‘Genius’ grant winners

Elissa Hallem, 34, a neurobiologist at UCLA, is among the 23 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants.  (Stephanie Diani / Associated Press)

Uta Barth, 54, a conceptual photographer who explores the nature of vision and the difference between reality and how a camera records it.  (Roman Cho / Associated Press)

Maurice Lim Miller, 66, a social services innovator who designs projects that reward and track self-sufficiency among residents of low-income neighborhoods in Oakland, San Francisco and Boston.  (Don Feria / Associated Press)

Benoit Rolland, 58, a stringed-instrument bow maker who experiments with new designs and materials to create violin, viola and cello bows that rival the quality of prized 19th century bows and meet the artistic demands of today’s musicians.  (Tsar Fedorsky / Associated Press)

Melody Swartz, 43, a bioengineer who enhances understanding of the dynamic processes of tissue vascularization and immune responses to tumor invasion using a large toolbox of concepts and methods from biophysics, cell culture, molecular genetics, engineering and immunology.  (Stefan Jermann / Associated Press)

Laura Poitras, 48, a filmmaker revealing the consequences of military conflict abroad in documentaries that portray the lives and intimate experiences of families and communities largely inaccessible to the American media.  (Sean Gallup / Associated Press)

Dr. Benjamin Warf, 54, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital of Boston who is revolutionizing treatment of hydrocephalus and other intra-cranial diseases in young children and advancing standards of and access to healthcare in the developed and poorest regions of the world.  (Tsar Fedorsky / Associated Press)

Dr. Daniel Spielman, 42, a computer scientist at Yale University who connects theoretical and applied computing to resolve issues in code optimization theory with implications for how we measure, predict and regulate our environment and behavior.   (Kenneth Gabrielsen / Associated Press)

Nancy Rabalais, 62, a marine ecologist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium who documents the environmental and economic consequences of dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.  (Daymon Gardner / Associated Press)

Terry Plank, 48, a geochemist at Columbia University who probes the usually invisible but remarkably powerful thermal and chemical forces deep below the Earth’s crust that drive the motion of tectonic plate collisions.  (Matt Carr / Associated Press)

David Finkel, 56, a Washington Post journalist whose writing has transformed readers’ understanding of military service and sacrifice.  (John Spaulding / Associated Press)

Eric Coleman, 47, a geriatrician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who is improving healthcare by focusing on patient transitions from hospitals to homes and care facilities.  (Kim Cook / Associated Press)

An-My Le, 52, a photographer at Bard College who approaches the subjects of war and landscape from new perspectives.  (Matt Carr / Associated Press)

Dinaw Mengestu, 34, a writer whose novels and nonfiction pieces enrich understanding of the little-explored world of the African diaspora in America.  (Eli Meir Kaplan / Associated Press)

Maria Chudnovsky, 35, a mathematician at Columbia University whose work is deepening the connections between graph theory and other major branches of mathematics, such as linear programming and geometry.  (Christopher Lane / Associated Press)

Oliver Guyon, 36, an optical physicist and astronomer at the University of Arizona who designs telescopes and other astronomical instrumentation that play a crucial role in the search for Earth-like planets outside this solar system.  (Marco Garcia / Associated Press)

Raj Chetty, 34, an economist at Harvard University who studies how policy decisions affect real-world behavior.  (Tsar Fedorsky / Associated Press)

Arts entrepreneur Claire Chase, 34, who engages audiences in the appreciation of contemporary classical music and opens new avenues of artistic expression through her International Contemporary Ensemble.  (Matt Carr / Associated Press)

Natalia Almada, 37, a documentary filmmaker who captures complex and nuanced views of Mexican history, politics and culture.  (Rafael Monroy / Associated Press)

Chris Thile, 31, a mandolinist and composer who is creating a new musical aesthetic and a distinctly American canon for the mandolin.  (Christopher Lane / Associated Press)

Northwestern University historian Dylan Penningroth, 41, who is unearthing evidence from scattered archives to shed light on shifting concepts of property ownership and kinship among African American slaves and their descendants.   (Peter Wynn Thompson / Associated Press)

Junot Diaz, 43, a fiction writer who uses raw, vernacular dialogue and spare, unsentimental prose to draw readers into the various and distinct worlds that immigrants straddle.