MacArthur Genius Winner Archives - Page 4 of 5

Dr Jennifer Richeson

Social psychologist whose research has illuminated how identities – particularly racial identities – are formed and shaped through interactions with others.

Marian Wright Edelman

Founder and President of the Children’s Defense Fund and an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life.

Jacqueline Barton probes DNA by shooting electrons through it. Using custom-built molecules to direct these electrical currents, she can locate genes, see how they are arranged, and scan them for damage.
Barton hopes that these techniques will lead to new ways to diagnose diseases and treat them through DNA repair. To further this end she cofounded GeneOhm Sciences in 2001, which became part of Becton, Dickinson and Company in 2006.

Barbara McClintock

In 1983, at the age of 81, she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on “mobile genetic elements,” that is, genetic transposition, or the ability of genes to change position on the chromosome. McClintock was the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

Carrie Mae Weems

Decades before the #BlackLivesMatter movement stamped itself into our collective psyche, Carrie Mae Weems was living its message by example through provocative artwork about racial representation.

Amy B Smith

Amy Smith is an inventor, teacher and founder of MIT D-Lab and Senior Lecturer of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Loretta Ross

Loretta Ross is an academic and activist who has dedicated many years to advocating for women’s rights and reproductive justice. Most notably, she is a cofounder of SisterSong and Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, served as a previous Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, and is one of twelve women credited with coining the phrase and framework “reproductive justice.”

Julia Bowman Robinson

Julia B Robinson worked on computability, decision problems and non-standard models of arithmetic.

Ingrid Daubechies

Ingrid Daubechies is a Belgium mathematician and physicist who has done important work on wavelets in image compression. She is on the Board of Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education, an organisation which helps women get advanced degrees in mathematics.

Karen Uhlenbeck

Karen Uhlenbeck is an American mathematician who is a leading expert on partial differential equations.