Emmanuel Candès, PhD ’98, chair of Stanford’s mathematics and statistics department, and acclaimed author Jesmyn Ward, ’99, MA ’00, are among the winners of a 2017 MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Fellows receive $625,000 stipends, or “genius” grants, in recognition of their originality and creativity.
Candès worked for many years to develop compressed sensing, a set of algorithms that is able to create high-resolution images from small amounts of data. The breakthrough has already had “spectacular applications in pediatric MRIs,” he explains, by speeding the process. Shortening the time required to capture MRIs particularly benefits children whose respiration or heartbeat must be stopped temporarily to eliminate movement. With the grant money, Candès plans to apply new statistical methods to Big Data and to its real-world concerns, such as “fake news.”
Ward, an associate professor of English at Tulane University, has said she almost gave up on writing. Instead, she returned to Stanford in 2008 as a Stegner fellow and wrote Salvage the Bones, a powerful novel about a rural Mississippi family; the book won the 2011 National Book Award. Her latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award.
