Macarthur Fellowships

Two scholars associated with UC San Diego, anthropologist Edwin Hutchins and mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, were among the seven Californians named Monday to receive MacArthur fellowships. Fellows receive the $24,000-to-$60,000-a-year stipends for five years to allow them to pursue their interests as they see fit.

Eight Californians, including a public high school physics teacher, a deaf sign-language expert, a jellyfish researcher and an installation artist, are among 23 winners of this year's grants from the MacArthur Foundation. The recipients will each receive $500,000 over the next five years, with no strings attached. Included on this year's list are a few celebrated names, such as David Simon, the Baltimore-based screenwriter of "The Wire," the 2002-08 television series about the urban drug trade, and Annette Gordon-Reed, the Harvard law professor who has written about Thomas Jefferson's relationship with a slave.

UC San Diego philosophy professor Patricia Smith Churchland, who is using computers and brain cells to learn the answer to the age-old question of being, was one of two San Diego County residents who received prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowships Monday. Churchland, 47, a native of Canada, will receive $290,000 no strings attached over five years. She said she will use the money to continue working on a research project that shows how the brain manages time.

Erik Winfree and Hideo Mabuchi couldn't have less in common. Winfree is a computer scientist designing DNA molecules that can work as living calculators. Mabuchi is a quantum physicist pursuing single atoms through a maze of mirrors and laser beams.

Every year now, after the Academy Awards, after the Pulitzer Prizes, around the time of the Tony Awards, come the MacArthur fellowships. The "MacArthur" is one of Ameri ca's glittering prizes, given to the best among us, the brightest, the people who might change America, the people who should be our true heroes. Last week, MacArthur prizes were awarded to 20 Americans.

It is that time of year again, when the unsuspecting get phone calls informing them that they've just won six-figure grants they didn't ask for. The 1998 MacArthur Fellowships have been awarded to 29 men and women, ranging from an ecologically minded Arizona cattle rancher to a moralist. The group includes eight Californians, three of whom are from the Los Angeles area: historian Mike Davis, attorney and Asian American advocate Stewart Kwoh, and linguistic anthropologist Elinor Ochs.

That Cormac McCarthy received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for his most recent novel, "The Road," was no surprise: He had been previously awarded top honors by the National Book Critics Circle and the National Book Awards for his 1992 novel, "All the Pretty Horses." What did surprise the literary world was that Oprah Winfrey picked "The Road" as her most recent Oprah's Book Club choice.

The so-called genius awards from the MacArthur Foundation went to three Californians on Monday, who were recognized for such diverse work as research into the mysteries of pregnancy, the composition of modern poetry and translations of ancient Greek writings. Self-taught evolutionary biologist Margie Profet and writers Thom Gunn and Jim Powell--all from the Bay Area--were among 31 MacArthur fellows around the country who will receive annual grants of $30,000 to $75,000 for the next five years.

Two Stanford University professors and two UC scholars--including an evolutionary biologist who has been blind since childhood--are among this year's 33 winners of the MacArthur Foundation's eclectic and coveted "genius" awards, officials announced Monday.

In the early 1970s when he was in France as a Fulbright scholar, John Benton had to sell his mother's old typewriter to help raise the money to get his family back home. But this year Benton didn't have to worry about how to get home from another scholarly mission in Paris. While he was abroad, he learned that he will receive $250,000 over a period of five years, no strings attached.