Penn State Intercom......April 30, 2001

Four faculty members
named Guggenheim Fellows

Four University faculty are among those selected as Guggenheim Fellows for 2001. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation selects Fellows on the basis of their unusually distinguished achievements and their exceptional promise for future accomplishments. From a pool of 2,700 applicants, 183 scientists and scholars were selected for the current year.

The University's Guggenheim Fellows are:

* James Beatty, associate professor of physics and astronomy and astrophysics. The award will provide support for Beatty's research on the highest-energy particles in the universe. As a member of the Pierre Auger Project, Beatty has helped address the origin of those high-energy cosmic rays -- one of the key unresolved questions in modern astrophysics -- for the past several years. He serves as task leader for detector electronics, and in that role supervises work involving about a quarter of the
$50 million budget for the international collaborative research effort. With the use of ground-based detectors, the Auger Project is beginning to collect data on those particles and their origin. While on sabbatical from Penn State at Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, Beatty will devote his fellowship year to the problems related to the analysis and interpretation of data from the Auger Project.

Beatty joined the University in 1995 and has held positions at Washington University in St. Louis and the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, Boston University and the University of Chicago. He earned his doctoral and master's degrees in physics as well as a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Chicago.

* Aníbal González, Edwin Erle Sparks professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. González was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his next research project, a book on "The new sentimental novel in Spanish America." This project will study the turn toward sentimentality and love themes in novels by a group of major contemporary Spanish-American writers. A preliminary version of this research project, concentrating on a novel by Alfredo Bryce Echenique, was presented as a lecture at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of Yale University on March 27.

González received his bachelor's degree from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras in 1977 and his doctorate in Latin American literature from Yale University in 1982. He joined the University in 1994 after teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and at Michigan State University.

* Joan B. Landes, professor of women's studies and history. Landes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her next research project on "Artificial Life in 18th-Century France." She will spend the yearlong fellowship in archives and libraries in Paris and Burgundy. A preliminary version of the research project, concentrating on the anatomist Honoré Fragonard, was delivered last November at the University for the Consortium for Early Modern Studies symposium "Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in the Early Modern Period," and will appear in a book Landes is co-editing from the symposium and related lectures.

Educated at New York University and Cornell University, Landes joined the faculty in 1995 after teaching at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and serving as a visiting professor at other institutions, including Bucknell University, Smith College, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

* Mark Maroncelli, professor of chemistry. Maroncelli's fellowship will help support a sabbatical leave split between the University of Texas and Penn State, during which time he will undertake computational studies of supercritical fluids in collaboration with other researchers. These computations are part of ongoing research in his laboratory that focuses on achieving a molecular-level understanding of static and dynamic aspects of solvation and how those aspects influence chemical reactions and other time-dependent processes taking place in a solution.

A member of the University faculty since 1987, Maroncelli was named associate professor in 1993 and professor in 1997. Before he arrived at Penn State, he held positions at the University of Chicago and Oregon State University. He earned his doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983 and his bachelor's degree in chemistry, with highest honors, at Williams College in 1979.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was established in 1925 by U.S. Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga as a memorial to a son who died in 1922. The foundation offers Fellowships to further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.

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