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MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship Winners

Yesterday, the winners of the prestigious MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships were unveiled.  Twenty winners received $500,000 of funding over 5 years with no strings attached.  Some of the winers include:

  • Esther Duflo is a development economist exploring the social and economic forces perpetuating the cycle of poverty for the poorest peoples in South Asia and Africa..  She is the co-founder of the  Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT.
  • Rebecca Onie founded Project HEALTH which works to overcome the barriers for low-income families to good health outcomes that are often the result of apparently unrelated constraints, such as child care, transportation, housing, food, education, and legal advocacy.  She also works with clinics to help train providers to work on identifying patients socio-economic needs.
  • Jill Seaman is a physician committed to delivering and improving treatment for infectious diseases endemic to Southern Sudan, one of the most remote, impoverished, and war-torn regions of the world. She first began treating the Nuer tribespeople of Sudan’s Western Upper Nile province in 1989, as an epidemic of visceral leishmaniasis — a deadly, parasite-borne infection — devastated the already conflict-ravaged and malnourished population. In the midst of a civil war, she worked with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) to set up makeshift clinics and offer the only treatment option for an area with no health care infrastructure, electricity, or running water. 

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