Spradley’s program has positively identified some 300 migrants at the Texas border
The MacArthur Foundation on Tuesday named its 2026 class of 20 MacArthur Fellows, awarding each recipient $800,000 over five years with no strings attached. Two of this year’s recipients — Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University, and Felipe De Brigard, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University — are being recognized, according to NPR, for their work “at the intersection of science and justice.”
Spradley received the fellowship for Operation Identification (OpID), a program she created to identify the remains of migrants who died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Texas. Her effort began in 2013 in Brooks County, when the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team enlisted her to exhume the body of a young Salvadoran man named Elmer Esau Barahona — only to discover that the funeral home did not know where he was buried.
“We don’t know where he’s buried,” the funeral home staff told her. Nor did they know where more than a hundred other Central American migrants who had died that year were interred. Spradley says the practice is illegal — and a human rights violation. “Everyone should have dignity in death,” she says. “And there is no dignity in taking someone, burying them and just forgetting about it — and never returning to try to further investigate who this person was or how to get them back to their family. The torture that the families were going through, not knowing where their loved ones were.”
That is when Spradley says she and her team realized: “We are going to have to exhume this entire cemetery.”
The county had been overwhelmed by deaths. “It was just too much for the county to handle,” she says. “They didn’t know what to do. And they started just burying them” without keeping records of who was interred where. Spradley and her team call this “administrative loss,” “where they just become lost in the shuffle and fall through the cracks and [are] buried forever without any chance of identification.”
Barahona had fled El Salvador in 2012 after a gang pressured him to join. He and other migrants paid a coyote — the person who guides them across the border — to lead them. They were part of a surge of Central American migrants that year crossing from Mexico into Texas, “fleeing gang violence, political persecution, poverty — in record numbers,” says Spradley. “Texas, like every border state, has pretty hostile terrain,” she explains. “It’s all just scrub brush and cedar trees and sandy soil. So it’s hard to walk, it’s hot, and there’s nothing to orient you north. So sometimes people get lost, they can’t keep up, and they might wander around in circles.”
When Barahona’s family didn’t hear from him, they soon realized something was wrong. Spradley says the coyote phoned Barahona’s aunt and said to her, “Hey, we left your nephew behind next to a tree. There’s a brown plaid shirt tied around his knee.” Officials buried him in the local cemetery without recording the plot.
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team — a group that looks for, identifies, and repatriates the bodies of missing people who have died — said it would pay for the DNA analysis of the bones so Barahona’s remains could be returned to El Salvador, and enlisted Spradley and her team, who were based nearby, to recover the body.
OpID now searches multiple cemeteries across southern Texas, sometimes using ground-penetrating radar. Spradley and her colleagues try to extract identifying information from skeletal remains or by fingerprinting individuals, even in advanced states of decomposition — the FBI trained them on the use of rehydration to recover prints from decomposed fingertips. These efforts have produced positive identifications for some 300 individuals.
Spradley also helped form the Forensic Border Coalition to push for policy changes. As a result of the coalition’s efforts, the FBI has changed its policy to include DNA from Latin American families in its federal database, which has eased identification work. “Although Brooks County was a worst-case scenario for years,” she says, “local officials started working together and now set an excellent example for other rural border counties to follow.”
In one case, a brown plaid shirt turned up in Spradley’s lab. “I walked into the lab and I saw this shirt hanging on a clothesline,” recalls Spradley. “And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this could be Elmer.’” And it was. “That really provided proof to us,” she says, “that what we were doing is a good thing, and the right thing.”
De Brigard, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, is being recognized for rethinking what memory is. “I like to say that I have been interested in memory for as long as I can remember,” he offers.
For a long time, memory was thought to be archival, like a library whose books could be shelved and then pulled off to be read. It “suggests that every time that we have an experience, it gets stored untainted, unchanged,” says De Brigard. “Then, at the time of retrieval, we just go back as if we were going to an archive.” But De Brigard believes this perspective is “entirely wrong.” Instead, memory is a cobbling together of fragments of experiences, knowledge, expectations, and assumptions — and can be flawed and malleable.
“What the memory is doing at the time of retrieval,” De Brigard explains, “is piecing together bits of information that got stored not only from the original event but also from other events in the past.”
To explore this idea further, De Brigard and his colleagues have launched a project called Memoria y Perdón, which translates to “Memory and Forgiveness” in Spanish. The team is exploring the memories of those living in the north of De Brigard’s home country of Colombia who were victims of intense paramilitary and guerrilla violence.
“There were murders, massacres, kidnappings, disappearances,” he says. “We’re talking perhaps 100,000 people that were victims in that area.” Once a peace agreement was signed, many of the perpetrators returned home to the same communities they had terrorized. “Reconciliation becomes almost a matter of life or death,” says De Brigard.
For five years and counting, he and his team have been interviewing these victims, taking their vitals, and recording brain data. And they found that forgiveness in the present can dilute the potency of traumatic memories.
“Memory is in part modifiable because that modification helps us to carry the burden of our past,” De Brigard says.
The two researchers’ work converges on what happens when a person cannot locate or reconstruct what they have lost: Spradley recovers migrants’ remains for their families; De Brigard studies how survivors of mass violence reshape their memories over time. “When you lose someone and you don’t know what happened,” Spradley said, “all you have is memories.”
Other 2026 MacArthur Fellows include a bioengineer creating nanotechnologies to improve vaccines and drug delivery, a climate researcher examining the interaction between polar sea ice and global change, and an organic chemist using electricity to help build complex molecules more efficiently and sustainably.