Four With Social Science Ties Named MacArthur Fellows for 2025
Four individuals with backgrounds in social and behvioral sciences received John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowships for 2025, the foundation announced earlier last week.
Archaeologist Kristina Douglass, political scientist Hahrie Han, cultural anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte, and nuclear security specialist Sébastien Philippe were among the 22 people to receive the so-called ‘genius grants.’ According to the foundation, “The MacArthur Fellowship is an $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.”
The word ‘potential’ is key here.
“While individuals will have a track record of significant achievement,” the foundation stresses, “the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award—it is an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.”
MacArthur offers three criteria in selecting fellows: exceptional creativity, the promise for important future advances, and the ability of the fellowship itself to facilitate subsequent creative work.
Kristina Douglass is an associate professor in the Climate School at Columbia University. As an archaeologist doing field work in communities Madagascar’s southwest coast, she studies how societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability. Douglass’s research focuses on, a biodiversity hot spot that is particularly vulnerable to present-day climate change pressures. She uses tools and methods from archaeology, climatology, and conservation biology and works closely with local, Indigenous, and descendent communities in the co-production of knowledge. Her work offers valuable insights for designing effective conservation policies that protect and respect local livelihoods and cultures.
Hahrie Han is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, where she is the inaugural director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute and faculty director of the P3 Lab. Her research uses ethnographic, sociological, experimental, and quantitative methods, to study civic infrastructure with the goal of encouraging people to emerge from their social silos to improve the public sphere. Han’s most recent book, Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church, details an evangelical megachurch in Cincinnati, Ohio that initiated a racial justice program.
Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Professor of International Security and Anthropology in the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and directs the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at Brown. Her fieldwork in ethnography interrogates border regions and the political and moral ambiguities that flourish there. Her books include 2015’s Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border and last year’s Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border.
Sébastien Philippe was a research scholar in the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (earlier this year before becoming an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Trained as a nuclear safety engineer, he combines his experiences alongside archival research and data modelling to encompass the human and environmental damage from nuclear tests – ranging from French Polynesia to the American Southwest — and the risks associated with nuclear weapon modernization policies. In data visualizations, a short film, a podcast, and other materials on The Missiles on Our Land website, he and collaborators illustrate the widespread destruction that would be caused by a nuclear attack on the missile sites.
