded in 1988 to help promising early-career professors pursue science and engineering research with few restrictions and little paperwork. Each year a panel of distinguished scientists and engineers selects 20 researchers to receive $875,000 each over a period of 5 years.

After Nelson received a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2003, she conducted postdoctoral research at the Department of Cancer Biology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She joined the Princeton engineering faculty in 2007.

Her research focuses on understanding how the final architectures of living tissues and organs are determined, specifically focusing on how individual cells integrate complex biological signals (both biochemical and mechanical) dynamically and spatially within tissues to direct the development of organs.