The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation unveiled its newest class of fellows on Tuesday, recognizing 20 individuals with its signature "no-strings-attached" grant. Among this year's cohort are scholars whose work sits squarely at the intersection of scientific inquiry and the pursuit of justice, a pairing the foundation has increasingly highlighted in recent years.
Each MacArthur Fellow receives a stipend of $800,000, disbursed over five years. The award comes with no reporting requirements and no restrictions on how recipients may spend the money — a deliberate design meant to give creative and scholarly leaders the freedom to pursue ambitious work without the pressure of conventional funding cycles.
This year's list includes Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University, whose decade-long effort to identify and repatriate the remains of migrants has drawn national attention. Also recognized is Felipe De Brigard, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Duke University whose research examines memory, imagination, and the ethical dimensions of how the mind reconstructs the past.
Spradley's work began with what should have been a straightforward task. In Brooks County, in southern Texas, she set out to exhume the body of a man from a local cemetery. The plan was simple: consult a map provided by the funeral home, locate the plot, and carefully remove the remains with shovels and trowels.
That plan quickly collapsed. Staff at the cemetery told Spradley they did not know where the man was buried. As it turned out, the same was true for more than a hundred other Central American migrants who had died in the region. The records simply did not exist, or had never been kept with the precision that forensic identification requires.
Spradley characterizes the practice as both illegal and a violation of human rights. In her view, the failure to document and investigate these deaths strips individuals of dignity even after death. Burying someone and then forgetting about them — never returning to determine who they were or how to reunite them with their families — represents a profound injustice, she argues.
The emotional toll on families is central to her mission. Spradley describes the anguish of relatives who never learn what became of a loved one who disappeared while migrating north. That uncertainty, she says, amounts to a form of ongoing torture for those left behind.
Faced with the absence of reliable burial records, Spradley and her colleagues reached a difficult conclusion: the only way forward was to exhume the entire cemetery. The undertaking, which began in 2013, has since become one of the most significant forensic humanitarian projects along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The effort involves painstaking archaeological methods, DNA sampling, and coordination with families and governments across Central America. Each set of remains represents a potential identification and, ultimately, a chance to return someone to their relatives for a proper burial.
The MacArthur Foundation cited this work in naming Spradley among its 2026 fellows, placing her alongside researchers who apply scientific tools to questions of accountability, memory, and human rights. The foundation's announcement emphasized that several of this year's recipients were recognized specifically for work at the boundary between science and justice.
De Brigard's inclusion reflects a different but related dimension of that boundary. His scholarship explores how memory operates — not as a faithful recording device but as a constructive, often unreliable process. That research carries implications for how societies reckon with contested histories and for how legal systems treat eyewitness testimony.
Together, the two honorees illustrate a broader trend in contemporary research: the growing willingness of scientists and scholars to engage directly with questions of ethics, policy, and redress. Forensic anthropology, once largely confined to crime labs and archaeological digs, now plays a central role in documenting deaths at the border and identifying the missing.
The MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to informally as the "genius grant," has historically supported individuals across disciplines — from artists and writers to scientists and activists. The unrestricted nature of the award allows recipients to take risks that traditional grants rarely permit.
For Spradley, the funding arrives as her team continues the slow, methodical work of exhumation and identification. The scale of the task is immense: more than a hundred sets of remains, each requiring careful excavation, analysis, and cross-referencing with missing-person reports.
The broader significance of her project extends beyond individual identifications. By treating migrant deaths as a matter of forensic and human rights concern, Spradley's work challenges the notion that certain lives can be quietly forgotten. Her insistence that everyone deserves dignity in death reframes the debate over border policy in terms of basic humanity.
The 2026 MacArthur class as a whole reflects the foundation's long-standing interest in supporting individuals whose work defies easy categorization. This year's emphasis on science and justice suggests a recognition that some of the most pressing problems — from migration to memory to accountability — demand tools from multiple disciplines at once.
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