Fellowships in the Natural Sciences

As published in the Foundation’s Report for 1926–27: Pauling, Linus Carl: Appointed for certain theoretical researches concerning the topology of the interior of the atom and the structure of molecules, with especial reference to the nature of the chemical bond, principally with Professors A. Sommerfeld, at Munich, Germany, and Niels Bohr, at Copenhagen, Denmark; tenure, twelve months from March 1, 1926. Born February 28, 1901, at Portland, Oregon. Education: Oregon Agricultural College, B.S., 1922; California Institute of Technology, Ph.D., (summa cum laude), 1925. Teaching Assistant, 1922–23, Teaching Fellow, 1923–25, California Institute of Technology; Fellow in Chemistry, National Research Council, 1925–26; Research Associate of the California Institute of Technology, 1926—. Publications: Articles in Journal of the American Chemical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physical Review, Zeitschrift für Kristallographic.  

Dawn Song is an Associate Professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her B.S. in Physics from Tsinghua University in China in 1996, her M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2007. Her research interest lies in security and privacy issues in computer systems and networks, including areas ranging from software security, networking security, database security, distributed systems security, to applied cryptography. She is the recipient of various awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship Award, the IBM Faculty Award, the George Tallman Ladd Research Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Award, and the Li Ka Shing Foundation Women in Science Distinguished Lecture Series Award. She is also the author of multiple award papers in top security conferences, including the Best Paper Award at the USENIX Security Symposium and the Highest Ranked Paper at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Recently she was awarded the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, recognizing her as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35.

A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and formerly a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Elizabeth Kolbert has largely focused her writings during the last decade on the issue of climate change. “The Climate of Man” (2005), her three-part series for The New Yorker on the hotly debated and often confusing topic of global warming, won a National Magazine Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award, and a National Academies’ communications award. She then expanded the series, publishing Field Notes from a Catastrophe the following year; it received the Louis J. Battan Author’s Award from the American Meteorological Society and was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times.

Continuing in this vein, she has contributed in recent years more than a score of articles on climate and conservation topics to The New Yorker and National Geographic, and her work has been included in Climate Change: Picturing the Science (Norton, 2009), edited by Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolf, The Best American Science Writing 2007, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010. She edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 and coedited The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic (Bloomsbury, 2007). In November 2010, she received a Heinz Award for her outstanding body of work in environmental journalism.

During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be completing a book-length study of extinction and the history of life.