“Notions of objectivity and subjectivity are getting questioned more and more,” she said of the world of documentary filmmaking. She said that as a female filmmaker in a mostly male world, “it makes a difference” in the conversations that unfold when she picks up her camera.

Like Ms. Almada, Mr. Chetty also found early success. He was a tenured professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, by the age of 27. He was born in New Delhi; his high-achieving family came to Milwaukee when he was 9. His two older sisters are college professors, his mother is a pediatric pulmonologist, and his father is an economist.

He was having lunch with his mother when the MacArthur phone call came. “She was very excited,” he said. “She was happy that we moved here, and things turned out so well.”

Mr. Chetty took part in two studies that have made headlines because they sought to quantify the value of good teachers. One released this year, conducted with economists at Harvard and Columbia, tracked one million students in a large urban school district over 20 years and calculated that replacing an average teacher with an excellent one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $1.4 million. Good teachers who lifted standardized test scores also had students less likely to become teenage parents and more likely to attend a good college, among other positive results.

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“I’m motivated to ask these questions about why some students have good outcomes and some do not by reading the paper or observing the real world,” Mr. Chetty said. “At a broad level government policies can impact people’s lives, but we often don’t have the scientific evidence.”

He is already immersed in his next project, which explores what factors allow children to move up the economic ladder, relative to their parents.

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Dr. Coleman, a geriatrician and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, is director of the Care Transitions Program, which trains nurses and social workers to help patients and their caregivers manage issues like medication use and organizing appointments. The impetus behind starting the program was the constant stream of stories about patients discharged from hospitals only to be readmitted in short order. A recent study estimated that 20 percent of Medicare patients discharged from hospitals are readmitted within 30 days because of lapses of communication among patients and various health care providers. “We liken the discharge experience to a drive-by shooting,” Dr. Coleman said.

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Hundreds of hospitals and community agencies across the country and abroad have adopted the intervention, which has been shown to reduce the likelihood of readmission by 20 to 50 percent.

The other winners in the sciences this year are: Maria Chudnovsky, 35, a mathematician at Columbia University; Olivier Guyon; 36, an optical physicist and astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson; Elissa Hallem, 34, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles; Sarkis Mazmanian, 39, a medical microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology; Terry Plank, 48 a geochemist at Columbia University; Nancy Rabalais, 62, a marine ecologist at Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium; Daniel Spielman, 42, a computer scientist at Yale; Melody Swartz, 43, a bioengineer at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland; and Benjamin Warf, 54, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston.

And the other winners in the arts are: Uta Barth, 54 a conceptual photographer in Los Angeles; Maurice Lim Miller, 66, a social services innovator in Oakland, Calif; Dylan C. Penningroth 41, a historian at Northwestern University; Laura Poitras, 48, a documentary filmmaker in New York City; Benoît Rolland, 58, a stringed instrument bow maker in Boston; and An-My Lê, 52, a photographer at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.