Felipe De Brigard, a cognitive scientist and philosopher, received the coveted fellowship for his work on brain and memory issues
The phone kept ringing, but the number was unfamiliar, so Felipe De Brigard did what we all do. He ignored the call.
He was busy with a work retreat, bumping elbows with colleagues at a hotel in Asheville. But the calls wouldn't stop so he finally answered. On the other end, a cryptic message: Is there somewhere you can talk privately?
So De Brigard, a Duke philosopher and cognitive scientist, stepped away from lunch to take the call that would change his life. It was a team from the MacArthur Foundation telling him he had won one of the organization's coveted fellowships. Known broadly as "Genius Grants," the fellowships are awarded each year to 20 to 30 people in a broad range of fields - writers, artists, scientists, teachers, composers, entrepreneurs and the like - who demonstrate exceptional creativity and future promise in their work.
The award, announced Tuesday, comes with an $800,000 stipend he can use however he pleases.
"I was floored," he said. "It's huge news. I had no inkling I was being considered for it." When he went back to join colleagues, De Brigard said it was a struggle to remain composed.
De Brigard was notified about a month ago. The MacArthur fellowships are famously secretive until the announcement each year, and De Brigard was only allowed to tell a single person. So he waited to call his wife, Anne, when she finished her workday. He even kept the secret from their two kids.
A native of Colombia, De Brigard, 47, has been at Duke since 2013 and holds appointments in the departments of philosophy, and in psychology and neuroscience. He works primarily on episodic memory, exploring the relationship between the brain and memory and how the state a person is in when remembering an event colors how that person recalls it.
"I am thrilled that Felipe De Brigard has been selected as a MacArthur Fellow," said Duke President Vincent E. Price. "His creative, cross-disciplinary scholarship is expanding our understanding of the human mind and opening new pathways to improve the human experience. We are proud to have him as a member of the Duke University faculty."
De Brigard is the fifth Duke scholar to receive the MacArthur award while at Duke and the first since evolutionary anthropologist Jenny Tung in 2019. Prior Duke winners were biochemist Jane Richardson in 1985, primatologist Patricia Wright in 1989 and environmental scientist John Terborgh in 1992. More than two dozen other prior winners boast a Duke degree or worked at Duke subsequent to their MacArthur fellowship.
"Being a philosopher is being in love with knowledge."
Felipe De Brigard
"It's a huge responsibility in a sense because they give you an award not only for what you've done but for your promise - what you'll do with it," De Brigard said. "That part is exciting - the possibilities."
De Brigard plans to use the money to continue his laboratory's work on memory, which among other uses may help people with anxiety and depression by adjusting how a person views a bad memory. His work is based on the idea that memories aren't stacked in the brain like an archive of files. Rather, they are reconstructed when we remember them, with the brain trying to match at retrieval the state it was in when we first experienced the event. But that reconstruction is complex and malleable - it requires context, information and strategy - and helps explain why memories can be unreliable.
That reconstruction is at the core of De Brigard's work, which looks for ways to turn debilitating memories into ones that don't elicit such negative emotions. One example: If you're in car accident in which your car is badly damaged but you aren't hurt, you might recall later being devastated because your car was ruined. But if you change your perspective and consider that you came away unharmed, that feeling of relief - a positive emotion - may change how you remember the accident.
De Brigard and fellow researchers also study the relationship between memory and forgiveness among victims of political violence in his native Colombia. That research has revealed that while forgiveness doesn't change a person's memory of a violent or harmful event, it can make the memory less traumatic and negative.
De Brigard did his undergraduate work in Colombia before coming to the U.S. for graduate school. He received a master's degree at Tufts University before receiving his doctorate in philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill. He considers his training in philosophy core to everything he does as brain scientist.
"I'm a very interdisciplinary person and I wouldn't have thought of these ideas if I wasn't a philosopher, and I would not have been able to implement them if I wasn't a scientist," he said.
"Being a philosopher is being in love with knowledge, so whenever I encounter new questions that interest me, it's just a matter of learning how to study them.
A current Provost Faculty Fellow at Duke, De Brigard recently received the Lebowitz Prize from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa for his contributions to philosophy.
