MacArthur Genius Grants: Don't Call Them, They'll Call You

On Sept. 17, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded no-strings-attached fellowships of $625,000 each to 21 people recognized as exceptionally creative. The foundation has given out these "genius grants" every year since 1981.

Previous recipients include jazz musician Ornette Coleman and historian Jared Diamond, along with physicists, philosophers, psychologists, painters, playwrights, and poets. A New Mexico blacksmith, Tom Joyce, was a winner one year. Another year, Michigan violinmaker, Joseph Curtin, was recognized.

Engineers have received MacArthur fellowships in the past. This year, the 2014 class of MacArthur Fellows includes three engineering professors and a computer scientist.

Danielle Bassett is a professor of bioengineering at Penn State University. Trained as a physicist, Dr. Bassett's work uses tools from computer and systems engineering (including network theory and complex systems theory) to shed light on the mysteries of the human brain. By looking at the brain as a complex network, she has been able to better explain how we learn, how we recover from brain injuries, and how mental illnesses can affect us.

In addition to neuroscience, she has also used a systems engineering approach to solve problems from other fields. For example, she has studied how sound waves propagate through granular materials, and how large groups of people react during natural disasters and other emergencies. In all her work, she looks at how things connect with one another.

Tami Bond is a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Illinois. Dr. Bond is a leading expert on air pollutants, specifically black carbon, also known as soot. These particles are produced by many combustion processes, including the burning of coal in power plants, the burning of gasoline and diesel fuel in car and truck engines, the burning of wood to cook food and to clear land, and the burning of kerosene in lamps common in many developing countries. Dr. Bond has studied how these pollutants form, spread through the atmosphere, interact with sunlight, and affect global climate. She also worked with a team to develop cleaner-burning cookstoves that were successfully implemented in rural Honduras.

Mark Hersham is a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University, and the director of Northwestern's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. He is known for his work with nanomaterials, specifically organic-inorganic hybrids. These hybrids make it possible to combine organic nanomaterials, such as graphene-based sensors, with inorganic nanomaterials, such as silicon-based molecular electronics. He also developed an ultracentrifugation technique that could be used for large-scale production of high-quality carbon nanotubes. This technique could someday make nanoscale electronic devices commonplace.

Craig Gentry is an IBM computer scientist. His work is focused on cryptography, the encrypting of information. In 2009, he solved the problem of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which had been thought by some to be impossible. FHE makes it possible to perform computations on encrypted information without decrypting it first. This could greatly increase the security of online information, especially cloud-based storage. Given the recent breaches in customer financial information at retail stores, as well as the recent theft of celebrity photos from cloud-based storage, the potential benefits of FHE are obvious. While a practical version of FHE has yet to be developed, Dr. Gentry's work showed that it is possible.

Think you've got what it takes to join this illustrious crew of MacArthur Fellows? Don't look for an application to fill out. Potential candidates are suggested by an anonymous group of nominators. The nominations are then reviewed by an anonymous selection committee. Finally, the MacArthur Foundation's board of directors votes to decide which of the candidates will receive the award. In other words: Don't call them, they'll call you.

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