A professor at the University of Chicago was announced Wednesday as a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a “genius grant,” for her work in theoretical statistics. Her work has been used to improve the quality of medical CT scans and to find the most useful types of information in large datasets.
Rina Foygel Barber, who was born in Odesa, Ukraine, is one of 20 to receive the no-strings-attached $800,000 stipend that “is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” according to the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
