By Wendy Greenberg
Recent recipients of prestigious awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025, and MacArthur Foundation grants, known informally as “genius” grants, have connections to Princeton’s academic community.
Mary E. Brunkow, who received her Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1991 from Princeton University, received the Nobel Prize, sharing it with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi “for their groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance that prevents the immune system from harming the body” according to the Nobel Prize announcement.
“Every day, our immune system protects us from thousands of different microbes trying to invade our bodies,” explained the announcement at nobelprize.org. “These all have different appearances, and many have developed similarities with human cells as a form of camouflage. So how does the immune system determine what it should attack and what it should defend?
“Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 for their fundamental discoveries relating to peripheral immune tolerance. The laureates identified the immune system’s security guards, regulatory T cells, which prevent immune cells from attacking our own body.”
Brunkow apparently was not expecting the honor. The Nobel website notes that she said she saw a caller ID number from Sweden and thought it was spam, disabled the phone, and went back to sleep. Then the Associated Press came to her front door.
The laureates’ discoveries, said the Nobel announcement, can spur the development of medical treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases, which may lead to more successful transplantations.
Brunkow, who is currently working at Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, was one of the first graduate students to join Princeton’s Department of Molecular Biology, with adviser and former University President Shirley M. Tilghman.
University President Christopher L. Eisgruber said in the Princeton announcement: “Princeton congratulates its alumna Mary Brunkow, whose trailblazing achievements illustrate the power of high-quality scientific research to improve human health and change our world for the better.”
Rodney Priestly, dean of the Princeton Graduate School, said in a University press release, “We encourage our students to be bold in their research. We tell them they can push the forefront of human knowledge to benefit humanity. Mary is an inspiring example for Princeton graduate students of how their education and training can lead them to breakthroughs that transform the world.”
Brunkow joins other Princetonians who have won the Nobel Prize, detailed at princeton.edu/meet-princeton/honors-awards. The Nobel Prize is about $1.2 million, divided among the shared recipients.
Two Princeton alumni have won MacArthur “genius” grants for their work in service-oriented research.
Nabarun Dasgupta, a member of the Class of 2000, and Sébastien Phillippe, a 2018 Ph.D. recipient and visiting researcher at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Program on Science and Global Security, are among 20 scientists, artists, and scholars across the country who will receive an unrestricted $800,000 stipend from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Additionally, Lauren K. Williams, von Neumann Fellow (2017) in the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Dasgupta is now the Gillings Innovations Fellow and senior scientist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and runs the Street Drug Analysis Lab there.
According to the MacArthur citation, Dasgupta is an epidemiologist and harm reduction advocate creating practical programs to mitigate harms from drug use, particularly opioid overdose deaths. “He combines scientific studies with community engagement to improve the wellbeing and safety of people who use drugs and people living with debilitating pain. He collaborates with people who have experience with drug use or its consequences to design effective, evidence-based interventions that respond to the needs of people who use drugs and community-based organizations that support them,” the citation states.
In 2020, Dasgupta and colleagues created a new naloxone supply and distribution model, Remedy Alliance/For The People, working with the Food and Drug Administration to revise licensing requirements that had made it difficult for harm reduction organizations to access naloxone.
He completed a molecular biology major at Princeton, earned a master’s of public health degree from Yale, and then a Ph.D. in epidemiology from UNC-Chapel Hill.
Philippe is described in his citation as “a nuclear security specialist exposing past harms and potential future risks from building, testing, and storing launch-ready nuclear weapons. Philippe draws on archival research, data modelling, and his training as a nuclear safety engineer to clarify the extent of human and environmental damage from nuclear tests and the risks associated with nuclear weapon modernization policies. He builds multidisciplinary collaborations to make his research accessible and useful to affected communities and policymakers.”
As of this fall, he is assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Williams was a 2017 von Neumann Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the IAS, and is currently Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. The citation recognizes her “significant contributions to numerous mathematical fields, including cluster algebras, representation theory, and algebraic geometry. She has also forged cross-disciplinary collaborations to tackle long-standing and challenging problems in physics related to quantum field theory, participle physics and wave propagation.”