Haruko Wainwright joined the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2022, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She received her BEng in Engineering Physics from Kyoto University, Japan in 2003; her MS in nuclear engineering in 2006, MA in statistics in 2010 and PhD in nuclear engineering in 2010 from University of California, Berkeley. Before joining MIT, she was a Staff Scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and an adjunct professor in Nuclear Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on environmental modeling and monitoring technologies, with a particular emphasis on nuclear waste and nuclear-related contamination. She has been developing Bayesian methods for multi-type multiscale data integration and model-data integration. She leads and co-leads multiple interdisciplinary projects, including the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Long-term Environmental Monitoring Systems (ALTEMIS) project, and the Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) initiative. 

César Terrer joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor in July 2021. He obtained his PhD in Ecosystem Ecology and Climate Change from Imperial College London, where he started working at the interface between experiments and models to better understand the effects of elevated CO2 on vegetation. His research has advanced the understanding on the effects of CO2 in terrestrial ecosystems, the role of soil nutrients in a climate change context, and plant-soil interactions. Synthesizing observational data from CO2 experiments and satellites through meta-analysis and machine-learning, César has found that microbial interactions between plants and soils play a major role in the carbon cycle at a global scale, affecting the speed of global warming.

Loza Tadesse will join the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor in July 2023. She received her PhD in bioengineering from Stanford University in 2021 and previously was a medical student at St. Paul Hospital Millennium Medical College in Ethiopia. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Tadesse’s past research combines Raman spectroscopy and machine learning to develop a rapid, all-optical, and label free bacterial diagnostic and antibiotic susceptibility testing system that aims to circumvent the time-consuming culturing step in ‘gold standard’ methods. She aims to establish a research program that develops next generation point-of-care diagnostic devices using spectroscopy, optical, and machine learning tools for application in resource limited clinical settings such as developing nations, military sites, and space exploration. Tadesse has been listed as a 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 in healthcare, received many awards including the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Career Development Award, the Stanford DARE Fellowship and the Gates Foundation “Call to Action” $200K grant for SciFro Inc., an educational non-profit in Ethiopia, which she co-founded.

Tess Smidt joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in September 2021. She earned her SB in Physics from MIT in 2012 and her PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. She is the principal investigator of the Atomic Architects group at the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), where she works at the intersection of physics, geometry, and machine learning to design algorithms that aid in the understanding and design of physical systems. Her research focuses on machine learning that incorporates physical and geometric constraints, with applications to materials design. Prior to joining the MIT EECS faculty, she was the 2018 Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Software Engineering Intern on the Google Accelerated Sciences team, where she developed Euclidean symmetry equivariant neural networks which naturally handle 3D geometry and geometric tensor data.

Vincent Sitzmann will join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July 2022. He earned a BSc from the Technical University of Munich and an MSc and PhD from Stanford University. Sitzmann is currently a postdoctoral associate at the MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab under the mentorship of professors Josh Tenenbaum, Bill Freeman, and Fredo Durand. His research is at the intersection of machine learning, graphics, neural rendering, and computer vision. He seeks to build algorithms that learn to reconstruct, understand, and interact with 3D environments from incomplete observations like the way humans can. Sitzmann was awarded with the NeurIPS 2019 Honorable Mention Outstanding New Directions Paper Award.

Ritu Raman joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an Assistant Professor and Brit (1961) & Alex (1949) d’Arbeloff Career Development Chair in August 2021. Raman received her PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in 2016 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Robert Langer at MIT, funded by a NASEM Ford Foundation Fellowship and a L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship. Raman’s lab designs adaptive living materials powered by assemblies of living cells for applications ranging from medicine to machines. Currently, she is focused on using biological materials and engineering tools to build living neuromuscular tissues. Her goal is to help restore mobility to those who have lost it after disease or trauma and to deploy biological actuators as functional components in machines. Raman published the book Biofrabrication with MIT Press in September 2021. She was in the MIT Technology Review ‘35 Innovators Under 35’ 2019 class, the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ 2018 class, and has received numerous awards including being named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2020 and receiving the Science and Sartorius Prize for Regenerative Medicine and Cell Therapy in 2019. Ritu has championed many initiatives to empower women in science, including being named an AAAS IF/THEN ambassador and founding the Women in Innovation and Stem Database at MIT (WISDM).

Qin (Maggie) Qi joined the Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2022. She earned dual BS from Cornell University and a PhD from Stanford University. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Her research focuses on combining extensive theoretical and computational work on predictive models that guide experimental design. She seeks to investigate particle-cell biomechanics and function for better targeted cell-based therapies. Qi also plans to design microphysiological systems that elucidate hydrodynamics in complex organs, including the delivery of drugs to the eye, and to examine ionic liquids as complex fluids for biomaterial design. Her aim is to push the boundaries of fluid mechanics, transport phenomena, and soft matter for human health and innovate precision healthcare solutions. Qi was a participant in the inaugural class of the MIT Rising Stars in chemical engineering. 

Darcy McRose will join the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor in August 2022. She completed a BS degree in Earth Systems at Stanford and a PhD in Geosciences at Princeton. Darcy is currently conducting postdoctoral work at Caltech where she is mentored by Professor Dianne Newman in the Divisions of Biology and Biological Engineering and Geological and Planetary Sciences. Her research program focuses on microbe-environment interactions and their effects on biogeochemical cycles and incorporates techniques ranging from microbial physiology and genetics to geochemistry. A particular emphasis for this work is the production and use of secondary metabolites and small molecules in soils and sediments. McRose received the Caltech BBE Division postdoctoral fellowship in 2019 and is currently a Simons Foundation Marine Microbial Ecology postdoctoral fellow as well as a L’Oréal USA for Women in Science fellow.

Mina Konakovic Lukovic will join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July 2022. She earned a BSc and MSc from the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Belgrade and a PhD from the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Lukovic is currently a Schmidt Science Fellow at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, where she is being mentored by Professor Wojciech Matusik. Her research focuses on computer graphics, computational fabrication, 3D geometry processing, and machine learning, including architectural geometry and the design of programmable materials. She was awarded the ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention, Eurographics PhD Award, and 2021 SIAM Activity Group on Geometric Design Early Career Prize.

Aristide Gumyusenge joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in January 2022. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University working with Professor Zhenan Bao and Professor Alberto Salleo. He received a BS in chemistry from Wofford College in 2015 and a PhD in chemistry from Purdue University in 2019. His research background and interests are in semiconducting polymers, their processing and characterization, and their unique role in the future of electronics. Particularly, he has tackled longstanding challenges in operation stability of semiconducting polymers under extreme heat and has pioneered high-temperature plastic electronics. He has been selected as a PMSE Future Faculty Scholar (2021), the GLAM Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022), and the MRS Arthur Nowick and Graduate Student Gold Awardee (2019), amongst other recognitions. At MIT, he will lead the Laboratory of Organic Materials for Smart Electronics (OMSE Lab). Through polymer design, novel processing strategies, and large-area manufacturing of electronic devices, he is interested in relating molecular design to device performance, especially transistor devices able to mimic and interface with biological systems. He will hold the Merton C. Flemings (1951) Career Development Professorship.