Four Professors Receive Guggenheim Awards

Many students, and even a few professors, may be busy applying for summer research grants, but for a few select faculty the next year of study is practically paid for.

Earlier this month, four Harvard professors were honored with John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, awards dedicated to the promotion of scholarship in both the arts and sciences through funded research.

Professor of Anthropology Peter T. Ellison said he was excited and honored to receive the grant.

"The list of former Fellows is extraordinarily distinguished and the size and quantity of the pool is quite daunting," he said.

Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature Svetlana Boym, Professor of Government Paul Pierson and Professor of Psychology Daniel L. Schacter received the prize along with 164 other North American artists, scholars, and scientists.

The grants provide an average award of $28,481 to fund up to a year of independent research.

According to the Guggenheim foundation, awards are presented on the basis of exceptionally distinguished scholarly achievement and future promise. However, past fellows lay a large role in choosing candidates for the grants, Kardon said.

"Since we have been in business for almost 75 years, we have a network of over 10,000 past fellows in 79 different fields who act as a pool of potential advisors and play a large role in the selection process."

Ellison said he would use the award to take time off from teaching and finish his upcoming book, "On Fertile Ground: Ecology, Evolution, and Human Reproduction."

"The book is based on 15 years of research on the responsiveness of the human reproductive system to ecological factors such as nutrition, workload and disease," he said.

Schacter, whose work examines memory and the brain, said he was excited about the fellowship because it "allows me further time on my sabbatical to do what I want to do." Schacter intends to use the fellowship to finish writing a book on the issue of money distortion in the brain.

Pierson also plans to use award funds to support a research project, "Temporal Professes in Politics" that he hopes to publish. The project is focused on "building bridges between political science and history," Pierson said.

Last year, six Harvard affiliates were among the 164 who received grants.

This year, the highly competitive selection process involved more then 3,000 applicants.