Two Northwestern Faculty Named Guggenheim Fellows

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Two Northwestern University scholars, Daniel Diermeier, of the Kellogg School of Management, and Jiaxing Huang, of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, are among this year’s newly named 2014 Guggenheim Fellows.

Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the 2014 fellowships were awarded to a diverse group of 178 scholars and artists from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants from the United States and Canada.

Every April the prestigious fellowship is granted to approximately 200 scholars, artists and scientists selected from thousands of applicants “on the basis of impressive achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.”

Diermeier is the IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice in the department of managerial economics and decision sciences and director of the Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship at Kellogg. His teaching and research focus on political institutions, the interaction of business and politics, and crisis and reputation management. He is currently working on a book-length project on behavioral models of voting and foundations of corporate reputation management.

“A renowned scholar and reputation management expert, as well as an outstanding teacher, Daniel exemplifies the best of Kellogg,” said Kellogg Dean Sally Blount. As faculty director of the Kellogg Public-Private Initiative, Diermeier also studies how corporations and government interact. Diermeier has taught at Kellogg since 1997 and holds faculty appointments in Northwestern’s departments of political science, linguistics and economics at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and at Northwestern University School of Law. See Kellogg story about the honor.

Huang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at McCormick, studies materials chemistry, processing and manufacturing. His best-known research relates to 2-D soft-layered materials and the study of their properties as polymers, colloids, amphiphiles and membranes. Through his project, “Ultrafine Particles with Very Weak Van der Waals Interaction,” Huang and his team will develop techniques to make miniaturized crumpled, paper ball-like particles suited for applications requiring a high-surface area, such as electrodes for batteries, ultracapacitors and fuel cells. Huang’s professional goal is to make material innovations with enduring impact while promoting the intellectual growth of his trainees and himself. In the classroom, he encourages students to keep up their curiosity and test their insights by imagining innovative ideas in materials science.

“These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best,” said Edward Hirsh, president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has always bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue the tradition with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”