This year’s class of 20 fellows — whittled down from thousands of nominees, some over a period of years, and publicly announced Wednesday — includes artists, scientists, legal scholars and activists. They fight climate change, examine gene expression and create music. They write novels and study machine learning.

And over the next five years, they will each receive $800,000, in quarterly installments, to use as they see fit.

The 2016 presidential election made clear to Bassin that “we were living through a global democratic recession,” he says. Protect Democracy was his response. The organization’s software VoteShield is designed to fight election fraud. Its National Task Force on Election Crises prepares for unprecedented election catastrophes. Its Law for Truth project files defamation lawsuits to help people harmed by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

The grants, given every year since 1981, can produce a complicated mix of feelings: honor at the recognition, shock at the money, reflection over the reasons for their work. In California’s East Bay area, Diana Greene Foster snuck away from her college-age children and their friends to return the foundation’s phone call. She is a demographer who studies abortion — specifically the adverse affects of not receiving a desired one, which is more common now in a post-Roe v. Wade era.

“It’s a mix of being happy that I was able to do research that useful and sad that we’re at a point where we’re having this conversation,” says Foster, 52, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco. As states decide whether to pass their own abortion bans, Foster wants the recognition to shine light on her findings — including that those who are denied abortions are more likely to be unemployed and live under the poverty line.

“My hope is they will take the scientific evidence and not just vote on this on the basis of politics,” she says. On a broader level, she hopes it will show “that it’s possible to do good research, even on controversial topics.”

The fellows are 12 women, seven men and one nonbinary individual. They hail from across the country, from Arizona to New York; four live in the Boston area and two each live in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans.