Five Northwestern professors were awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for accomplishments in research. This is the first year since 2004 that more than one NU professor has won the award.
The Foundation awarded 190 grants in total this year. Recipients of the award are granted an average of $43,200 to further their research.
NU’s Lance Rips, Wendy Griswold, Alice Dreger, and Ken Alder were also named 2008 Guggenheim Fellows.
Rips, a psychology professor, received the fellowship for his work studying the manner in which people perceive and recognize other individuals over a length of time. The money awarded to him through the foundation will allow him to take a year off from teaching to set up his own experiments, he said.
Huang, the Joseph Cummings professor of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering in McCormick, was awarded the Guggenheim for his work with a continuum, or unification, theory for nanostructured materials.
Huang said nanotechnology has many theories that don’t work on a real-world scale. Still, large-scale engineering needs the nano-scaled technology to help it solve large-world problems.
“We need to link these two together; in other words, link the nano-scale size to the larger-scale engineering,” he said.
Eventually, Huang hopes to develop “stretchable circuits,” such as cell phones that can bend instead of breaking, or electronic newspapers that can be “folded and put in your pocket,” he said.
Alder, the Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities, won the award for studying forensic techniques throughout history and how different cultures have identified criminals.
The money will cover the cost of travel to London and Paris, Alder said. His current work is centered on studying the legal systems in the U.S., England and France.
Dreger, the Associate Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Feinberg, won for her research about science and identity politics in the Internet age. Griswold, a professor of sociology, won for her work about the Federal Writers’ Project and American regionalism.
