Fifty-six scholars studying topics from immigration to love poetry will pursue their projects as fellows at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Institute officials announced last week.

The scholars, 46 women and 10 men, include 13 scientists, 8 artists and writers, 16 humanities scholars and 19 social scientists.

Each year, the Radcliffe Institute chooses a class of scholars, who come to Radcliffe for a year to pursue a specific project related to their field of study. This year, the program received 738 applicants for 56 spots.

Radcliffe provides these scholars with a stipend of up to $50,000, office space, research support and library privileges at Harvard, according to a spokesperson for the Institute.

Though each scholar pursues a project in his or her field of expertise, they are also grouped into academic “clusters”—related fields of study—for optimal collaboration.

“The notion is to have a variety of fellows working on all different projects, but also to have focused and sustained interaction and planned interaction,” said Radcliffe Dean Drew Gilpin Faust. “Many other institutes for advanced study do the same thing, they have special little areas.”

Last year, Radcliffe housed an astrophysics cluster.

This year, a group of computer scientists will study the concept of randomization and a group of social scientists will study immigration.

The latter cluster has met throughout the past year to help plan what issues they will tackle during their year at Radcliffe.

“I’m delighted,” said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard and a new Radcliffe fellow, who will work with the immigration cluster. “I was involved...in identifying the people we wanted to have in the cluster. We’ve already been meeting and talking about our projects.”

Hochschild’s project concerns identity politics and “the general relationship between race and ethnicity,” as the concepts have evolved over time.

Similarly, the computer scientists said they are excited about the new possibilities for collaboration that working at Radcliffe will mean for them.

“First of all, historically, a lot of the fellows in the cluster have already interacted in the past and written some papers together,” said new fellow Eli Ben-Sasson, who is a post-doctoral student with a joint post at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s what we’re hoping for, to be able to be in one place and work together a lot.”

Their project will look into the role of randomization in computer science.

“At a very high level, it turns out, somewhat surprisingly, many aspects of computer science suddenly become much richer and more interesting when randomization is thrown into the picture,” said Salil Vadhan, a fellow who is also an assistant professor of computer science at Harvard. “There are some areas of computer science that can’t even get off the ground without looking at randomization; cryptography is an example. But it’s an open question whether randomization is really necessary [in other areas.]”