Four University of Colorado at Boulder faculty have received prestigious Guggenheim fellowships for the 1998-99 academic year.
The grants were announced this week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York.
CU-Boulder faculty receiving the awards are Mitchell Begelman, professor and chair of astrophysical and planetary sciences; Albert Chong, associate professor of fine arts; Steven Epstein, professor of history; and Russell Monson, professor of environmental, population and organismic biology.
The Guggenheim Foundation provides fellowships for advanced professionals in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts.
This year the foundation awarded 168 fellowships in the United States and Canada, from a pool of more than 3,000 applicants. The grants averaged $32,000, for a total of $5.37 million.
"We are extremely honored and proud that four College of Arts and Sciences faculty have won highly competitive and prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships," said Arts and Sciences Dean Peter Spear. "Coupled with the three National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships won by our faculty earlier this year, these awards demonstrate the excellence of our faculty across the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences disciplines in the college."
Descriptions of the faculty projects follow:
o Mitchell Begelman of astrophysical and planetary sciences won a fellowship
to study the "Demography of Black Hole Spin." Begelman聮s project will take him first to Cambridge, England, and then to Santa Barbara, Calif., where he will work with colleagues on developing methods for taking a census of black holes. Begelman said he hopes the work eventually will lead to knowledge of how black holes develop.
Begelman has been on the CU-Boulder faculty for 15 years and also is a JILA fellow. He is the co-author of "Gravity聮s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe," which won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award in 1996.
o Albert Chong of fine arts received a fellowship to produce a book on his native Jamaica. The partly autobiographical work will explore the music and folklore of Jamaica and showcase some of Chong's portrait photography. A CU faculty member since 1991, Chong specializes in photography and installation art.
Chong also received a $30,000 grant this year from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which awards grants internationally based on artistic merit and financial need. Chong plans to use the grant to pay for therapy needed by his son, who was injured recently in a car accident.
o Steven Epstein of the history department received the Guggenheim to complete a book on the institution of slavery in Italy, which lasted from the Middle Ages into the 19th Century. A CU faculty member since 1984, Epstein is a specialist in Italian history and plans to spend part of the upcoming year in Italy.
Epstein also received a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation to spend a month at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in Italy, where he will document his research.
o Russell Monson of EPO biology received a Guggenheim fellowship to study at the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. There, he will work with Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen studying how tropical forest ecosystems influence atmospheric chemistry. Monson has been at CU since 1982 and currently is the director of the Environmental Residential Academic Program.