Professor, alum win $500,000 genius grants

Geosciences professor Daniel Sigman and visiting engineering lecturer Ted Zoli ’88 were named recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship to support their research, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced on Tuesday.

The fellowships, which provide $500,000 in funding to each recipient over five years, “come without stipulations and reporting requirements and offer Fellows unprecedented freedom and opportunity to reflect, create, and explore,” the foundation said in a statement. This year, there are 24 recipients of the fellowships, known by many as “genius grants.”

Sigman, who specializes in geochemistry and oceanography, came to Princeton as a postdoctoral fellow in 1998 and joined the faculty two years later. He has focused his research on “cycles of biologically important elements and their interaction with changing environmental conditions through the course of Earth history,” according to his website.

“It is easy enough to feel that I am not progressing in my work at the rate I should, or that I am making too many big and little mistakes,” Sigman said in an e-mail. “Rightly or wrongly, awards like this (and this is my biggest) calm me down and allow me to say to myself, I am not messing up that badly.”

Sigman added he has not yet decided exactly how he will spend his fellowship funds. “I am thinking right now that the best way to honor the grant is to think deeply for some time about how to put it to work,” he said.

While Sigman continues to teach and conduct research at the University, he has already made advances that have “revolutionized” his field, said geosciences department chair Bess Ward, who has known Sigman since his years as an MIT graduate student. Ward explained that her first impression of Sigman was that he was “very intense [and] very smart.”

“He’s trained people all over the world,” she said. “We always knew he was a genius: we already knew he was a star, so I think [the award] was entirely appropriate.”

Sigman said that teaching at the University has helped him grow as a scholar.

“At Princeton, I have the luxury of teaching at a fairly high level,” he explained. “Even students in introductory courses can ask incisive questions and seek a profound understanding ... As a result, I am constantly learning new things about the material I teach, either because I seek to teach the material in an intellectually complete way to engage the students or because of interactions with the students.”

Zoli, who studied civil engineering and operations research while he was an undergraduate at the University, is the vice president at a New York engineering firm and collaborated with Swiss engineer Christian Menn to help design the new Streicker pedestrian bridge currently being built on campus.

With his expertise in long-span, cable-supported bridges, Zoli contributed to the building of the Blennerhassett Island Bridge over the Ohio River and the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge in Boston. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Zoli has researched armoring strategies to retrofit bridges across the United States to protect them against damage from explosions.

“We sometimes optimized materials to such a degree that things became difficult to build and perhaps less safe,” Zoli said in a University statement. “I’ve focused much of my career on building structures that are safer using forms that are easy to construct and fabricate and mass-produced materials that are more accessible.”

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Zoli said he is considering using his grant money to work on developing new building materials for structural engineering, according to the statement. He may also research alternative methods of building synthetic rope bridges in national parks and mountainous regions.

Zoli did not respond to requests from The Daily Princetonian for comment.

Civil engineering department chair Michael Celia praised his colleague’s work.

“Ted is one of the world’s great bridge designers who also happens to be an outstanding and really creative researcher,” Celia said in an e-mail. “His work on armoring strategies for bridge retrofitting, and his ideas on new materials and designs for structures, are truly remarkable.”

Both professors received a phone call from the director of the foundation before the announcement was made public. Because the foundation only accepts anonymous nominations from those with “expertise and familiarity with exceptionally creative people in their respective areas of focus,” recipients are usually surprised to hear the news.

“The director of the Fellows Program was on the other end of the phone line, explaining to me why I had been selected, and all I could do was say, ‘Wow,’ ” Sigman said in a University announcement.