Three named Guggenheim fellows

Three members of the faculty have been awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships for the year 2000. They are Jill Banfield, professor of geology and geophysics, Robert J. Hamers, professor of chemistry, and Thomas W. Reps, professor of computer science.

The awards are based on achievement in the past and promise for future accomplishment. Recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers were considered and approved by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s Board of Trustees, which includes former fellows such as UW alumna Joyce Carol Oates.

The average award this year is $35,800.

Banfield, who also received a MacArthur creative “genius grant” last year, was selected for her research in microbe-mineral interactions of environmental importance. Banfield and Hamers joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1990.

Hamers, the Evan P. Helfaer Professor of Chemistry at UW–Madison, was chosen to receive a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies in molecular electronics.

A member of the computer science faculty since 1985, Reps was nominated for his work on a “new compressed representation of Boolean functions.” The fellowship will be used to support his work during a sabbatical next year in Pisa, Italy, where he will carry out research at the Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, a government research institute, as well as at the Dipartimento di Informatica of the University of Pisa.

UW–Madison’s new fellows are among 182 winners selected from more than 2,900 applicants for awards totaling $6,345,000, according to the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Since 1925 more than 15,000 individual artists, writers, scientists and other scholars have received fellowships reaching more than $192 million, according to the Foundation.