The MacArthur Foundation has announced the names of the 2012 MacArthur Fellows! This year’s group is a pretty exciting bunch. I was interested to see the number of folks on the list working at the edge of art, science and culture, including Uta Barth and Maurice Lim Miller. The two fellows that interest me the most, mainly based on their area of expertise, are Maria Chudnovsky and Sarkis Mazmanian.

Dr. Chudnovsky is a professor of operations research and mathematics at Columbia University and studies graph theory. I’ve seen a lot of very interesting papers in the past few years where the specific tractability of analysis that you get with graphs has been used to elucidate phenomena from failovers on communications networks to growth dynamics in social media. Dr. Chudnovsky’s work is fundamental in connecting the specifics of graph theory to other branches of analysis.

Dr. Mazmanian is a professor of biology at CalTech. Regular readers of this blog and my Google+ stream will understand why I’m excited about this guy. His area of study is the interaction between host organisms and their beneficial microbial symbiotes. This area of research and the underlying premise that at least in humans, we can treat our bodies as an ecosystem rather than an organism promises to shape medical research outcomes for the next half-century.

I’m grateful to Ed Darrell for breaking the news when I was sound asleep!