MacArthur Foundation announces new fellows

CHICAGO, Sept. 22 (UPI) -- A human-rights lawyer, a sculptor and a microbiologist are among the 23 people chosen as the 2016 recipients of the MacArthur fellowships, awarded for exceptional "originality, insight and potential."

Recipients of the so-called "genius grants" also include non-profit organization leaders and writers for the five-year $625,000 grant each to continue their work. Started in 1981, the MacArthur fellowship is considered among the most prestigious prizes in the United States.

"We want to give people new wind against their sails," Cecilia A. Conrad, a managing director of the foundation and the leader of the fellows program, told the New York Times.

The fellows include 11 men and 12 women, ranging in age from 31 to 67. They include the following people, as described by the foundation:

-- Ahilan Arulanantham, advocacy and legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. A human-rights attorney, Arulanantham, 43, has done extensive work to help people facing deportation.

-- Daryl Baldwin, director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University of Ohio. Baldwin, 53, is a linguist and cultural preservationist who has worked to revive the linguistic, cultural, and intellectual heritage of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.

-- Anne Basting, professor of theatre at Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin. Basting, 51, uses creative expression to improve the lives of the elderly who are experiencing cognitive impairment.

-- Vincent Fecteau, sculptor from San Francisco. Fecteau, 47, creates sculptures that are "deceptively intricate" and "provoke thoughtful reflection as their challenging forms make the viewer aware of the act of perception."

-- Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, playwright from New York City. Jacobs-Jenkins, 31, tackles complicated issues around identity, family, class, and race in contemporary and historical theatrical genres.

-- Kellie Jones, associate professor in the art history and archaeology departments at Columbia University in New York City. Jones, 57, has helped create a deeper understanding of the African diaspora by, in part, introducing the work of now seminal black artists to larger audiences.

-- Subhash Khot, theoretical computer scientist at New York University. Khot, 38, who tackles unresolved questions in optimization and approximation and contributing to significant advances in the field of computational complexity.

-- John Kun, cultural historian at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Jun, 45, explores the ways in which the arts and popular culture are conduits to cross-cultural exchange and bringing diverse communities in Los Angeles together around heretofore unnoticed cultural commonalities.

-- Maggie Nelson, writer at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Calif. Nelson, 43, renders pressing issues of our time into portraits of day-to-day experience in works of nonfiction marked by dynamic interplay between personal experience and critical theory.

-- Dianne Newman, microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. Newman, 44, merges methods and approaches from disparate fields to investigate the co-evolution of bacteria and their environments, from the ancient Earth to the human body.

-- Victoria Orphan, geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. Orphan, 44, studies microbial communities in extreme environments, which are shedding new light on the biogeochemical processes underlying the cycling of nutrients and energy that shape the Earth's climate.

-- Manu Prakash, physical biologist and inventor at Stanford University in California. Prakash, 36, applies principles of soft-condensed matter physics to unravel microscale mysteries of living and nonliving matter and inventing affordable technologies for global education, health, and science explorations.

-- José A. Quiñonez, financial services innovator at Mission Asset Fund in San Francisco. Quiñonez, 45, whose model for establishing the creditworthiness of underbanked populations is affording them a pathway to mainstream financial services and improving their financial stability.

-- Claudia Rankine, poet at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Rankine, 53, crafts critical texts for understanding American culture at the beginning of the 21st century in inventive, ever-evolving forms of poetic expression.

-- Lauren Redniss, artist and writer at Parsons, the New School for Design in New York. Redniss, 42, fuses artwork, written text, and design in a unique approach to visual nonfiction that enriches the ways in which stories can be conveyed, experienced, and understood.

-- Mary Reid Kelley, video artist in Olivebridge, N.Y. Kelley, 37, whose unique vision spans a variety of media and culminates in arresting, playful, and erudite videos that explore the condition of women throughout history.

-- Rebecca Richards-Kortum, bioengineer, at Rice University in Houston. Richards-Kortum, 52, develops point-of-care diagnostic technologies for use in low-resource settings and inspiring the next generation of engineers to translate lessons from the classroom into solutions for global health disparities.

-- Joyce J. Scott, jewelry maker and sculptor in Baltimore. Scott, 67, repositions beadwork into a potent platform for commentary on social and political injustices.

-- Sarah Stillman, long-form journalist at The New Yorker. Stillman, 32, brings to light the stories of people usually invisible to mainstream reporting and providing new and compelling perspectives on even well-covered social justice issues.

-- Bill Thies, computer scientist at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore, India. Thies, 38, advances the socioeconomic well-being of low-income communities in the developing world through innovative communication and digital technologies that respond to real-world constraints.

-- Julia Wolfe, composer at New York University. Wolfe, 57, synthesizes various musical styles in highly physical, large-scale narrative compositions that reimagine folk traditions and lore and address issues of the American worker.

-- Gene Luen Yang, graphic novelist in San Jose, Calif. Yang, 43, brings diverse people and cultures to children's and young adult literature and confirming comics' place as an important creative and imaginative force within literature, art, and education.

-- Jin-Quan Yu, synthetic chemist at Scripps Research Institute. Yu, 50, pioneers new methods for the catalysis and functionalization of carbon-hydrogen bonds and enabling the development of versatile, novel, and beneficial chemical compounds.