Seven Academic Women Win MacArthur Foundation “Genius Awards”

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago has announced this year’s class of 23 MacArthur Fellows. The fellowships, often referred to as “Genius Awards,” offer scholars, artists, writers, and performers $500,000 in unrestricted support for the following five years. Winners also receive health insurance. Including this year’s Fellows, 873 people, ranging in age from 18 to 82 at the time of their selection, have been named MacArthur Fellows since the inaugural class in 1981.

This year, 10 of the 23 MacArthur Fellows are women. Several have affiliations with higher education.

(L to R) Uta Barth, Maria Chudnovsky, Elissa Hallem, An-My Le, Terry Plank, Nancy Rabalais, and Melody Swartz

Uta Barth is professor emerita at the University of California at Riverside. She taught in the university’s art department from 1990 to 2008. A conceptual photographer, Barth is a graduate of the University of California at Davis. She earned a master of fine arts degree at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Maria Chudnovsky is an associate professor in the department of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York City. Her research focuses on graph theory. Maria Chudnovsky received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She earned a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Elissa Hallem is an assistant professor of microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics at the University of California at Los Angeles. A neuroscientist, Dr. Hallem’s research explores the physiology and behavioral consequences of odor detection. She joined the faculty at UCLA in 2010 after conducting postdoctoral research at CalTech. Dr. Hallem is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She earned a Ph.D. at Yale University.

An-My Le is a professor of photography at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has been on the Bard faculty since 1998. A native of Vietnam, her artistic work focuses on photographs of landscapes transformed by war or other forms of military activity. Le holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University and a master of fine arts degree from Yale University.

Terry Plank is a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University in New York City. Her research in platetectonics focuses on what happens geologically in areas where the earth’s plates collide. She has been on the Columbia University faculty since 2008. She previously taught at Boston University and the University of Kansas. Professor Plank is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Nancy Rabalais is the executive director and professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium in Chauvin. She is a marine ecologist whose research concerns “dead zones” in the world’s oceans. Dr. Rabalais holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&M University in Kingsville. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas.

Melody Swartz is a professor a the Institute of Bioengineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Her research involves studying the mechanisms of the movement of biologic fluids through tissue and the implications for human health. A native of Illinois, she is a former assistant professor at Northwestern University.

Dr. Swartz is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.