A Virginia Tech professor is one of 24 people to receive $500,000 grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Marc Edwards, a professor in civil and environmental engineering, has received national attention in the past for his work on lead contamination in water systems. In 2003, he was the first to call attention to the leaching of lead into home water supplies in Washington, D.C., leading Time magazine to dub him "the plumbing professor" in a 2004 article.

The MacArthur Foundation solicits nominations each year from a spectrum of disciplines inside and outside of academe. The foundation has given out the annual awards to 756 people since the program started in 1981. The nominations are anonymous, and an anonymous committee of 12 people winnows the thousands of nominees over the course of a year. The nominees don't know they're being considered until they're notified, and they can use the grants however they see fit, no strings attached.

Daneil Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows program, said he thinks Edwards is the first person from Virginia Tech to receive the award while at the university. The winners don't hear from the foundation again. Socolow said that's by design.

"Creative people need space, they need time and they need, most of all, control," he said.

Edwards received his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle. He came to Virginia Tech in 1997 and is one of three lead investigators of a National Science Foundation project related to the effects of corrosion on drinking water quality and infrastructure. Earlier this year he was one of 12 professors in Virginia who received Outstanding Faculty Awards from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

The MacArthur Foundation, based in Chicago, is a private, independent grant-making institution dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster lasting improvement in the human condition. With assets of more than $6 billion and grants and program-related investments totaling approximately $225 million annually, MacArthur is one of the nation's largest private philanthropic foundations.

On the Net: www.macfound.org