MacArthur Fellow From Illinois Receives $800,000 ‘Genius Grant’

ILLINOIS — A Chicago statistician is among 20 new recipients of prestigious fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, known as “genius grants.”

Each of the new fellows announced Wednesday will receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want. The fellows do not apply and are not interviewed before the award is made. Instead, fellows are nominated and endorsed by their peers and communities through an open, years-long process overseen by the foundation.

Rina Foygel Barber, who was 40 at the time she received the genius grant, is a statistician studying the theoretical foundations of formal interference and prediction models and designing new methods for working with massive and multidimensional datasets, according to a news release. Barber’s research focuses on reducing false discovery rates and cross-validating machine learning prediction models. Her work improves the quality of statistical analysis while also uncovering the limitations of statistical methodologies.

Foygel Barber is the first genius grant recipient from Illinois since 2020.

MacArthur Fellows are individuals “of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual and professional inclinations,” according to the foundation’s website.

Marlies Carruth, who directs the MacArthur Fellows program, said this year’s fellows “are applying individual creativity with a global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities.”

Fellows include a scientist who studies the transmission of diseases, a master hula dancer and cultural preservationist, the sitting U.S. poet laureate, a law professor who created a database of recent Louisiana prison or jail deaths, and a National Book Award winner who has written multiple books about the resistance and activism of Black Americans in the face of injustice.

“They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment,” Carruth said in an announcement.

One of the goals of the program is for fellows to support and inspire one another.

“The prize is financial, but it’s also access and being part of a community of extraordinary thinkers and doers,” Carruth told The Associated Press.

The MacArthur Foundation has awarded genius grants to 1,030 recipients since 1981. Previous recipients from Illinois include:

• R. Stephen Berry
• Dawoud Bey
• Tami Bond
• Shawn Carlson
• John E. Carlstrom
• Shannon Lee Dawdy
• Stuart Dybek
• Helen T. Edwards
• LaToya Ruby Frazier
• Daniel H. Friedan
• Jeanne Gang
• Steven Goodman
• Aleksandar Hemon
• Mark Hersam
• Daryl Hine
• Thomas Cleveland Holt
• Sokoni T. Karanja
• Leszek Kolowski
• Albert J. Libchaber
• Inigo Manglano-Ovalle
• Kerry James Marshall
• Todd Martinez
• Tarrell McCraney
• Reuben Jonathan Miller
• Arnaldo Dante Momigliano
• Kevin Murphy
• Rami Nashashibi
• John Novembre
• Olufunmilayo Olopade
• Vivian Gussin Paley
• Dylan C. Penningroth
• Lucia M. Perillo
• Emmanuel Pratt
• A. K. Ramanujan
• Tomeka Reid
• Jennifer Richeson
• Reginald R. Robinson
• Francesca Rochberg
• John A. Rogers
• Hipolito (Paul) Roldan
• Amy Rosenzweig
• Juan Salgado
• Rebecca Sandefur
• Ralph Shapey
• Robert S. Shaw
• Stephen Shenker
• Michael Silverstein
• Noel M. Swerdlow
• Karen K. Uhlenbeck
• Ken Vandermark
• David Foster Wallace
• Amanda Williams
• William Julius Wilson
• Carl R. Woese
• Tara Zahra
• Mary A. Zimmerman