MacArthur Foundation

Growing up in Alief in southwest Houston, Hahrie Han didn't think she would be a political scientist. Instead, she had her sights set on physics.

"I actually spent the summer before my freshman year in college interning in a physics lab at Rice University," Han, now 50, told Houston Public Media. "And then I went to college and realized that, actually, while I still find physics extremely interesting, that the kind of social-political world was so interesting to me that I wanted to figure out how to make sense of it in a different way."

Now, Han is a Harvard and Stanford-educated professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. She's also the recent recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program, commonly referred to as the genius grant — an $800,000, no-

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