Meet the Academics Who Nabbed This Year’s MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation on Thursday announced the 25 winners of this year’s “genius” grants, and more than half of the recipients are academics. Each fellowship carries a $625,000 stipend, paid out over five years, with no strings attached.

U. of Texas at Austin

Gregg Gonsalves, one winner, is an epidemiologist who holds several positions at Yale University. “I’ve always had the idea that science had a role in improving people’s lives, that it wasn’t just ivory-tower work,” he said. “My work now is not around drug development. It’s about how you get the drugs that are already out there out to the people who need them.”

The other academics on the MacArthur list are:

• Clifford Brangwynne, a biophysical engineer at Princeton University, where he is an associate professor in the department of chemical and biological engineering.

• Natalie Diaz, a poet who writes about indigenous Americans. She is a member of the Mojave Gila River Indian Tribe and an associate professor of English at Arizona State University.

• Livia S. Eberlin, a chemist who works on “developing technologies for more efficient and accurate clinical diagnosis and surgical treatment of cancer.” She is an assistant professor in the department of chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin.

• Deborah Estrin, a computer scientist and professor in the department of computer science, as well as an associate dean, at Cornell Tech.

• Amy Finkelstein, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also the co-founder and co-scientific director of J-PAL North America, as well as the founding editor of the American Economic Review: Insights.

• John Keene, a fiction writer and chair of the department of African-American and African studies at Rutgers University at Newark. He has also taught at Brown University and Northwestern University, among other institutions.

• Kristina Olson, a psychologist who works on “shedding light on the social and cognitive development of transgender and gender-nonconforming youth.” She is an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Washington.

• Lisa Parks, a media scholar and professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also director of MIT’s Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab.

• Rebecca Sandefur, a sociologist “whose research on how legal services are delivered and consumed is informing emerging models for more equal access to civil justice.” She is an associate professor in the department of sociology and the College of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has also taught at Stanford University.

• Allan Sly, a professor in the department of mathematics at Princeton University.

• Sarah T. Stewart, a planetary scientist “shedding light on planet formation and evolution.” She is a professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California at Davis.

• Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, where she is a professor of biology.

For more information about the other MacArthur fellows, visit the foundation’s page.

Correction (10/4/2018, 8:42 p.m.): This article originally left out the poet Natalie Diaz. That error has been corrected.