The years of work that Becca Heller has put in as a human rights lawyer who works as director and co-founder of the Manhattan-based International Refugee Assistance Project has paid off in the form of a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Heller is part of a group of 25 journalists, artists, scientists and others who were picked for the prestigious fellowship. The fellows receive $625,000 grants that are distributed over five years; Heller was the only practicing attorney to make the cut. The names of the nominators and their selection process are mostly kept secret.

Heller, a Yale Law School graduate, co-founded IRAP in 2008 while she was still a 2L at Yale Law to assist Iraqi refugees displaced by the war to get resettled in the West. Since then the group, which is part of the Urban Justice Center, has grown into a vast network of volunteer attorneys and law students from 29 law schools and more than 100 law firms around the world.