University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz, music professor Timothy Rommen and theoretical chemist Joseph Subotnik have won John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships. They are among 178 scholars, artists and scientists selected from nearly 3,000 applicants from the US and Canada. The new fellows, announced last month, were chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Dr. Mutz, who has dual appointments in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Annenberg School for Communication, will use her Guggenheim in conjunction with her fall sabbatical to work on a study of American attitudes toward globalization over the next academic year. She teaches and does research on public opinion, political psychology and mass political behavior, with an emphasis on political communication. She holds the Samuel A. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication and serves as the director of the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics.

Dr. Rommen, a professor of music and Africana studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, specializes in the music of the Caribbean with research interests that include folk and popular sacred music, popular music, critical theory, ethics, tourism, diaspora and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. He will use his Guggenheim to complete a book, Sounding a Borderless Caribbean: The Creole Geographies of Dominica’s Popular Music.

Dr. Subotnik, an associate professor of chemistry in the School of Arts & Sciences, will use his award to further fundamental understanding of electrochemistry, the study of chemical reactions that involve the transfer of electrons at metal surfaces. These reactions are critical to the operation of catalysts, batteries, photovoltaic cells and many other energy-related devices. He will collaborate with Stanford University’s Todd Martinez, as well as other theorists there, to make faster, more detailed computer simulations of electrochemical reaction dynamics.