MIT senior Sadhana Lolla has won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students the opportunity to pursue graduate studies in their chosen field at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Established in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship offers full-cost postgraduate scholarships to exceptional candidates from countries outside the UK. The fellowship's mission is to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.
Lolla, a senior from Clarksburg, Maryland, is majoring in computer science and has minors in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, she will pursue a master's degree in technology policy.
In the future, Lolla aims to lead conversations about technology deployment and development for marginalized communities, such as the rural Indian village where her family lives, while also conducting research on embodied intelligence.
At MIT, Lolla conducts research on safe and reliable robotics and deep learning in the Distributed Robotics Lab with Professor Daniela Rus. His research focuses on bias reduction strategies for autonomous vehicles and accelerating robotic design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis AI, she works to create uncertainty-aware deep learning frameworks that have impacts on computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Outside of research, Lolla leads initiatives to make computer science education more accessible globally. She is an instructor for Class 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), one of the largest AI courses in the world, reaching millions of students each year. She is responsible for the Momentum AI program, the only US program that teaches AI to underserved students for free, and she has taught hundreds of students in the north of Scotland through the MIT Global Teaching Labs program .
Lolla also served as director of xFair, MIT's largest student-run career fair, and is a board member of Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible to students of all musical horizons. In her free time, she enjoys singing, solving crosswords, and cooking.
“Between Sadhana’s impressive research in the Distributed Robotics Group, her volunteer teaching with Momentum AI, and her internships and extracurricular experiences, she has developed the skills needed to become a leader,” says Kim Benard, associate dean for distinguished scholarship. in career counseling and professional counseling. Development. “Her work at Cambridge will give her time to think about reducing bias in systems and the ethical implications of her work. I am proud that she represents MIT within the Gates Cambridge community.