25 New MacArthur Fellows Announced. Photos from left to right: Edith Widder, Kenneth Catania and Linda Griffith.

My statement from last year seems worth repeating: “I think the fellowships are a great idea: give money to people who have done excellent work. I am not sure of the motivations of the MacArthur Foundation, but if it were me I would trust by providing funds to those people they would (as a group, not every single person) take advantage of those funds to create great advances for all of humanity.”

Each fellow will receive $500,000 over the next 5 years to do with as they please. Among the winners are scientist and engineers, including:

• Edith Widder – biologist and deep-sea explorer, “Working with engineers, she has built a number of unique devices that enable scientists to see the ocean in new ways, including HIDEX, a bathyphotometer that measures how much bioluminescence there is in the oceans, and LoLAR, the most sensitive deep-sea light meter.”

• Kenneth Catania – Comparative Neurobiologist, “investigating the central nervous systems of unusual animals to generate new insights into the mammalian cortex—how it evolves, develops, and responds to changing conditions.”
• Linda Griffith – Bioengineer, “shaping the frontiers of tissue engineering and synthetic regenerative technologies by designing new methods for fabricating scaffolds on which cultured cells can adhere and grow.”

Related: 2005 MacArthur Fellows post – posts on science and engineering awards