Dear Commons Community,

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced yesterday the MacArthur Fellows Awards for 2022.

The MacArthur Fellows Award  is among the most coveted award in academia, the arts and sciences. This year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows will each receive $800,000, a “no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential,” according to the MacArthur Foundation website. This year’s class of so-called ‘geniuses’ includes an ornithologist, a cellist, a computer scientist and a human rights activists. The fellows can do whatever they want with their awards.

The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are:

Jennifer Carlson of Tucson, Ariz., is a sociologist who studies “the motivations, assumptions, and social forces that drive gun ownership and shape gun culture in the United States.”

Paul Chan of New York, N.Y., is an artist, “testing the capacity of art to make human experience available for critical reflection and to effect social change.”

Yejin Choi of the University of Washington is a computer scientist who uses, “natural language processing to develop artificial intelligence systems that can understand language and make inferences about the world.”

P. Gabrielle Foreman of Pennsylvania State University is a literary historian and digital humanist who specializes in “nineteenth-century collective Black organizing efforts through initiatives such as the Colored Conventions Project.”

Danna Freedman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a synthetic inorganic chemist, “creating novel molecular materials with unique properties directly relevant to quantum information technologies.”

Martha Gonzalez of Scripps College is a musician, scholar and artist/activist “strengthening cross-border ties and advancing participatory methods of artistic knowledge production in the service of social justice.”

Sky Hopinka of Bard College is an artist and filmmaker who combines “imagery and language in films and videos that offer new strategies of representation for the expression of Indigenous worldviews.”

June Huh of Princeton University is a mathematician who studies the “underlying connections between disparate areas of mathematics and proving long-standing mathematical conjectures.”

Moriba Jah of the University of Texas, Austin, is an astrodynamicist “envisioning transparent and collaborative solutions for creating a circular space economy that improves oversight of Earth’s orbital spheres.”

Jenna Jambeck of the University of Georgia is an environmental engineer “investigating the scale and pathways of plastic pollution and galvanizing efforts to address plastic waste.”

Monica Kim of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is a historian who examines “the interplay between U.S. foreign policy, military intervention, processes of decolonization, and individual rights in regional settings around the globe.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer of SUNY is a plant ecologist, educator, and writer “articulating an alternative vision of environmental stewardship informed by traditional ecological knowledge.”

Priti Krishtel of the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) in Oakland, Calif., is a health justice lawyer “exposing the inequities in the patent system to increase access to affordable, life-saving medications on a global scale.”

Joseph Drew Lanham of Clemson University is an ornithologist, naturalist, and writer “creating a new model of conservation that combines conservation science with personal, historical, and cultural narratives of nature.”

Kiese Laymon of Rice University is a writer “bearing witness to the myriad forms of violence that mark the Black experience in formally inventive fiction and nonfiction.”

Reuben Jonathan Miller of the University of Chicago is a sociologist, criminologist and social worker who traces “the long-term consequences that incarceration and re-entry systems have on the lives of individuals and their families.” W

Ikue Mori of New York, N.Y., is an electronic music composer and performer “transforming the use of percussion in improvisation and expanding the boundaries of machine-based music.”

Steven Prohira of the University of Kansas is a physicist “challenging conventional theories and engineering new tools to detect ultra-high energy sub-atomic particles that could hold clues to long-held mysteries of our universe.”

Tomeka Reid of Chicago, Ill., is a jazz cellist and composer “forging a unique jazz sound that draws from a range of musical traditions and expanding the expressive possibilities of the cello in improvised music.”

Loretta J. Ross of Smith College is a reproductive justice and human rights advocate “shaping a visionary paradigm linking social justice, human rights, and reproductive justice.”

Steven Ruggles of the University of Minnesota is a historical demographer “setting new standards in quantitative historical research by building the world’s largest, publicly-available database of population statistics.”

Tavares Strachan of New York, N.Y., and Nassau, The Bahamas, is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist “expanding the possibilities for what art can be and illuminating overlooked contributions of marginalized figures throughout history.”

Emily Wang of Yale University School of Medicine is a primary care physician and researcher who partners with “people recently released from prison to address their needs and the ways that incarceration influences chronic health conditions.”

Amanda Williams of Chicago, Ill., is an artist and architect “reimagining public space to expose the complex ways that value, both cultural and economic, intersects with race in the built environment.”

Melanie Matchett Wood of Harvard University is a mathematician “addressing foundational questions in number theory from the perspective of arithmetic statistics.”

Congratulations to all the winners!

Tony