Six faculty receive Guggenheim Fellowships

By Cynthia Lee

Six UCLA faculty members are recipients of the 2008 Guggenheim Fellowships, which are awarded on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. The announcement was made April 3 by the New York-based John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

In all, 190 fellowships, totaling $8.2 million, were awarded to American and Canadian artists, scientists and scholars who were chosen from among 2,600-plus applicants. This year’s Fellows come from 81 different academic institutions and represent 75 disciplines.

The six winners were among 17 UC faculty who received the fellowships this year — more than from any other university system. They join a prestigious group of Fellows from all sectors of the arts and sciences, including Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Martha Graham, Henry Kissinger, Linus Pauling, Isamu Noguchi and James Watson.

The Fellowships allow faculty to focus on a specific research topic. Marc Suchard, for example, will be launching a new research project examining the evolutionary history of viruses that share their genetic material frequently.

"It's fantastic and very rewarding that the Guggenheim Foundation is supporting such basic research," said Suchard, an assistant professor of biomathematics, biostatistics and human genetics. He will work toward finding solutions to the fundamental problems in statistical phylogenetics.

Other UCLA recipients:

* Susanna Hecht, a professor of urban planning, will use more than 150 years of mapping history, remote sensing, archival study and ecological research to pinpoint the magnitude and impact of deforestation in the Amazon that occurred with the rise of steam transport and the rubber boom that ushered in the modern era. She will also assess forest resilience under different clearing regimes.

* Professor Chandrashekhar B. Khare of mathematics will be focusing on providing evidence for the unity of motives, Galois representations and automorphic forms.

* Glen Macdonald, professor of geography, studies climate warming and epic droughts. He will travel to the southwestern U.S., Mexico, Egypt, Syria, Israel and India to research current drought vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies and use records of past climate warming and droughts to better understand the potential impacts of future droughts.

* Law Professor Katherine Stone will look at how the nature of work has changed in many developed countries and how those changes have triggered changes in the regulatory framework that governs the workplace.

* Roger Waldinger, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology, studies international migration to the United Studies. He will complete "Between Here and There: America's New Immigrants and Their Homeland Connections," a book that will explain how the American experience at once facilitates, competes with and structures immigrants' involvements with the countries from which they come.