UCLA and two other universities led the nation in receiving 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards, among the most prestigious honors presented to scholars, artists and writers, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced.

The Guggenheim Foundation awards the fellowships for “unusually distinguished achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.�

UCLA, Columbia and the University of Wisconsin (Madison) led all institutions, each receiving five Guggenheim Fellowships. Next was the University of Chicago, with four fellowships. Ten universities had three fellowships.

UCLA faculty who received 2002 Guggenheim Fellowships are:

· Philip Brett, professor of musicology. Brett specializes in the study of English music, editing and textual criticism, early music performance, and gay and lesbian studies. He will use his Guggenheim Fellowship will support his research on the life and music of Benjamin Britten.

· Kefeng Liu, associate professor of mathematics. Liu, whose research interests focus on differential geometry, topology and mathematical physics, will use the Guggenheim fellowship to conduct research on the mathematical and physical aspects of the mirror principle.

· Adrian Saxe, professor of art. Saxe teaches ceramics in the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA, and the Guggenheim fellowship will provide support for his work. Saxe’s ceramics have been collected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other museums in the United States and abroad.

· Daniel Treisman, associate professor of political science. Treisman studies Russian politics, the political economy of development, democratic transitions and political corruption. He will use the fellowship to study decentralization, governance and economic performance.

· Robert Watson, professor of English. Watson specializes in the literature of the English Renaissance, with an emphasis on William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. For the past six years he has served as head scholar of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Watson’s fellowship will support his research for his next book, which will explore human alienation from nature in early modern England.

UCLA consistently ranks among America’s leading universities in receiving awards to faculty for research and other achievements.

UCLA’s Guggenheim winners were among 184 fellows chosen from more than 2,800 applicants. Awards by the Guggenheim Foundation for 2002 totaled $6.8 million. Since 1925, the foundation has granted more than $200 million in fellowships.

The Guggenheim Fellowship recipients for 2002 include poets, novelists, playwrights, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, scientists and scholars in the liberal arts.

Most Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to scholars at American colleges and universities; 86 institutions received one or more fellowships.

Recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships are selected by a committee of scholars from universities and institutes nationwide.