Category: Black Excellence

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/trajal-harrell

Trajal Harrell is a choreographer and dancer bringing different dance traditions into dialogue with each other and creating speculative moments of coexistence and interaction. Harrell transforms extensive research about dance history into what he calls a “fictitious archive,” in which the geographic, temporal, or social barriers that separated dance styles, cultures, and artists are suspended in the collective imagination. In his explorations of Japanese butoh, minimalism, modern and postmodern dance, and other performance practices, he shows how bodies can express multitudes of historical possibilities and counter-histories.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/maaza-mengiste

Maaza Mengiste is a fiction writer depicting the moral and personal harms of political conflict in works that render both the intimate textures of individuals’ lives and the broad sweep of historical events unfolding around them. She grounds her novels in extensive research and inhabits multiple historical and fictional voices, offering complex, sometimes competing, accounts of periods of violence in twentieth-century Ethiopia.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/ellora-derenoncourt

Ellora Derenoncourt is a labor economist and economic historian uncovering the historical roots of racial disparities in wealth and economic mobility in the United States. For her research on labor market standards, wage inequality, and economic policies, Derenoncourt builds innovative datasets and leverages real-world historical events as starting points of inquiry. She is identifying the key policies and drivers of ongoing gaps in earnings and accumulated wealth between Black and White Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Easley

Annie Jean Easley (April 23, 1933 – June 25, 2011) was an American computer scientist who contributed significantly to the beginning iterations of NASA‘s rocket technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urschel

John Cameron Urschel Jr. (born June 24, 1991) is a Canadian mathematician and former professional football guard.^[1][2] He played college football at Penn State and was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL draft. Urschel played his entire NFL career with Baltimore before announcing his retirement on July 27, 2017, at 26 years old.

Urschel has bachelor’s and master’s degrees (both from Penn State) and a PhD (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), all in mathematics.^[3][4] Urschel is also an advanced statistics columnist for The Players’ Tribune. He served a three-year term on the College Football Playoff selection committee which began in the spring of 2020,^[5] and is an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern_Hunt

Fern Yvette Hunt (born January 14, 1948) is an African American^[1] mathematician known for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology.^[2] She currently works as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she conducts research on the ergodic theory of dynamical systems.^[3]

Hunt was born in New York City on January 14, 1948, to Daphne Lindsay and Thomas Edward Hunt. Her sister, Erica Hunt, is a published poet and author. Hunt’s grandparents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica before World War I.^[4][2] Her family lived in a primarily black housing project in Hampton. Her father did not graduate from high school, and though her mother attended Hunter College for two years, she did not earn a degree. When Hunt was 9 years old, her mother gifted her a chemistry set for Christmas, which sparked her early interest in science. Hunt’s middle school science teacher, Charles Wilson, further encouraged Hunt to pursue math and science.^[2][5] Hunt attended the Bronx High School of Science, and it was during her time in high school that her primary focus shifted from science to mathematics.^[6] After graduating high school, Hunt attended Bryn Mawr College following the encouragement of her mother, earning an A.B. in mathematics in 1969.^[4] She went on to earn a master’s degree and PhD in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University in 1978.^[7] Her PhD thesis (1978) Genetic and Spatial Variation in some Selection-Migration Models was advised by Frank Hoppensteadt.^[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemia_Haynes

Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes (September 11, 1890 – July 25, 1980) was an American mathematician and educator. She was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, which she earned from the Catholic University of America in 1943.^[1]

Euphemia Lofton was the first child and only daughter of William S. Lofton, a dentist and financier, and Lavinia Day Lofton, a kindergarten teacher. She was the valedictorian of M Street High School in 1907 and then graduated from Normal School for Colored Girls, now known as University of the District of Columbia, with distinction and a degree in education in 1909.^[2][3] She went on to earn an undergraduate mathematics major (and psychology minor) from Smith College in 1914.^[3] In 1917 she married Harold Appo Haynes, a teacher. The couple had no children. She gained a master’s degree in education from the University of Chicago in 1930. In 1943, she gained her PhD from The Catholic University of America with a dissertation, supervised by Aubrey E. Landry, entitled The Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondences.^[1][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Okikiolu

Kate Adebola Okikiolu (born 1965) is a British mathematician.^[2] She is known for her work with elliptic differential operators as well as her work with inner-city children.^[3]

Okikiolu was born in 1965 in England. Her father was George Olatokunbo Okikiolu, a renowned Nigerian mathematician^[4] and the most published black mathematician on record.^[5] Her British mother was a high school mathematics teacher. Okikiolu received a B.A. in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1987. In 1991 she earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles,^[6] for her thesis The Analogue of the Strong Szego Limit Theorem on the Torus and the 3-Sphere.^[5][7][8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blackwell

David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics.^[2] He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem,^[3] and is also known for the Blackwell channel, Blackwell’s contraction mapping theorem, Blackwell’s approachability theorem, and the Blackwell order. He wrote one of the first Bayesian statistics textbooks, his 1969 Basic Statistics. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor with tenure at the University of California, Berkeley,^[1][4][5] and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.^[6] By the time he retired, he had published more than 90 papers and books on dynamic programming, game theory, and mathematical statistics.^[7] In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Weldon_Woodard

Dudley Weldon Woodard (October 3, 1881 – July 1, 1965) was a Galveston-born American mathematician and professor, and the second African-American to earn a PhD in mathematics; the first was Woodard’s mentor Elbert Frank Cox, who earned a PhD from Cornell in 1925.

He received his B.A. degree from Wilberforce University in Ohio (1903), his B.S. degree (1906) and M.Sc. degree (1907) at the University of Chicago.^[1] He taught collegiate mathematics in Tuskegee for many years,^[2] until finally he earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania (1928).^[3] His doctoral thesis was entitled, On Two-Dimensional Analysis Situs with Special Reference to the Jordan Curve Theorem, and was advised by John R. Kline.^[4][5]