Two Duke alumni are recipients of 2014 MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as "Genius Grants"
Craig Gentry, who received his undergraduate degree from Duke in 1995, is a computer scientist fueling a revolution in cryptography and theoretical computer science through his elegant solutions to some of the discipline’s most challenging open problems. As an undergraduate, Gentry was Duke's second Putnam Fellow and member of the university's 1993 First Place team in the prestigious Putnam competition.
Translator and poet Khaled Mattawa is a cultural ambassador and poet-translator of Arabic poetry giving voice to a vast literature largely unknown in the Western hemisphere. He has published English translations, many the first available, of the work of contemporary poets highly respected in the Arab world, such as Amjad Nasser (Jordan), Saadi Youssef (Iraq), Adonis (Syria), and Fadhil Al-Azzawi (Iraq), as well as women poets whose names may be less familiar, such as Iman Mersal (Egypt), Joumana Haddad (Lebanon), and Maram Al-Massri (Syria). He received his Ph.D. from Duke in 2009.
Read more about them here.