April 27, 2005

Guggenheim fellowships awarded to two Purdue faculty

faculty members Marianne Boruch and Sabre Kais.

GuggenWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has extended two of its annual fellowships to Purdue University heim fellowships are grants designed to assist select individuals who are pursuing creative research and artistic endeavors. According to the foundation, the average grant amount in 2003 was almost $36,000. No special conditions are attached to the grants, and fellows may spend the funds in any manner they deem necessary for their work.

Marianne Boruch, a professor of English and director of Purdue's Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program in the College of Liberal Arts, will use the fellowship to complete her sixth collection of poems. Boruch, who writes about "ordinary moments in ordinary life," also has written two books of essays on poetry, "In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations" and "Poetry's Old Air."

Her work includes five collections of poetry – "Poems New & Selected" (2004), "A Stick that Breaks and Breaks" (1997), "Moss Burning" (1995), "Descendant" (1989) and "View from the Gazebo" (1985). Boruch was brought to Purdue in 1987 to develop the graduate creative writing program, which she has directed since then.

She also has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and two Pushcart Prizes for poems that appeared in journals. Her poems and essays have been published in such places as The New Yorker, The Nation, Iowa Review and The Georgia Review and have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry, 1997. Boruch earned her master of fine arts degree from the University of Massachusetts in 1979.

Sabre Kais (pronounced SOB-ray kice), a professor of theoretical chemistry in Purdue's College of Science, will use his award to further his research in developing finite-size scaling, a theoretical method that may help in the development and design of unusual new materials with specific electronic properties. These materials could have application in next-generation computer chips that are faster, more efficient and use less energy than contemporary chips.

Kais is currently involved in two main projects: quantum computing and quantum phase transition. Quantum computing, though still in its infancy, is a field that may develop next-generation computer chips based on different physical properties than the silicon-based transistor chips in conventional computers. Such quantum computers may allow improvements in information security and cryptography, as well as allow chemists to solve the difficult Schrodinger equation for large systems. Solving this equation, which gives information about the structure and electronic properties of molecules, would give scientists a powerful tool for understanding matter at very small scales.

Quantum phase transition deals with changes in the behavior of some form of matter at temperatures approaching absolute zero and the conditions at which these materials change from being insulators to conductors of electricity.