The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced its newest cohort of 20 fellows, recognizing scholars and practitioners whose work spans disciplines and addresses some of society's most pressing challenges. Among this year's recipients are researchers whose efforts sit at the intersection of science and justice, demonstrating how rigorous inquiry can serve vulnerable communities and correct historical wrongs.
Each MacArthur Fellow receives an $800,000 grant, often described as "no-strings-attached," disbursed over five years. The fellowship is designed to provide recipients with the freedom and flexibility to pursue their creative, intellectual, and professional endeavors without the burden of fundraising or institutional constraints. The foundation selects fellows based on their exceptional creativity, track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for future advances.
This year's class includes Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University, whose work exemplifies the fusion of scientific expertise with humanitarian advocacy. Spradley's recognition stems from her years-long effort to identify and repatriate the remains of migrants who died after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, a mission that has required both technical skill and moral conviction.
Spradley's project began in 2013 when she and her team confronted a troubling situation in Brooks County, a rural area in southern Texas that has become a corridor for migrants traveling from Central America. The county's cemetery contained the unmarked graves of more than a hundred individuals who had died in the region, many of them unidentified and their families left without answers or closure.
The initial goal seemed straightforward: exhume the body of one man from a local cemetery, a process that would ordinarily involve consulting a funeral home map to identify the correct plot before digging with shovels and trowels. But when Spradley's team arrived, cemetery staff informed them that they did not know where the man was buried—nor could they locate the final resting places of the other migrants interred there.
This lack of record-keeping, Spradley argues, constitutes more than administrative failure. She contends that the practice is illegal and amounts to a human rights violation. "Everyone should have dignity in death," Spradley says. "And there is no dignity in taking someone, burying them and just forgetting about it—and never returning to try to further investigate who this person was or how to get them back to their family."
Spradley has also spoken to the anguish experienced by families of the deceased, who often endure years of uncertainty about what happened to their loved ones and where their remains might be. "The torture that the families were going through, not knowing where their loved ones were," she said, describing the emotional toll that drives her work.
Faced with a cemetery full of unidentified graves and incomplete records, Spradley and her team reached a difficult conclusion: "We are going to have to exhume this entire cemetery." The decision transformed what began as a single exhumation into a large-scale forensic investigation aimed at recovering, analyzing, and identifying remains so that they might be returned to their families.
The effort, which has continued since 2013, has drawn national attention for its combination of forensic science, forensic anthropology, and humanitarian purpose. Spradley's team has worked to document burial locations, recover remains, and use scientific methods to establish identities—work that requires painstaking attention to detail and collaboration with medical examiners, law enforcement, and international partners.
The MacArthur Foundation's recognition of Spradley reflects a broader theme in this year's fellowships: honoring researchers who apply scientific tools to questions of equity, accountability, and human dignity. Felipe De Brigard, another one of this year's fellows, is also cited as working at the interface of science and justice, according to the foundation's announcement.
The foundation's fellowships are unique in that they impose no reporting requirements and allow recipients to decide how best to use the funds. For researchers like Spradley, whose work often operates outside traditional academic incentives, the unrestricted nature of the award can be transformative—providing resources to expand projects, hire staff, or sustain long-term investigations that might otherwise struggle for funding.
The identification of migrant remains is a complex and politically sensitive undertaking. It involves not only scientific challenges—such as degraded DNA, fragmented skeletal remains, and limited antemortem records—but also legal and ethical questions about jurisdiction, consent, and the obligations of local authorities. Spradley's insistence that the treatment of these individuals violated both law and human rights highlights the tensions between immigration enforcement and humanitarian obligations.
By bringing forensic anthropology to bear on the migrant crisis, Spradley's work also serves as a form of documentation and accountability. Each identification can provide a measure of closure for a family and can contribute to broader understanding of the dangers migrants face. Her team's efforts in Brooks County have been described as among the most comprehensive attempts to address unidentified migrant burials in the United States.
The 2026 MacArthur Fellows class, announced on September 29, includes 20 individuals from a range of fields, from the arts to the sciences. The inclusion of researchers like Spradley and De Brigard underscores the foundation's interest in supporting work that crosses disciplinary boundaries and addresses social challenges through empirical inquiry.
For Spradley, the fellowship provides validation of a mission that has often required navigating bureaucratic obstacles, legal ambiguities, and emotional hardship. The $800,000 award will allow her and her team to continue their efforts to exhume, identify, and repatriate the remains of migrants—work that she frames as a fundamental matter of dignity.
As the foundation's announcement makes clear, the newest fellows are not only advancing knowledge in their respective fields but also challenging institutions and practices that leave vulnerable people invisible. In Spradley's case, the quest to recover the dead is also a demand that society remember them, and that families no longer be left to suffer the torture of not knowing.
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