James Mahoney and Marc Perlman receive Wriston Fellowships; Greg Landsberg and David Sheinberg receive fellowships from Sloan Foundation
James Mahoney, assistant professor of sociology, and Marc Perlman, assistant professor of music, have been awarded Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowships for academic year 2001-02.
The Wriston Fellowship is one of the highest awards Brown bestows upon its faculty. Established in 1972 to encourage and reward excellence in teaching, it is awarded annually to a junior member of the faculty to recognize significant accomplishments in teaching and to allow for scholarly research and the preparation of new contributions to the undergraduate curriculum. Candidates are nominated by their faculty colleagues. Their credentials are reviewed by a committee of distinguished faculty members, which makes its final recommendations to the dean of the College. This year, the review committee consisted of Professors Janet Blume (engineering), Ross Cheit (political science), and Carolyn Dean (modern culture and media).
Mahoney will use his fellowship to launch a new research project on social movements in the creation and evolution of newly democratic regimes in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and to link this research with a new Internet-centered course on the topic.
Perlman’s fellowship will enable him to complete a book manuscript, tentatively titled "The Invention of Music Notation in Java (Indonesia): The Psychology and Colonial Politics of Music Writing."
Faculty members Greg Landsberg of physics and David Sheinberg of neuroscience have been awarded research fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The foundation selects scientists in the early stages of their careers on the basis of their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. Twenty-six former Sloan Fellows have received Nobel prizes, and hundreds have received other awards and honors.
Landsberg and Sheinberg are among 104 young scientists and economists who were selected.
Landsberg received the award in part for his research on extra dimensions and for a number of searches for new physics phenomena that he has worked on for the past few years. Landsberg is a leader of the New Phenomena group of the D-Zero Experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron particle accelerator — the machine that collides particles at the highest energies ever achieved. The hope is that any new physics phenomena, like additional particles or dimensions, will show up in these conditions.
The goal of Sheinberg’s research is to understand how the brain learns to recognize and respond to objects in the world. The approach involves familiarizing monkeys with virtual objects which have features including three-dimensional structure, animate behavior and associated sound. Sheinberg and colleagues expose animals to the virtual objects and record the animals' eye movements and manual responses and the activity of groups of brain cells. Sheinberg hopes to learn how these neocortical neurons work together to provide a unified experience of perception, and to see how changes in the activity of these cells relate to changes in familiarity and expertise with these objects.