MacArthur Names 20 New Fellows, From a Saxophonist to a Forensic Anthropologist

A jazz saxophonist who performs alongside a chef cooking onstage, a forensic anthropologist who returns the remains of migrants to their families, and a poet who takes apart the language of government documents are among the 20 people the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named this week as its 2026 fellows.

The fellowships, widely known as genius grants, carry an award of $800,000 that recipients may spend however they choose. The foundation describes the prize as an investment in the potential of exceptionally creative people, and recipients are chosen through the foundation’s network of scouts rather than by application.

This year’s class leans heavily toward the climate and the environment. Holly Jean Buck, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo, studies the ethics and politics of climate policy and has argued that carbon removal should serve local communities rather than corporate profit. Kaiyu Guan of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign combines satellite data and machine learning to help farms grow more food with less environmental harm. Marika Holland, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, models how thinning polar sea ice speeds up warming.

Historians and economists are also well represented. Elizabeth Ellis of Princeton studies how smaller Indigenous nations shaped early American history. Ellora Derenoncourt, also of Princeton, has shown how extending minimum wage protections in 1966 to sectors that had been excluded sharply narrowed the earnings gap between Black and white Americans. Ariel Ron of Southern Methodist University has shown how Northern farming shaped economic development and the growth of federal power in the 19th century.

The sciences round out the list. Stanford chemist Song Lin uses electricity, sometimes from ordinary batteries, in place of toxic heavy metals to build complex molecules for medicines. Liangfang Zhang of the University of California, San Diego, cloaks drug-carrying nanoparticles in natural cell membranes so the immune system leaves them alone. Vincenzo Vitelli, a University of Chicago physicist, builds theoretical models of how soft, engineered and living materials behave.

In the arts, the honorees include the novelist Maaza Mengiste, the painter Vincent Valdez, the sculptor and installation artist Rodney McMillian, the sound and visual artist Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf and turns sound into drawings, the poet Layli Long Soldier, the novelist Bryan Washington and the choreographer Trajal Harrell. The philosopher Felipe De Brigard of Duke studies how memory helps communities recover from political violence.

Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University, founded Operation Identification in 2013 to identify migrants who died along the Texas-Mexico border and return their remains. The oldest fellow, 69-year-old Chip Thomas of Flagstaff, Arizona, spent 36 years as a primary care physician on the Navajo Nation and makes public art drawn from that work. The youngest, 29-year-old saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, stages concerts as multisensory events.

In announcing the class, Kristen Mack, the foundation’s vice president for communications and the fellows program, said the program has spent 45 years recognizing people who question conventions and cross disciplines, and that this year’s group explores human connection, the hidden origins of modern problems and the edges of scientific research.