William Tarpeh awarded MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship

UC Berkeley Engineering alum William Tarpeh (M.S.’13, Ph.D.’17 Environmental Eng) has been named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, joining 21 other recipients to receive the prestigious award this year. Often called a “genius grant,” the fellowship recognizes “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

The award provides $800,000 in unrestricted funds over five years from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Started in 1981, the program now includes 1,175 fellows, selected for their “ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions.”

Tarpeh, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, is working to develop sustainable and practical methods to recover valuable chemical resources from wastewater. His research focuses on recycling nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus using resource recovery technologies that require minimal infrastructure and energy.

Among his many innovations, Tarpeh has developed electrochemical-based processes to convert nitrogen in urine waste streams into ammonia-based products, which can be used in fertilizer or in household cleaners and industrial chemical production. He also has demonstrated an electrocatalyst-in-a-box (ECaB) that recovers ammonia directly from municipal wastewater and is being tested with agricultural run-off in California farm fields.

In addition to Tarpeh, UC Berkeley’s Teresa Puthussery, an associate professor of optometry and vision science, and alum Kareem El-Badry (M.A.’18, Ph.D.’21 Astrophysics) were also named fellows.

For more details on this year’s MacArthur Fellows and past winners, view the official announcement.

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