An Indian-origin surgeon is among a group of 25 people named by a prestigious US-based private grant-making foundation as its Fellows for 2006.

Forty-year-old Atul Gawande, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, will receive $500,000 in a "no strings attached" support over the next five years from Chicago-based John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation.

Among others to get the "genius grants", which recognises people in various fields, are 37-year-old Pakistan-origin painter Shazia Sikander as also deep-sea explorer Edith Widder of Florida, jazz violinist Regina Carter from New York and Kevin Eggan, a biologist and principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Gawande received an MA from the University of Oxford, an MD from Harvard Medical School and other degrees from Stanford University and Harvard School of Public Health and has been an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a surgeon in the Division of General and Gastrointestinal Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Gawande is also a staff writer for The New Yorker and writes a column 'Notes of a Suregon' for the New England Journal of Medicine.

The foundation notes that as a surgeon, Gawande has a critical eye and a fresh perspective to modern surgical practice "articulating its realities, complexities and challenges in the interest of improving outcomes and saving lives".