Four UC Davis scholars have been awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships, the foundation announced Thursday.

Alan M. Taylor, professor of economics; Stephen Brush, professor of human and community development; Daniel Cox, professor of physics; and Deborah Harkness, associate professor of history, are among the 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 3,200 applicants for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's 80th annual awards.

Using support from the fellowships, Taylor and Brush will go abroad for a year to gather information and consult with other scholars, with the intention of eventually writing books on their subjects. Harkness plans to finish her research in London and then write a book next year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle in North Carolina, while Cox will spend a year's sabbatical at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at the University of California San Diego.

Taylor, co-author of the 2004 book "Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis and Growth" and a co-editor or author of six other books on international trade and finance, will spend the academic year in Great Britain and France at the London School of Economics and American University in Paris. Both cities have important historical archives related to 19th-century globalization and are in countries that have been major commercial centers of trade since the 19th century. In addition, the universities have been centers of scholarship in economic history for centuries.

By focusing on the comparisons and contrasts between the 19th century and today, Taylor hopes to answer questions about globalization of both financial markets and trade.

Taylor's project will pull together the study of the causes and the consequences of economic integration during both periods. He also wants to discover what the implications are for economic growth, investment, trade, income distribution and equality across the world if economic integration intensifies as it did in the late 19th century.

"The past is the only economic laboratory we've got, " Taylor said.

In 1997, Taylor, along with collaborator Maurice Obstfeld, won the Sanwa Prize in International Economics and Financial Markets. The two have spent the past six years performing joint work on the history of world finance, culminating with their book "Global Capital Markets."

Anthropologist Brush's new project will be aimed at understanding the Mexican urban consumer and the relationship between Mexico's national culture priorities and the future of corn. His new book, "Farmers' Bounty: Locating Crop Diversity in the Contemporary World," will be published in May.

He will spend the academic year in Morelia, a university town and the capital of the state of Michoacán. There, with colleagues from the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Brush will interview consumers, restaurant owners, wholesale distributors, tortilla manufacturers and others in the food chain to determine the public discourse about the future of corn in the country.

As Mexico urbanizes and agriculture changes in the global economy, Brush sees many Mexicans looking to a U.S. model of agribusiness. Rather than many farmers raising corn on small plots, Mexico could rely on U.S. imports or a few farmers to produce corn as a major commodity on an immense industrialized scale. That could threaten the biodiversity of traditional genetic maize stock, Brush believes.

Brush has been a consultant to the World Bank, the Office of Technology Assessment, the United Nations Development Programme, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and UNESCO.

Cox uses mathematical models to study the physics of biological problems, such as the electronic properties of DNA and how metal ions interact with proteins. He is especially interested in prions -- infectious proteins that are thought to cause "mad cow" disease in cattle, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans and similar diseases in sheep, deer, mink and rodents.

Prions are thought to be misfolded versions of a normal brain protein. Cox's laboratory has developed models to investigate how a change in protein folding that takes fractions of a second can develop into a disease that may take decades to develop. More recently, his group has turned to other questions such as the evolution of prion "strains" and the role of metal ions in prion diseases.

The UC San Diego center, funded principally by the National Science Foundation, has one of the strongest programs in theoretical biological physics in the country, Cox said. He expects to use their facilities and expertise to build more detailed models of molecular events, and learn from them as well as contributing to the work of the center.

Historian Harkness intends to study science, medicine and technology in Elizabethan London. Author of "John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and the End of Nature" (1999), Harkness studies the social foundations of the scientific revolution. Her current research focuses on the networks of natural knowledge and science practice that existed in London in the 16th century.

"I'm interested in how artisans, women, and other early modern individuals fascinated by the natural world sought to explore and explain the world around them," Harkness said. "Though often overshadowed by figures like Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, I believe that their lives and experiences can tell us a great deal about how scientific ideas emerge."

UC Davis is among 87 institutions in United States and Canada recognized with Guggenheim Fellows this spring. Fellows are appointed by recommendations from expert advisers on the basis of distinguished past achievement and the promise of future accomplishment. Awards this year total $6.9 million; fellowships are expected to average about $37,360 per fellow.