Two Climate Experts Win ‘Genius Grants’ at a Trying Time for US Science

On Wednesday, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced its so-called “genius grants” for 2025. The annual award honors individuals who “expand the boundaries of knowledge, artistry, and human understanding” and comes with a no-strings-attached prize of $800,000.

Two climate experts were among this year’s 22 winners: Ángel Adames-Corraliza, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who investigates the mechanisms underlying tropical weather patterns, and Kristina Douglass, an archaeologist at Columbia University’s Climate School who studies the history of climate adaptation in Madagascar.

Receiving a MacArthur Fellowship is often life-changing. This year, the announcement comes amid deep cuts to science funding in the US and a clampdown on climate science by the Trump administration.

“Up until the moment that I heard about the award, my plans were to size down my research group and cut down my research,” Adames-Corraliza told Bloomberg Green. “But with this money, I feel that I can still progress.”

We talked to the two researchers about their work. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Ángel Adames-Corraliza

What insight has modeling weather patterns in the tropics given you about combating climate change globally?

We want to understand how these patterns work so we can better understand how they are going to change in the future climate. If we can understand what drives tropical phenomena, we can understand how the tropics will respond to climate change.

Read more: How Trump’s War on Climate Science Impacts All Americans

I’m originally from Puerto Rico, so living through heavy rainfall, thunderstorms and destructive hurricanes were part of my experience growing up. A more knowledgeable community is a more powerful community. It’s a community more ready for action because they know what’s at stake. My hope is to give this knowledge back to the community so they can be ready for the impact and understand the risks.

Kristina Douglass

What can the archaeology of Madagascar teach us about climate adaptation?

Archaeology has a lot to teach us about climate change because we are effectively looking at this library of human experience. When we look at Madagascar, here is an island that has experienced a lot of climatic variability because of its geographical and geological position in history, and the communities who live on Madagascar have adapted over time to deal with this high degree of variability.

There is a lot of unpredictability in the climate of southwest Madagascar. So when we look at the communities that have lived there for many generations, they have developed strategies that revolve around a single idea, which is flexibility. You have to be able to develop a livelihood approach, a social-network approach and a mobility approach that is highly flexible.

What are the similarities and differences between navigating environmental changes in the past and solving today’s climate crisis?

Today the impacts of climate change are really driven by human inequality. What is similar and what we can draw from the past is the concept of mobility. But the way that people are moving around today is also different from the past. Today we have pretty intensive issues of borders and border crossings and displacements.

When I think about southwest Madagascar as an example of this, we see that the way climate-related mobility has evolved as a strategy comes into opposition in some ways with contemporary land- and sea-use policy. Today many policies around managing collective resources want people to stay in place.

We have to find a way to bridge the gap between what are often top-down policies and approaches to adaptation — whether that has to do with the conservation of biodiversity or development of alternative sustainable livelihoods — and the bottom-up experiences of people that come from generations of learning what does and doesn’t work when you are adapting to climate change.