The MacArthur Fellowship is a five-year $800,000 grant, awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future. The Fellowship is designed to provide recipients with the flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional activities in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements. Grants are given to typically 20–30 individuals each year, working in any field, who have shown “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction” and are citizens or residents of the United States. Among the 20 MacArthur Fellows this year are two of our 2023 IMS Fellows, Rina Foygel Barber and Lester Mackey.

Rina Foygel Barber is Louis Block Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. She is interested in developing and analyzing estimation, inference, and optimization tools for structured high-dimensional data problems such as sparse regression, sparse nonparametric models, and low-rank models. She works on developing methods for false discovery rate control in settings where there may be under-sampled data or misspecified models, and for distribution-free inference in settings where the data distribution is unknown. She also collaborates on modeling and optimization problems in image reconstruction for medical imaging. Previous honors include a Sloan Fellowship, the COPSS Presidents’ Award, the IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award, and the inaugural Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize. Read more at https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2023/rina-foygel-barber

Lester Mackey, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, is a computer scientist and statistician advancing solutions to data science problems with practical applications. Mackey’s research in machine learning and statistics focuses on techniques to improve efficiency and predictive performance in computational statistical analysis of very large data sets. He applies his theoretical insights to develop scalable learning algorithms with direct benefit for society. Mackey was part of the team that came second* in the 2009 Netflix Prize [Lester noted, “We tied the winning team, but the tie breaker was time of submission, and we submitted 20 minutes later!”] and the 2012 ALS Prize4Life, an elected member of the COPSS Leadership Academy, and the recipient of the 2023 Ethel Newbold Prize. Read more at https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2023/lester-mackey.

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* Editor’s note: The original article incorrectly stated that Lester Mackey’s team had won the 2009 Netflix Prize. We apologize for the error.