A Caltech astrophysicist and an interdisciplinary artist who graduated from UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts were among the 22 MacArthur Fellows announced Wednesday.
Kareem El-Badry, 31, an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, and Gala Porras-Kim, 40, currently a visiting critic in sculpture at Yale School of Art, were both named recipients of the coveted fellowships.
Awarded by the MacArthur Foundation, MacArthur Fellows each receive an $800,000, no-strings-attached award — commonly dubbed a “genius grant.” The grants are awarded to individuals “who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future.”
The fellowships are designed to “provide recipients with the flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional activities in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements.”
“The 2025 MacArthur Fellows expand the boundaries of knowledge, artistry, and human understanding,” Kristen Mack, a foundation vice president, said in a statement. “They focus our attention on microbial worlds and distant stars, community vitality and timeless traditions, sacred and improvisational music, and shared histories of our time on Earth. With virtuosity, persistence, and courage, they chart new paths toward collaborative, creative, and flourishing futures.”
The foundation recognized Porras-Kim for “proposing new ways to recognize the layered meanings and functions of cultural artifacts held in museums and industrial collections.”
“With nuance, empathy, and, at times, playfulness, Porras-Kim probes the methods institutions use to classify, conserve, and interpret items in their collections,” according to the foundation. “Her research-intensive practice focuses on objects and forms of knowledge that have been separated from their original contexts.”
The foundation pointed to Porras-Kim’s 2016 exhibition “Reconstructions” at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, for which she selected “fragmented objects of unknown origins from the storage shelves of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.” The resulting exhibition “brought together the artifacts with drawings and sculptures that prompted viewers to consider how the textile fragments, pottery shards, and other orphaned objects functioned and came to be acquired by the museum.”
Porras-Kim’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Leeum Museum of Art in South Korea, the national Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in South Korea, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
El-Badry was tapped for his work “expanding our knowledge of binary star systems, black holes and other wonders of the universe.”
“El-Badry leverages astronomical datasets and theoretical modeling to investigate binary star systems, black holes, neutron stars, and other stellar bodies,” according to the foundation. “His ability to extract insights from the enormous amounts of data gathered in space observation missions has led to many discoveries — from overlooked dormant black holes in our galaxy to new classes of stars and coupled systems.”
According to Caltech, El-Badry in 2018 he developed a new method for identifying binary stars — pairs of stars that can be hard to distinguish due to their proximity — and subsequently discovered more than 3,000 binary systems in the Milky Way. He later worked with the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to discovery more than 1 million binaries.
In a statement released by Caltech, El-Badry said he was stunned by the MacArthur Foundation honor.
“At first, I was pretty sure someone was trying to scam me,” he said. “It feels great to have my work recognized, and I feel lucky to have been chosen. My work relies heavily on collaboration. In fact, the Gaia collaboration that produces a lot of the data I work with involves hundreds of people, many of whom are less visible but without whom the work wouldn’t be possible. I can also thank my students for the hard work they put into our research.”
The foundation, which has awarded 1,175 fellowships since 1981, uses three criteria for selection: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances and potential for the fellowship to support creative work.
The foundation “supports creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”