Feliciano Giustino Among 3 UT Faculty Named as Guggenheim Foundation 100th Class of Fellows

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has named three faculty members at The University of Texas at Austin to its 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows:

• Feliciano Giustino, professor of physics and Principal Faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
• Swarat Chaudhuri, professor of computer science
• Eli Durst, Studio Art Associate Professor of Practice 

The three were among 198 individuals to receive fellowships out of almost 3,500 applicants. 

“Each of these faculty members shares a drive to have significant impact through their work,” said UT interim Provost David Vanden Bout. “Their fellowships through the Guggenheim Foundation will support inspiring artistic works, advances in artificial intelligence and important research relevant to the development of new quantum technologies. Their dedication builds on a track record of achievement by our faculty and their abilities to go on to transform their respective fields.”   

Feliciano Giustino

A pioneer in computational condensed matter physics, through the fellowship, Giustino will investigate a new class of quasiparticles, topological polarons, which his team recently discovered while studying materials at the forefront of solar energy research. These exotic entities emerge when electrons strongly interact with the atomic vibrations of a crystal, forming vortex-like structures akin to magnetic skyrmions. Giustino’s project will explore novel emergent phenomena arising from electron-phonon interactions that may inform future quantum technologies. 

“Topological polarons represent an unexpected bridge between electron-phonon interactions in condensed matter and topological concepts in mathematics,” says Giustino, “and they open the door to entirely new opportunities in quantum materials research.” Giustino is also the director of the Oden Institute's Center for Quantum Materials Engineering.

"Since joining the Institute in 2019, Giustino has been a powerhouse of research in computational quantum materials. We congratulate him on this well-deserved honor,” said Karen Willcox, Director of the Oden Institute.

Giustino holds the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Quantum Materials Engineering and is internationally recognized for his foundational contributions to the theory of electron-phonon interactions, the development of open-source software for quantum simulations on high-performance computers and the discovery of novel halide perovskites for solar cells and LED lighting. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher.

Swarat Chaudhuri

Swarat Chaudhuri works in the intersection of formal methods and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the College of Natural Sciences. His lab has developed an AI agent called Copra that repeatedly asks a large language model (LLM) to predict the next step in a proof of a mathematical theorem. Once the LLM chooses a step, the system uses it to simplify the problem, and the LLM makes another prediction. However, this method works only for theorems with set proof goals. 

Through the fellowship, Chaudhuri will work on designing an AI agent that proposes new math problems and their solutions, and another one that evaluates the “interestingness” the outputs of the first agent. Unlike his previous research, this project will emulate the curiosity-driven exploration that human mathematicians are known for. As such, it will be an important step, Chaudhuri explains, towards “building AI systems that can co-author research papers with human mathematicians,” which would represent a major advance in the use of AI for mathematics. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Google Research Award, the ACM SIGPLAN John Reynolds Doctorate Dissertation Award. 

Eli Durst

Born and raised in Austin, Durst is an associate professor of practice in the Department of Art and History. With his fellowship, Durst will undertake a photographic project exploring the future of evangelical Christianity in America by looking at large church congregations across Texas. Rather than reproducing the same reductive stereotypes seen in popular culture, he hopes to better understand what is so appealing to so many Americans about these epicenters of 21st-century Christian life and how these organizations create a sense of shared purpose and collective identity through faith.

Durst’s work blends the languages of conceptual and documentary photography, creating open-ended and ambiguous narratives. He is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the UT Senate’s Professor of the Semester in Spring 2022 and the 2022 Department of Art & Art History Outstanding Teaching Award. He is also the winner of the Spring 2022 Hopper Prize. Durst received the Aperture Portfolio Prize for his series In Asmara, which examines the postcolonial legacy of Eritrea’s capital city, and a 2017 Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant. Durst holds an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art.

Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors. 

“We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation, in today’s announcement, “and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”

Adapted from UT News. For more information, contact:

Joanne Foote (Oden Institute)
Christine Sinatra (College of Natural Sciences)