Sri Lankan American Ahilan Arulanantham is named too for $625,000 award.
Physical biologist Manu Prakash and theoretical computer scientist Subhash Khot – both of whom are akum of IIT – are among the 23 exceptionally creative individuals with a track record of achievement and the potential for significant contributions in the future, named as the 2016 MacArthur Fellows. Joining the two Indian Americans is Sri Lankan American Ahilan Arulanantham, an immigration attorney by profession. The 23 Fellows will each receive a no-strings-attached stipend of $625,000, allowing recipients maximum freedom to follow their own creative visions.
“While our communities, our nation, and our world face both historic and emerging challenges, these 23 extraordinary individuals give us ample reason for hope,” said MacArthur President Julia Stasch, in a statement. “They are breaking new ground in areas of public concern, in the arts, and in the sciences, often in unexpected ways. Their creativity, dedication, and impact inspire us all.”
Manu Prakash is a physical biologist applying his expertise in soft-matter physics to illuminate often easy to observe but hard to explain phenomena in biological and physical contexts and to invent solutions to difficult problems in global health, science education, and ecological surveillance. His many lines of research are driven by curiosity about the diversity of life forms on our planet and how they work, empathy for problems in resource-poor settings, and a deep interest in democratizing the experience and joy of science globally.
Prakash’s projects range from explorations of how shorebirds drink to how a few drops of food coloring can demonstrate highly complex behavior such as chemotaxis, akin to active living matter. His early training and research focused on ideas of physical computation, with a goal of building new computational engines capable of manipulating not just bits of information but also physical matter. One such demonstration involved building a computer out of tiny air bubbles traveling in microfluidic channels. In recent work, Prakash demonstrated a practical implementation of this “water computer,” or microfluidic processor, with potential applications in diagnostics and environmental monitoring.
More recently, Prakash has channeled his ingenuity to invent several devices that empower frugal science: these are low-cost, widely accessible, and appropriate for use in low-resource and field settings. Foldscope, a lightweight optical microscope that costs less than a dollar to produce, is assembled from an origami-based folding design from a single sheet of paper with integrated lenses and electronics. With submicron resolution, Foldscope has already been widely embraced in educational contexts.
Prakash has enlisted thousands of volunteers—from medical experts to citizen scientists—to field test Foldscope as he works to refine it for use in public health and biomedical settings. Another recent project is a low-cost, sticker-like microfluidic chip that can collect thousands of nanoliter-volume droplets of saliva from mosquito bites that can be screened for pathogens. The chip would enable rapid, scalable, and low-cost collection of surveillance data that is critical for predicting and controlling mosquito-borne disease outbreaks. With remarkable breadth and imagination, Prakash defies traditional disciplinary boundaries in his coupling of basic research and fabrication of high-capability scientific instruments for widespread use in the field and classroom.
Prakash received a B.Tech. (2002) from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and a Ph.D. (2008) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2008–2011) prior to joining the faculty of Stanford University, where he is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering, a member of the Biophysics Program in the School of Medicine and the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Faculty Fellow of Stanford ChEM-H, and an affiliate member of the Woods Institute for the Environment. He holds numerous patents and his research has been published in such scientific journals as PLoS One, Journal of Experimental Biology, Science, and Nature, among others.
Subhash Khot is a theoretical computer scientist whose work is providing critical insight into unresolved problems in the field of computational complexity. Since the 1970s, one of the major questions in theory of computing has been whether or not P = NP. That is, can every problem whose solution can be quickly verified by a computer also be quickly solved by a computer? Most computer scientists believe that P does not equal NP—that there are problems, known as NP-hard problems, for which a solution cannot be found efficiently by an algorithm. Thousands of practical problems, from the best way to design a computer chip to optimal airplane schedules, have been shown to be NP-hard.
Over the past two decades, most research in this area has focused on whether, and how well, solutions to these problems can be approximated. To this discussion, Khot contributed the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), which proposes that for one specific problem about assigning colors to the nodes of a network according to a set of constraints, finding even an approximate solution is NP-hard. While seemingly a simple statement with limited applicability, the UGC has spurred novel and unexpected research. Work by Khot and others has demonstrated that although it is as yet unproven, the conjecture sheds new light on the computational complexity of many, very diverse, optimization tasks. If true, then solutions to a host of problems, many of them seemingly unrelated to the original problem of the UGC, are also too hard to approximate. Even if the UGC ultimately is found to be false, efforts to prove it have led to new theorems in geometry, Fourier analysis, the mathematics of foams, and even the stability of different election systems.
As computers come to drive ever more aspects of our lives, greater understanding of the limitations of computing is increasingly important. Khot’s continued ingenuity and tenacity in exploring the potential of the UGC will drive this important and fruitful area of research for many years to come.
Khot received a B.Tech. (1999) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a Ph.D. (2003) from Princeton University. He is currently Silver Professor of Computer Science in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. His prior affiliations include the University of Chicago (2011–2013), the Georgia Institute of Technology (2004–2007), and the Institute for Advanced Study (2003–2004). He has published numerous articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings, including Journal of the ACM, SIAM Journal on Computing, Proceedings of the Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, and Proceedings of the Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, among many others.
Ahilan Arulanantham is an attorney working to secure the right to due process for individuals facing deportation. Through advocacy and successful litigation of a series of landmark cases, Arulanantham has expanded immigrant detainees’ access to legal representation and limited the government’s power to detain them indefinitely. Courts have traditionally characterized deportation proceedings as civil cases, which means defendants do not have many of the rights guaranteed to criminal defendants, including the right to counsel and the right to ask for release on bond. As a result, immigrants going through deportation hearings often have to represent themselves in complex proceedings, during which they can be detained for months or even years.
Arulanantham worked with a group of human rights attorneys to challenge indefinite detentions in Nadarajah v Gonzales (2006) and the class action suit Rodriguez v Robbins. The 2013 Rodriguez ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit established that immigrants in pending removal proceedings have the right to ask for bond at a hearing if they have been detained for six months or longer.
Hundreds of people in immigration proceedings, including asylum seekers and parents and spouses of U.S. citizens, were immediately given an opportunity to seek release to their families while waiting for their cases to be adjudicated. In 2016, the Supreme Court will consider whether to reverse the Rodriguez ruling or instead extend the right to ask for release on bond nationwide. For the class action suit Franco-Gonzalez v Holder, launched in 2010, Arulanantham led a coalition of attorneys and other advocates to secure the right to appointed counsel for immigrants with mental disabilities. The named plaintiff in the Franco-Gonzalez case had been languishing in detention for nearly five years without a bond hearing or an attorney. The 2013 ruling in the case was the first to entitle an entire class of non-citizens to legal representation.
Arulanantham is currently advocating for extending the right to counsel to another vulnerable population—children placed in deportation proceedings—in J.E.F.M. v Lynch. Through his incremental approach and careful selection of cases, Arulanantham works to demonstrate the human costs of denying due process to immigrants and to set vital precedents to expand the rights of non-citizens.
Arulanantham received B.A. degrees from Georgetown University (1994) and the University of Oxford, Lincoln College (1996) and a J.D. (1999) from the Yale Law School. He was an Equal Justice Works fellow (2000–2002) with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, an assistant federal public defender (2002–2004) in El Paso, Texas, and lecturer in the University of Chicago Law School (2010) and the University of California, Irvine, School of Law (2015). In 2004, he returned to the ACLU, where he is currently director of advocacy and legal director of the ACLU of Southern California and affiliated with the Immigrants’ Rights Project (since 2012).