Three U-M researchers named 2011 MacArthur Fellows

Sept. Three U-M researchers named 2011 MacArthur Fellows - ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Three University of Michigan researchers—a historian, a chemist and a stem cell biologist—are among the 22 new MacArthur Fellows announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each will receive $500,000 in "no strings attached" support over the next five years from the MacArthur Foundation. This year's U-M winners are: o Tiya Miles, director of the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Miles is a public historian who is reframing and reinterpreting the history of our diverse nation in works that illuminate the complex interrelationships between the African and Cherokee peoples in colonial America. Her studies tease evidence from census records, legal petitions, missionary reports, newsprint, and oral histories and span territories east and west in the South, before and after the Trail of Tears (1838-1839) and up to the Civil War. o Melanie Sanford, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Chemistry in LSA, is an organometallic chemist reigniting research on an important chemical pathway and developing a method to enable modification of complex molecules with important products we use every day.