May 1, 2003
Three profs win prestigious fellowships
Three UW scholars have won prestigious fellowships from two different foundations.
Sabine Wilke, professor and chair of Germanics, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Wilke, who has been at the UW since 1989, will pursue a project entitled “Masochism and the German Colonial Imagination,” which she describes as exploring the central function of colonial images for the construction of German cultural modernity.
“I argue that the trajectory of modern German culture is deeply intertwined with its colonial history that plays itself out in terms of the sexually fantasized encounter between colonizer and colonized within a masochistic framework,” Wilke says.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Wilke, who earned her doctorate at the University of Mainz in Germany, was one of 184 Fellows chosen from 3,200 applicants.
Pedro Domingos and Zoran Popovic, both assistant professors in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, have been named to the 2003 class of Sloan Research Fellows. The Sloan Research Fellowship program recognizes the nation’s most outstanding young faculty members in the sciences. Winners receive $40,000 grants over two years, to be used to fund research.
Domingos’ research interests are in the fields of machine learning and data mining. In effect, he would like to make computers do more with less help from people, including learning from experience, adapting effortlessly to new situations and discovering new knowledge. He received a doctoral degree from the University of California at Irvine in 1997 in information and computer science and joined the UW faculty in 1999.
Popovic’s research involves computer graphics, specifically character animation, motion editing and modeling or simulation of natural phenomena. He earned a doctoral degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999 and joined the UW faculty that same year.
Domingos and Popovic are CSE’s ninth and 10th Sloan recipients, joining Tom Anderson, Brian Curless, Chris Diorio, Alon Halevy, Raj Rao, David Salesin, Steve Seitz, and Dan Suciu.
Both have been recognized previously with National Science Foundation Career Awards.
