Daniel Klionsky, associate professor of microbiology, and Jacob Olupona, professor of African American and African studies, at the University of California, Davis, are two of 164 artists, scholars and scientists selected nationally to receive 1997 Guggenheim fellowships. Recipients of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation annual competition are selected on the basis of unusually distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for the future. Nearly $5 million has been awarded this year. Klionsky, who joined the UC Davis faculty in 1990, studies how cells function on a molecular level. More specifically, he is interested in proteins, which do most of the work in a cell. Proteins need to be in the right place to work correctly. He and his students are researching how proteins are delivered to their correct locations in the cell. The Guggenheim award will allow Klionsky to take a sabbatical at the Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire and work full time in the lab to examine how cells respond when they run out of food. Under this type of situation, cells need to recycle some of their protein. This is similar to a starving organism using fat reserves, eventually even breaking down muscles. It allows the cell or organism to survive. The molecular basis of this recycling process, called autophagy, however, is not well understood. Learning how cells work at the subcellular level has important implications for subjects ranging from biomedical research to agriculture. Klionsky's research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He collaborates with scientists in Japan, Germany and Israel. Klionsky holds two patents with the university. Olupona, who joined the UC Davis faculty in 1991, studies African religion and culture. He plans to use the award to further his study of Yoruba thought and culture, examining and translating verses of primarily oral religious and philosophical chants used by the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria. Olupona will interpret the principal chants memorized by priests-diviners during long apprenticeships -- scholarship that will be the first interpretation of the verses since 1951 and 1970 when other researchers pioneered such studies. Olupona plans to use the material as a source for a book on Yoruba thought and culture. The work is significant, Olupona says, because it will provide groundwork for other scholars interested in the local knowledge and religious life of the Yoruba people. Olupona notes that in American urban areas, a renaissance of Yoruba religion is taking place. The religion, he says, is in the process of achieving the status of a global religion, undergoing a similar transformation that scriptural traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism underwent before reaching more mainstream status, Olupona says. Olupona is the author of the book "Kingship Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community" and has edited more than four books. In 1996, he organized an international conference held on campus titled "Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity." Olupona has received several fellowships and grants in the humanities and social sciences from British, Swedish, German, Japanese and U.S. sources. During the past 73 years, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted nearly $176 million in fellowships. More information about the foundation and fellowships may be found at the web site, http://www.gf.org/.