Four Women Scholars Named MacArthur Fellows

The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation has announced the selection of 24 individuals in this year’s class of MacArthur Fellows. The honors, frequently referred to as the “Genius Awards,” include a $625,000 stipend over the next five years which the individuals can use as they see fit. Fellows are chosen for their “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.” The goal of the awards is to “encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations” without the burden of having to worry about their financial situation.

Of this year’s 24 MacArthur Fellows, four are women with current ties to the academic world.

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an assistant professor of photography in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her collection of black-and-white photographs of the steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, was published in the book The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014). Frazier is a graduate of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and holds a master of fine arts degree from Syracuse University.

Marina Rustow is a professor in the departments of Near Eastern studies and history at Princeton University in New Jersey. Professor Rustow joined the faculty at Princeton this year after teaching at Emory University in Atlanta and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She is the author of Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) and co-editor of Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Professor Rustow is a graduate of Yale University. She holds two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Beth Stevens is an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. Her research on microglial cells has prompted new discoveries about the role of neuron communication in healthy brains and the origins of adult neurological diseases. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Stevens was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She is a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Heidi Williams is the Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor in the department of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on the economics of the healthcare and pharmaceutical marketplaces. Dr. Williams joined the faculty at MIT in 2011. She also serves as a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Williams is a graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She earned a master’s degree at the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. at Harvard University.