UC Berkeley Press Release

Three UC Berkeley faculty members win Guggenheim fellowships

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | 20 April 2006

BERKELEY – An historian, a statistician and an environmental sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, 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.

Guggenheim fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement and exceptional promise for the future. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $247 million in fellowship awards to more than 16,000 scholars. The program enables important research in the arts, humanities and sciences.

UC Berkeley's Guggenheim fellows are:

• Paula S. Fass, a history professor, who will use her award to further her research into parent-child relations in American history between 1800-2000. "As someone who has been actively involved in making the historical study of children and childhood a vital area of inquiry, the Guggenheim awards some of my personal efforts in this area but, more importantly, provides a significant form of recognition for the larger project of children's history that it represents," Fass said.

• Nancy Lee Peluso, a professor of society and environment and program director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics. She will examine territoriality, violence and the production of landscape history in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. "I am hoping to complete a book on the connections between violence, new forms of resource enclosure, and the ways alternative landscape histories have been told about agrarian, ethnic, and forest conflicts in Indonesian Borneo," Peluso said. "I am thrilled to have a year to finish this book."

• Bin Yu, a statistics professor will research interpretable models for high-dimensional data. "I very much enjoy delving into fields as diverse as neuroscience, Internet tomography, remote sensing, and finance to appreciate the complexities of the different data and to learn the different sciences/theories behind them," Yu said. "I also enjoy the moment when a useful statistical structure emerges as the right framework for understanding data and for assessing the uncertainties."

• Also, Carl Haber, a senior scientist with the physics division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has won a Guggenheim fellowship to research optical methods to recover sound from mechanical recordings.