Sadhana Lolla, a senior at MIT, has won the celebrated Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students the chance to pursue graduate studies in the sphere of their alternative on the University of Cambridge within the United Kingdom
Established in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship provides full postgraduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside the UK. The scholarship's mission is to construct a world network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.
Lolla, a student from Clarksburg, Maryland, is majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge she is going to pursue an MPhil in Technology Policy.
In the longer term, Lolla would love to guide conversations concerning the use and development of technology for marginalized communities, akin to the agricultural Indian village her family calls home, while conducting research in the realm of ​​embodied intelligence.
At MIT, Lolla conducts research on secure and trustworthy robotics and deep learning within the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Her research included equalization strategies for autonomous vehicles and accelerating robotic design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis AI, she works on developing uncertainty-aware deep learning frameworks that impact computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work on 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 worldwide. She is an instructor for Class 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), one in all the most important AI courses on the earth, reaching hundreds of thousands of scholars annually. She serves as Curriculum Lead for Momentum AI, the one U.S. program that teaches AI totally free to underserved students, and has taught a whole lot of scholars in northern Scotland as a part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.
Lolla has also served as director of xFair, MIT's largest student-organized profession fair, and is a board member of Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella music more accessible to students from diverse musical backgrounds. In her free time, she enjoys singing, doing crossword puzzles and baking.
“Through Sadhana’s impressive research within the Distributed Robotics Group, her volunteer teaching at Momentum AI, and her internships and extracurricular experiences, she has developed the talents to be a frontrunner,” says Kim Benard, associate dean for distinguished fellowships in profession counseling and skilled development . “Her work in Cambridge will give her time to take into consideration reducing bias in systems and the moral implications of her work. I’m proud that she is going to represent MIT within the Gates Cambridge community.”
