By Donald Gilpin

Princeton is always ready to show off its unusual assemblage of geniuses, and last week’s announcement of the 2022 MacArthur Fellowships, known as “genius grants,” once again gives bragging rights to Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).

This year’s MacArthur recipients included four scholars with local connections who, along with the 21 other recipients, have demonstrated “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.

In addition to the public acclaim, each recipient will receive a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000, increased from $625,000 last year, to be awarded over the next five years. The Foundation states that Fellowship recipients, from age 35 to 69 this year, “show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future.”

Princeton University Mathematics Professor June Huh, 39, Fields Medal winner earlier this year and formerly a visiting professor and fellow at IAS, was cited by the MacArthur Foundation for “discovering underlying connections between disparate areas of mathematics and proving long-standing mathematical conjectures.”

“Mathematics is an exploration,” said Huh in a MacArthur website video. “There are different types of pleasure one gets by doing mathematics. And most of it is, I think, very similar to the kind of pleasure that artists get when you discover that you can actually communicate something that is so subtle and intricate.”

Huh received his B.S. (2007) and M.S. (2009) from Seoul University and his Ph.D. (2014) from the University of Michigan. He served as a fellow and visiting professor for multiple stints at IAS, held an appointment at Stanford University (2020-2021), and officially joined the Princeton University faculty in 2021.

“June Huh is a rare and distinctive talent with an inspiring combination of mathematical genius and creativity,”
said Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber.

The MacArthur Foundation announcement noted, “With his innovative approach and fruitful collaborations with others, Huh is reinvigorating the field of geometric combinatorics and inspiring a new generation of mathematicians.”

Melanie Matchett Wood, 41, who received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton in 2009 and is now a professor at Harvard University specializing in number theory and algebraic geometry, “combines a breadth of mathematical approaches” to “reveal new ways to see fundamental properties of numbers,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.

“Wood is revealing new properties of natural numbers that are relevant to other mathematical conjectures and theorems, thereby setting the stage for new discoveries in number theory in the future,” the MacArthur Foundation wrote in its announcement of the awards.  Wood investigates foundational questions in pure mathematics, with her research often springing from questions in arithmetical statistics.

She received her B.S. (2003) from Duke University and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics (2004) from the University of Cambridge before earning her Ph.D. at Princeton (2009). She was a researcher at the American Institute of Mathematics (2009-17), and served on the faculty of Stanford University (2009-11), the University of Wisconsin at Madison (2011-19), and the University of California at Berkeley (2019-20). In 2020 she joined the Harvard University faculty and became Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Monica Kim, 44,  a member of IAS’ School of Social Sciences in 2015-16 and currently associate history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was acclaimed by the MacArthur Foundation for “uncovering new insights into U.S. foreign policy in the context of global decolonization after World War II” and for illuminating “our understanding of U.S. foreign policy during and after the Korean War.”

“Through her scholarship Kim is expanding the perspectives from which we view American foreign policy — past, present and future,” the MacArthur Foundation wrote in its announcement.

Kim received her B.A. (2000) from Yale University and a Ph.D. (2011) from the University of Michigan. She was an assistant professor at University of Albany-SUNY (2012-14) and at New York University (2014-20) before taking her current post as associate professor in U.S. international and diplomatic history at the University of Wisconsin.

Her 2019 book, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold Stories, uses interviews with interrogators and evidence from U.S. and international sources in four languages to examine the incarceration and interrogation of prisoners of war (POWs) during the armistice negotiations.  Her current book project, The World That Hunger Made: The Koreas, the United States, and Afro-Asia, discusses economic development as a tool of foreign policy and international influence.

“As a historian, I am forced to reckon with a fundamental principle: the stories we tell about war affect if and how we can imagine a radical peace,” said Kim, as quoted by the MacArthur Foundation.

Reuben Jonathan Miller, 46 — sociologist, criminologist, and social worker, IAS member in the School of Social Sciences in 2016-17, and now a professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice — has explored “the long-term consequences of incarceration on the lives of individuals and their families, with a focus on communities of color and those living in poverty,” the MacArthur Foundation noted.

In an interview with the MacAthur Foundation, Miller described how his research “started off as an intellectual curiosity and something of a moral and ethical impulse,” but, as a volunteer chaplain at Chicago’s Cook County jail, “when I got there I was confronted with the realities of mass incarceration. What sprang from an ethical curiosity and a moral impulse turned into something very personal.”

His book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (2021) draws on historical and theoretical research and 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, Detroit, and other cities.

Miller received a B.A. (2006) from Chicago State University, an A.M. (2007) from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. (2013) from Loyola University Chicago. He was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan (2013-2017) before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2021.

“Miller is modeling a way to write about his subjects that refuses to reduce them to their hardships, and he is illuminating how the American carceral system reshapes individuals’ lives and relationships long after their time has been served,” the MacArthur Foundation wrote in describing Miller’s work.

In announcing the 2022 awards, MacArthur Fellows Director Marlies Carruth stated, “The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood.” She also noted that they offer “new ways for us to understand the communities, systems, and social forces that shape our lives around the globe.”