Before the MacArthur Foundation awarded him what is informally called a "genius grant," Sokoni Karanja already was living up to an earlier appellation.

This one came more than two decades ago from villagers in a Tanzanian farming community when Karanja still was Lathan Johnson, a doctoral student from Topeka, Kan., visiting Africa for research. Because Johnson was always lending a hand in the fields, building schools, building minds, the villagers called him "person from the sea with knowledge who is willing to share."

Among those recipients are four people with ties to the Chicago area: Nancy D. Cartwright, chairwoman of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Stephen Lee, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago; Frank von Hippel, professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, formerly of Argonne National Lab near Lemont; and Henry Tutwiler Wright, an archeologist who received his Ph.D. from the U. of C.