Kaiyu Guan *13 and two Princeton professors awarded MacArthur ‘genius’ grants

The fellowships recognize individuals who have demonstrated “exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits,” according to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Princeton professors Ellora Derenoncourt and Elizabeth Ellis have also been awarded 2026 MacArthur Fellowships. 

Guan, Derenoncourt and Ellis are among the 20 MacArthur Fellows in the 2026 cohort, a group of scientists, artists and scholars who will each receive an $800,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation over a five-year period. 

Other recent Princeton faculty MacArthur Fellows include Ruha Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies; June Huh, professor of mathematics; and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies. Alumni Nabarun Dasgupta ’00 and Sébastien Philippe *18 were honored last year. 

“For 45 years, MacArthur Fellows have defied boundaries, by questioning conventions, crossing disciplines, and driving collective progress,” said Kristen Mack, vice president of communications, MacArthur Fellows and partnerships for the foundation. “The 2026 Fellows continue that creative tradition — they explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to modern challenges; they expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research. They show us new ways to understand the world.” 

Kaiyu Guan 

Guan, an environmental scientist who earned his Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering in 2013, was awarded a 2026 MacArthur fellowship for research that combines “Earth observations, process models and machine learning to understand and predict how crops, the environment and human agricultural practices interact across agricultural landscapes.” 

“As the pressures from climate change and a growing global population increase, Guan is providing the technical and scientific foundations for a more environmentally sustainable and productive future for agriculture,” the MacArthur Foundation said in its announcement. 

Guan is the Stuart L. and Nancy J. Levenick Professor and a Blue-Waters Professor in Supercomputing at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is also the founding director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center at UIUC and the chief scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium — NASA’s flagship program in advancing U.S. agricultural research. 

He has created several platforms that combine field observational data (such as crop conditions, climate, water and nutrient resources), satellite data, and AI models of agricultural processes to give farmers a better understanding of how crops respond to specific environmental conditions and management practices. 

Guan said he is “deeply honored” to receive the fellowship and that it allows him to advance a field he considers fundamental to society. “Agriculture has to produce food, support farmers, and protect our natural resources, and I believe productivity and sustainability do not have to be opposing goals — my work is about using novel observations, scientific understanding and AI to help advance them together.” 

He said he will always be grateful to Princeton and to his adviser, the late Eric Wood, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Emeritus, who “changed the course of my life” by teaching and mentoring “with extraordinary care and passion.” Guan said Wood “trained me to think: he demanded rigor, pushed me to ask my own questions, and gave me the freedom to develop my own scientific path and the belief that the best science should be both fundamental and consequential.” 

Ellora Derenoncourt 

Derenoncourt, an associate professor of economics at Princeton University, has been awarded a 2026 MacArthur Fellowship for “uncovering the historical roots of racial disparities in wealth and economic mobility in the United States.” 

“For her research on labor market standards, wage inequality, and economic policies, Derenoncourt builds innovative datasets and leverages real-world historical events as starting points of inquiry,” the MacArthur Foundation said in its announcement. “She is identifying the key policies and drivers of ongoing gaps in earnings and accumulated wealth between Black and white Americans.” 

Derenoncourt joined the Princeton faculty in 2021. She is the recipient of a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship, a 2023 National Science Foundation CAREER award, and the founding director of Princeton’s Program for Research on Inequality in the Department of Economics. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and American Economic Review: Insights. 

“Ellora Derenoncourt is an exceptional economist and a leading voice in her field who is committed to understanding and addressing inequality through keen scholarly inquiry,” President Christopher L. Eisgruber said. “We at Princeton are fortunate to have such an innovative thinker who focuses her scholarship on improving society.” 

“There are many types of economic disparities that appear deeply entrenched,” Derenoncourt said. “I see much of my work as hunting through the historical record to see when there was a change in inequality and what drove the change.” 

Her research on the precipitous decline in the wage gap between Black and white workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a close examination of that period more broadly, “revealed that minimum wage policies were as important as antidiscrimination laws,” Derenoncourt said. “I believe these episodes from history have lessons for today. I’m excited to expand on this kind of work during the fellowship, and to foster connections with the next generation of scholars interested in studying economic inequality.” 

Her recent work includes the 2024 article “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the 2022 article “Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration,” published in the American Economic Review. 

Derenoncourt received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and her MSc from the London School of Economics. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton’s Industrial Relations Section from 2019 to 2020. Derenoncourt was an assistant professor of economics and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley before joining Princeton. 

She has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and a visiting fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She has served as a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2021, where she is an elected member of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. 

Elizabeth Ellis 

Ellis, an associate professor of history at Princeton, is a scholar of early North American and Native American history. Her research focuses on Indigenous politics, diplomacy, migration and borderlands, as well as early Native American art and iconography. 

In its announcement, the MacArthur Foundation recognized Ellis for scholarship that “sheds light on the different strategies Native nations used to maintain their livelihoods and wield influence among European settlers,” and in particular her “portrait of alternative conceptions of nationhood among small Indigenous tribes.” 

Ellis‘ 2022 book, “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South,” tells the stories of the smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of present-day Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The book has received awards from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Western History Association, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, among other organizations. 

She was a key research partner for last year’s exhibit at the Palace of Versailles in France titled “1725: Native American Allies at the Court of Louis XV,” which shared the little-known diplomatic history of French-Native alliances. 

“Elizabeth Ellis is an extraordinary historian who has enriched Native American and Indigenous studies at Princeton and well beyond,” President Christopher L. Eisgruber said. “Her renowned research on lesser-known histories of Indigenous politics and diplomacy in early North America shines an important light on the power and resilience of Native and Indigenous peoples throughout history.” 

Ellis is also involved in several community-engaged history projects, including the Reclaiming Stories project, the project CRoyAN (Collections Royales d’Amérique du Nord) and the Indigenous Borderlands of North America research project. She helps lead the Princeton Department of History’s Delaware History Project in partnership with the Delaware Tribe of Indians and Delaware Nation. 

“By establishing connections between the colonial past and present-day Indigenous communities, Ellis provides new frameworks for understanding the sovereignty of Indigenous nations,” the MacArthur Foundation noted. 

Ellis said she is honored to be recognized as a MacArthur Fellow. 

“It is deeply moving to me that people are seeing and understanding why the stories we tell about Native people matter and why they matter so much to the present — not just for Native people, but for all of us who are in this continent,” she said. 

Ellis is Peewaalia and an enrolled citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. She said the MacArthur grant will help support her two current research projects — one on Native American iconography from the years 1000 to 1800 and the other tracing the history of the Peoria Tribe. 

“The questions I’m asking are focused on what Native people are saying about themselves,” Ellis said. “It has been a real privilege to work with tribal communities and other historians to get more tribal perspectives included in the way we do research and to create broader access to some of these histories,” she said. 

Ellis joined Princeton’s Department of History in 2022. She is also affiliated with the Effron Center for the Study of America and teaches courses that are part of the new undergraduate minor in Native American and Indigenous studies.

From 2017 to 2022, Ellis was an assistant professor of history and co-director of the Native Studies Forum at New York University. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Ellis earned her bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

Reported by Rebekah Schroeder, Emily Aronson and Jamie Saxon. A version of this story originally appeared on the Princeton University website.