Astronomer Martin White named 2011 Guggenheim Fellow

Martin White, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in this year’s round of awards, which were announced April 7 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

White, who also is a faculty senior scientist in the physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was one of 180 scholars, artists and scientists selected this year as fellows from the United States and Canada.

Guggenheim Fellowships are one-time-only grants made for a minimum of six months and a maximum of twelve months, providing a block of time in which fellows can work with as much creative freedom as possible.

With Guggenheim support, White plans to mine the data returned by an experiment called the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which aims to constrain dark energy and theories of gravity. White is chair of the survey science team for BOSS, which is a part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III.

Since its establishment in 1925, the foundation has granted nearly $290 million in Fellowships to more than 17,000 people.

For more information:

• Guggenheim Foundation press release
• List of Guggenheim Fellows
• Martin White’s web pages
• Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)