Stanford added another genius to its rosters last Tuesday, namely Pehr Harbury. The associate professor of biochemistry was just named one of this year’s 25 recipients of the $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the “genius” grant.

The award’s main criteria are “extraordinary originality and dedication in creative pursuits” according to MacArthur’s Web site. It is not restricted by field, and in the past has been awarded to writers, filmmakers, poets and social scientists as well as those in the natural sciences.

The nomination process is highly secret, with around 100 nominators feeding names to a selection committee of about a dozen. Everyone in the process serves anonymously, so as not to bias the results.

“Everyone around the office was really excited,” Harbury said. “The Chemistry Department is like a family.”

According to Harbury, the grant was most likely awarded for his work on DNA display.

“It’s a way to apply test-tube evolution to synthetic combinatory chemistry libraries, the most obvious application of which is for drug discovery,” he said. “We’ve struggled terribly with funding over the past few years and a lot of people were aware of the work and were aware of the problems with funding.”

Harbury began researching the topic while completing his graduate thesis at Harvard.

“I tried to predict how an amino acid sequence would fold up into a three-dimensional fold,” he said. “The specific aspect of the problem I was working on was trying to engineer new sequences that would fold up into shapes that didn’t exist in nature.”

After graduate school, Harbury, a native of the Bay Area, completed his post-doctoral studies at UC-Berkeley and arrived at Stanford seven years ago.

The head of the Biochemistry Department, Suzanne Pfeffer praises Harbury’s work and accomplishments.

“Everyone’s delighted; there’s no one I can think of who is more deserving,” she said. “Pehr is incredibly smart, very creative and he’s a wonderful citizen and a really dedicated teacher. He still works in a lab among his students and post-docs, that’s fairly unusual in this stage of his career, but it’s a part of his success.”

Graduate student Jarret Wrenn, a member of Harbury’s lab, also commended his work ethic.

“His research is striking; it’s very different from any other professor that I’ve talked to,” Wrenn said. “He had three or four very big high-level projects that were very cool and out there.”

Rebecca Fenn, another one of Harbury’s graduate students, agreed.

“He’s very enthusiastic about everyone’s projects and has great ideas,” she said. “He’s good at encouraging everyone to keep plowing ahead with their project at every stage. When you run into different problems he’s really interested in coming up with new ways to solve the problem”.

The award, paid out over five years, comes with no expectations.

According to MacArthur’s Web site, “The Foundation does not require or expect specific products or reports from MacArthur Fellows, and does not evaluate recipients’ creativity during the term of the fellowship. The MacArthur Fellowship is a ‘no strings attached’ award in support of people, not projects.”

Harbury said he will probably put his award money in an unrestricted fund at Stanford to support the research in his lab.

“Since it doesn’t have a timed finish line on it, I can save it for future rainy days,” he said.

Harbury brings the number of Stanford professors who have been named MacArthur fellows up to 23.