When Vincenzo Vitelli fielded a call from an unknown number a few weeks ago, he exhibited extreme skepticism, believing it was a fraud or perhaps a joke orchestrated by a pal.
Vitelli, 48, a theoretical physicist and tenured professor at the University of Chicago, deals in mind-bending ideas every day, but the notion that he’d just won a MacArthur Fellowship and the $800,000 of no-strings-attached money that comes with it seemed beyond the pale. The 2026 Fellows were announced by the foundation Tuesday.
“It took the people speaking on the other side of the phone quite a few minutes to convince me this was not a joke,” he said.
The fellowship is an honor that is “intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations,” according to the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Vitelli’s work centers on understanding the behavior of information-processing agents — including humans, bots, cells and even individual molecules, which all possess the capacity for adaptive, intelligent behavior.
“Our research centers on a fundamental question: What laws govern complex systems composed of many such agents? What happens when you put them together and they start interacting? What is the emergent behavior? Can you describe them as if it was a material?”
Vitelli, who grew up in the historic town of Matera in southern Italy, said he’d like to use the fellowship money, which is paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years, to allow him to focus more on work.
“I’d like to use it to get even more freedom [on] the personal level, to intensify my push towards studying a less conventional form of physics,” said Vitelli, who leads a team of about a dozen researchers.
A significant part of his work is simply inventing concepts.
“In part, my work is to imagine new materials and potentially even come up with ideas that change the notion of what a material actually is, blurring the lines of what people call materials, what people call machines, perhaps even what people call brains.”
Vitelli says his mind can shift into imagination mode during his daily e-bike commute from his South Loop home to the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus, at a concert or while taking in a play at one of Chicago’s many theaters, or at home with his wife and 5-month-old son.
“It is something that can be somewhat irritating to the people around you who may observe lapses of attention on your part because your mind is flying somewhere else,” he said.
Vitelli’s concepts have undergone laboratory testing, but the research is still at the level of theoretical and has not resulted in any new technology or patents, he said.
When asked if he sometimes tells people he’s an insurance salesman so he doesn’t have to try explaining complex theories to laymen — like newspaper reporters — Vitelli said the opposite is more often true.
“Usually, if you say you’re a theoretical physicist, you can achieve the same results more rapidly,” he said with a laugh.
Vitelli has been a tenured physics professor at the University of Chicago since 2017. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and came to Chicago from the Netherlands, where he worked as a professor at Leiden University.
“Chicago is a very vibrant city,” he said. “I’m coming to appreciate it more and more.”