Non-Profit Leaders Are Among 32 Fellows Named by MacArthur Fund

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced 32 new MacArthur Fellows.

Recipients of the fellowships, often called “genius awards,” are free to use the money as they wish. The foundation does not require them to produce any products or reports.

No one can apply for a MacArthur Fellowship. Nominations are proposed by more than 100 people who serve anonymously for one year.

Fellows receive $200,000 to $375,000 over five years: The older the fellow, the more he or she gets. Recipients are also offered health insurance.

Including this year’s group, the foundation has named a total of 563 fellows since the program began in 1981.

Following are the 1999 fellows:

Jillian F. Banfield, 39, associate professor of geology and geophysics, University of Wisconsin at Madison: $290,000. She is a mineralogist whose work examines the physical and chemical forces that shape the earth’s surface, including the mechanisms of rock weathering and other factors that affect soil and sediment formation and water quality.

Carolyn R. Bertozzi, 32, assistant professor of chemistry, University of California at Berkeley: $255,000. She has made important contributions to understanding how cells interact and has developed a method for tricking cells into expressing non-natural sugars on their surface, which subsequently can be modified chemically to suit experimental design. This technique can be used to study and develop methods for treating infection and other disease processes.

Bruce G. Blair, 51, foreign-policy analyst, the Brookings Institution, Washington: $350,000. He works to reduce the risks of nuclear engagement and to demonstrate the instability of Cold War and post-Cold War missile command-and-control mechanisms and their vulnerability to human and technical error.

John Bonifaz, 33, executive director and founder, National Voting Rights Institute, Cambridge, Mass.: $260,000. He is a public-interest lawyer who uses innovative litigation to re-examine campaign-finance-reform arguments; he restructures the legal arguments to focus not on the First Amendment, but on 14th Amendment protections, challenging the relationship between money and politics.

Shawn Carlson, 39, founder and executive director, Society for Amateur Scientists, San Diego: $290,000. He is a physicist and educator who seeks to demystify the scientific process for non-scientists; his organization identifies opportunities for curious amateurs to investigate important, but unsolved, scientific questions.

Mark Danner, 40, independent journalist and a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley: $295,000. He is a writer specializing in foreign affairs who examines human rights, the role of the United States in global affairs, and historical and contemporary developments in Haiti, El Salvador, Bosnia, and other locales.

Alison L. Des Forges, 56, writer and consultant for Human Rights Watch/Africa, New York: $375,000. She documents and examines the causes of genocide, and has analyzed the social and political conditions in Rwanda, Burundi, and elsewhere in central Africa before, during, and after the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Working with local human-rights organizations, she aided the International Criminal Tribunal in its prosecution of those responsible for the genocide.

Elizabeth Diller, 45, architect at Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., and Ricardo Scofidio, 64, architect at Cooper Union, New York: $375,000. Their work embodies an alternative model of architectural practice, explores how space functions in our culture, and asserts that architecture should be examined as the physical manifestation of social relationships.

Saul Friedlander, 66, professor of history, University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Tel Aviv: $375,000. He is a scholar of the Third Reich and the Holocaust whose work incorporates the perspectives of ordinary Germans, Nazi-party activists, military and political figures, and victims and survivors, and demonstrates the role of memory and representation in the interpretation of historical events.

Jennifer L. Gordon, 33, lawyer and community organizer, Brooklyn, N.Y.: $260,000. She founded the Workplace Project in 1992, a center that provides legal services, designs public-education programs, and conducts organizing campaigns as part of a coordinated effort to protect the rights of immigrant and low-wage workers.

David M. Hillis, 40, professor of zoology, University of Texas at Austin: $295,000. He has developed new molecular genetic analyses and has shown that the relationships among species can be inferred from small differences in their DNA sequences, revealing the order and timing of evolutionary processes.

Sara Horowitz, 36, executive director, Working Today, New York: $275,000. She created Working Today to promote the interests of temporary, part-time, contract, or independent workers in the United States and to form a union of consumers, trade organizations, and workers in non-traditional employment arrangements.

Jacqueline Jones, 51, professor of American civilization, Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.: $350,000. She is a social historian whose writings explore such issues as the transition from slavery to free labor, technological advances and assembly lines, and the history of the American labor-union movement.

Laura L. Kiessling, 38, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, University of Wisconsin at Madison: $285,000. She has developed innovative organic syntheses that expand the capacity to understand and control the biology of inflammation, and has designed compounds that can aggregate specific inflammation-mediating proteins, causing them to shed from the cell surface.

Leslie V. Kurke, 39, associate professor of classics and comparative literature, University of California at Berkeley: $290,000. A scholar of classical Greek antiquity and an expert in archaic Greek poetry, she is at the forefront of cultural poetics, a relatively new sub-discipline of classical studies that combines the methods of philology, new historicism, and cultural anthropology, and integrates the evidence of literary sources and material culture.

David Levering Lewis, 63, professor of history, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.: $375,000. He is a biographer, cultural historian, and scholar of race relations whose studies of black intellectual and social leaders have influenced numerous scholars.

Juan Martin Maldacena, 30, associate professor of physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.: $245,000. He is a physicist who works in the abstract field of string theory, which postulates the existence of fundamental constituents of matter too small to detect with current experimental apparatus; his work has contributed to the clarification of certain questions in theoretical physics, including the ultimate structure of matter.

Gay J. McDougall, 51, executive director, International Human Rights Law Group, Washington: $350,000. She has worked to craft human-rights legislation for emerging democracies, has been a leader in the struggle for human rights in southern Africa, and conducts human-rights advocacy, litigation, and training in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe through her organization.

Campbell McGrath, 37, associate professor of creative writing, Florida International University, Miami: $280,000. He is a poet whose work appeals to diverse audiences and is characterized by lyrical skill, intellectual breadth, blending of high and low subject matter, and humor.

Dennis Albert Moore, 54, anthropologist and coordinator of the linguistics division at the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Brazil: $365,000. He is leading an effort to preserving the language and culture of endangered indigenous groups in Brazil; his work involves both native speakers and others in documenting and preserving more than 100 endangered languages.

Elizabeth Murray, 58, artist and professor of studio arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: $375,000. She is a painter noted for creating three-dimensional, often large, canvases, that are conceptually sophisticated and abstract while mirroring the emotions and personal experience.

Pepon Osorio, 44, artist, New York: $315,000. He is an installation artist whose work combines Latino popular culture with traditional aesthetic sensibilities and allegorical references in order to explore the dynamics of culture and community.

Peter Shor, 39, senior member of the research staff at AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, N.J.: $290,000. A computer scientist, he is helping to shape the field of quantum computing; his discoveries incorporate tools from physics, computation, and information theory, and offer the possibility of an exponential increase in the speed of an important class of calculations, breaking limits in computing currently thought to be insurmountable.

Eva Silverstein, 28, assistant professor of physics, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford, Cal.: $235,000. She is a theoretical physicist who is linking recent theories of particle physics and cosmology; her studies provide key insights into the age, structure, dynamics, and eventual fate of the universe.

Wilma Alpha Subra, 55, public-interest scientist, New Iberia, La.: $370,000. She is a chemist and environmentalist who helps ordinary citizens in Louisiana to understand, cope with, and combat toxic chemicals in their communities; her work has contributed to the clean-up of dozens of polluted sites statewide.

Ken Vandermark, 34, musician, Chicago: $265,000. He is a composer, improviser, and tenor saxophone and clarinet player whose work draws on a range of influences and styles, including jazz, reggae, and European classical and folk music.

Naomi Wallace, 38, playwright, Otterburn, England, and Prospect, Ky.: $285,000. Her plays combine poetic and highly original language with a strong social and political sensibility, incorporating such diverse settings as the Persian Gulf War and 17th-century England.

Jeffrey R. Weeks, 42, mathematician, Canton, N.Y.: $305,000. He is a researcher, writer, computer-software developer, and educator who has made fundamental contributions to the analysis of knots, collaborates with cosmologists to interpret the shape of the universe, and writes texts and articles designed to stimulate general interest in geometry and space.

Fred Wilson, 44, curator and artist, New York: $315,000. An installation artist, he explores the relationship between museums and works of art, rearranging and reclaiming pieces from museum storage to bring out hidden or neglected possibilities and creating new installations that highlight important social and cultural themes.

Xu Bing, 44, artist, New York: $315,000. He uses ancient Chinese methods of print making and calligraphy to explore new dimensions for contemporary Chinese art; much of his work deals with the representation of language and issues of meaning.

Ofelia Zepeda, 45, professor of linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson: $320,000. She is a linguist, poet, editor, and community leader devoted to maintaining and preserving American Indian languages and to revitalizing tribal communities and cultures.