DISGRASIAN™

AMAZIANS OF THE WEEK! L. Mahadevan, Lin He And Maneesh Agrawala

Good fellows: (left to right) L. Mahadevan, Lin He, and Maneesh Agrawala

Names: L. Mahadevan, Lin He and Maneesh Agrawala

Hail from: While Mahadevan holds court at Harvard in Cambridge, MA, He and Agrawala both operate out of Cal in Berkeley, CA.

Occupations: Mahadevan is an applied mathmetician, He a molecular biologist, and Agrawala a computer vision technologist.

Known for: Being all smart and stuff. Mahadevan, He and Agrawala were three of the twenty-four (that’s 1/8, or .125 for all you math lovers) recipients of the 2009 MacArthur “Genius Award”–a $500k Fellowship grant awarded to 20-40 Americans each year who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.”

We’re with the MacArthur Foundation on this one–these remarkable folks’ repective fields of work show extreme promise. Mahadevan’s mathematical analyses of practical problems (like how cloth folds when draped) may overwhelm us a tad, but tickle our left-brain fancies almost as much as knot theory and fractals. We fully believe that He’s microRNA research will lead to great strides in cancer research (We all agree… cancer is wack), and are psyched that Agrawala understands how important it is to create visual interfaces in computers that enhance users’ ability to process tons of info (part of the reason we buy Apple ‘puters).

Bottom line: We love geniuses. But who the heck doesn’t?

[MacArthur Foundation: Meet the 2009 Fellows]

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Thanks, Jennifer!

Filed under: 2009 MacArthur Fellows, Computers, Genius Awards, Geniuses, L. Mahadevan, Lin He, MacArthur Foundation, MacArthur Grant Recipients, Maneesh Agrawala, Math Is Cool, Science is Sexy, Visionaries

AMAZIAN OF THE WEEK! Dartmouth Prez Jim Yong Kim

Name: Dr. Jim Yong Kim

Age: 49

Occupation: Newly-appointed president of Dartmouth College

Known for: Leading the global fight against HIV/AIDS, receiving a MacArthur genius grant in 2003, getting interviewed by Madonna in Vanity Fair, becoming the first Asian-American president–the Brown and Harvard-educated Doc was born in Seoul–of an Ivy League university.

It’s a tricky time to lead any university, but if Dr. Kim can provide care to the world’s poorest, surely he can handle the world’s richest, plummeting endowment notwithstanding, no?

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Filed under: Dartmouth College, Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim, Doctors, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, Geniuses, HIV/AIDS, Korean-Americans, MacArthur Grant Recipients, The Ivy League, World Health Organization