Two members of the ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ community—a graduate and an honorand—are being awarded a so-called genius grant by the MacArthur Foundation this year.
Biologist ’98 and Wabanaki basket maker H’25 are among the twenty-two “exceptional, creative, and inspiring” people chosen to be 2025 MacArthur Fellows.
The prize is an $800,000, no-strings-attached award, which, according to the foundation, goes “to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.”
Kiers is an evolutionary biologist exploring the relationship between plants, fungi, and other microbes. In 2021 she founded the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (), to map and protect the world’s underground fungi, and in 2023 she became the youngest scientist ever to win the prestigious Spinoza Prize (sometimes referred to as the “Dutch Nobel”). Check out this ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ Magazine profile of Kiers from fall 2024.
Jeremy Frey was given an honorary ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ degree this summer for his cultural achievements as one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation, descended from six generations of esteemed Indigenous basket weavers. The MacArthur Foundation praises him for “balancing tradition with innovation in technically precise and visually stunning woven artworks.”
In 1993, ornithologist Heather Williams ’77 received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
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September 11, 2025New England writer Ben Shattuck’s short story, “The History of Sound,” has inspired a feature film of the same name, which opens this week. Part of the story takes place in Maine in the early twentieth century, and ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ is among the featured settings.