The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has unveiled its newest group of fellows, a cohort of 20 individuals who will each receive an $800,000 grant with no restrictions on how the money is used. Among this year's honorees are scholars whose careers sit at the crossroads of scientific inquiry and the pursuit of justice, a pairing that the foundation has increasingly recognized as essential to addressing some of society's most entrenched problems.
One of those fellows is Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University whose work has focused on identifying the remains of migrants who died after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The other is Felipe De Brigard, a researcher whose scholarship also merges scientific methods with questions of fairness and accountability, according to the foundation's announcement.
Spradley's path to the fellowship began with what should have been a straightforward task: exhuming a man's body from a cemetery in Brooks County, located in southern Texas. The plan was simple enough on paper. Her team would ask the funeral home to identify the correct plot on a map, then dig up the remains using ordinary tools such as shovels and trowels.
Instead, the staff at the cemetery delivered news that would reshape years of her professional life. They did not know where the man was buried. Worse still, they could not say where more than a hundred other Central American migrants who had died in the area had been laid to rest. The deceased had been buried and effectively forgotten, with no reliable records to guide families or investigators back to them.
Spradley describes that practice as both illegal and a violation of fundamental human rights. In her view, death does not erase a person's claim to dignity, and a burial that is never documented or revisited strips away that dignity in a way that compounds the grief of surviving relatives. She has spoken about the anguish families endure when they are left without answers about where a loved one's body is or whether it will ever be returned to them.
That anguish, Spradley has said, amounts to a form of ongoing torture. Relatives who lose a family member during migration are already coping with loss. When authorities bury those remains without tracking them, the families are denied even the most basic closure. The uncertainty never resolves; it simply becomes a permanent part of their lives.
Faced with the absence of records, Spradley and her colleagues arrived at a difficult conclusion. They would have to excavate the entire cemetery. The undertaking began in 2013 and has continued since, representing an unusually large-scale effort in the field of forensic anthropology. Rather than recovering a single set of remains, the team committed itself to systematically locating and identifying the many people who had been interred without documentation.
That decision carried significant logistical and emotional weight. Exhuming a cemetery requires painstaking archaeological methods to avoid damaging remains, careful chain-of-custody procedures to preserve evidence, and sustained coordination with local authorities, funeral homes and families. Each set of remains must be analyzed to establish identity, cause of death and other details that can help answer the questions families have been asking for years.
The work also raises broader questions about how border communities handle the deaths of migrants. Brooks County, where Spradley's effort began, has become emblematic of the challenges facing local officials who must manage deaths that occur in remote areas far from the resources of major cities. Without clear protocols or adequate funding for identification, remains can end up in unmarked or poorly documented graves.
For Spradley, the scientific work is inseparable from the ethical obligation to restore names to the unnamed. Identifying a person's remains can allow a family to learn what happened, to claim the body and to conduct a proper burial according to their own traditions. That process can be the difference between an open wound and a measure of peace.
The MacArthur Foundation's decision to recognize Spradley places her alongside a select group of thinkers and practitioners who have demonstrated what the foundation calls exceptional creativity in their fields. Fellows are chosen not for a single project but for a body of work that suggests the potential for even greater contributions in the future. The unrestricted nature of the award is intended to give recipients the freedom to take risks that conventional funding would not support.
This year's class as a whole reflects the foundation's interest in researchers who refuse to treat science as disconnected from human consequence. By highlighting scholars who work at the intersection of science and justice, the foundation signals that rigorous inquiry can serve the cause of accountability, whether in forensic investigations, public health, or the study of how people reason about right and wrong.
For families of missing migrants, Spradley's recognition may carry a particular resonance. It draws national attention to a problem that often remains invisible outside the border regions where it occurs. It also validates the insistence that every deceased person deserves to be identified, mourned and remembered, regardless of how they entered the country or where they died.
The fellowship does not end the work. Cemeteries still contain unidentified remains, and families still wait for news. But the award provides resources and visibility that can help Spradley and her team continue the labor of exhumation, analysis and reunification. In a field where progress is measured one identification at a time, that support can translate directly into answers for people who have gone years without them.
De Brigard's inclusion in the cohort points to a parallel effort: understanding the psychological and philosophical dimensions of justice through empirical research. Together, the two fellows illustrate a broader trend in contemporary scholarship, one in which scientific tools are brought to bear on questions of fairness, dignity and the treatment of vulnerable people.
The MacArthur Foundation has not disclosed the full roster of this year's fellows beyond noting that 20 individuals were selected. Each will receive the same unrestricted grant, allowing them to decide how best to advance their work. For Spradley, that freedom may mean expanding the cemetery project, improving identification methods or training the next generation of forensic anthropologists.
What remains constant is the principle she articulated when confronted with a cemetery full of forgotten people. Everyone should have dignity in death, she has said, and no one should be buried and then abandoned without further effort to determine who they were or how to return them to their families. The fellowship is, in effect, an endorsement of that principle and a bet that the work it supports will bring more families closer to the truth.
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