By Bianca Licitra
The MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “Genius Grant,” is an $800,000 no-strings-attached prize awarded to 20-30 extraordinarily talented and creative individuals each year. The 2025 class of MacArthur Fellows consists of 22 accomplished individuals, including 12 faculty members from AAU universities. A total of 15 academics were honored with the fellowship this year.
The MacArthur Fellowship program seeks to “foster and enable innovative, imaginative, and groundbreaking ideas, thinking, and strategies” by investing directly in fellows’ “originality, insight, and potential.” Recipients tend to be individuals with a “track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice” and who have demonstrated “the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions.”
Faculty at AAU member research universities honored with the fellowship in 2025 include:
- Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for “advancing understanding of the forces that drive tropical weather patterns.”
- Nabarun Dasgupta, senior scientist at the Injury Prevention Research Center and innovation fellow at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for “combining scientific studies with community engagement to reduce deaths and other harms from drug use.”
- Kristina Douglass, associate professor of climate at Columbia University’s Climate School, for “investigating how past human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability.”
- Kareem El-Badry, assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, for “expanding our knowledge of binary star systems, black holes, and other wonders of the universe.”
- Hahrie Han, professor in the Department of Political Science, inaugural director of the SNF Agora Institute, and faculty director of the P3 lab at Johns Hopkins University, for “analyzing the organizations and movements that equip people to participate in public life and solve problems together.”
- Ieva Jusionyte, professor in the Waston School of International and Public Affairs and director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at Brown University, for “exploring the political and moral ambiguities of border regions and historically shifting distinctions between legal and illegal practices.”
- Jason McLellan, professor and chair in chemistry in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, for “characterizing and engineering viral protein structures to develop vaccines for infectious diseases.”
- Sébastien Philippe, assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for “exposing past harms and potential risks from building, testing, and storing launch-ready nuclear weapons.”
- Gala Porras-Kim, visiting critic in sculpture at the Yale School of Art, for “proposing new ways to recognize the layered meanings and functions of cultural artifacts held in museums and institutional collections.”
- Teresa Puthussery, associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of California, Berkeley, for “exploring how neural circuits of the retina encode visual information for the human brain.”
- William Tarpeh, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, for “envisioning sustainable and practical solutions to treat wastewater and recover valuable mineral resources.”
- Lauren K. Williams, professor of mathematics at Harvard University, for “uncovering transformative connections between algebraic combinatorics and problems in other areas of math and physics.” uncovering transformative connections between algebraic combinatorics and problems in other areas of math and physics.”
A complete list of this year’s awardees is available here. Congratulations to the winners!
Bianca Licitra is editorial and communications assistant at AAU.