Harvard Neurobiology Professor Receives 2008 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’

When assistant professor of neurobiology Rachel I. Wilson picked up the phone ringing in her office, the caller told her he was trying to reach a certain person and was going to describe that person to her.

After a minute, it dawned on Wilson that this description fit her perfectly.
“I said, ‘Are you talking about me?’ and they said, ‘Of course we’re talking about you!’” she said.

The representative from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation then told her that she was one of this year’s recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—the ‘genius grants’ that give recipients $500,000 over a five-year period with “no strings attached.”

Wilson, who works at Harvard Medical School, and Susan E. Mango—who was recently appointed professor of molecular and cellular biology in FAS, effective next July—were two of this year’s 25 awardees.

“It’s the individuals, their way of approaching problems, of ignoring everybody else, and of moving forward with whatever they’re doing that’s catching our attention,” said Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows program. “We’re looking for a person we feel is extraordinarily creative in all they do and has enormous potential.”

Wilson’s research, which focuses on olfaction in fruit flies, involves taking electrical recordings from individual brain cells in the fly brain and then studying how the brain cells respond to different odors.

“Each cell has a particular tuning, which means that it will respond to some odors and not others,” Wilson said. “We compare the way that neurons are tuned to odors in different parts of the olfactory system and try to figure out how that tuning arises.”

The MacArthur Foundation hopes the Fellows will take their work to a “new level,” a prospect that Wilson said she finds intimidating.

The MacArthur Foundation hopes the Fellows will take their work to a “new level,” a prospect that Wilson said she finds intimidating.

“Sometimes I can barely make it from Monday to Tuesday,” Wilson said.
She also said it was strange to have things work backwards and be given money instead of having to base her experiments on “feasibility and fundability.”

“In just a few years, Rachel has distinguished herself as a vital member of the HMS faculty,” said Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, in a press release. “She has taken on some of the biggest questions in neurobiology and developed elegant methods for gleaning answers to those questions.”

Mango, who was previously a professor of oncological sciences at the University of Utah’s School of Medicine, could not be reached for comment last night.

—Staff writer Alissa M. D’Gama can be reached at adgama@fas.harvard.