The joke in academia is that the Institute destroys geniuses. All the great names associated with it did their best work before going there. That said, I believe Einstein and Godel did some interesting late-career work together there or something, on the nature of time.

As Richard Hamming said in his famous talk, You and Your Research

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robi...

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.