Meet the 2009 MacArthur Fellows

creating a powerful visual record of the most pressing conflicts and humanitarian crises of the 21st century.

designing visual interfaces that enhance users’ ability to synthesize and comprehend large quantities of complex, digital information.

reinvigorating the art of hand-papermaking and leading the preservation of traditional Western and Japanese techniques and practices.

incorporating ephemera from urban environments into richly textured, abstract compositions that evoke a multitude of metaphors.

chronicling the power of human resistance and endurance through moving and insightful depictions of the Haitian immigrant experience.

rendering minutely detailed landscapes of unexpected vistas that reconsider the intersection between the built and the natural world.

analyzing the forces perpetuating cycles of poverty in South Asia and Africa and enhancing the policies and interventions designed to improve lives.

crafting distinctive portraits of contemporary American life in tales of striking precision, fluency, and moral depth.

advancing our understanding of the role of microRNAs in the development of cancer and laying the groundwork for future cancer treatments.

mining a wealth of often-conflicting experimental observations to develop compelling theories that explain global climate change over time.

deepening our understanding of the conflicts in the Middle East through intimate portraits of communities living under extremely challenging conditions.

investigating principles underlying the behavior of complex systems to address such accessible, but vexing, questions as how flags flutter, how skin wrinkles, how Venus flytraps snap closed.

composing richly layered verse that unabashedly embraces such wordplay as puns, rhymes, and syntactical twists to explore the human condition.

ensuring that unsolved murders from the Civil Rights era are finally prosecuted by uncovering largely unknown details of decades-old stories of thwarted justice.

building a low-cost, replicable program that melds the aspirations of college students and the needs of health care institutions to address the link between poverty and poor health.

drawing from developmental biology, optical physics, and paleontology to address central questions about avian development, evolution, and behavior.

inventing flexible electronic devices that lay the foundation for a revolution in manufacture of industrial, consumer, and biocompatible technologies.

expanding the options for those suffering from severe mental illness through scholarship, practice, and policy informed by a life story that adds uncommon depth and insight.

adapting the tools of 21st-century medicine to treat infectious diseases endemic to Southern Sudan and other remote, war-torn regions of the world.

using molecular phylogenetics and biostatistics to reconstruct the influences on population dynamics of extinct or severely challenged species.

unraveling the interrelated physical, chemical, geological, and biological forces that have shaped the oceans’ fertility and the Earth’s climate over the past two million years.

challenging prevailing notions of falls as unavoidable accidents associated with advanced age and identifying risk factors that contribute to morbidity due to falls.

redefining how viewers experience and interact with art through vibrant, pictorial compositions that are activated by human presence and movement.

making major technological advances to protect transportation infrastructure in the event of natural and man-made disasters.