More than half of the 23 winners of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowships are academics, according to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which chooses the fellows for their “exceptional creativity, promise of important advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”
The winners will each receive a $625,000 grant, distributed over five years, to use at their discretion.
A full list of the winners and their achievements can be found on the foundation’s website. The academics who won fellowships are as follows, drawing on the foundation’s citations:
- Daryl Baldwin, a linguist and cultural preservationist at Miami University, in Ohio, who is working to revive the culture and heritage of the Miami nation, a people indigenous to the Great Lakes region.
- Anne Basting, at theater artist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee who has shown the power of storytelling and creative expression to help the elderly suffering from cognitive impairments.
- Kellie Jones, an art historian and curator at Columbia University whose research and curation have introduced the work of important but underrecognized black artists.
- Subhash Khot, a theoretical computer scientist at New York University who has tackled unresolved questions in optimization and approximation, and has contributed to significant advances in computational complexity.
- Josh Kun, a cultural historian and professor of communication at the University of Southern California. Most recently, he has been studying and writing about the history of race, music, and cultural exchange in Los Angeles.
- Maggie Nelson, a nonfiction writer at the California Institute of the Arts who renders pressing issues of our time into portraits of day-to-day experience in works marked by interplay between personal experience and critical theory.
- Dianne Newman, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology who has merged methods and approaches from disparate fields to investigate the co-evolution of bacteria and their environments.
- Victoria Orphan, a geobiologist at Caltech. Her work has helped demonstrate that certain deep-sea microbes consume methane, reducing significant amounts of the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.
- Manu Prakash, a physical biologist and inventor at Stanford University, who has created several devices to make scientific research more affordable.
- Claudia Rankine, a professor of poetry at Yale University. Ms. Rankine’s poetry and writing often explore race in American society.
- Lauren Redniss, an artist and writer at the New School’s Parsons School of Design who fuses artwork, written text, and design in an approach to visual nonfiction that enriches how stories can be conveyed, experienced, and understood.
- Rebecca Richards-Kortum, a bioengineer at Rice University who developed point-of-care diagnostic technologies for use in low-resource settings and inspired the next generation of engineers to translate lessons from the classroom into solutions for global health disparities.
- Julia Wolfe, a composer at NYU who has synthesized various musical styles in highly physical, large-scale narrative compositions that reimagine folk traditions and lore, and address issues of the American worker.
- Gene Luen Yang, a graphic novelist and faculty member at Hamline University. His graphic novels, written through a Chinese-American lens, employ diverse sets of characters.
- Jin-Quan Yu, a synthetic chemist at the Scripps Research Institute who has pioneered new methods for the catalysis and functionalization of carbon-hydrogen bonds, and has enabled the development of versatile, novel, and beneficial chemical compounds.
Corrections (9/23/2016, 12:24 a.m.): The original version of this article did not include Gene Luen Yang. The article also misspelled the first name of one winner. She is Claudia Rankine, not Claudine. The list has been corrected.