The 2009 MacArthur Fellows

Lynsey Addario, 35, photojournalist, in Istanbul. She is creating a powerful visual record of the most pressing conflicts and humanitarian crises of the 21st century.

Maneesh Agrawala, 37, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, University of California at Berkeley. He is designing visual interfaces that enhance users’ ability to synthesize and comprehend large quantities of complex, digital information.

Timothy Barrett, 59, research scientist, University of Iowa, in Iowa City. He is reinvigorating the art of hand-papermaking and leading the preservation of traditional Western and Japanese techniques and practices.

Mark Bradford, 47, mixed-media artist, in Los Angeles. He is incorporating ephemera from urban environments into richly textured, abstract compositions that evoke a multitude of metaphors.

Edwidge Danticat, 40, novelist, in Miami. She is chronicling the power of human resistance and endurance through moving and insightful depictions of the Haitian immigrant experience.

Rackstraw Downes, 69, painter, in New York. He is rendering minutely detailed landscapes of unexpected vistas that reconsider the interaction between the built and natural world.

Esther Duflo, 36, professor of poverty alleviation and development economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. She is analyzing the forces perpetuating cycles of poverty in South Asia and Africa.

Deborah Eisenberg, 63, short-story writer, in New York. She is crafting distinctive portraits of contemporary American life in tales of striking precision, fluency, and moral depth.

Lin He, 35, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, University of California at Berkeley. She is advancing our understanding of the role of microRNA’s in the development of cancer and laying the groundwork for future cancer treatments.

Peter Huybers, 35, assistant professor of climate, Harvard University, in Cambridge. He is mining a wealth of often-conflicting experimental observations to develop compelling theories that explain global climate change over time.

James Longley, 37, filmmaker, Daylight Factory, in Seattle. He is deepening our understanding of the conflicts in the Middle East through intimate portraits of communities living under extremely challenging conditions.

L. Mahadevan, 44, professor of applied mathematics, Harvard University, in Cambridge. He is investigating principles underlying the behavior of complex systems to address such accessible, but vexing, questions as how flags flutter, how skin wrinkles, and how Venus flytraps snap closed.

Heather McHugh, 61, professor of English, University of Washington, in Seattle. She is a poet composing richly layered verse that unabashedly embraces such wordplay as puns, rhymes, and syntactical twists to explore the human condition .

Jerry Mitchell, 50, investigative reporter, Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson, Miss. He is ensuring that unsolved murders from the Civil Rights era are finally prosecuted by uncovering largely unknown details of decades-old stories of thwarted justice.

Rebecca Onie, 32, founder and executive director of Project Health, in Boston. She is building a low-cost, replicable program that melds the aspirations of college students and the needs of health-care institutions to address the link between poverty and poor health.

Richard Prum, 48, professor of ornithology, Yale University, in New Haven, Conn. He is drawing from developmental biology, optical physics, and paleontology to address central questions about avian development, evolution, and behavior.

John A. Rogers, 42, professor of materials science and engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is inventing flexible electronic devices that lay the foundation for a revolution in manufacture of industrial, consumer, and biocompatible technologies.

Elyn Saks, 53, professor of law, psychology, and psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. She is expanding the options for those suffering from severe mental illness through scholarship, practice, and policy informed by a life story that adds uncommon depth and insight.

Jill Seaman, 57, infectious-disease physician, in Old Fangak, Sudan. She is adapting the tools of 21st-century medicine to treat infectious diseases endemic to Southern Sudan and other remote, war-torn regions of the world.

Beth Shapiro, 33, assistant professor of biology, Pennsylvania State University, in University Park. She is using molecular phylogenetics and biostatistics to reconstruct the influences on population dynamics of extinct or severely challenged species.

Daniel Sigman, 40, professor of geological and geophysical sciences, at Princeton University, in N.J. He is unraveling the interrelated physical, chemical, geological, and biological forces that have shaped the oceans’ fertility and the Earth’s climate over the past two million years.

Mary Tinetti, 58, professor of medicine and epidemiology and public health, Yale University School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn. She is challenging prevailing notions of falls as unavoidable accidents associated with advanced age and identifying risk factors that contribute to morbidity due to falls.

Camille Utterback, 39, digital artist, in San Francisco. She is redefining how viewers experience and interact with art through vibrant, pictorial compositions that are activated by human presence and movement.

Theodore Zoli, 43, bridge engineer, HNTB Corporation, in New York. He is making major technological advances to protect transportation infrastructure in the event of natural and man-made disasters.