Meet the 2025 MacArthur Fellows: NPR

A cartographer, composer, archaeologist, neurobiologist and astrophysicist are among this year’s MacArthur Fellows, one of the most prestigious cash awards given to “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential,” according to the MacArthur Foundation. Each scholar will receive an unconditional award of $800,000.

So how do you get one of these so-called “genius grants”? You must be nominated and approved. It’s a selection process that takes “many months and sometimes years,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.

MacArthur Fellows may work in very different fields, but they share certain attributes such as creativity, risk-taking, optimism and perseverance. They are “thinkers, doers and dreamers,” Carruth said.

The 2025 MacArthur Fellows are below; quotes about their work come from the MacArthur Foundation:

Angel F. Adames Corraliza from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is an atmospheric scientist whose research “sheds light on the tropical atmospheric dynamics that influence global weather patterns and phenomena such as tropical cyclones and monsoons.”

Matte black from Exeter, California, is a photographer who focuses on marginalized communities, from migrant farmworkers to shuttered cities across the United States. His work shows that “poverty is not an aberration but rather a defining feature of the American landscape.” NPR interviewed Black for its project “The Geography of Poverty” in 2018.

Garrett Bradley from New Orleans is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores “issues of justice, public memory and cultural visibility.” For the installation “America” (2019), Bradley interspersed images of Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1915), considered the oldest film with an all-black cast, featuring vignettes she created of black characters from the early 20th century. Bradley spoke with NPR about his 2021 Oscar-nominated documentary Time.

Heather Christian from Beacon, New York, is a composer, lyricist, playwright, singer and member of the Arbonauts. With works like Tierce: a practical breviary (2024), Christian explores “the possibility of the sacred and the spiritual in our modern world”. NPR interviewed Christian in 2012 about experimental work she co-created on American capitalism.

Nabarun Dasgupta from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an epidemiologist who brings “compassion, collaboration and creative vision” to his work to reduce harm and death from drug use. Dasgupta told the news agency Compromise he began analyzing data on overdose deaths twenty years ago, when a close friend died of a heroin overdose.

Kristina Douglass from Columbia University in New York, is an archaeologist specializing in the coastal communities of southwest Madagascar. Douglass involves local residents in his research, which “informs efforts to protect biodiversity hotspots while preserving the way of life of those who live there.”

Kareem El Badry from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, is an astrophysicist whose research into all things stars “has led to numerous discoveries – from overlooked dormant black holes in our galaxy to new classes of stars and coupled systems.”

Jeremy Frey of Eddington, Maine, is an artist from a long line of Wabanaki basket weavers. Using all-natural materials that he harvests himself, Frey “forges a singular aesthetic that blurs the lines between craftsmanship, design and contemporary art.” He was interviewed by Maine Public in 2024.

Hahrie Han from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is a political scientist whose research “advances scholars’ understanding of what makes some forms of civic participation more enduring and impactful than others.” She was interviewed by WYPR about her book Undivided: the quest for racial solidarity in an American Church.

Tonika Lewis Johnson from Chicago is a social justice photographer and artist who tells NPR that her work uses “art, storytelling and community organizing to help the general public learn about and confront the history of segregation, housing injustice and the ways in which black neighborhoods have been devalued.” His current project is UnBlocked Englewood, developed in partnership with the Chicago Bungalow Association.

Ieva Jusionyte from Brown University in Providence, RI, is a cultural anthropologist who immerses herself in the communities most affected by border security issues. She worked as a volunteer paramedic on both sides of the United States-Mexico border. She spoke with WYPR about Exit woundshis book on the continued flow of arms from the United States to Mexico.

Toby Kiers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands is an evolutionary biologist who studies the relationships between plants, fungi, and other microbes, “one of the largest and most widespread mutualisms on Earth.” She spoke with NPR in 2025.

Jason McLellan from the University of Texas at Austin is a structural biologist considered one of the heroes of the pandemic. His work was instrumental in the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. He and his team are currently focused on “developing a universal vaccine that would be effective against all coronaviruses.”

Tuan Andrew Nguyen from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the trauma of war and displacement as well as resistance and resilience. His feature film The unburied sounds of a troubled horizon (2022), for example, tells the story of a woman who lives in a region of Vietnam heavily bombed by the United States. To help manage the pain, she creates Alexander Calder-style sculptures from leftover bombs. Nguyen is exhibiting the film alongside his own artwork made from relics of the Vietnamese bomb.

Tommy Orange of Oakland, California, is a fiction writer whose novels, There there And Wandering Stars are centered on the Native American experience, past and present, showing “the many ways in which historical trauma and dislocations can rupture the fabric of everyday life.” Orange spoke with NPR in 2024.

Margaret Wickens Pearce of Rockland, Maine, is a cartographer who creates maps in collaboration with indigenous communities “to bring to light their history, their knowledge and their presence throughout North America.” His current project is called Mississippi Dialogues.

Sébastien Philippe from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a nuclear security specialist who has studied past harms and potential risks related to the construction, testing and storage of nuclear weapons. On The Missiles on Our Land website, “he and his collaborators illustrate the widespread destruction that would be caused by a nuclear attack on the missile sites.”

Gala Porras-Kim of Los Angeles and London is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on how cultural artifacts are preserved in museums and other institutional collections. Porras-Kim’s work “asks powerful questions about the lives of objects, which shapes their preservation and how their stories are told.” She was interviewed by KQED in 2018.

Teresa Puthussery from the University of California, Berkeley, is a neurobiologist and optometrist whose research “lays the foundation for a more complete understanding of human vision and the treatment of debilitating eye diseases.”

Craig Taborn from Brooklyn, New York, is an improvising musician and composer who draws inspiration from various musical genres to create a distinct sound using a “fearless and sophisticated approach.” Here’s a review of Taborn’s 2021 album Shadow games on the fresh air of WHYY.

William Tarpeh from Stanford University in California is a chemical engineer developing ways to recover valuable chemical resources from wastewater. For example, its electrochemical reactors can convert nitrogen found in urinary waste into ammonia-based products like fertilizers and home cleaning products.

Lauren K. Williams from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a mathematician who “expands fundamental mathematical theory” and makes connections to other scientific fields such as physics “with an approach to research driven by curiosity and a willingness to collaborate across disciplines.”

The MacArthur Foundation financially supports NPR.