Apr. 28, 2000


Wen Wang Awarded Guggenheim For Research Into Information Technologies, Jaime Manrique Wins One To Write Memoir

By Amy Callahan

Wen Wang

Professor Wen I. Wang, an eminent researcher in high-speed optoelectronics and molecular beam epitaxy, and Jaime Manrique, adjunct assistant professor of Writing in the School of the Arts, have been awarded 2000 Guggenheim Fellowships.

Professor Wang's research areas of interest include heterostructure devices and physics, material properties and molecular-beam-epitaxy. In 1996, Wang was awarded a $1.4-million Office of Naval Research grant to use molecular layering techniques, such as molecular beam epitaxy, to create a multi-layered crystal that could be used as a high-temperature semiconductor. He was selected by the IEEE Electron Device Society as a distinguished lecturer to speak on the topic.

Wang, who received his undergraduate education at National Taiwan University and holds a Ph.D. from Cornell, joined the Columbia's Electrical Engineering Department in 1987 where he is Thayer Lindsley Professor.

Between 1981 and 1982 he worked at the Rockwell Science Center and between 1982 and 1987 he worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His current research interests include high temperature transistors and high speed optoelectronic devices. He has contributed some 200 journal articles in the areas of heterostructure device physics, high speed transistors, semiconductor lasers, photodetectors, molecular beam epitaxy, and surface science. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, American Physical Society, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Electron Device Society.

Jaime Manrique

Jaime Manrique, adjunct assistant professor of Writing in the School of the Arts, is a novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who has written extensively both in English and Spanish. He has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in order to write his memoir.

Manrique's first volume of poetry received Colombia's National Poetry Award. In English he has published the volume of poems My Night with Federico García Lorca (1995) and the novels Colombian Gold (1983), Latin Moon in Manhattan (1992), and Twilight at the Equator (1997). He has just published Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me and edited Bésame Mucho, an anthology of new gay Latino writing. A new volume of poems, Mi cuerpo y otros poemas has just been published in Colombia.

Manrique was born in Colombia, received his B.A from the University of South Florida, and has taught creative writing and literature at New York University, Mount Holyoke College, and The New School for Social Research.

Wang and Manrique join two other Columbia faculty to receive Guggenheim Fellowships this year: Anne Bogart, a professor of theater in the School of the Arts, and Zoe Strother, assistant professor of art history and archeology, who specializes in the visual arts of Africa and its diaspora in the twentieth century.

The awardees in the 76th annual competition of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are selected on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The foundation was created in the 1920s to recognize and reward promising young artists, scholars and scientists. Recipients of the Guggenheim, a prestigious and highly prized award, often become some of the most prominent individuals in their fields.