University of Colorado at Boulder professors Roger Bilham and G. Barney Ellison have been awarded prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships for 1999.
The CU-Boulder professors, chosen from among 2,785 applicants, join 177 American and Canadian Fellows each receiving an average $33,866.
Professor Bilham, a seismologist who in the past has traveled to the Himalayas to research the mountain range聮s seismic risk, is spending the next year studying earthquakes and their rising urban risk.
During his fellowship, he is based in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, and is investigating 18th to 20th century Indian earthquakes, as well as global earthquakes. Bilham traveled to Taiwan last week to study the affects of the Sept. 21 earthquake on the island.
A CU-Boulder professor of geological sciences since 1986, Bilham has traveled to India, Bangladesh, New Zealand and Turkey in 1999 to continue his research of earthquakes. He is also a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Environmental Research, or CIRES, which is jointly sponsored by CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
G. Barney Ellison, a professor of organic chemistry specializing in mechanistic and physical organic chemistry, was awarded his fellowship to study atmospheric processing of organic aerosols.
The aerosols, or small dust particles, he will be studying play an important role in the formation of clouds, which are one of the major factors controlling the earth聮s temperature. Scientists only recently have discovered what makes up these aerosols, and Professor Ellison is trying to find out how their chemical properties change when they form clouds.
Ellison, with assistance from aerosol chemists, atmospheric chemists and chemical oceanographers, will work on understanding the specific chemistry of the "atmospheric processing" of organic aerosols, particularly aerosols found over the ocean.