MacArthur Foundation Names 25 Recipients of ‘Genius’ Prizes

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, has announced the 25 recipients of its 2005 MacArthur Fellowships.

The fellowships, commonly referred to as the “genius awards,” recognize people in a wide range of fields who demonstrate exceptional creativity and originality and the promise for continued innovative work. Each fellow receives $500,000 over five years, and the award is bestowed with “no strings attached,” allowing each fellow to use the money as he or she sees fit. There is no application process for the fellowship program, and nominators from many disciplines serve anonymously.

Most of the fellows work for academic institutions and other nonprofit groups.

Among the nonprofit officials selected as winners are three who devote their lives to the arts and humanities:

• Marin Alsop, principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, in Poole, England. Ms. Alsop is scheduled to become the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in September 2007, making her the first female director of a major orchestra.
• Terry Belanger, a professor at the University of Virginia who leads the Rare Book School, which holds week-long sessions on the art and preservation of old and rare manuscripts for scholars, curators, rare-book collectors, and others from such institutions as the Library of Congress and the Royal Library of the Netherlands.
• Aaron Dworkin, a violinist and arts educator who, in his mid-20s, founded the Sphinx Organization, a nonprofit group in Detroit that supports black and Latino musicians interested in careers in classical music. Mr. Dworkin began by organizing an annual national competition for minority string players; his programs now encompass an orchestra made up entirely of African-American and Latino musicians.

Two of the fellows work to improve public health.

• Majora Carter, founder and director of Sustainable South Bronx, returned to her native Hunts Point neighborhood after completing an M.F.A. at New York University. While she initially thought her work in the South Bronx would revolve around the arts, she soon found herself involved in a successful grass-roots campaign to stop a planned solid-waste-management facility in Hunts Point that would process 40 percent of New York City’s garbage.

• Since then, Ms. Carter, who is 38, has started other efforts to improve the environment in the South Bronx, such as educating the neighborhood’s residents about air quality, exercise, nutrition, and other public-health topics.

• Michael Cohen is a leader in efforts to combat the serious, yet often undisclosed, problem of preventable deaths that result from medication and drug-delivery errors. As president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., he helped set up a confidential program through which medical professionals can learn about potentially deadly mistakes and take steps to prevent such errors in their own practices.

The foundation also selected two fellows who focus on environmental preservation and animal welfare.

• Steven Goodman, a conservation biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, spends most of the year studying and cataloguing plants and animals in Madagascar. As part of his work, Mr. Goodman created and leads a program that trains Malagasy biologists to deal with critical local environmental issues, an approach that is being duplicated in environmentally fragile regions elsewhere.
• Ted Ames, who grew up on a remote island in Maine and studied biochemistry at the University of Maine, is a co-founder of the Penobscot East Resource Center. He combines his scientific background and knowledge of how fishermen work to protect fish habitats and promote environmental stewardship among people who fish for a living.

The fellows were notified by phone last week by the foundation that they had won a fellowship.

“The call can be life-changing, coming as it does out of the blue and offering highly creative women and men the gift of time and the unfettered opportunity to explore, create, and contribute,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, the foundation’s president, in a press statement.

As Mr. Ames, a 66-year-old who still works as a lobsterman, describes the experience: “They called me around 6 or 7 in the evening. I had not a clue. Daniel Socolow [the program’s director] said, ‘I want to talk with you about the MacArthur fellows.’ I thought he wanted to discuss one or another of the incredibly talented people I’ve worked with over the years. He slid around the subject until it became clear it was me he was talking about. This is not the sort of thing you imagine an old, curmudgeonly fisherman to end up with.”

Following are the 2005 fellows, along with their institutional affiliations and a summary of how the foundation describes their accomplishments:

Marin Alsop, 48, conductor, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Poole, England. She often communicates directly with her audiences, previewing short passages that demonstrate musical themes and motifs and helping to demystify both classical and contemporary music for a wide range of audiences.

Ted Ames, 66, fisherman, Stonington, Me. He helped create the Penobscot East Resource Center to conduct studies of past and present fishing patterns, and to combine applied science and practical experience to help protect important fish habitats from overharvesting.

Terry Belanger, 64, professor and honorary curator of special collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. He created and operates the Rare Book School, a nonprofit teaching facility and archive devoted to studying and preserving the histories of manuscripts, print, electronic text, and other cultural artifacts.

Edet Belzberg, 35, documentary filmmaker, New York. Her films delve into topics that others overlook; for example, her film Children Underground follows a group of homeless children living in a train station in Bucharest, Romania, and has focused attention on the status of children in post-communist Romania.

Majora Carter, 38, founder and executive director, Sustainable South Bronx, New York. She works to mitigate the environmental and public-health problems that residents of the South Bronx face, and to help bring about local advances in economic development, fitness and recreation, nutrition, transportation, and other issues.

Lu Chen, 33, assistant professor of neurobiology, University of California at Berkeley. A neuroscientist, she conducts research on synapses, the anatomical structures that mediate chemical signals sent from one neuron to another. Her research could lead to a better understanding of learning and memory and the development of new types of treatment for neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Michael Cohen, 61, president, Institute for Safe Medication Practices, Huntingdon Valley, Pa. He is a pharmacist who works to reduce preventable mistakes in providing patients with medicine — errors that kill thousands of people each year in the United States. He is pushing for improvements in drug naming, labeling, packaging, delivery systems, and regulation to reduce mistakes.

Joseph Curtin, 52, principal, Joseph Curtin Studios, Ann Arbor, Mich. He fuses acoustic science with the art of violinmaking, creating instruments that incorporate contemporary materials and aesthetics and experimenting with violin acoustics, sound, and ergonomics.

Aaron Dworkin, 35, founder and president, the Sphinx Organization, Detroit. He is a music educator who works through his nonprofit group to attract young blacks and Hispanics to classical music and to provide them with rigorous training, low-cost instruments, and performance opportunities.

Teresita Fernández, 37, sculptor, New York. Her room-sized installations integrate architecture and the optical effects of color and light to evoke quietude and mystery, reflecting such diverse aesthetic influences as Roman and Ottoman architecture and Japanese gardens.

Claire Gmachl, 38, associate professor of electrical engineering, Princeton University, N.J. She is a scientist whose work merges technology and fundamental physics into the fields of optics and semiconductor laser technology.

Sue Goldie, 43, associate professor of health-decision science, Harvard University, School of Public Health, Boston. A physician and public-health researcher, she uses mathematical modeling, risk analysis, and other strategies to identify new methods for improving the reproductive health of underserved women, including cervical-cancer-screening programs in Haiti, India, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, and Thailand.

Steven Goodman, 48, field biologist, department of zoology, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. He is a conservation biologist who studies and documents the endangered, diverse, and previously unknown plants and animals of Madagascar, where he works with international conservation groups and local biologists to record and preserve ecosystems increasingly threatened by rapid deforestation and population growth.

Pehr Harbury, 40, associate professor of biochemistry, Stanford University, Calif. His work explores the structure, activity, and synthesis of proteins with the goal of developing more-potent and more-specific drugs for treating disease.

Nicole King, 35, assistant professor of molecular and cell biology, University of California at Berkeley. She is a biologist who is using molecular genetic techniques to help reconstruct a critical event in the evolution of life on earth: the emergence of multicellular organisms that form the base of the animal kingdom.

Jon Kleinberg, 33, professor of computer science, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. His research spans such diverse topics as computer-networking analysis and routing, “data mining,” and comparative genomics and protein structure.

Jonathan Lethem, 41, novelist, Brooklyn, N.Y. His fiction includes Fortress of Solitude, a depiction of his childhood in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill area during the 1970s, a time when the neighborhood was filled with race and class tensions.

Michael Manga, 37, associate professor of earth and planetary science, University of California at Berkeley. He explores fundamental issues in geology and has shown that tiny deformations in water-saturated rock due to distant earthquakes can trigger local earthquakes, changes in groundwater flow, or shifts in underground magma. This discovery could assist in better identifying regional seismic hazards and forecasting seismic activity.

Todd Martinez, 37, professor of chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a theoretical chemist who seeks to explain and predict complex chemical reactions based on the quantum mechanical properties of the atoms involved in the reaction.

Julie Mehretu, 34, painter, New York. Her canvases depict large-scale maps and architectural plans upon which she paints geometric abstractions, iconic imagery, and loosely figurative markings.

Kevin M. Murphy, 47, professor, University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business. An economist, he applies empirical analyses within rigorous theoretical frameworks to help solve critical social issues. For example, he has identified how trends in wage inequality reflect underlying changes in demand for labor.

Olufunmilayo Olopade, 48, professor of medicine and human genetics, University of Chicago Hospitals. She is an oncologist who translates basic research on individual and population cancer susceptibility into effective clinical practices for treating breast cancer among African and African-American women.

Fazal Sheikh, 40, documentary photographer, Zurich. Through his black-and-white portraits, he strives to personalize the lives of displaced people in Afghanistan, Kenya, and elsewhere, and accompanies the photographs with text that uses the words of his subjects to chronicle their personal histories.

Emily Thompson, 43, associate professor of history, University of California at San Diego. Her work focuses on the role that sound, acoustics, and accompanying technologies have played in contemporary American history.

Michael Walsh, 62, technical consultant, Arlington, Va. An engineer and policy analyst, he works to improve regional public health and the global environment by reducing the impact of internal-combustion engines on air quality. His bimonthly publication, Car Lines, is an important resource for governments, manufacturers, and research institutions that want to keep up with technical advances in emissions control and trends in regulatory policies.