MacArthur 2012 Scientists
October 5, 2012
The
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation doesn't like to have its
MacArthur Fellows Program awards called "Genius Grants," but the name seems to fit, so there it stands in
popular culture. This year's MacArthur Fellows have been announced, and eight scientists are included.[1-2]
I wrote about
scientists who were recipients of last year's awards in a
previous article (The Genius Class of 2011, September 29, 2011).
Another article (MacArthur Fellows 2010, October 5, 2010) has a list of some past recipients of these fellowships whose names should be familiar to my readership.
If none of the faces and names below are familiar, just wait a few years.
Interestingly, the women outnumber the men, as they did last year. Clicking on a photograph will take you to the thumbnail
biography in the text, below.
Maria Chudnovsky
Mathematician, Maria Chudnovsky (
Ph.D.,
Princeton University, 2003), is an
Associate Professor in the
Columbia University Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. She was affiliated with Princeton University from 2003-2006, and she was a research fellow at the
Clay Mathematics Institute from 2003-2008, before joining Columbia University. Her specialty is
graph theory, a topic that's become much more important in our age of connectivity. She strives to discover shortcuts that render seemingly intractable problems
computable. She's noted for her contribution to the proof of the
Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, which helps to allocate
radio frequencies in
telecommunications networks so they don't
interfere.
Olivier Guyon
Olivier Guyon (Ph.D.,
Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 2002) is an
Optical Physicist,
Astronomer, and
Assistant Professor at the
University of Arizona Department of Astronomy. His specialty is in the design of
telescopes for the
detection of
extrasolar planets. He invented a technique called Phase-Induced Amplitude
Apodization to increase the sensitivity of telescopes for such studies. Guyon also works with
adaptive optics and other telescope measurement techniques; and he's a project scientist at the
Subaru Telescope,
National Observatory of Japan, at the
Mauna Kea Observatories in
Hawaii.
Elissa Hallem
Neurobiologist, Elissa Hallem (Ph.D.,
Yale University, 2005), is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics of the
University of California, Los Angeles. She studies the
physiology of
odor detection and its
behavioral consequences. Hallem works with
transgenic fruit flies, for which the odorant
receptor genes have been manipulated. Her research showed that some odorant receptors are highly selective and others respond to a broad range of odors. Hallem's studies have also looked at how
parasites use odors to find their
hosts.
Sarkis Mazmanian
Microbiologist, Sarkis Mazmanian (Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles, 2002), is a
Biology professor at
Caltech. He was at the
University of Chicago from 2002-2005, and the
Harvard Medical School from 2005-2006. His research focus is on
symbiosis, especially of the non-
pathogenic bacteria that colonize the
human gastrointestinal tract. As I wrote about in a
previous article (The Human Microbiome, June 18, 2012), the number of microbes in our
microbiome outnumber our
human cells by a factor of ten. There are about 10,000 bacterial species in our human microbiome. Mazmanian found that
enteric bacteria can influence
human immunity to certain
diseases, including
nervous system disorders.
Terry Plank
Terry Plank (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1993) is a
Geochemist and a Professor of
Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. Plank was at the
University of Kansas from 1995-1999, and
Boston University from 1999-2007. Her research is on the zones of
tectonic plate collisions, and it involves
chemical analysis of trace
metals in deep
core samples. Plank found that
volcanic magma includes materials from
subducted crust.
Nancy Rabalais
Marine Ecologist, Nancy Rabalais (Ph.D.,
University of Texas, 1983), is Executive Director of the
Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. Her research is on "
dead zones," the
aquatic areas of low
dissolved oxygen, that have increased in volume in the
Gulf of Mexico. Her research involves the long-term monitoring of such zones along the
Louisiana continental shelf. The
nutrients from
farmland fertilizer and other sources from the
Mississippi River watershed cause an overabundance of
algae when mixed into coastal waters. The decomposition of this algae consumes oxygen to the detriment of
ocean life. Rabalais has worked with various
government agencies in efforts to improve
water quality.
Daniel Spielman
Daniel Spielman (Ph.D.,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995) is a
Computer Scientist and the Henry Ford II Professor of
Computer Science, Mathematics, and Applied Science at
Yale University. His early research was on
error-correcting codes; and one of his codes, for low-density
parity checking, is used in
high-definition television transmission. Recently, Spielman and a colleague found that small amounts of
randomness added into the
simplex optimization algorithm can facilitate solution. He also studied flow through unidirectional
graphs, which is an important topic in
scheduling.
Melody Swartz
Bioengineer, Melody Swartz (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998), now a Professor at the
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, was at
Northwestern University from 1999-2006. Her research is on the mechanisms that control the
flow of
biologic fluids through
tissue and their
health implications. Such mechanisms are important to
organ maintenance and development, and they also figure into the
immune response to
tumor invasion.
References:
- MacArthur Foundation Web Site.
- MacArthur Foundation, 2012 MacArthur Fellows.
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