Brangwynne, Sly win MacArthur “Genius Grants”

Chemical and biological engineering professor Clifford Brangwynne and mathematics professor Allan Sly have been named recipients of the 2018 MacArthur Fellowship.

The fellows were announced on the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation website on Thursday, Oct. 4.

Unofficially known as the “Genius Grant,” the MacArthur Fellowship has been awarded to twenty-five individuals in the United States every year since 1981. Each fellow receives $625,000 with “no strings attached” and is selected for their “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits,” as well as “a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Brangwynne was honored for his work on cellular compartmentalization – specifically, using principles of “soft matter” physics and cell biology to determine the processes that drive the organization of membraneless organelles.

His laboratory ultimately aims to use this research to further our understanding of various diseases and treat them with synthesized self-assembling biomaterials.

Sly’s research centers on discrete probability theory and stochastic, or random, processes. He was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation for his innovative approaches to long-standing problems concerning Markov chain cutoffs, stochastic block models, and several other topics.

Both Brangwynne and Sly have received various awards in the past as commendations for their work. Most recently, Brangwynne was named a Sloan Research Fellow, and Sly was awarded a National Science Foundation Career Grant.