Teresa Puthussery, associate professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley, received a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called “genius grant”—in 2025 for research that could help people with vision loss see again. In 2023, her lab discovered a rare retinal cell that helps stabilize vision. Her team is also working with other universities to use stem cells to generate new photoreceptors for transplant into damaged retinas, in the hopes of one day restoring sight. “Twenty years ago,” Puthussery said, “many of the discoveries that we’ve made as a field, and even the methods we use in my lab, would have seemed like science fiction.”
Berkeley engineering alum William Tarpeh, M.S. ’13, Ph.D. ’17, also a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, now works at Stanford developing eco-friendly processes to rescue vital resources from wastewater. He developed a method to turn nitrogen from urine into products that can be reused in fertilizer or household cleaners, and another process that recovers ammonia from municipal wastewater. The latter is being tested on runoff from California farms. Tarpeh called the fellowship, which carries an $800,000 no-strings-attached award, “a testament to my community.”
Kareem El-Badry, M.A. ’18, Ph.D. ’21, researches the origin, evolution, and dynamics of star systems at Caltech. At Berkeley, he built a 3-D atlas to find binary stars, where two stars orbit around each other, shaping their companion’s evolution. “Every star has a story,” he told the MacArthur Foundation after being named to the 2025 class of fellows. The stellar development that El-Badry tracks generally happens on timescales too long for humans to observe. “But fortunately, there are a lot of stars,” El-Badry said. With enough observation over time and through large enough telescopes, “we can detect a lot of these events and see the drama unfolding in real time.”
El-Badry isn’t the only Berkeley astrophysicist to snag a recent genius award; preceding him, in 2024, was Vanderbilt Professor Keivan G. Stassun ’94, who was recognized for his leadership in increasing diversity in STEM fields as founding codirector of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program. In 2018, he also founded the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation, which works to help neurodiverse individuals find and keep employment. “Science and engineering are, at the end of the day, profound acts of human creativity,” Stassun told the foundation, adding that it’s vital for society to engage all backgrounds that “shape how different people think and experience the world.”
Joining Stassun as a 2024 MacArthur Fellow was Ruha Benjamin, M.A. ’04, Ph.D. ’08, a Princeton professor who writes about the intersections of race, inequity, technology, and science. “At the heart of all my work is the invitation to imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within,” she has said. Her recent articles are critical of artificial intelligence. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, she linked the rhetoric of AI optimists to eugenicist propaganda. “At every turn in the rhetoric of the artificial intelligentsia, we hear echoes of a eugenic calculus: the weak must be sacrificed for the strong to survive.”
Linsey Marr, M.S. ’97, Ph.D. ’02, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, received recognition for pivotal research she conducted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic about how airborne pathogens travel. While others had focused on droplets from sneezing and coughing, Marr showed that infectious bioaerosols—airborne particles containing viruses or bacteria—were also a major carrier of the coronavirus, and capable of traveling beyond the six feet required by social distancing. “It took a big effort by my colleagues and me to overturn this conventional wisdom,” she said, building the case for improving ventilation and filtration indoors.
