How Two Bay Area Researchers Became MacArthur Geniuses

It must be nice being a genius, especially if that comes with a five-year $625,000 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," as the annual awards are informally known. It's nice work if you can get it -- but you probably can't.

It turns out there isn't much you can do to be recognized as the genius that you are, at least according to your mom that time you made an intricate pipe cleaner sculpture at summer camp. You can't apply or ask to be nominated. You never even know who may be judging your work at any moment for potential genius material. For the 24 people announced as this year's MacArthur fellows, the call letting them know of their newfound status came as a surprise.

"It's one of those things you dream about," said Christopher Ré in the video below.

Ré, an assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University, was one of two Bay Area researchers picked for the no-strings-attached prize.  His work focuses on analyzing big data by building programs that are capable of processing "dark data" -- i.e., things like objects, images and books that are not typically accessible to standard database processing. And if that made sense to you, well, then you're at least a semi-genius.

Peidong Yang, an inorganic chemist on the faculty at UC Berkeley, was the second local genius. Yang works with semiconductor nanowires -- wires that are so small that they fundamentally behave differently from normal wires. He's even developed a synthetic leaf using semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that is capable of fake photosynthesis.

If it seems like the majority of geniuses picked out of the Bay Area tend to come from the Stanford or Berkeley campuses, that's probably not a coincidence. While the MacArthur Foundation guards its selection process closely, here's what they could tell us:

• The foundation selects nominators "across the spectrum of human activity" -- though there are, most likely, some limits to human activity that the foundation will consider experts in (for example, binge-watching "Real Housewives" will probably not qualify as genius-level activity).
• Those nominators come from recommendations, often from past nominators, former award winners or foundation board members. They are supposed to be experts familiar with "a wide variety of interesting and creative people."
• Those nominators serve anonymous terms of several months and can make as many nominations for geniuses as they see fit by writing a one-to-two page letter in support of each of their nominations.
• The nominations are then submitted to the 12-person Selection Committee -- also secret.
• Foundation staff prepares a file of the work of the potential genius for the secret committee to review, accompanied by expert letters evaluating the work and at times published reviews of said work.
• That committee then picks from those files some number of people to henceforth be geniuses.

All that is required then is for you to be a resident or citizen of the United States, not hold elected office (which presumably precludes you from being a genius), do creative and innovative work, and evidently have that work come to the attention of a secret expert.

This lends itself to certain trends, such as award winners coming out of well-known top universities.

We, however, would like to think that there are more than two geniuses in the Bay Area, and that many of those geniuses are going undiscovered by the anonymous selectors of excellence.  So we're turning the question over now to the wisdom of the crowd.

If you could nominate anyone, who would you pick?