RECIPIENTS LIST 'Genius grants'

The list of 23 fellows announced by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each will receive $500,000 over five years:
-- Angela Belcher, 37, Cambridge, Mass. An associate professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Belcher's research opens new paths for controlling inorganic chemical reactions.
-- Joseph DeRisi, 35, San Francisco. DeRisi is an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, who develops new technologies for exploring the pathways regulating gene expression.
-- John Kamm, 53, San Francisco. The executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation has won the release or improved the conditions for hundreds of political prisoners in China.
-- Daphne Koller, 36, Stanford, Calif. Koller, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, has developed new computational methods for representing reason and knowledge.
-- Naomi Ehrich Leonard, 40, Princeton, N.J. A professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, Leonard has developed autonomous underwater vehicles.
-- Vamsi Mootha, 33, Boston. Mootha is an assistant professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He specializes in the subcellular structures responsible for energy metabolism.
-- Maria Mavroudi, 37, Berkeley, Calif. Mavroudi is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the history of shared knowledge between medieval Byzantium and its neighbors in the Islamic Middle East.
-- Judy Pfaff, 58, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Pfaff is an artist who works to make paintings more three-dimensional and sculptures more painterly. She is a professor of art at Bard College.
-- Aminah Robinson, 64, Columbus, Ohio. Robinson is a folk artist, visual historian and storyteller who focuses on her childhood neighborhood in Columbus.
-- Amy Smith, 41, Cambridge, Mass. Smith is an inventor and mechanical engineer who specializes in labor-saving technologies and life-improving solutions in developing countries. She teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
-- Julie Theriot, 36, Stanford, Calif. Theriot is an assistant professor of biochemistry and microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. She is working to solve the mysteries of bacterial infection.
-- C.D. Wright, 55, Providence, R.I. Wright is the author of 10 volumes of poetry, an editor and a professor of English at Brown University.
-- David Green, 48, Berkeley, Calif. The executive director of Project Impact, Green applies traditional business strategies in developing countries to make health care products available inexpensively.
-- Reginald R. Robinson, 31, Chicago. Robinson is a pianist and composer who has devoted himself to preserving ragtime music.
-- Gretchen Berland, 40, New Haven, Conn. An assistant professor of internal medicine at Yale University School of Medicine, Berland has combined her current career as a physician with her past experience making documentaries to compose video projects on health care topics.
-- Rueben Martinez, 64, Santa Ana, Calif. Martinez works to inspire Spanish-speaking people to value literature and read to their children, and he turned his barber shop into a bookstore that is now one of the largest commercial sellers of Spanish-language books in the country.
-- Heather Hurst, 29, New Haven, Conn. Hurst is an archaeological illustrator and artist who focuses on the pre-Columbian Americas.
-- Tommie Lindsey, 53, Union City, Calif. Lindsey is a debate coach at James Logan High School, and his students -- many from poor or broken homes -- regularly excel at national championships.
-- Edward P. Jones, 53, Arlington, Va. Jones is a fiction writer whose multilayered novel about a black slave owner, "The Known World," won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
-- Aleksandar Hemon, 40, Chicago. Born in Sarajevo and writing in his adopted language of English, Hemon is a short story writer whose work addresses war, exile and ethnic conflict.
-- James Carpenter, 55, New York. Carpenter is a glass sculptor, engineer and designer who uses glass as a way to reshape space and light. He has been involved in the rebuilding of a structure at the World Trade Center site.
-- Cheryl Rogowski, 43, Pine Island, N.Y. Rogowski overhauled her family farm, which specialized in a single crop, to provide a variety of products for regional and specialty markets. She has also mentored immigrant farmers and worked on literacy programs for migrant farm workers.
-- Katherine Gottlieb, 52, Anchorage, Alaska. Gottlieb, the president and CEO of Southcentral Foundation, has improved health care in her Native Alaskan community by changing the focus to patient-centered health care.