Teresa Puthussery, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science, has received a 2025 MacArthur “genius” grant for her discoveries about how retinal cells encode visual information for the brain. (Credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Six University of California alumni and one UC faculty member are among the 22 winners of the 2025 MacArthur Foundation fellowships announced this month. The awards, known as “genius” grants, recognize outstanding scholars, creators and activists whose talent and dedication reshape their fields and serve humanity.

UC’s 2025 MacArthur fellows include an astrophysicist investigating how stars form and evolve; an interdisciplinary artist giving aesthetic shape to the enduring repercussions of violence and dispossession; and an evolutionary biologist investigating symbiotic partnerships between plants, fungi, and other microbes.

They are now part of an illustrious roster of more than 100 UC alums and faculty to be named MacArthur Fellows since the program launched in 1981. Fellows receive an $800,000, no-strings-attached grant to pursue their interests. Since 2020, UC alumni and faculty have accounted for nearly 1 in 4 recipients of the prestigious fellowship.

Read the whole story from the UC Newsroom