Two Columbians were recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships, commonly known as “genius grants.” Marina Rustow ’04GSAS, a professor of Near Eastern studies and history at Princeton, was honored for her work using the Cairo Genizah — a cache of thousands of legal documents, letters, and literary materials that were collected in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue beginning more than a millennium ago — to shed new light on Jewish life during the Middle Ages. Kartik Chandran, an associate professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia, was recognized for his work integrating microbial ecology, molecular biology, and engineering to transform wastewater into useful resources such as fertilizers, energy sources, and clean water.
