WESTWOOD—Three UCLA faculty members have been selected as recipients of the 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, officials announced on Friday, April 7.

The outstanding candidates are among the 173 scholars, artists, and scientists selected from a group of nearly 3,000 applicants in the foundation’s 93rd competition. The award helps recipients pursue a unique project for a period of 6 to 12 months.

The 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship recipients from UCLA are:

Michelle Huneven, lecturer in the UCLA English department and a critically acclaimed writer, who is presently teaching creative writing at UCLA to undergraduates. She is the author of four novels. Huneven’s first two books “Round Rock” (1997) and “Jamesland” (2003) were both New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the L.A. Times Book Award. Her third novel, “Blame” (2009), was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the L.A. Times Book Award. Her fourth novel “Of Course” (2014), was named the New York Times Editor’s Choice. Huneven will be using the fellowship grant to finish a novel in progress.

Hiroshi Motomura, the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He wrote two books: “American in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizen in the United States” (2006) and “Immigration Outside of Law” (2014), both of which won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award from the Association of American Publishers. Motomura will use the fellowship grant towards his new book, which will examine immigration in policy matters.

Aydogan Ozcan, the Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering, Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, and the HHMI Professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Ozcan leads research in photonics with a focus on nano- and bio-technologies. His Guggenheim Fellowship project is called, “Extreme-throughput computational imaging and sensing of viruses.”

In addition to the three recipients from UCLA, nine other UC scholars have been selected for the 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, including scholars from UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Cruz.

This year’s fellows bring UC’s Guggenheim Fellowships to a total of 1,669, more than any other university or college.

Since its establishment in 1929, the Guggenheim Foundation granted over $350 million in fellowships to more than 18,000 people.

“These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”