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Park Williams, left, and Tendayi Achiume. | Photos courtesy of the Macarthur Foundation/UCLA; Loey Felipe/United Nations/UCLA
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Two UCLA professors were among 20 MacArthur Fellows announced Wednesday.
MacArthur Fellows each receive an $800,000, no-strings-attached award, which is intended as an investment in their creativity and potential rather than a lifetime achievement prize.
“The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities,” Marlies Carruth, the MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows director, said in a statement. “They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment.”
UCLA law professor and legal scholar E. Tendayi Achiume, 41, was tabbed for her work “reframing foundational concepts of international law at the intersection of racial justice and global migration.”
“In her scholarship, Achiume envisions more ethical ways of governing the movement of people across borders in an effort to address the past and ongoing harms of colonial systems of power,” according to the foundation.
Achiume earned bachelor’s and law degrees at Yale University, and she joined the UCLA School of Law in 2014. She also serves as a visiting professor at the Stanford School of Law.
Achiume is also a research associate with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and a research associate with the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford. Earlier in her career, she worked as a legal clerk in the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
A. Park Williams, a 42-year-old hydroclimatologist, is an associate professor in the UCLA Department of Geography studying the impacts of climate on water systems.
“Williams uses statistical analysis of climate data, reconstructions of past ecosystem behavior, and detailed understanding of plant ecology to unravel the feedback between atmospheric (temperature, air moisture) and land (water availability, soil moisture, vegetation responses) processes,” according to the foundation. “His research is providing new insight into how climate change influences drought, wildfires, and tree mortality.”
Williams received a bachelor’s degree from UC Irvine and then a master’s and doctorate from UC Santa Barbara, where he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher. He also spent time at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and was a research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block issued a statement hailing the work of both honorees.
“The transformative work that is being done by our brilliant and inspiring scholars, Park Williams and E. Tendayi Achiume, exemplifies Bruin values of service and a commitment to applied research,” Block said. “The MacArthur Fellowships recognize the significance of these faculty members’ contributions thus far and signal that they have much more to share with the world.”
The foundation, which has awarded 1,131 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.”
Updated Oct. 5, 2023, 10:23 a.m.
