MacArthur Foundation Names 20 Fellows, Including Forensic Anthropologist Kate Spradley

The cohort spans a wide range of disciplines, but several winners converge on questions of human connection and healing. Among them are visual and sound artist Christine Sun Kim, philosopher and cognitive scientist Felipe De Brigard and novelist Bryan Washington.

The forensic anthropologist is Kate Spradley of Texas State University. Her work drew attention after she tried to exhume the body of Elmer Esau Barahona, a young man from El Salvador, from a cemetery in Brooks County in southern Texas. Barahona fled his country in 2012 because a gang was pressuring him to join, Spradley said. He and others paid a coyote to guide them across the border. After his family lost contact, the coyote told Barahona's aunt that they had left her nephew next to a tree, with a brown plaid shirt tied around his knee. He died there, and officials buried him in the local cemetery.

When the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team offered to pay for DNA analysis so Barahona's remains could be returned to El Salvador, Spradley and her team were enlisted to recover the body. The funeral home, however, did not know where he was buried, nor where more than 100 other Central American migrants who died were interred. Spradley said the practice was illegal and a human rights violation. 'Everyone should have dignity in death,' she said. She concluded that the team would have to exhume the entire cemetery.

That effort began in 2013. Spradley created Operation Identification, which she describes as an attempt to turn numbers into names, and helped form the Forensic Border Coalition to push for policy changes. As a result, the FBI changed its policy to include DNA from Latin American families in its federal database, easing identification efforts. Spradley's search now extends across multiple cemeteries in southern Texas, sometimes using ground-penetrating radar. She and colleagues try to identify remains through skeletal analysis or fingerprinting, even in advanced decomposition; the FBI trained them to use rehydration to resurrect a portion of the finger pad.

Other winners include researchers working on climate change. Holly Jean Buck, a University of Buffalo sociologist, centers on ethical and political questions around climate policy. In her 2019 book After Geoengineering, she argues that carbon removal systems must serve local communities and the public interest rather than corporate profit. Kaiyu Guan, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign climate scientist, combines satellite data and machine learning to boost food productivity while reducing environmental impacts. Marika Holland, based at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, demonstrated that as polar sea ice thins past critical thresholds, exposed ocean water and surface melt absorb more solar radiation, accelerating ice loss and rapid polar warming.

The foundation also recognized scholars rewriting American history and economics. Elizabeth Ellis, a Princeton historian, studies Indigenous sovereignty and commercial relationships, showing how smaller Indigenous groups shaped early American history. Ellora Derenoncourt, a Princeton labor economist and economic historian, studies the racial wealth gap; her work on the 1966 extension of the Fair Labor Standards Act shows that extending minimum wage protections to Black-dominated sectors such as agriculture, service industries and domestic work sharply decreased the Black-white earnings gap in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ariel Ron, a Southern Methodist University historian, argues in his 2020 book Grassroots Leviathan that Northern family farms were a powerful political and economic force, challenging narratives of a purely industrial North versus an agrarian, slave-holding South.

Several fellows confront political violence, memory and justice. Maaza Mengiste, a novelist and Wesleyan University English professor, wrote The Shadow King, a 2019 novel about Ethiopian women who took up arms against fascist Italian forces during and after the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Vincent Valdez, a Texas-based visual artist, subverts classical European painting traditions to depict working-class Chicano communities; for El Chavez Ravine, created with musician Ry Cooder, he painted a 1950s ice cream truck with scenes of Mexican American displacement in Los Angeles as Dodger Stadium was built. Rodney McMillian, a visual artist and UCLA professor, works in sculpture, painting, video and installation to highlight systemic inequality and historical erasure, focusing on the American South.

Other winners in this year's class include a bioengineer creating nanotechnologies to improve vaccines and drug delivery, and an organic chemist using electricity to help build complex molecules more efficiently and sustainably. The awards are given over five years with no strings attached, allowing recipients to decide how to use the money.