Bay Area scientists win MacArthur grants
Christopher Ré, a Stanford professor and researcher, answered the phone call declaring him a winner of a coveted $625,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation with a disbelieving laugh.
“It was a very strange phone call with a bunch of people on it,” Ré said about the call he received two weeks ago. “I thought it was one of my friends playing a joke on me.”
But when the voices on the other end of the line fell silent, he knew it was no joke.
Ré was selected as one of 24 people in the U.S. as a 2015 MacArthur fellow — a five-year grant given to individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work, with room for future development.
He said he didn’t even know he was nominated.
Ré was chosen for his work in creating a system that extracts undetectable online information.
And he wasn’t the only Bay Area person selected as a fellow this year.
Peidong Yang, UC Berkeley professor and researcher, was chosen for his work using nanowire technology to recycle heat into energy.
Yang, too, had no idea he was in the running for the grant.
“I found out about two weeks ago,” he said. “It was a huge surprise.”
The fellowship program is designed to provide financial support to recipients so they can further their intellectual, artistic, scientific or professional activities.
The $625,000 is paid out in quarterly installments over the course of the five years, and the recipients are not required to fulfill any obligations to the program or report any updates.
This year’s MacArthur fellow class spans a wide array of fields, from a poet in Vermont to a health advocate in Virginia.
“These 24 delightfully diverse MacArthur fellows are shedding light and making progress on critical issues, pushing the boundaries of their fields, and improving our world in imaginative, unexpected ways,” MacArthur President Julia Stasch said in a statement. “Their work, their commitment, and their creativity inspire us all.”
Ré, a professor in Stanford’s department of computer science, was selected for his work with DeepDive, a system that extracts “dark data” — undetectable online information buried in text, tables, figures and images without structure — and gives it structure so that it can be more readily detected.
For example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense — is using DeepDive to extract data about human trafficking networks from the dark Web.
Ré said he wasn’t yet sure what he would do with the financial support, but he may use it to add another researcher to his team or seed an outside-the-box project.
Yang, a professor in UC Berkeley’s department of chemistry, was selected for his work in the field of semiconductor nanowires and nanowire photonics and enabling wide-ranging practical applications of the parts.
Technology based on Yang’s work is now being demonstrated in commercial devices for the conversion of wasted heat into electricity. He has also created a synthetic version of a leaf — a system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that gathers sunlight and triggers the use of carbon dioxide and water to complete the photosynthetic process in order to produce a carbon-based chemical. This process can be used to produce methane, which is used in natural gas.
Yang said he plans to use his award money to move his work forward in any way he can.
“After 10 years of work, we have had some initial success,” he said. “So in the next five to 10 years we are going to try to further develop this system to get better efficiency and a more robust system toward carbon dioxide reduction chemistry.”