ITHACA, N.Y. -- Three Cornell University researchers have won Guggenheim Fellowship Awards for 1996. They are among 158 artists, scholars and scientists from among 2,791 applicants to be chosen for the honor. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation awarded $4.5 million in research funds this year. Fellows are chosen on the basis of unusually distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

The Cornell faculty members are: P. Andrew Karplus, associate professor of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, G. Peter Lepage, professor of physics, for numerical methods in low-energy strong interaction physics, and Stephen A. Vavasis, associate professor of computer science, for geometry in scientific computing.

" P. Andrew Karplus, associate professor of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, currently visiting professor at Oregon State University, for the relations of protein structure and function. Karplus earned his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Washington and a B.S. in 1978 from the University of California at Davis. He came to Cornell in 1988 and was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, carrying out research in Germany, in 1984 and 1990. His research interest is in using X-ray crystallography and protein chemistry to understand molecular details of how proteins carry out their biological functions. Such information can be used in structure-based drug design. Karplus intends to write a book on the subject of protein structure-function relations.

" G. Peter Lepage, professor of physics, for numerical methods in low-energy strong interaction physics. A member of the Cornell faculty since 1980, Lepage earned a doctorate in 1978 and a graduate degree in 1975, both from Stanford University, and an undergraduate degree from McGill University. Lepage is a theoretical physicist in Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies who currently is exploring the fundamental nature of protons and neutrons using numerical simulations. While such simulations in the past have required the largest of supercomputers, Lepage and his collaborators have developed new techniques that make state- of-the-art work possible using personal computers.

" Stephen A. Vavasis, associate professor of computer science, for geometry in scientific computing. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in 1989, studied at Cambridge University in 1985 and earned an undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1984. A former National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, Vavasis does research in designing more efficient algorithms to analyze increasingly complex large-scale scientific problems. He chairs the admissions committee of the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell.