Berkeleyan

Awards

19 April 2006

Three Berkeley faculty receive Guggenheim fellowships

Paula Fass, professor of history; Nancy Lee Peluso, professor of society and environment in Environmental Science, Policy and Management and program director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics; and Bin Yu, professor of statistics, are among the 187 winners of the 2006 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. They were selected from nearly 3,000 U.S. and Canadian artists, scholars, and scientists applying for awards totaling $7.5 million.

Fass will use her award to further her research into parents and children in American history between 1800 and 2000. Peluso will examine territoriality, violence, and the production of landscape history in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Yu will research interpretable models for high-dimensional data.

Carl Haber, senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Physics Division, was also named a Guggenheim fellow. He will use his award to research optical methods to recover sound from mechanical recordings.

For more information on the 2006 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Awards, visit www.gf.org.

Sloan Research Fellows named

Six Berkeley faculty members were named as Sloan Research Fellows this year: Joshua Simon Bloom, assistant professor of astronomy; Jamie Doudna Cate, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry; Phillip Lewis Geissler, assistant professor of chemistry; David Lee, associate professor of economics; Jan Liphardt, assistant professor of physics; and Haw Yang, assistant professor of chemistry.

These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the best young faculty members in specified fields of science. A total of 116 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.

EPA Environmental Award

The campus has been honored for its residential Green Room, located at Unit 1, with an EPA Environmental Achievement Award. The agency, which received more than 160 nominations for this year's awards, honored 38 organizations and individuals on Tuesday, April 18, in San Francisco.

Now in its eighth year, the U.S. EPA Region 9's Environmental Achievement Awards program seeks to recognize those working throughout several western states to protect and preserve the environment. Winners were selected based on numerous criteria, including their innovation, ability to work with others, and the replicability of the project.

John Wieczorek

John Wieczorek, a researcher in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, was awarded the 2006 Ebbe Nielsen Prize earlier this month in Cape Town, South Africa. The Nielsen Prize is the only one in the world given in the area of biodiversity informatics. Wieczorek will receive $35,000 for his work combining biosystematics and biodiversity-informatics research.

Wieczorek, whose leadership has been instrumental in developing community-based, distributed database networks about all terrestrial vertebrates in North America, says he will use the prize to help expand these projects to Brazil, Argentina, Madagascar, and Russia.