Three UW–Madison professors earn Guggenheim Fellowships

“Three UW–Madison professors earn Guggenheim Fellowships The prestigious awards recognize their prior career achievements and future promise. ​By Lydia Picotte ​ April 22, 2026 ​ Share this article Three UW–Madison professors in the College of Letters & Science have been named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows by the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The prestigious awards are given to applicants across disciplines, both for their prior career achievements and great future potential. Ilias Diakonikolas, the Sheldon B. Lubar Professor in Computer Sciences, Professor of Chemistry Randall Goldsmith, and Claire Wendland, the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology, are among 223 fellows selected from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants. Ilias Diakonikolas Diakonikolas’ research explores algorithms and machine learning, with a particular focus on the tradeoff between statistical efficiency, computational efficiency, and robustness for fundamental problems in statistics and machine learning. His work contributes to cross-disciplinary efforts on campus, including at the Institute for Foundations of Data Science, the Department of Statistics, the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the Data Science Institute. Diakonikolas has previously been the recipient of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Romnes Faculty Fellowship, a Google Faculty Research Award and a Marie Curie Fellowship, among other recognitions. Randall Goldsmith Goldsmith’s study of chemical systems centers on chemical reactions using individual-molecule methods. His work has interdisciplinary implications, with advancements in not only chemistry, but also materials science and biophysics. Earlier this year, Goldsmith was also selected as the recipient of the American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in Chemical Instrumentation. He became a Schmidt Sciences Polymath in 2022. Claire Wendland Wendland, who shares an appointment in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, has research interests in cultural and medical anthropology, maternal health, biomedicine and hospital ethnography. As part of her first major research project, she developed the first-ever ethnography of a medical school in the Global South. Her work at UW has previously earned her the Dr. Brenda Pfaehler Award of Excellence, the Phillip R. Certain Letters & Science Distinguished Faculty Award and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. All three professors join a distinguished community of some 19,000 scholars and artists — including James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Linus Pauling and Rachel Carson — who have been named Guggenheim Fellows since the program’s founding in 1925.

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