The MacArthur Fellowship is a $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.
Among the 20 individuals to receive a MacArthur Award in 2026 are just two from New York State, Buffalo Sociologist and Energy Policy Researcher Holly Jean Buck and Brooklyn Saxophonist and Composer Immanuel Wilkins.
Holly Jean Buck
Holly Jean Buck is a sociologist investigating the social, ethical, and political dimensions of emerging climate and energy policies. She envisions governance structures for a wide range of climate responses, from rural place-based efforts in natural resource management and clean energy to global-scale climate interventions, like solar radiation modification and carbon removal.
Buck cuts through heated rhetoric to focus on communities and just and equitable implementation of solutions to our planetary climate crisis.
In After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (2019), Buck combines empirical research and speculative fiction to explore possible pathways to using and managing geoengineering technologies.
She argues that within democratic frameworks attuned to long-term impacts on the public interest, technologies like carbon removal could be designed to benefit both global climate and local communities.
She encourages climate activists and policymakers to imagine and shape new governance structures, rather than rejecting consideration of all climate interventions.
Buck expands on just and effective management of decarbonization in Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough (2021). Here, she contends that building out clean energy infrastructure is critical but not sufficient for reaching international climate goals; clean energy must be coupled with equitable processes for winding down fossil fuel use.
Buck details the cultural, geopolitical, and built environment changes necessary to meaningfully phase out fossil fuels. She proposes developing democratic planning mechanisms to determine timelines for decarbonization, transitioning the fossil fuel industry infrastructure and personnel to work on carbon removal, and building social buy-in to shift energy sources.
Additionally, she makes a case for treating climate technologies such as carbon removal as public utilities, managed by governments or regulatory bodies.
In more recent work, Buck elevates voices and ideas that might otherwise go unheard but are essential to mitigating climate change at scale. Her research on different communities’ perceptions of climate policies provides valuable insights into barriers to and opportunities for building social support for climate action.
She is also studying the social dimensions of emerging technologies more broadly, including current conversations about how and by whom future technologies should be developed.
Her investigation into re-industrialization in rural communities that are taking an active role in shaping future technologies — from semiconductors to batteries to use of artificial intelligence in agriculture — will offer insights into how innovation can work in tandem with local needs and resources.
Buck is setting forth a compelling vision for what is needed to launch a successful energy and climate transition and to support rural innovation, while remaining attentive to social realities and justice.
Holly Jean Buck received a BA (2002) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, an MSc (2011) from Lund University, and PhD (2017) from Cornell University.
She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at University of California, Los Angeles (2017-2020) before joining the faculty of the University at Buffalo, where she is currently an associate professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability.
Her scientific articles have been published in Nature Climate Change, Climatic Change, and Environmental Research Letters, among other journals, and she is a frequent contributor to such publications as Dissent, Compact, and The New Republic.
Immanuel Wilkins
Immanuel Wilkins is an alto jazz saxophone player and composer blending traditional jazz motifs with modern textures in works that reflect on historical narratives of injustice and resilience.
As an instrumentalist, Wilkins exhibits flawless technical command and a clear and assured tone in composed and improvisational contexts alike. He often structures his multipart compositions as emotional arcs inspired by historical events that continue to reverberate in the present day.
On his debut album, Omega (2020), Wilkins meditates on and moves between painful histories and moments of grace. Across the album’s tracks, he draws a throughline from the lynching of Mary Turner in 1918 (“Mary Turner – An American Tradition”) to the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 (“Ferguson – An American Tradition”), giving voice to repeated and ongoing violence against African Americans.
The album also includes an homage to an African-American touchstone with “The Dreamer,” a song inspired by a poem written by James Weldon Johnson, lyricist of the anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing.
Through repeated phrases and subtle harmonic shifts, Wilkins conveys a range of complex and conflicting emotions, capturing terror, indignity, grief, transcendence, and joy.
With The 7th Hand (2022), a seven-part musical suite, Wilkins explores collective performance as a form of communal ritual. Here, the influences of gospel, West African percussion, and traditions of the Black American church come through in compositions that evoke spiritual reverence in sound.
He draws on the tradition of the blues as an expression of grief and a soothing balm on his third album, Blues Blood (2024). The title references a quote from one of six young men falsely accused of murder in 1964, and Wilkins’s compositions weave soulful vocals and spoken word into a sonic meditation on themes of intergenerational trauma, bloodlines, and perseverance.
For several live performances of the album, Wilkins and his ensemble were joined by a chef who prepared a meal on stage. The sounds of chopping and smell of cooking stew called to mind communal food traditions and memories that have been passed down through ancestors.
For Wilkins, these sensory memories serve as an example of the ways music can heal, transform, and channel the strength of generations past.
On Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live at the Village Vanguard (2026), Wilkins guides his long-time quartet through a series of mood-shifting improvisations that are amplified by the call and response of a live audience.
Acclaimed for his clarity of voice and depth of feeling, Wilkins is engaging a new generation of content-savvy listeners through compelling historical narratives and an expansive vision of a storied instrument and form.
Immanuel Wilkins attended the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts and received a BM (2019) from The Juilliard School. He is an adjunct instructor of jazz studies at New York University’s School of Professional Studies.
He has performed with his quartet and as a sideman, both domestically and internationally, at such venues and festivals as the Village Vanguard (New York, NY), SFJAZZ (San Francisco, CA), the Montreal Jazz Festival (Canada), Umbria Jazz (Perugia, Italy), the North Sea Jazz Festival (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg, Germany).
Photos provided.
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