4 in Bay Area among ‘genius’ award winners
A Stanford University biologist creates a computer out of water droplets. A financial expert in San Francisco helps poor people create a credit history. Three dimensions emerge from two in the hands of a San Francisco sculptor. And the world’s complexities grow clear on the comic pages penned by a graphic novelist in San Jose.
These seeming magicians from across the Bay Area are among 23 winners of the MacArthur “genius awards” for 2016, announced late Wednesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Chosen through a secret nominating process,
the honorees hail from seven states, mainly California and New York, and one lives in India. All are considered creative enough to merit a gift of $625,000 each over five years to do with as they please.
“It was a shock,” said Manu Prakash, the Stanford biologist. “Quite a humbling experience. It’s a huge honor.”
Sleep-deprived, Prakash, 36, was tending to his 4-month-old twins on a recent morning when the phone rang. He hesitated before picking up. It was 7:30 am — who would be calling?
The call was better than anything Prakash could have imagined. It’s hard to say which of his projects, many of them focused on global health and education, caught the eye of the MacArthur people. Maybe all of them.
Besides the astonishing water-based computer (water and computers each rely on the interactions of electrons, Prakash explains, so you just make a fluidic transistor and add a clock; simple, right?), the biologist uses a microfluidic chip to collect mosquito saliva for disease screening, food coloring to illustrate cellular activity, and origami to invent cheap microscopes for kids — and anyone else — around the world.
The microscope, called a Foldscope, costs pennies to make from paper embedded with electronics, like a BART ticket, he said.
“And when you fold it, all the optics align,” said Prakash, who devotes half of his lab time to inventing tools that can be used by people in resource-poor areas like India, where he grew up. “We made the first 50,000 and shipped them around the world to 230 countries. Next year, we’re going to ship 1 million.”
Another local winner offers the world no practical innovations. Vincent Fecteau of San Francisco is a sculptor whose creations of papier- mache and cardboard are described by the MacArthur Foundation as “deceptively intricate, abstract pieces (that) provoke thoughtful reflection.”
Compared with the other “geniuses,” he joked, “I’m sitting here with little pieces of paper and a glue gun.”
Yet Fecteau, 47, uses those tools to create something from nothing, “an ability that’s necessary for most problemsolving,” said Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the MacArthur Fellowships program, as the “genius awards” are formally known. “It’s essential to the human condition.”
The foundation says Fecteau’s sculptures “twist and swerve.” They “move between elegance and ungainliness” and they “convey a subtle visual humor.” As he works, Fecteau cannot predict where his hands and mind will take the sculpture, he told The Chronicle.
“I feel more and more committed to the idea of the intuitive process,” he said. “In the end, that’s all I have to offer. I think my job is to try to get as close to that as possible.”
Stunned that he won, Fecteau called it an incredible gift to be able to work “without worrying about bills for the next five years.”
Also in San Francisco, José Quiñonez, 45, is described by the foundation as a “financial services innovator” who created the nonprofit Mission Asset Fund to help low-income people establish a credit history, which allows them to access essential services like credit cards and bank loans.
Gene Luen Yang, 43, a San Jose cartoonist and graphic novelist, is the author of several works that transform seemingly inaccessible issues — bicultural identity, history’s violent Boxer Rebellion, and even computer coding — into compelling stories on the pages of his books: “AmericanBorn Chinese,” “Boxers and Saints” and “Secret Coders.”
The other MacArthur Fellows include four scientists, three nonfiction writers, two computer experts, a playwright, a poet, an art historian, a theater artist, a composer, a video artist, a jewelry maker, a linguist, a cultural historian and a human rights lawyer.
In all, 12 women and 11 men won this year’s awards.