Two Harvard alumnae are among the 2024 MacArthur Fellows announced today. Dorothy Roberts, J.D. ’80, is a legal scholar and public policy researcher who studies racial inequality in health and social service systems. A faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania since 2012, she holds named professorships in the law school and the department of sociology, with a joint appointment in Africana studies. Roberts’s work has focused in particular on reproductive freedom and black women’s reproductive rights, and on the child welfare system’s treatment of families of color.
In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997), she analyzed the long struggle over control of black women’s childbearing, from forced procreation during slavery to forced sterilization to contemporary welfare reform. Later, in Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001), and her most recent book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), Roberts examined how race and class disproportionately lead to state intervention in child welfare cases. She also described the historical, cultural, and political forces driving this imbalance, creating stereotypes and stigmas about black families and blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems with long roots in history. She calls for dismantling the current child welfare system, which she sees as irredeemable, and building a new one from the ground up.
Evolutionary biologist Martha Muñoz, Ph.D. ’14, is an assistant professor at Yale, where she studies the factors that affect rates and patterns of evolution. Working with reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, her research includes investigations into why some organisms and traits develop rapidly while others remain unchanged for millennia, and how behavior and biomechanics influence those changes.
Studying different populations of tropical anole lizards—at warm, sea-level habitats and on colder mountaintops—Muñoz challenged the assumption that environmental pressures are the primary drivers of evolution. Instead, she found, behavioral differences were what enabled both groups of lizards to regulate their body temperature, and that behavior can be “a motor and a brake” for evolution. Elsewhere, she has demonstrated the close link between biomechanics and evolution, studying changes in the forelimb of mantis shrimp—which the animal uses to punch or stab its prey. She found that the smallest component of the jointed forelimb evolves more rapidly than the others, and minute changes in its length have large effects on the claw’s overall force. Studying the jaws of more than 100 fish species, she found that the rates of evolution depend on whether the species needs more bite force or bite speed to catch prey. Currently, she is researching diversification among dozens of species of plethodontid salamanders, which breathe through their skin, living in microhabitats in the Appalachian Mountains.
The MacArthur Fellowship recognizes individuals across disciplines who “demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions.” Each of the approximately two-dozen fellows is awarded $800,000, paid out over five years. The funds are a no-strings-attached investment in the promise of the fellows’ work.
