{"id":97490,"date":"2025-12-17T00:12:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T00:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/97490\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T00:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T00:12:09","slug":"genius-grants-go-to-bay-area-standouts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/97490\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Genius Grants\u2019 go to Bay Area standouts"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the most recent group of MacArthur Fellows was announced in October, three recipients of the \u201cgenius grants\u201d were from the Bay Area: Oakland novelist Tommy Orange, Stanford assistant professor of chemical engineering William Tarpeh, and UC Berkeley associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science Teresa Puthussery.<\/p>\n

One of the unusual aspects of the MacArthur Fellowships is that recipients are not notified in advance that they have been nominated. According to the MacArthur Foundation: \u201cA pool of peers from various fields nominates individuals to be fellows. According to the award\u2019s requirements, there are three field categories: exceptional creativity, promise for significant future advances based on a track record of notable accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.\u201d<\/p>\n

East Bay Express spoke to Orange and Tarpeh about the $800,000 awards, administered over five years, and what they mean for their work.<\/p>\n

Tommy Orange\u2019s first novel, There There, about an Oakland Native American family\u2019s struggles and solidarity, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Award and won the 2019 PEN\/Hemingway Award. His prequel\/sequel, Wandering Star, was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey tricked me!\u201d Orange chuckled when asked about his MacArthur notification. He was asked to do a phone call about someone he knew who was being considered for the fellowship. \u201cAnd then they dropped the news!\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019ll use part of his fellowship money as he finishes his third novel. He is currently working on another draft and expects to be finished by the end of the year. This book, though it features Native characters and takes place in Oakland, is not connected to the first two, he said.<\/p>\n

The fellowship will also be of help with a film project that may be greenlighted soon, he said. His concern about the impact AI may have on creative projects is compelling him to start many new projects. \u201cI think we have about five years [before the impact is fully felt],\u201d he said, and as that is the time frame of the fellowship, the two things are connected in his plans.<\/p>\n

At this point in his career he could live anywhere, but the Oakland-born author said, \u201cI love Oakland\u2014its diversity \u2026 Oakland has a lot to give to its people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In John Freeman\u2019s recent book, California Rewritten, Freeman refers to There There as \u201csonically rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orange noted that he likes to hole up in a hotel\u2014his favorite was the now-closed Waterfront in Jack London Square\u2014and read his drafts aloud, over and over. \u201cThe way I write and think about sentences has to do with sound,\u201d he said. He is concerned that the popularity of recorded books is causing people to lose their textural relationship to story. \u201cStorytelling is all oral,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In the video he filmed for the MacArthur Foundation, he refers to thinking about characters\u2019 \u201cnuance and specificity.\u201d Asked to elaborate, he said, \u201cYou start out having a general idea of something \u2026 then get more specific. It\u2019s not weirdness for the sake of weirdness. [Showing a character\u2019s vulnerability] draws people in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/a>GENIUS PLANS Oakland novelist Tommy Orange plans to use part of the $800,000 award to finish his third novel. (Photo courtesy of the MacArthur Foundation)<\/p>\n

MacArthur Fellow William Tarpeh\u2019s passion is developing cost-effective technologies for recovering valuable resources from wastewater, primarily nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. These resources can then be converted into chemicals and used in fertilizers, household products and industry. The assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford is focused on the uses of these technologies in places such as under-resourced and poor communities in Africa and rural Alabama.<\/p>\n

Tarpeh was also \u201cpranked\u201d initially by the fellowship administrators. \u201cThey emailed me first, saying they were thinking of giving grants in my area,\u201d he said. When he agreed to a phone call, the caller asked, \u201cAre you alone?\u201d before revealing that Tarpeh was actually the recipient of the award.<\/p>\n

He is still deciding how to use the funds, but projects in Alabama and Africa that were interrupted first by Covid and recently by federal government cutbacks will likely be reinvigorated. For example, according to Stanford sources, the Alabama project is linked to environmental justice. Tarpeh is studying problems with failing septic tanks, particularly in low-income Black communities, to see if some of his lab\u2019s processes might be a solution.<\/p>\n

Tarpeh\u2019s video on the MacArthur site shows him describing his lab\u2019s work as \u201celectric chemical wastewater refining.\u201d The concept is a \u201cclosed loop. We take things from the environment, use them as many times as possible, and then discharge as little as possible to the environment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Tarpeh said he is humbled to follow in the footsteps of 1995 MacArthur Fellow Bryan Stevenson, the American lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who serves as an inspiration to him.<\/p>\n

Although Tarpeh is a Washington, D.C., native, he earned his master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in environmental engineering at UC Berkeley and, as he said, \u201cAlmost all of my adult life has been spent in the Bay Area.\u201d It was as a Berkeley grad student, he said, that he began tying engineering to social programs, and found the support to try a different path in his field. He passes his concepts on to the students he mentors at Stanford.<\/p>\n

In his video, he said, \u201cI would love it if we could get to a future where the concept of wastewater is obsolete.\u201d<\/p>\n

The third Bay Area MacArthur Fellow, Teresa Puthussery, is a neurobiologist and optometrist at UC Berkeley, whose research is devoted to advances in the early detection of ocular neuropathies like glaucoma, which remain undetectable until the later stages of the disease. Although she was not available for an interview, in her MacArthur video she said, \u201cI hope in my lifetime we can see some of these treatments for these blinding diseases reach the clinic, and improve the quality of life for our patients.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the most recent group of MacArthur Fellows was announced in October, three recipients of the \u201cgenius grants\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":97491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[53333,143,145,144,53334,53335],"class_list":["post-97490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-macarthur-fellows","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-tommy-orange","tag-william-tarpeh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}