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3 Chicagoans among class of MacArthur 'geniuses'
Three Chicagoans — a documentary photographer, a computational biologist and a community education innovator — are among the 24 newest MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant winners announced Monday.
(Chicago Tribune)
John CarpenterContact ReporterChicago Tribune
Geniuses among us: Here is the list of 24 MacArthur Foundation fellows for 2015.
Three Chicagoans — a documentary photographer, a computational biologist and a community education innovator — are among the 24 newest MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant winners announced Monday.
Officially known as MacArthur Fellows, all can look forward to $625,000, paid out over five years with no strings attached.
Handed out every year since 1981 by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the grants are meant to shine a light on — and slip a little cash to — creative people across a variety of fields.
Winners run the gamut from scientists to community activists to a puppeteer, culled from more than 1,000 "nominees" each year. The selection process is somewhat secretive, with the foundation relying on a "network of informants" to flag potential winners for consideration, said Cecilia A. Conrad, vice president of the MacArthur Foundation and leader of the Fellows Program.
She said the ideal candidate is someone who has demonstrated a high degree of creativity in their field, "with the potential for more. We kind of want to catch them before they really make it," she said.
Nearly half of this year's winners are in their 30s, and 19 of the 24 are younger than 50. Seven of the 24 winners hail from New York City, and more than two-thirds come from the East Coast.
With Tuesday's official announcement, the winners get to experience a sort of reverse surprise party. All have been notified over the past few weeks, on the condition they are allowed to share the news with only one person. Most, Conrad said, tell their spouse, with the rest of their family, friends and colleagues finding out with the official announcement, released late Monday night.
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University of Chicago computational biologist John Novembre was interviewed by phone from Colorado Saturday, where he was attending a family reunion. (Reporters were given the names under strict embargo last week.) Novembre had to sneak away for the call, as his family didn't know about the award. He said he initially missed the MacArthur phone call, as he tends to ignore numbers he doesn't recognize, assuming they are telemarketers.
"I finally answered when they called again, and they asked me if I was in a place where I could have a private conversation, which I thought was weird," he said. "Then they said they were from the MacArthur Foundation, and I began to realize it might be something important."
Novembre was singled out for his work developing algorithms to help researchers analyze genetic data and better understand human evolutionary history. He said the award will allow him to push the boundaries of his work, perhaps trying more creative methods that might otherwise not warrant research funding. Perhaps more important, though, is the sense of validation the award brings.
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"It's incredible how affirming it is," he said. "It makes me feel like the work we're doing is making an impact."
That's the takeaway for LaToya Ruby Frazier, a documentary photographer and filmmaker who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work highlights the plight of residents, especially older African-Americans, in her hometown of Braddock, Pa., once a bustling steel mill town.
"I'm fighting for the relevance of social documentary work," she said. "To receive an award like this, in the early stages of my career, is a huge validation."
Frazier, at 33, is the youngest of this year's winners.
Frazier's "The Notion of Family," published by Aperture last year, offers spare photographs of her mother and grandmother, as well as herself. It explores the idea that the residue of abandoned industry is not only environmental degradation but forgotten people, left without essential services like health care.
Frazier hopes her work will shine a light on those people, to give them a seat at the table as decisions are made about the future of their communities. "The answers to these problems should come from the people who are dealing with them," she said.
As president and CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino on the West Side, Juan Salgado has dedicated his career to helping low-income workers acquire the education and skills they need to land higher-paying jobs. The idea, Salgado said, is to shorten the path to a brighter future, so workers can see that it is attainable. He sees building a more talented workforce as the key to the city's economic future.
"In our work, you do the mission to achieve the mission," he said. "You need resources, and you need an audience of people who understand the work you're doing. At the end of the day, you want to make as big a dent in the world as you can. This (award) means more people are going to know about the dent you're making."
Here are this year's MacArthur Fellows.
Patrick Awuah, 50, Ghana: This former Microsoft engineer founded Ashesi University in Ghana in 2002, convinced that a focus on liberal arts and ethical leadership can help his native country move past pervasive corruption.
Kartik Chandran, 41, New York: An environmental engineer working to replace wasteful, energy-consuming wastewater treatments with a system that turns the waste into useful products like fertilizers and helpful chemicals, not to mention clean water.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, 39, Washington, D.C.: He's a journalist who started a national conversation last year with his essay on race relations, "The Case for Reparations in America." MacArthur officials called him "a highly distinctive voice … emerging as a leading interpreter of American concerns to a new generation of media savvy audiences and having a profound impact on the discussion of race and racism in this country."
Gary Cohen, 59, Reston, Va.: This social entrepreneur and activist has been working for nearly 20 years to encourage hospitals to reduce the amount of dangerous chemicals they release into the environment. His Health Care Without Harm organization works with several thousand hospitals in more than 50 countries.
Matthew Desmond, 35 Cambridge, Mass.: Eviction isn't merely a symptom of poverty, it's often the cause, Desmond argues. His Milwaukee Area Renters Study examines the high rates of eviction among low-income African-Americans, in particular the fact that households led by women are more likely to face eviction. His book, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," is due out next year.
William Dichtel, 37, Ithaca, N.Y.: Imagine a small droplet of polymer weighing no more than a gram but with a surface area approaching that of a football field thanks to its complex structure. Dichtel, a chemist, is being honored for his work bringing these nanostructural materials — porous polymers known as covalent organic frameworks — out of the lab and into daily use. Potential applications include storing chemical fuels and electrical charge, as well as water purification and sensing of trace substances.
Michelle Dorrance, 36, New York: Take the uniquely American dance form of tap and add swooping, bending, leaping and twisting "with a dramatic expression that is at once musical and visual," and you have Dorrance's work, which MacArthur officials say is credited with reinvigorating the tap form.
Nicole Eisenman, 50, New York: A multimedia artist, Eisenman has found success with painting, sculpture and drawing. Judges said she "restored to the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
LaToya Ruby Frazier, 33, Chicago: A photographer, video artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Frazier's work explores social inequality in the post-industrial age. Her backdrop is often the crumbling landscape of Braddock, Pa., her hometown. Her subjects: People she says have been left behind after America's industrial economy has moved on.
Ben Lerner, 36, New York: A literary utility player, Lerner is a novelist, poet, critic and essayist whose work explores "the way in which politics, art and economics intertwine with everyday experience."
Mimi Lien, 39, New York: This New York-based set designer is no stranger to Chicagoans, having designed last year's "The World of Extreme Happiness" at the Goodman Theatre. She was cited for "bold, immersive designs (that) shape and extend a dramatic text's narrative and emotional dynamics."
Lin-Manuel Miranda, 35, New York: With one of the hottest shows on Broadway at the moment — "Hamilton," a hip-hop interpretation of the life of Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the Treasury — it's likely that the $625,000 in MacArthur cash is icing on the cake for Miranda. Still, pairing street rapping with America's founding narrative seems worthy of acknowledgment.
Dimitri Nakassis, 40, Toronto: Who among us hasn't stood at a cocktail party and heard the same old tired argument that late Bronze Age Mycenaean palatial society was a highly centralized oligarchy, quite distinct from the democratic city-states of classical Greece? Nakassis uses philology, archaeology and contemporary social and economic theory to propose that power and resources were, in fact, more broadly shared, transforming our understanding of prehistoric Greek societies.
John Novembre, 37, Chicago: The computational biologist teaches at the University of Chicago, where he creates algorithms that shed new light on human evolutionary history, population structure and migration.
Christopher Re, 36, Stanford, Calif.: In an increasingly digital world awash in data and creating more of it every nanosecond, Re, a computer scientist, creates data processing applications for solving practical problems. His "inference engine" analyzes data buried deep in texts, illustrations, images and other content, then infers facts from them based in their connections to real-world objects.
Marina Rustow, 46, Princeton, N.J.: Using the Cairo Geniza texts — hundreds of thousands of legal documents, letters and literary materials deposited in Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue over more than a millennium — Rustow has called into question conventional wisdom about Jewish life in medieval Middle East society.
Juan Salgado, 46, Chicago: A leader in Chicago's West Side Latino community, Salgado has developed a curriculum at the Instituto del Progreso Latino that incorporates basic education, vocational training and technical skills development, speeding participants toward higher-paying jobs.
Beth Stevens, 45, Boston: Her work revealed the unknown role of certain cells in neuron communication in the brain, prompting a fundamental shift in thinking about brain development in both healthy and unhealthy states.
Lorenz Studer, 49, New York: The stem cell biologist is pioneering large-scale generation of certain neurons for transplantation, a breakthrough that could provide treatment for Parkinson's disease.
Alex Truesdell, 59, New York: She challenges ideas about disability by creating user-inspired adaptations of tools and furniture that enable children with disabilities to participate actively in their homes, schools and communities.
Basil Twist, 46, New York: The aptly named puppeteer and theater artist bends the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, with work ranging from classic stories to abstract visualizations of orchestral music.
Ellen Bryant Voigt, 72, Cabot, Vt.: The oldest member of this year's "genius" class, Voigt's eight published collections of poetry "meditate on will and fate and the life cycles of the natural world while exploring the expressive potential of both lyric and narrative elements," according to the MacArthur judges.
Heidi Williams, 34, Cambridge, Mass.: Another of this year's class members harnessing the massive accumulation of data in the modern world, Williams' work helps economists unravel the causes and consequences of innovation in health care.
Peidong Yang, 44, Berkeley, Calif.: If scientists ever create an artificial leaf that uses artificial photosynthesis to turn solar energy into fuel, Yang, an inorganic chemist transforming the field of semiconductor nanowires, may be the person to do it.
Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune
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