The Vision Pioneer and the Street Scientist: Two Indian Americans Win 2025 MacArthur ‘Genius Grants’

When the phone rang on a Tuesday morning, Teresa Puthussery was at home enjoying her coffee. Assuming it was spam, she let it ring—many times. Even after Googling the number, she remained skeptical.

“It wasn’t until they started reading out a description of my work that I was convinced that they had called the right person,” Puthussery said. “It’s certainly just really unexpected, and so humbling and gratifying,” according to Berkeley News.

Meanwhile, across the country at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nabarun Dasgupta received his call at an impossibly conflicting moment—his team had just gathered for a ceremony honoring Louise Vincent, a colleague and nationally recognized addiction activist who had died in August after struggling for years with health complications linked to her drug use, NPR reported.

On October 8, 2025, the MacArthur Foundation announced that both 46-year-old Puthussery, and Dasgupta—two Indian American researchers working at opposite ends of the health spectrum —were among 22 recipients of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowships, each carrying an $800,000 stipend with no strings attached.

Teresa Puthussery: Illuminating the Invisible

Puthussery, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science, is a neurobiologist and optometrist exploring how neural circuits of the retina encode visual information for the primate brain, according to Berkeley News.

Her journey to this recognition began in an unlikely place. She grew up in the small rural community of Warragul, Australia, located about an hour outside of Melbourne, the daughter of two school teachers—her mother taught math and her father taught science.

Puthussery, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science, is a neurobiologist and optometrist.

“I always liked being in my dad’s biology classroom. There were lots of interesting specimens, microscopes and fun things to play with,” Puthussery said. “I think his curiosity and passion for science rubbed off on me,” according to Berkeley News.

From Clinic to Lab

Puthussery began her career as a clinical optometrist before returning to school to become a vision scientist. The transition came after a pivotal encounter with a patient.

As a young optometrist, she saw a patient also in his early 20s who had retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited blinding disease, and was gradually losing his vision. “For me, this was kind of a turning point because I thought, ‘Wow, how is it that we have people in the prime of their lives, my age, progressively losing their vision and there’s nothing anyone can do about it,'” Puthussery said. “I think seeing that in the clinic made me realize that we’ve got some really big problems to solve, and that spurred me in the direction of doing a Ph.D. in vision research,” according to Berkeley News.

A Groundbreaking Discovery

Drawing on her training in optometry, deep knowledge of eye anatomy, and facility with neuroscientific experimental techniques, Puthussery discovered direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) in the primate retina, according to American Bazaar Online.

DSGCs detect the direction in which a visual scene is moving and prompt the eye to follow it, thereby maintaining a stable and clear image. They were first identified in the rabbit retina nearly 60 years ago. Research had not previously revealed DSGCs in primates, and scientists speculated that this complex visual feature was encoded in the primate brain, rather than in the retina, the publication reported.

Puthussery laid this speculation to rest, identifying DSGCs in primate retinas through a novel combination of genetic, electrophysiological, and imaging technologies, according to American Bazaar Online.

Her lab recently discovered a rare type of ganglion cell that, like a gimbal for a camera, helps to stabilize our gaze. These cells are crucial for helping us maintain a sharp, steady view of the world, Berkeley News reported.

A Moonshot for Vision Restoration

In collaboration with researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Puthussery is engaged in a “moonshot” project to help restore vision by generating new photoreceptors in a lab from stem cells and transplanting them into damaged retinas, according to Berkeley News.

“Twenty years ago, many of the discoveries that we’ve made as a field, and even the methods we use in my lab, would have seemed like science fiction,” Puthussery said, according to Berkeley News.

Puthussery received a BS (2000), a PhD (2005), and a postgraduate degree (2006) from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She was a postdoctoral research fellow and assistant research professor at Oregon Health and Science University prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley.

Nabarun Dasgupta: The Street Scientist

While Puthussery peers into the microscopic workings of the eye, Dasgupta looks at the macro picture of America’s overdose crisis—and both are trying to restore what’s been lost.

By his own description, Dasgupta digs through drug overdose data obsessively, scrutinizing the latest numbers from around the U.S. for clues about America’s deadly overdose crisis, NPR reported.

In 2024, the researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was one of the first scientists in the country to realize something new was happening: “I was going through [reports] state-by-state and all the graphs kind of pointed downwards,” Dasgupta told NPR. Fatal overdoses were dropping fast, the biggest, most hopeful shift in decades.

Dasgupta holds multiple titles at UNC-Chapel Hill, including Innovation Fellow at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and senior scientist at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center.

Dasgupta holds multiple titles at UNC-Chapel Hill: Innovation Fellow at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, senior scientist at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center, and leader of the UNC Street Drug Analysis Lab, according to the university.

Science in Service

His Street Drug Analysis Lab tests community-donated samples from around the country to determine what is in street drugs, then makes the results public in an online database. To date, the lab has completed more than 16,000 analyses with atomic precision, UNC reported.

In 2020, Dasgupta and colleagues established Remedy Alliance/For The People, a new model to distribute free and low-cost naloxone to harm reduction programs across the country. He worked with the Food and Drug Administration to revise licensing agreements, allowing the nonprofit to purchase naloxone directly from pharmaceutical companies. They currently supply more than 500 organizations around the country and have shipped more than 6 million doses of the lifesaving antidote.

Maya Doe-Simkins, co-director of Remedy Alliance/For The People, said that “the work that Nab is involved with definitely saves lives, to the tune of tens of thousands of people,” NPR reported.

Dasgupta received an AB (2001) from Princeton University, an MPH (2003) from Yale University, and a PhD (2013) from the University of North Carolina.

Parallel Paths to Impact

Though their fields differ dramatically, both scientists share a common philosophy: bridging the gap between laboratory discoveries and real-world human need.

“In the human retina, there are still many ganglion cell types whose functions remain unclear,” Puthussery said. “Not only will this provide a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of how we see and navigate the world, but it will also help in creating better tests to diagnose and monitor different retinal diseases, and in developing therapies to restore naturalistic sight after vision loss,” according to Berkeley News.

Dasgupta articulated a similar ethos: “Our mission is science in service. We want people to have access to the best knowledge and tools, so they can make better decisions about what they put in their bodies,” UNC reported.

Both scientists also credit collaborative spirit for their success. Doe-Simkins said Dasgupta is one of the few researchers studying addiction who has deep sources of information and knowledge in street communities. “Oftentimes there’s a disconnect, and Nab is different. He’s connected with people who are generously sharing, back and forth, ideas and innovation and creativity,” NPR reported.

Indian American Excellence

UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons said of Puthussery: “Dr. Puthussery’s work embodies the spirit of discovery and innovation that is at the core of Berkeley’s research mission and showcases how the work we do here has a transformative impact on human health and well-being,” according to Berkeley News.

Dasgupta is Carolina’s third MacArthur Fellow, following Tressie McMillan Cottom in 2020 and former Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz in 2011.

This story was aggregated by AI from several news reports and edited by American Kahani’s News Desk.