Three Yale alumni - the epidemiologist and harm reduction advocate Nabarun Dasgupta '03 M.P.H.; archaeologist Kristina Douglass '16 Ph.D.; and astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry '16 - are among the 22 recipients of 2025 MacArthur Fellowships, a prestigious award known informally as the "genius grant."
Awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the fellowships help support people of outstanding talent - and working in a range of fields and disciplines - pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations for the betterment of human society.
Each recipient receives an $800,000 stipend over five years, which they can spend however they wish. They are nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and are evaluated by an anonymous selection committee.
Nabarun Dasgupta
Epidemiologist Dasgupta, 46, works to create practical programs to mitigate harms from drug use, particularly opioid overdose deaths. By combining scientific studies with community engagement he aims to improve the wellbeing and safety of people who use drugs and people living with debilitating pain. He collaborates with individuals who have experience with drug use or its consequences, designing evidence-based interventions that respond to the needs of people who use drugs and community-based organizations that support them.
Much of his work focuses on broadening access to inexpensive or free naloxone, which reverses opioid overdose. He co-founded Project Lazarus, a nonprofit in rural Wilkes County, North Carolina, and partnered with the state's medical board to enable direct distribution of naloxone to individuals with a doctor's prescription. Project Lazarus' efforts drastically reduced overdose deaths in the county. In 2020, Dasgupta and colleagues created Remedy Alliance/For The People, which offers a new naloxone supply and distribution model. He also worked with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to revise licensing requirements that had made it difficult for harm reduction organizations to access naloxone.
Dasgupta has also developed a nationwide drug checking program for unregulated substances to help individuals make informed decisions about their drug use by offering information about what substances are in the drug supply. It also allows community members and frontline medical responders to prepare proper care and overdose responses. For the program, Opioid Data Lab, he devised a collection mechanism to legally send samples through the mail by rendering drug samples unusable but still testable. After determining the ingredients and amounts in the samples they receive, they post results anonymously on their website.
Kristina Douglass
Douglass, 41, is an archaeologist who investigates how human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability. Her research focuses on coastal communities in southwest Madagascar, a biodiversity hot spot that is particularly vulnerable to the threat of climate change. She uses tools and methods from archaeology, climatology, and conservation biology and works closely with local, Indigenous, and descendent communities in the co-production of knowledge. Her work offers valuable insights for designing effective conservation policies that protect and respect local livelihoods and cultures.
Douglass's investigations of zooarchaeological evidence have shed new light on how Malagasy societies interacted with their environments. From a comprehensive archaeological survey of animal remains in southwest Madagascar, she and her research team determined that humans and now-extinct species, like the elephant bird, likely co-existed for a significant period of time. The finding challenges the assumption that human settlement led to megafauna extinctions on the island. In another line of research in the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Douglass analyzed microstructural features of cassowary eggshell remains and found that humans were hatching and managing the birds thousands of years before chicken domestication.
Her work in Madagascar is a leading model of community-engaged archaeology. Residents are key members of her research team, and she includes her community collaborators as co-authors and scholarly presenters. Douglas says that their interests and perspectives shape, in part, her research agenda, which has led to projects on a range of topics, such as arts education in a fishing village and ethical use of remote sensing tools in archaeological research. In uncovering the climate adaptations of the past, Douglass informs efforts to protect biodiversity hot spots while preserving the lifeways of those who live in them.
Kareem El-Badry
El-Badry, 31, is an astrophysicist investigating how stars form, evolve, and interact, leveraging astronomical datasets and theoretical modeling to investigate binary star systems, black holes, neutron stars, and other stellar bodies. His ability to extract insights from the enormous amounts of data gathered in space observation missions has led to many discoveries, from overlooked dormant black holes in our galaxy to new classes of stars and coupled systems.
In his early work, El-Badry developed a method for identifying binary stars in spectrographic datasets. More than half of stars exist in binary systems, but they are often too close together to be differentiated with available technology. El-Badry overcame this challenge through targeted statistical analysis of existing spectral data. His analysis of data from the APOGEE (Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment) project identified more than 3,000 binary systems in the Milky Way, and in later work with Gaia mission data, he discovered more than 1 million binaries - the largest known sample to date.
As a postdoctoral fellow, El-Badry used spectral disentangling (separating the light spectra emitted by different stellar bodies) to demonstrate that several purported dormant black holes were, in fact, stars that had been stripped of their outer hydrogen layer and were contracting, causing them to appear abnormally bright. The stripped stars' inflated luminosities led researchers to overestimate their masses and, therefore, identify the companions as black holes. El-Badry went on to show that this process is how most of the high-luminosity stars (known as B-class stars) form, thereby solving a decades-old mystery. In more recent work, he developed a method for identifying dormant, or non-interacting, black holes in wide binaries. Using this method, El-Badry and colleagues thus far have discovered two dormant black holes, including the nearest known black hole to Earth, as well as dozens of neutron stars.
El-Badry has made contributions to many other areas of stellar astronomy, including findings about high-velocity stars, triple star systems, the fates of massive stars, and galaxy formation.
Other 2025 MacArthur recipients include atmospheric scientist Ángel F. Adames Corraliza; artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley; political scientist Hahrie Han; and neurobiologist and optometrist Teresa Puthussery.
A full list and biographies of all recipients can be found on the program's website.
Since 1981, 1,105 people have received the grants. Twenty-one previous fellows were actively serving as a Yale faculty or staff member at the time of their award, including 2024 recipient Martha Muñoz, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and 2022 recipient Emily Wang, a professor at Yale School of Medicine and the Yale School of Public Health.
