WASHINGTON: It is called the “Genius Grant” and each award comes with $625,000, no strings attached. But no, you can’t apply for it; or have a well-connected uncle enter you for it. Those being considered have no inkling and when the call comes, they are always surprised.
Manu Prakash, who was among the 23 winners announced on Thursday, almost didn’t answer the phone. The Indian-born Stanford biologist was handling his four-month old twins then. “I was very sleep deprived when the phone rang,” he told Stanford, the university’s in-house magazine. But he did, eventually. He was one of two Indian-born men among the 23 MacArthur Fellowship awardees for 2016. Subhash Khot, a computer scientist from New York University was the second. They are both from the IITs — Prakash from Kanpur and Khot from Mumbai. There is a third India-linked winner this year as well — Bill Thies, an American working at a Microsoft lab in Bengaluru.
The John D and Katherine T MacArthur Foundation, which has offices in India as well, awards an unrestricted number of fellowships every year to people who have shown “exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances”.
Past winners with an India connection include writers Ved Mehta and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, poet and scholar A K Ramanujam, classical musician Ali Akbar Khan and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer. Nominees, drawn from a variety of fields, are brought to the foundation’s notice by a changing pool of nominators who remain anonymous. Applications and “unsolicited” nominations are not accepted.
{{/usCountry}}Past winners with an India connection include writers Ved Mehta and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, poet and scholar A K Ramanujam, classical musician Ali Akbar Khan and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer. Nominees, drawn from a variety of fields, are brought to the foundation’s notice by a changing pool of nominators who remain anonymous. Applications and “unsolicited” nominations are not accepted.
{{/usCountry}}Prakash will never know how he got selected but there’s no question he deserves the fellowship. He is a physical biologist and inventor, the foundation said, who has used his “expertise in soft-matter physics to illuminate easy to observe but hard to explain phenomena in biological and physical contexts and to invent solutions to difficult problems in global health, science education, and ecological surveillance”.
He has used tiny air bubbles travelling through “microfluidic channels”, such as water, to create a basic computer.
Khot is a theoretical computer scientist who studies, in simple terms, what computers can do and what they can’t. His research, it seems is bolstering a sobering realisation among computer scientists that there are a lot of problems — computational problems — that can’t be solved fast.