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The 24 MacArthur 'Genius Grant' fellows who just got $625,000 to save the world
Age: 50
City: Accra, Ghana
After going to college in the US and working at Microsoft for years, the Ghana-born Awuah returned home to set up Ashesi University, a school that provides a progressive model of critical thinking-based education.
Age: 41
City: New York, New York
Chandran's research centers around transforming waste water not just into clean water, but also chemicals, fertilizers, and energy resources.
Age: 39
City: Washington, DC
Coates has become one of the most insightful voices in American journalism, with groundbreaking longform features like "The Case for Reparations" and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" and his newest book, "Between the World and Me."
Age: 59
City: Reston, Virginia
As cofounder of Health Care Without Harm, Cohen has helped health care providers move away from relying on toxic cleaning agents, fossil fuels, and other unsustainable practices.
Age: 35
City: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Harvard sociologist Desmond has uncovered how eviction is one of the main drivers of poverty in American cities.
Age: 37
City: Ithaca, New York
The Cornell chemist Dichtel has pioneered covalent organic frameworks, a remarkable polymer that has a surface area "a football field per gram of the polymer" that can be used in a range of research applications.
Age: 36
City: New York, New York
Dorrance has bushed the boundaries of her form, turning tap dancing performances into full-length narratives.
Age: 50
City: New York, New York
While painting has moved further and further into abstraction, Eisenman has made the depictions of the human body continually compelling, exploring themes like inequality and gender in nearly 40 years of work.
Age: 33
City: Chicago, Illinois
Frazier uses visual autobiographies to tell the personal story of Rust Belt America. Her first book, "The Notion of Family," came out in 2014.
Age: 35
City: New York, New York
The hottest show on Broadway in 2015 is "Hamilton," a hip hop epic that traces the Founding Father's come-up from orphan child to first Treasury Secretary. It came from Miranda's pen.
Age: 40
City: Toronto, Canada
Scholars used to think that Mycenaean society — chronicled by Homer — was oligarchical, but Nakassis showing that power was more broadly distributed.
Age: 37
City: Chicago, Illinois
University of Chicago scholar Novembre has developed new analytical techniques to enhance our understanding of how geography has shaped our genetic history.
Age: 36
City: Stanford, California
Ré has expanded the domain of big data through DeepDive, his platform that collects the "dark data" in media that used to not be analyzable, like texts, illustrations, and images.
Age: 46
City: Princeton, New Jersey
The Princeton historian Rustow is analyzing the Cairo Geniza, a collection of 30,000 manuscripts from around 1,000 CE. By digging into documents, she's given a high-resolution picture of medieval Jewish life in "Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate."
Age: 39
City: New York, New York
Lien has made a career in creating immersive set designs, from Tsarist Russian salons to the Greek underworld.
Age: 46
City: Chicago, Illinois
Through the grassroots Instituto Del Progreso Latino and Instituto Health Sciences Career Academy, Salgado has opened up the path to career success for immigrant communities in Chicago's southwest side.
Age: 36
City: New York, New York
Lerner's novels "10:04" and "Leaving the Atocha Station" wrestle with living in America in the 2010s.
Age: 46
City: Chicago, Illinois
Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Stevens has identified an additional function of microglia, a type of brain cell that she discovered is used to "prune" pathways in the brain — which may relate to conditions ranging from schizophrenia to Alzheimer's.
Age: 49
City: New York, New York
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center biologist Studer has made breakthroughs in generating dopamine-generating neurons for transplantation, which could be used to treat Parkinson's.
Age: 59
City: New York, New York
As the founder and director of the Adaptive Design Association, Truesdell has designed tools that empower disabled children.
Age: 46
City: New York, New York
Twist has helped restore puppetry — often associated with children — as a form of high art for adults. His works of abstracted puppetry, 2013's "Rite of Spring," have helped place his craft in the context of theatre and dance.
Age: 72
City: Cabot, Vermont
Not only has Voigt been publishing books of poetry since the 1970s, but she's also helped grow further generations of scribes, through founding a low-residency MFA program and writing two books on the craft, "The Flexible Lyric" and "The Art Of Syntax."
Age: 34
City: Cambridge, Massachusetts
This MIT economist has used the pursuit of the human genome as a case study in how patents and intellectual property help — or hinder — innovation.
Age: 44
City: Berkeley, California
A University of California chemist, Yang is using nanowires — super tiny wires — to engineer synthetic photosynthesis, the process by which plants turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into energy.
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