April 25, 2002
Three profs win Guggenheims
Three UW professors are among 184 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 2,800 applicants for Guggenheim Fellowship awards. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The UW is one of 86 institutions with Guggenheim winners.
George Bertsch plans to use his fellowship for a project that spans several disciplines within physics. “My main expertise is in theoretical nuclear physics, developing models to explain nuclear properties,” he said. “If a property cannot be measured, one has to rely on theory.” However, Bertsch added, nuclear binding energies are important in many contexts, such as in astrophysics, but often the existing theory is not good enough for the application. What he plans to do is to take a theory that has been developed for a completely different area and determine whether it is useful for the nuclear physics problem. “It’s called ‘density functional theory,’ and it is widely applied in chemistry and condensed-matter physics to predict the binding of all sorts of matter ranging from individual molecules to crystalline solids,” Bertsch explained. “I hope to translate some of that success to the nuclear binding problem.” Bertsch, who has been at the UW nearly 10 years, earned his doctorate at Princeton.
Margaret Levi, who has been a member of the political science faculty since 1974, plans as her Guggenheim project to investigate how the behavior of states and organizations can affect trust and civic engagement among constituents, and the relationship between democratic processes and trustworthy governance. Levi is the Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former holder of the UW’s Harry Bridges Chair in labor studies and was last year’s winner of the University’s S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award for exemplary leadership in community-based instruction.
Elizabeth Thompson is a professor of statistics and biostatistics and adjunct in genetics, but it is genetics she will concentrate on with her Guggenheim Fellowship. “Currently, the two most exciting places in the U.S. to do statistical genetics relating to modern genome sciences are UW, where there are outstanding researchers in human and medical genetics, and North Carolina State University (NCSU) where the expertise has grown out of a long tradition of research in animal and plant genetics,” Thompson said. “I will spend the seven-month period of my Guggenheim Fellowship in the Bioinformatics Research Center at NCSU, and the remainder of my 2002–03 sabbatical year here at UW, in the UW Genome Center.” Thompson, who has been at the UW since 1986, earned her doctorate at Cambridge University. “I am immensely excited by the prospect of a full year of immersion in modern genome science,” Thompson said.
Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $200 million in Fellowships to more than 15,000 individuals. This year’s total comes to $6.75 million.
