One-fifth of this year’s “genius grant” winners have Harvard ties.
On Tuesday, the MacArthur Foundation announced 20 new fellowship recipients for 2026—individuals working across science, policy, literature, music, and more—who “explore the depths of our humanity, reveal untold origins to modern challenges, and expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research,” according to the organization. Winners each receive one-time, $800,000 grant to pursue their work. The four Harvardians are:
Ellora Derenoncourt ’09, Ph.D. ’19
Ellora Derenoncourt is a labor economist and historian who studies the roots of racial wealth inequality and economic mobility in the United States. She is an associate professor of economics at Princeton University, where she is also the founder and faculty director of the school’s Program for Research on Inequality. In her fellowship entry, the MacArthur Foundation notes how she uses rigorously assembled datasets to identify how economic gaps shift and evolve across key points in history, the effects of policy changes and migration patterns, and more. In a 2022 paper, for example, Derenoncourt showed that “Black Americans who moved from the South to Northern cities achieved some economic gains, but economic prospects actually declined for subsequent generations,” according to the MacArthur biography, because backlash to new arrivals led to disinvestment in urban neighborhoods, nearly a century of local expenditure data shows. “Derenoncourt adds empirical evidence and historical context to policy conversations about the causes and potential means for repair of long-entrenched economic inequality,” the bio reads.
Derenoncourt graduated from Harvard College in 2009 with a degree in gender studies and a minor in molecular biology. She earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics in 2011 before returning to Harvard, graduating in 2019 with a Ph.D. in economics.
Song Lin, Ph.D. ’13
An organic chemist, Song Lin has been recognized for his work designing electrochemical methods to more efficiently and sustainably build complex organic molecules—processes that have wide applicability, including in pharmaceutical development and in building materials, like polymers. Lin’s experiments to develop those processes, as well as his documentation of the underlying mechanisms, will help lay a foundation for future discoveries.
By using electrochemistry to induce chemical reactions, Lin has developed an alternative to processes that use “resource-intensive and often toxic chemical reagents,” according to his MacArthur Fellowship. “In addition to being more sustainable and safer, electrochemistry offers the potential for added control over reactions and their output.”
“In early work, Lin developed an electrochemical method for transforming alkenes into vicinal diamines, a structure that appears in many pharmaceuticals and biologically active molecules,” the entry continues. The process “often requires expensive and rare heavy metals and produces toxic waste. By contrast, Lin’s low-cost and streamlined process uses the abundant element manganese as a catalyst and electrical current from two AA batteries.” Lin has also created tools to make the electrochemical processes he has pioneered accessible to other researchers.
A professor of chemistry at Stanford University, Lin joined the faculty there in 2026 after a decade at Cornell. He graduated with a B.S. from Peking University in 2008 before earning a Ph.D. in 2013 at Harvard; while in Cambridge, he worked with Emery professor of chemistry Eric Jacobsen.
Vincenzo Vitelli, Ph.D. ’06
Vincenzo Vitelli is a theoretical physicist who was chosen for a MacArthur grant for “building theoretical frameworks to describe the behavior of metamaterials, soft materials, active matter, and biological systems”—insights that could “lay the groundwork for entirely new classes of materials. In his early research, he applied topology—the mathematical study of properties of objects that stay the same when bent, twisted, stretched, or deformed—to synthetic materials, which have different mechanical properties than natural materials. In later work, he advanced the theoretical understanding of what physicists call “non-reciprocal active matter,”: diverse systems made of individual, energy-using components, such as living tissues, flocks of birds, and robotic swarms.
“Vitelli introduced the concept of ‘odd elasticity’ to describe how non-reciprocal, soft, active matter responds to deformations,” his MacArthur biography explains. “Under normal conditions, deforming soft matter in one direction will cause it to deform perpendicularly: squeezing the sides of a square sponge will make it stretch vertically into a rectangular shape. Vitelli showed that in non-reciprocal active matter, deforming an object in one direction can cause deformations in many directions.” That work has implications for understanding biology, human behavior, and artificial intelligence through principles of non-reciprocal physics.
A professor in the department of physics and the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago, Vitelli earned a B.S. in 2000 from Imperial College London before earning his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006.
Felipe De Brigard (postdoctoral fellow, 2011-2013)
Felipe De Brigard is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Duke University, where he leads the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab. His work focuses on the nature and function of memory, and “integrates tools and frameworks from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in theoretical and empirical investigations into how memory relates to other cognitive functions, such as causal and moral judgement, imagination, and forgiveness,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.
De Brigard’s recent research has reframed conventional understandings of episodic memory formation, which he posits is a more imaginative and constructive process than previously assumed. Through a body of work based on behavioral experiments and fMRI studies, “he contends that episodic memory is part of a broader cognitive system that supports hypothetical thinking, that is, imagining what could have been and could be,” his MacArthur Fellow entry reads. He is currently investigating the relationship between memory and forgiveness among victims of political violence in his native Colombia.
Before joining Duke, De Brigard was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab and the Center for Brain Science from 2011 to 2013.
