4 Academics in State Win ‘Genius’ Prizes : Awards: Two from Stanford and two from UC system are named by the MacArthur Foundation. Other winners include saxophonist Steve Lacy and dancer Twyla Tharp.

Two Stanford University professors and two UC scholars--including an evolutionary biologist who has been blind since childhood--are among this year’s 33 winners of the MacArthur Foundation’s eclectic and coveted “genius” awards, officials announced Monday.

Despite being sightless from glaucoma since age 3, Geerat Vermeij of UC Davis has become an expert on the evolutionary links between shell-bearing ocean creatures and their predators, supporting the belief that environment helps determine biological diversity. He was awarded $280,000 from the Chicago-based foundation that began awarding the prizes in 1981 to artists, scientists, writers, activists and even furniture makers.

“It was a complete and utter surprise,” Vermeij, 45, said in a telephone interview from his office at UC Davis, where he has been a professor for four years and makes his way around campus with the help of only a cane. He said he may use his prize to finance research expeditions for himself and assistants to the tropical western Pacific or to southern Africa.

Vermeij, Dutch-born, has a huge Braille library of scientific works and is able to identify many biological specimens by touch. Some people tried to discourage him from his career goals because of his blindness, but he stressed: “I guess I have had an attitude that if you don’t look too hard for discrimination, you won’t find it.”

He recalled how a skeptical interviewer for graduate school admission at Yale handed him specimens to identify. “I think he was wondering if I wasn’t just bluffing,” said Vermeij, who quickly identified the creatures and went on to earn a Yale doctorate. More recently, he had to argue away safety concerns to win a berth on a University of Alaska research cruise to the Aleutian Islands.

The other California winners are Sharon Long, a Stanford biologist who works with bacteria to improve agricultural grain; Stanford’s Stephen Schneider, a climatologist who is outspoken on the consequences of global warming; Evelyn Fox Keller, of UC Berkeley’s rhetoric and women’s studies departments, who has written about gender’s effect on scientific research, and San Francisco-based artist and lecturer Amalia Mesa-Bains, an expert on Chicano traditions.

Across the nation and world, this year’s grantees range from well-known choreographer Twyla Tharp to Unita Blackwell, the first black woman mayor in Mississippi, to jazz saxophonist Steve Lacy to Robert McCabe, president of Miami-Dade Community College. Depending on their ages, all will receive grants from $150,00 to $375,000 over five years--with no strings attached or any work required.

This year’s awards went to more women than men--17 to 16--for the first time since the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation began handing them out 11 years ago. Individuals cannot apply for the monies. Working anonymously, more than 100 nominators in various arts, sciences, professions and crafts send names to a 12-member selection panel, which hands over recommendations to the foundation’s directors. Including Monday’s group, 383 MacArthur fellowships have been awarded, totaling $112 million.

Long, the Stanford biological sciences professor, said she at first thought that someone in her husband’s family might be ill when she saw a message last week asking her to return a call to a Chicago telephone number. She discovered that the number was at the MacArthur Foundation and that she had won $260,000.

“I didn’t drop the phone but I came close to doing so,” she said.

Long, 41, earned her undergraduate degree at Caltech and her doctorate at Yale. During her 10 years at Stanford, she has explored the symbiotic relationships between grains and bacteria, most notably how alfalfa and the Rhizobium bacterium exchange chemical signals. The ultimate goal is to improve agricultural yields.

Long said she might use the grant to fund her sabbatical studies in new computer analysis or chemistry techniques at laboratories “local or far away.”

“These funds are so precious, I will think a lot for a long time about how to use them,” she said in a telephone interview.

Probably the best known of the California winners is Schneider, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., for two decades who moved to Stanford last year. In his writings and in testimony before Congress, Schneider has argued for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to avoid devastating global warming.

Schneider, 47, said he will use his $290,000 MacArthur grant to hire assistants at Stanford, where he has an unusual interdisciplinary appointment in biology and international studies. Schneider, in a telephone interview, added that he may develop a television series about the environment. “I like to do controversial things,” he said.

“We are trying to get people to recognize that (reducing greenhouse emissions) will not bankrupt the country but is good economics in the long run as well as good Earth policy,” he said.

Schneider received his undergraduate degree and a doctorate in plasma physics from Columbia University.

“I haven’t figured out a good enough use. But I figure I have time,” Evelyn Fox Keller said of her $335,000 grant. After four years at UC Berkeley, the professor is taking a new post this fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor in the history and philosophy of science.

According to the MacArthur Foundation, Keller’s writings raise “important questions about the relationship between science and gender.” Her books include a 1983 biography of Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize laureate in medicine whose research on plant genetics was ignored initially, in part, Keller showed, because of gender bias.

“I’m interested in how new concepts about the world enter into the mainstream or not,” said Keller, 56, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Brandeis University and a doctorate in physics at Harvard University.

Asked about her first reaction to the MacArthur news, Keller replied: “It apparently was quite routine. I just said: Oh, my God.’ ”

Winners of MacArthur Awards

Here is a list of the 33 new MacArthur fellows, with brief biographical information and the amount of their stipends:

Janet Benshoof--45; New York; president of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy; $280,000

Robert Blackburn--71; New York; director of the Printmaking Workshop; $375,000

Unita Blackwell--59; mayor of Mayersville, Miss.; the first black woman elected mayor in Mississippi; $350,000

Lorna Bourg--50; New Iberia, La.; co-founder, Southern Mutual Help Assn., which aids regional farm workers and rural poor; $305,000

Stanley Cavell--65; Brookline, Mass.; professor at Harvard University and humanistic scholar; $374,000

Amy Clampitt--71; New York; poet and essayist known for an eye for small, luminous details; $375,000

Ingrid Daubechies--37; New Brunswick, N.J.; professor, Rutgers University; mathematical analyst; $240,000

Wendy Ewald--40; New York; photographer and educator who works in remote settings; $260,000

Irving Feldman--63; Buffalo, N.Y.; professor, State University of New York at Buffalo; poet specializing in the Holocaust; $369,000

Barbara Fields--45; New York; professor, Columbia University; historian of 19th-Century South; $280,000

Robert H. Hall--47; Durham, N.C.; research director of Institute for Southern Studies; has helped mine and textile workers negotiate with major companies; $290,000

Ann Ellis Hanson--56; Ann Arbor, Mich.; scholar specializing in the Roman Empire and the history of ancient science; $340,000

John Holland--63; Ann Arbor, Mich.; professor, University of Michigan; pioneer in machine learning, artificial intelligence; $369,000

Wes Jackson--55; Salina, Kan.; founder of the Land Institute, which seeks alternatives to mass-production agriculture; $335,000

Evelyn Fox Keller--56; Berkeley; professor, UC Berkeley; a researcher who has analyzed the role of gender in scientific study; $335,000

Steve Lacy--57, Paris; jazz musician, soprano saxophonist and composer; $340,000

Suzanne Lebsock--42; Highland Park, N.J.; professor, Rutgers University; social historian focusing on women’s status; $265,000

Sharon Long--41; Palo Alto; professor, Stanford University; biologist whose exploration of the relationship between bacteria and legumes has implications for new agricultural genetic technologies; $260,000

Norman Manea--55; Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; international fellow at Bard College and author concerned with the Holocaust; $330,000

Paule Marshall--63; Richmond, Va.; professor, Virginia Commonwealth University; writer who explores healing divided cultures; $369,000

Michael Massing--40; New York; free-lance journalist who writes about foreign relations, politics, the press and human rights; $250,000

Robert McCabe--62; Miami; president, Miami-Dade Community College; directed innovative scholarship programs, career preparation keyed to the local work force and immigrant education; $365,000

Susan Meiselas--43; New York; photojournalist who has worked in wide range of foreign locations and U.S.-Mexico border; $275,000

Amalia Mesa-Bains--48; San Francisco; artist and critic; $295,000

Stephen Schneider--47; Stanford, Calif.; professor at Stanford University who researches global climate data; $290,000

Joanna Scott--31; Rochester; associate professor, University of Rochester; author of three novels; $215,000

John T. Scott--51; New Orleans; professor of fine arts, Xavier University of Louisiana; creator of painted steel sculptures; $315,000

John Terborgh--56; Durham, N.C.; director, Duke University Center for Tropical Conservation; biologist working in ecology; $335,000

Twyla Tharp--50; New York; dancer and choreographer; $310,000

Philip Uri Treisman--45; Austin, Tex.; professor of mathematics at University of Texas; works to improve the quality of math instruction in high school and college, especially for minority students; $285,000

Laurel T. Ulrich--53; Durham, N.H.; associate professor of history at University of New Hampshire; studying women and gender relations in 17th-Century America; $320,000

Geerat Vermeij--45; professor of geology at UC Davis; biogeographer of the sea; blind since the age of 3; $280,000

Gunter Wagner--38; professor of biology at Yale University working on evolutionary biology and population genetics; $245,000

Source: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation