UC Irvine scholars are among 198 recipients of prestigious award this year

University of California, Irvine professors Coleman Collins and Simon Huttegger have been awarded 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships. As part of the 100^th class of fellows, they are among 198 American and Canadian scientists, scholars and artists receiving this year’s prestigious grants.

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. Each fellow receives a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”

“Congratulations to Professors Coleman Collins and Simon Huttegger on being recognized with 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships,” said Hal Stern, UC Irvine provost and executive vice chancellor. “The awards recognize the exceptional promise of the work to be carried out by these outstanding faculty members.”

An assistant professor of art, Collins is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and researcher whose most recent work examines the connections between “things in the world” and their digital approximations, paying particular attention to the ways in which real and virtual spaces are socially produced. Utilizing sculpture, video, photography and text, he seeks a synthesis of seemingly opposed terms: subject and object, object and image, original and duplicate, and freedom and captivity. Collins earned an M.F.A. at UCLA in 2018 and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2019, he participated in the Whitney Museum’s independent study program. Coleman will use Guggenheim support to produce a new body of work that continues his exploration of the resonances between the emergent cultures of diasporic groups and the effects of digital methods of transmission, copying and reiteration.

Huttegger is a Chancellor’s Professor of logic and philosophy of science. His scholarly focus is game and decision theory, the philosophy of science, the foundations of probability, the theory of measurement, and the philosophy of biology. A native Austrian, he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Salzburg in 2006. Before joining UC Irvine in 2008, he spent two years as a postdoc at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, north of Vienna. Huttegger will use the Guggenheim Fellowship to support his research on the mathematical, statistical and philosophical foundations of inductive reasoning.

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.

UC Irvine now has 61 Guggenheim Fellows from various backgrounds and fields of study.