Gioele Zardini joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor in September 2024. Driven by societal challenges, Zardini’s research interests include the codesign of sociotechnical systems, compositionality in engineering, applied category theory, decision and control, optimization, and game theory, with society-critical applications to intelligent transportation systems, autonomy, and complex networks and infrastructures. He earned his BS, MS, and PhD in mechanical engineering, focusing on robotics, systems, and control from ETH Zurich.
Thomas John “T.J.” Wallin joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2024. As a researcher, Wallin’s interests lie in advanced manufacturing of functional soft matter, emphasizing soft wearable technologies and their applications in human-computer interfaces. Previously, he was a research scientist at Meta’s Reality Labs Research, working on their haptic interaction team. Wallin earned a BS in physics and chemistry from the College of William and Mary and an MS and PhD in materials science and engineering from Cornell University.
Jessica Stark joined the Department of Biological Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2024. In her research, Stark develops technologies to realize the largely untapped potential of cell-surface sugars, called glycans, for immunological discovery and immunotherapy. Previously, Stark was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. She earned a BS in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Cornell University and a PhD in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University.
Sungho Shin joined the Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in July 2023. His research interests include control theory, optimization algorithms, high-performance computing, and their applications to decision-making in complex systems, such as energy infrastructures. Shin is currently a postdoc at the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received a BS in mathematics and chemical engineering from Seoul National University and a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Alex Rives joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in September 2024, with a core membership at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In his research, Rives focuses on AI for scientific understanding, discovery, and design for biology. As a graduate student, Rives worked with Meta, leading the Evolutionary Scale Modeling Team that developed large language models for proteins. Rives received his BS in philosophy and biology from Yale University and is completing his PhD in computer science at New York University.
Sendhil Mullainathan will joined the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Economics as a professor in July 2024. His research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and medicine. Previously, Mullainathan spent five years at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2004, and then the University of Chicago in 2018. He earned his BA in computer science, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University.
Yael Kalai PhD ’06 joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as a professor in September 2024. Her research interests include cryptography, the theory of computation, and security and privacy. Kalai currently focuses on both the theoretical and real-world applications of cryptography, including work on succinct and easily verifiable noninteractive proofs. She earned a BS from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an MS from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a PhD from MIT.
Anna Huang SM ’08 joined the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Music and Theater Arts as an assistant professor in September 2024. She will help develop a graduate program focused on music technology. Previously, she spent eight years with Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music making. She created Music Transformer and Coconet, which powered the Bach Google Doodle. Huang holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila. She earned a BM in music composition and BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an SM from MIT, and a PhD from Harvard University.
Kaiming He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an associate professor in February 2024. His research interests cover a wide range of topics in computer vision and deep learning. He is currently focused on building computer models that can learn representations and develop intelligence from and for the complex world. In the long term, he aims to augment human intelligence with improved AI. Before joining MIT, he was a research scientist at Facebook AI. He earned a BS from Tsinghua University and a PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Mitchell Gordon joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July 2024. In his research, Gordon designs interactive systems and evaluation approaches that bridge principles of human-computer interaction with the realities of machine learning. He currently works as a postdoc at the University of Washington. Gordon earned a BS from the University of Rochester and an MS and PhD from Stanford University, all in computer science.