A professor from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Evolution, ecology and behavior professor Alison Bell is among 188 writers, scholars, artists and scientists chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s press release.
Bell studies the evolution of behavior in the three-spined stickleback fish. She is a pioneer in the study of animal personality, using genomics and other tools to understand the causes and consequences of individual behavior differences. She is a member of the Animal Behavior Society, the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and the American Society of Naturalists. She is a 2020 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the 2012 Young Investigator Award and the 2022 Quest Award from the Animal Behavior Society. She is the leader of the Gene Networks in Neural and Developmental Plasticity theme and the director of the Kellner Center for Neurogenomics, Behavior and Society at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology; a Romano Professorial Scholar; and a professor in the Beckman Institute, the Program in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, and the Neuroscience Program.
As a Guggenheim Fellow, Bell will work towards developing a conceptual framework that integrates neural and gene regulatory networks to offer new insights into fundamental questions about the origin and maintenance of behavioral diversity.
U of I architecture professor Paul Hardin Kapp was also awarded a fellowship. Kapp specializes in historic preservation, and he is the associate director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management at Illinois. He will use his Guggenheim Fellowship for his latest book project: “Popular Iconoclasm in the Public Square” which will examine how iconoclasm, as both acts of protest and works of civic artistic engagement, can alter the ways that we perceive, appreciate and engage with our most historic and monumental public spaces.
