Two Princeton professors and one graduate alumnus named MacArthur Fellows

The 2026 MacArthur Fellows were announced at the end of last month, with economics professor Ellora Derenoncourt, history professor Elizabeth Ellis, and environmental scientist Kaiyu Guan GS ’13 among those awarded. The three researchers are among twenty total fellows who make up this year’s cohort.

The MacArthur Foundation, according to its website, “boldly invests in creative solutions to urgent challenges, sparking hope for our future.” The prestigious fellowship program awards individuals who have contributed significantly to an innovative idea with $800,000, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.

Notably, fellows do not apply for the grant but are instead selected through a rigorous nomination process. The $800,000 grant is also provided with a “no strings attached” policy, as recipients have no restrictions or obligations on how they choose to spend the grant.

Each of the researchers was entirely unaware of their achievement until they were called by the MacArthur Foundation.

“I was actually working from my office here at Princeton that day, and so I found out in my office, and I just started shaking. I could not believe it,” Ellis told The Daily Princetonian.

“I was completely dumbstruck and in shock,” Derencourt reacted similarly in an interview with the ‘Prince.’ “As the news has sunk in, I think I just feel really happy that there’s interest in the question of racial economic justice.”

Guan, who received his Ph.D. at Princeton in 2013, is now a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was in Singapore for work purposes at the time, and said that when the foundation called, his phone flagged the call as a “spam risk.” 

“I actually terminated the call and I blocked the phone number,” he said to the ‘Prince.’ After several days of back-and-forths, Guan realized he had to unblock the number after an email from the foundation, and was finally notified of his achievement.

“I was speechless over the call for 30 seconds,” Guan said.

MacArthur fellowships are colloquially referred to as “genius grants,” despite the foundation preferring not to use the term. Nonetheless, Guan found himself grappling with the weighty title.

“I have to reflect: am I really a genius or not? The short answer that I’m gonna have for you is I don’t think I’m a genius in the conventional [sense],” he said. “But I should see this word as people giving a very strong vote of confidence for the work that we are doing as a team, and then at this moment I feel it’s great to get that recognition.”

With such recognition, the researchers are considering how to best use the funds towards their work. Ellis, who specializes in Native American history, cites tribal partnerships as an important venue for her search.

“I work really closely with my own tribal nation, the Peoria Tribe Indians of Oklahoma, and I’ve worked with a variety of tribal partners in the past,” Ellis said, “So this kind of funding would give me more flexibility to do things like hold summits and workshops, and work with tribal cultural offices on research projects without everything having to be oriented around my needs as the researcher towards an academic publication.”

Ellis’ work has already been involved in reaching out to Indigenous communities to lead workshops. “I was able to use some funding from here to run a workshop out on our reservation in Oklahoma with a variety of tribal historical preservation officers,” she told the ‘Prince.’  

Ellis finds that she “really value[s] the opportunities to work with contemporary communities.” She also teaches a course on Native American History that she designed, which can be used to fulfill the new Native American and Indigenous Studies Minor housed in the Effron Center for the Study of America. 

Derenoncourt is a labor economist and economic historian, and her “work looks at the drivers of inequality over a long time frame, a lot of it in the United States, and a lot of that work has focused on racial inequality specifically.”

Her work in Princeton’s economics department focuses on the earnings gap across race in America. “A collaborator and I were looking at the decade of the late 1960s, early 1970s, and that’s a remarkable period because the gap went from 50 percent to 25 percent in less than 10 years,” Derenoncourt told the ‘Prince.’ “It was a very striking change, and digging into that period, we figured out that a large chunk of that was just from a very simple reform to minimum wage policy in the U.S.” 

With the funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Derenoncourt will be able to connect with scholars to evaluate her historical minimum wage research in light of current economic issues. “We had to do archival research to find reports that the government had created at the time, documenting hourly wage distributions in different industries,” Derenoncourt said. “We can identify the effect of the reform on wages, and then, you know, look downstream what's happening for income gaps of different groups.” 

Guan’s research focuses on agricultural methods. He is interested in “how you use these advanced tools [supercomputers, advanced sensing technology] to address more classic problems in agriculture.” 

“We actually have a very, very powerful supercomputer at the University of Illinois to help us to execute that. When we combine this all together, we can generate some unprecedented innovations that open up new doors for us, not only for scientific discovery but also … for potential policy-making design,” he said.

Derenoncourt mentions that Princeton is “a dream place to be not just an economist, but especially a labor economist.”

“I feel really fortunate to work on these topics here,” she added.

Similarly, Guan expressed his appreciation for the support he received from his Ph.D. advisor, the late civil and environmental engineering professor Eric Wood. 

“He was such an influential person to me,” Guan said. “He always asked me to have the greatest rigor for science. He asked me to ask my own science questions, [to] be creative for myself.”

The turn from the theoretical foundation that Guan’s Princeton education provided him to the agricultural research he does today was inspired by conversations with his grandmother, to whom he wanted to be able to explain the applicability and relevance of his work. 

“I started thinking, is there anything more tangible to society where I can actually [have] more immediate impact, more obvious impact?” Guan said. 

This inclination towards creative problem-solving is exactly what the MacArthur fellowship rewards, in its aim to identify “extraordinarily creative individuals.”

Guan himself acknowledged, “I’m very humble to the word ‘genius.’ But I think that creativity is a very solid word. I will take it.”

Haeon Lee is the associate News editor for the ‘Prince’ leading research coverage. She is from Brooklyn, N.Y. and often covers campus research and academic departments. She can be reached at hlee[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

Sasha Fedorov is a reporter-in-training for the ‘Prince.’ 

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.