UW News

April 13, 2012

Three faculty members awarded Guggenheim fellowships

News and Information

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced that three UW faculty members have been named among the foundation’s 181 fellows for 2012. The winners, chosen from nearly 3,000 scholars, artists and scientists, will receive grants for periods ranging from six to 12 months that allow the recipients to pursue creative projects of their choice.

They include Ellis Goldberg, professor of political science; Huck Hodge, assistant professor of music; and Richard Olmstead, professor of biology and curator at the Burke Museum.

Goldberg is in the process of completing two books. One is on the role of moral emotions and the construction of community before and after the revolutionary uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011, and the other on how Egyptian jurists and intellectuals participated in global debates about the rule of law and the role of judges throughout the 20th century.

Hodge writes music that explores the embodied poetics of organized sound, perceptual illusion and the threshold between design and intuition. His output is varied and comprises a wide range of symphonic, chamber, and multimedia works. His music has been the subject of numerous international radio broadcasts and is regularly performed at major new music festivals throughout the world. His work “Pools of shadow from an older sky” is available online.

Olmstead’s research focuses on the reconstruction of flowering plants by molecular methods as a way of gaining insight into fundamental questions of evolution and natural history. In addition, the lab is actively involved with research on the overall phylogeny of green plants, from their roots in the green algae to the tips of flowering plants. His lab has been instrumental in implementing new approaches from molecular biology in plant systematics, and in developing approaches for dealing with the problems associated with analyzing large molecular datasets.

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Guggenheim Foundation: http://www.gf.org/news-events/2012-Fellows-in-the-United-States-and-Canada/