Four physicists win MacArthur fellowships

New York Times : Four physicists are among the 23 recipients of this year’s MacArthur fellowships , which are five-year grants with a stipend of $500 000. MacArthur fellowships honor “individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future.” Amir Abo-Shaeer , a physics teacher, works to inspire public high-school students to study science with his rigorous applied science curriculum in Dos Pueblos High School in Santa Barbara, California. John Dabiri , a biophysicist at Caltech, studies animal locomotion of simple multicellular organisms, such as jellyfish, to better understand evolutionary adaptation and related fluid dynamics issues. Michal Lipson , an optical physicist at Cornell University, designs silicon-based photonics circuits for optical computing devices. Nergis Mavalvala , a quantum astrophysicist at MIT, is making fundamental contributions to physics at the intersection of optics, condensed matter, and quantum mechanics.