Two professors from UC Berkeley have been awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, joining a long list of distinguished alumni including Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin. This year, philosopher Hannah Ginsborg and chemical engineer Markita del Carpio Landry have been recognized.

The fellowship, which has named 198 new awardees this year, provides recipients the freedom to pursue projects under “the freest possible conditions,” as stated by the Guggenheim Foundation. Markita del Carpio Landry, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, highlights the importance of this freedom in exploring innovative ideas. “It allows me to pursue bold and unconventional ideas that are failure-prone but could generate significant impact if successful,” she said.

Del Carpio Landry's research is concentrated on manipulating tiny particles to advance scientific understanding in two main areas. Her work aids scientists in tracking neurochemical signaling in the brain, which may help understand conditions like Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and depression. Additionally, her research focuses on delivering genetic modification tools to plant cells. In 2023, this research earned her the Bakar Prize for its potential benefits in developing climate-resilient crops.

With her Guggenheim Fellowship, del Carpio Landry plans to combine these fields by studying compounds from plants used in Indigenous Bolivian medicine for potential uses in treating nervous system disorders. She emphasizes the divide between countries with traditional knowledge but limited scientific resources and those with the opposite situation. “I find this is the case with my home country of Bolivia,” she noted.

Supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation, del Carpio Landry has been collecting plant samples in Bolivia’s high plateau, working alongside local Indigenous communities. Her team intends to use advanced imaging techniques to study the impact of these plant-derived molecules on brain chemistry.

Meanwhile, Hannah Ginsborg, a Berkeley professor since 1988, has been delving into the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, focusing on modern applications of his work on judgment and cognition. Her Guggenheim-backed project, a book entitled "Normativity Without Reasons," will explore the development of normative understanding in early childhood, arguing for its primitiveness compared to rationality. Ginsborg describes "primitive normativity" as a basic understanding of norms preceding more complex social and moral norms.

Normativity Without Reasons, while primarily targeting academics, holds broader implications. “How a child learns her first language can be very illuminating in understanding the nature of human language, thinking and the capacity to reason,” Ginsborg explained. She suggests this exploration could also illuminate differences between human learning and the functioning of large language models.

Robert Sanders contributed to this report.