University of California, Irvine professors Wang Feng and Gene Tsudik have been awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships. They join 186 other American and Canadian scientists and scholars receiving the prestigious grants this year.

Guggenheim Fellowships have been bestowed annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

“I am pleased to congratulate professors Wang Feng and Gene Tsudik on being awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships,” said Hal Stern, UCI provost and executive vice chancellor. “The projects that these grants will support exemplify the breadth of research excellence among our faculty.”

For nearly four decades, UC Irvine sociology professor Wang Feng has employed a variety of methodologies from surveys to statistical data analysis to study global population shifts and policies and social inequalities in China. He’s penned more than 100 articles and 11 books that explore China’s history, society, rising inequality, family trends, and more. He’s served as an expert for the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum. Most notably, his academic research and public advocacy played an instrumental role in overturning China’s harmful decades-old one-child per couple policy. His research has earned him top awards from the Social Science History Association, American Sociological Association and Japanese Population Association. An elected member of the Sociological Research Association, Wang Feng was recognized in 2022 with the UCI Lauds & Laurels Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement. That same year, he was elected a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, one the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific academies. Most recently, he turned his full attention to inequality in China, a topic he’s explored over the years alongside his one-child policy work. His newest book - China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath – explores the country’s rise to material abundance, present predicaments, and future challenges due to internally driven demographic, economic, and political problems. He will use his fellowship to complete a new book on the politics of policymaking, using the case of China’s one-child policy.

Tsudik is a Distinguished Professor of computer science. His research interests include many topics in computer security, privacy and applied cryptography. Some of his recent work is focused on security (especially, malware-resistance) for the burgeoning global ecosystem of so-called Internet of Things devices. He is a Fulbright scholar and a three-time Fulbright specialist. He received the 2017 Outstanding Contribution Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control and the 2020 Jean-Claude Laprie Award from the International Federation for Information Processing. He is also the author of the first crypto-poem published as a refereed paper. Tsudik is the only computer scientist to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, and he intends to use his fellowship funding to bootstrap a new line of research on building IoT devices resilient against devastating large-scale malware infestations that have become all too common in recent years.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has given nearly $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, including over 125 Nobel laureates; members of all the National Academies; winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize and National Book Award; and recipients of other internationally recognized honors.

UCI now has 60 Guggenheim Fellows from various backgrounds and fields of study.

-Tom Vasich, UCI