MIT associates named 2025 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows | MIT Information

Two present MIT associates and 7 extra alumni are amongst these named to the 2025 cohort of AI2050 Fellows.  

Zongyi Li, a postdoc within the MIT Pc Science and Synthetic Intelligence Lab, and Tess Smidt ’12, an affiliate professor {of electrical} engineering and laptop science (EECS), had been each named as AI2050 Early Profession Fellows. 

Seven extra MIT alumni had been additionally honored. AI2050 Early Profession Fellows embody Brian Hie SM ’19, PhD ’21; Natasha Mary Jaques PhD ’20; Martin Anton Schrimpf PhD ’22; Lindsey Raymond SM ’19, PhD ’24, who will be part of the MIT college in EECS, the Division of Economics, and the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing in 2026; and Ellen Dee Zhong PhD ’22. AI2050 Senior Fellows embody Surya Ganguli ’98, MNG ’98; and Luke Zettlemoyer SM ’03, PhD ’09. 

AI2050 Fellows are introduced yearly by Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit group based in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to speed up scientific data and breakthroughs with probably the most promising, superior instruments to help a thriving planet. The group prioritizes analysis in areas poised for influence together with AI and superior computing, astrophysics, biosciences, local weather, and area — in addition to supporting researchers in quite a lot of disciplines by means of its science programs program. 

Li is postdoc in CSAIL working with affiliate professor of EECS Kaiming He. Li’s analysis focuses on growing neural operator strategies to speed up scientific computing. He obtained his PhD in computing and mathematical sciences from Caltech, the place he was suggested by Anima Anandkumar and Andrew Stuart. He holds undergraduate levels in laptop science and arithmetic from Washington College in St. Louis. 

Li’s work has been supported by a Kortschak Scholarship, PIMCO Fellowship, Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, Nvidia Fellowship, and MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Fellowship. He has additionally accomplished three summer time internships at Nvidia. Li will be part of the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences as an assistant professor of arithmetic and knowledge science in fall 2026.

Smidt, affiliate professor {of electrical} engineering and laptop science (EECS), is the principal investigator of the Atomic Architects group on the Analysis Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), the place she works on the intersection of physics, geometry, and machine studying to design algorithms that support within the understanding of bodily programs beneath bodily and geometric constraints, with purposes to the design each of latest supplies and new molecules. She has a selected concentrate on symmetries current in 3D bodily programs, reminiscent of rotation, translation, and reflection.

Smidt earned her BS in physics from MIT in 2012 and her PhD in physics from the College of California at Berkeley in 2018. Previous to becoming a member of the MIT EECS college in 2021, she was the 2018 Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory, and a software program engineering intern on the Google Accelerated Sciences group, the place she developed Euclidean symmetry equivariant neural networks that naturally deal with 3D geometry and geometric tensor knowledge. In addition to the AI2050 fellowship, she has obtained an Air Power Workplace of Scientific Analysis Younger Investigator Program award, the EECS Excellent Educator Award, and a Transformative Analysis Fund award.

Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative geared toward serving to to resolve onerous issues in AI. Inside their analysis, every fellow will deal with the central motivating query of AI2050: “It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be vastly helpful to society. What occurred? What are an important issues we solved and the alternatives and prospects we realized to make sure this consequence?”