April 15, 2004
Three UW professors receive Guggenheims
Three UW professors are among 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected from 3,200 applicants for this year’s Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. Ann Marie Kimball, Kannan M. Krishnan and Anne Nelson were appointed on the basis of “distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment,” according to the Guggenheim Foundation.
A professor of epidemiology and health services at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Ann Marie Kimball is also director of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Emerging Infections Network and an attending physician at the International Clinic at Harborview Medical Center. Kimball earned her MD at Stanford (1976) and her MPH (1981) from the UW, and joined the UW faculty in 1991. The Guggenheim award will allow her to continue her work on emerging infections in an era of global trade. Her previous work on safe trade was completed with a Fulbright fellowship. Kimball predicts that unless more is done quickly to harmonize the needs of international trade and global health, trade barriers and disruptions will become more frequent and have greater consequences than we have seen before.
Kannan M. Krishnan, Campbell Chair professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and an adjunct professor of physics, joined the UW in September 2001. Before that, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his doctorate in materials science from UC Berkeley in 1984. Krishnan’s research involves exploring and designing fundamental materials in terms of the properties the materials display. His work emphasizes the structure of new materials, the correlation of the materials’ behavior with its microstructure and how those materials apply to emerging technologies. Krishnan will use his Guggenheim fellowship to develop new approaches to nanomedicine, particulary the utilization of magnetic nanoparticles for cancer therapeutics.
Ann E. Nelson, a physics professor, received the Guggenheim award to further her work in cosmological physics, particularly theories of dark energy, a mysterious force that is believed to counter gravity and therefore is actually allowing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Nelson came to the UW in 1994 from the University of California, San Diego. She received her bachelor’s degree at Stanford University and earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 1984.
Guggenheim grants are generally for one year, with support varying according to the project. The average grant is $37,362. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $230 million in Fellowships to over 15,500 individuals.
