4/23/01

Mark Shwartz, News Service (650) 723-9296;
e-mail: mshwartz@stanford.edu

Bernheim, Gordon, Ross win Guggenheim awards

Three campus scholars have been awarded 2001 Guggenheim fellowships, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced recently. The fellowship winners include 183 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 2,700 applicants, with awards totaling $6.58 million. Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

B. Douglas Bernheim is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Economics and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1979 and his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. His research interests are in public finance, industrial organization and microeconomic theory.

Bernheim, 43, first came to Stanford's Economics Department in 1982 as an assistant professor. He became an associate professor in the department in 1987 and, in 1988, moved to Northwestern University's Graduate School of Management as a professor of risk management. From 1990 to 1994, he was a professor of economics and business policy at Princeton before returning to Stanford in his present position.

Bernheim will use his award to help fund a sabbatical starting this fall at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He plans to do research on a theory of legislative policy making and how legislatures select from among different economic programs. "This could be applied to national or state legislatures or to parliaments in other countries," he said.

Bernheim explained that economists have spent a lot of time during the past decade studying how different public policies affect the allocation of resources in the economy. More recently, he said, "economists have become interested in how those policies get selected and how the features of the institutions that are used to select the policies affect which policies are chosen and how resources are allocated."

Deborah M. Gordon, associate professor of biological sciences, received her master's degree in biology from Stanford in 1977 and a doctorate in zoology from Duke University in 1983. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1991 after completing postdoctoral work at Oxford and Harvard universities.

Gordon's research examines the behavioral ecology of social insects, particularly ant colonies, which operate as biological systems without central control. Each ant, using local information, makes decisions that in the aggregate produce the complex behavior of the colony, Gordon says. She plans to use her Guggenheim award to study similarities between ant colonies and other biological systems, such as the human brain, in which individual neurons perform tasks that result in complex behaviors.

Gordon will take a sabbatical from teaching during the 2001-02 academic year and become a full-time fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She was named a Stanford MacNamara Fellow in 1993 and received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Association of Northern California in 1995. Gordon also is author of the book Ants at Work: How Insect Society Is Organized (Free Press, 1999).

Janice L. Ross lectures in the Drama Department and the School of Education. She teaches courses in dance history, dance education and dance criticism. She also directs the Graduate Program in Dance Education.

Her book, Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (University of Wisconsin Press), was published in 2000.

For 10 years, Ross was the staff dance critic for the Oakland Tribune. She has been the San Francisco correspondent for Dancemagazine since 1976. She also has written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

She is a past president of the Dance Critics Association and has served as a site visitor, panelist and panel chair for the National Endowment for the Arts' Dance Program. She currently is on the board of directors of the Society of Dance History Scholars.

She has been a member of the academic staff at Stanford since 1988.

For the 2001-02 academic year, Ross will be a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. The following year, she will use the Guggenheim fellowship to complete a book project on postmodern dance.

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By Mark Shwartz