The Fannie and John Hertz Basis introduced that it has awarded fellowships to 10 PhD college students with ties to MIT. The celebrated award supplies every recipient with 5 years of doctoral-level analysis funding (as much as a complete of $250,000), which permits them the flexibleness and autonomy to pursue their very own revolutionary concepts.
Fellows additionally obtain lifelong entry to Hertz Basis applications, equivalent to occasions, mentoring, and networking. They be a part of the ranks of over 1,300 former Hertz Fellows who’re leaders and students in a spread of fields in science, engineering, and expertise. Connections amongst fellows over time have sparked collaborations in startups, analysis, and expertise commercialization.
The ten MIT recipients are amongst a complete of 18 Hertz Basis Fellows students chosen this yr from throughout the nation. 5 of them acquired their undergraduate levels on the Institute and can pursue their PhDs at different colleges. Two are present MIT graduate college students, and 4 will start their research right here within the fall.
“For greater than 60 years, Hertz Fellows have led scientific and technical innovation in nationwide safety, utilized organic sciences, supplies analysis, synthetic intelligence, house exploration, and extra. Their contributions have been important in advancing U.S. competitiveness,” says Stephen Fantone, chair of the Hertz Basis board of administrators and founder and president of Optikos Corp. “I’m excited to look at our latest Hertz Fellows as they pursue difficult analysis and proceed the sturdy custom of making use of their work for the larger good.”
This yr’s MIT-affiliated awardees are:
Owen Dugan ’24 graduated from MIT in simply two-and-a-half years with a level in physics, and he plans to pursue a PhD in pc science at Stanford College. His analysis pursuits lie on the intersection of AI and physics. As an undergraduate, he performed analysis in a broad vary of areas, together with utilizing physics ideas to reinforce the velocity of huge language fashions and growing machine studying algorithms that routinely uncover scientific theories. He was acknowledged with MIT’s Excellent Undergraduate Analysis Award and is a U.S. Presidential Scholar, a Neo Scholar, and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Dugan holds a number of patents, co-developed an app to scale back meals waste, and co-founded a startup that builds instruments to confirm the authenticity of digital pictures.
Kaylie Hausknecht will start her physics doctorate at MIT within the fall, having finishing her undergraduate diploma in physics and astrophysics at Harvard College. Whereas there, her undergraduate analysis targeted on growing new machine studying strategies to resolve issues in a spread of fields, equivalent to fluid dynamics, astrophysics, and condensed matter physics. She acquired the Hoopes Prize for her senior thesis, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and received two main writing awards. As well as, she accomplished 5 NASA internships. As an intern, she helped determine 301 new exoplanets utilizing archival knowledge from the Kepler House Telescope. Hausknecht served because the co-president of Harvard’s chapter of Science Membership for Women, which works to encourage ladies from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue STEM.
Elijah Lew-Smith majored in physics at Brown College and plans to pursue a doctoral diploma in physics at MIT. He’s a theoretical physicist with broad mental pursuits in efficient area concept (EFT), which is the research of techniques with many interacting levels of freedom. EFT reveals easy methods to extract the related, long-distance habits from sophisticated microscopic guidelines. In 2023, he acquired a nationwide award to work on making use of EFT systematically to non-equilibrium and lively techniques equivalent to fluctuating hydrodynamics or flocking birds. As well as, Lew-Smith acquired a scholarship from the U.S. State Division to dwell for a yr in Dakar, Senegal, and later studied at ’École Polytechnique in Paris, France.
Rupert Li ’24 earned his bachelor’s and grasp’s levels at MIT in arithmetic in addition to pc science, knowledge science, and economics, with a minor in enterprise analytics.He was named a 2024 Marshall Scholar and can research overseas for a yr at Cambridge College earlier than matriculating at Stanford College for a arithmetic doctorate. As an undergraduate, Li authored 12 math analysis articles, primarily in combinatorics, but in addition together with discrete geometry, chance, and harmonic evaluation. He was acknowledged for his work with a Barry Goldwater Scholarship and an honorable point out for the Morgan Prize, one of many highest undergraduate honors in arithmetic.
Amani Maina-Kilaas is a first-year doctoral pupil at MIT within the Division of Mind and Cognitive Sciences, the place he research computational psycholinguistics. Particularly, he’s eager about utilizing synthetic intelligence as a scientific device to check how the thoughts works, and utilizing what we all know concerning the thoughts to develop extra cognitively life like fashions. Maina-Kilaas earned his bachelor’s diploma in pc science and arithmetic from Harvey Mudd Faculty. There, he performed analysis relating to intention notion and theoretical machine studying, incomes the Astronaut Scholarship and Computing Analysis Affiliation’s Excellent Undergraduate Researcher Award.
Zoë Marschner ’23 is a doctoral pupil at Carnegie Mellon College engaged on geometry processing, a subfield of pc graphics targeted on easy methods to characterize and work with geometric knowledge digitally; in her analysis, she goals to make these representations able to enabling essentially higher algorithms for fixing geometric issues throughout science and engineering. As an undergraduate at MIT, she earned a bachelor’s diploma in pc science and math and pursued analysis in geometry processing, together with repairing hexahedral meshes and detecting intersections between high-order surfaces. She additionally interned at Walt Disney Animation Studios, the place she labored on collision detection algorithms for simulation. Marschner is a recipient of the Nationwide Science Basis’s Graduate Analysis Fellowship and the Goldwater Scholarship.
Zijian (William) Niu will begin a doctoral program in computational and techniques biology at MIT within the fall. He has a selected curiosity in growing new strategies for imaging proteins and different biomolecules of their native mobile environments and utilizing these knowledge to construct computational fashions for predicting their dynamics and molecular interactions. Niu acquired his bachelor’s diploma in biochemistry, biophysics, and physics from the College of Pennsylvania. His undergraduate analysis concerned growing novel computational strategies for organic picture evaluation. He was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for making a deep-learning algorithm for precisely detecting tiny diffraction-limited spots in fluorescence microscopy pictures that outperformed current strategies in quantifying spatial transcriptomics knowledge.
James Roney acquired his bachelor’s and grasp’s levels from Harvard College in pc science and statistics, respectively. He’s at present working as a machine studying analysis engineer at D.E. Shaw Analysis. His previous analysis has targeted on deciphering the interior workings of AlphaFold and modeling most cancers evolution. Roney plans to pursue a PhD in computational biology at MIT, with a particular curiosity in growing computational fashions of protein construction, operate, and evolution and utilizing these fashions to engineer novel proteins for functions in biotechnology.
Anna Sappington ’19 is a pupil within the Harvard College-MIT MD-PhD Program, at present within the first yr of her doctoral program at MIT in electrical engineering and pc science. She is eager about constructing strategies to foretell evolutionary occasions, particularly connections amongst machine studying, biology, and chemistry to develop reinforcement studying fashions impressed by evolutionary biology. Sappington graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s diploma in pc science and molecular biology. As an undergraduate, she was awarded a 2018 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and chosen as a Burchard Scholar and an Amgen Scholar. After graduating, she earned a grasp’s diploma in genomic drugs from the College of Cambridge, the place she studied as a Marshall Scholar, in addition to a grasp’s diploma in machine studying from College Faculty London.
Jason Yang ’22 acquired his bachelor’s diploma in biology with a minor in pc science from MIT and is at present a doctoral pupil in genetics at Stanford College. He’s eager about understanding the organic processes that underlie human well being and illness. At MIT, and subsequently at Massachusetts Basic Hospital, Yang labored on the mechanisms concerned in neurodegeneration in repeat enlargement ailments, uncovering a novel molecular consequence of repeat protein aggregation.
