Two current MIT members and 7 other alumni are amongst those accepted into the 2025 cohort AI2050 fellows.
Zongyi Lia postdoc within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Tess Smith '12, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), were each named AI2050 Early Career Fellows.
Seven other MIT alumni were also honored. The AI2050 Early Career Fellows include Brian Hie SM '19, PhD '21; Natasha Mary Jaques PhD '20; Martin Anton Schrimpf PhD '22; Lindsey Raymond SM '19, PhD '24, who will join the MIT faculty in EECS, the Department of Economics, and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in 2026; and Ellen Dee Zhong PhD '22. The AI2050 Senior Fellows include Surya Ganguli '98, MNG '98; and Luke Zettlemoyer SM '03, PhD '09.
AI2050 fellows are announced annually by Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery and breakthroughs with probably the most promising and advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in areas of high impact, including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, life sciences, climate and space – and supports researchers in diverse disciplines through its science systems program.
Li is a postdoctoral fellow at CSAIL and works with EECS Associate Professor Kaiming He. Li's research focuses on developing neural operator methods to speed up scientific computing. He received his PhD in computer science and arithmetic from Caltech, where he was advised by Anima Anandkumar and Andrew Stuart. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and arithmetic from Washington University in St. Louis.
Li's work was supported by a Kortschak grant, a PIMCO grant, an Amazon AI4Science grant, an Nvidia grant, and an MIT-Novo Nordisk AI grant. He also accomplished three summer internships at Nvidia. Li will join NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in fall 2026 as an assistant professor of mathematics and data science.
Smidt, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), is the principal investigator of the Atomic Architects group on the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), where she works on the intersection of physics, geometry, and machine learning to design algorithms that help understand physical systems under physical and geometric constraints, with applications to the design of each latest materials and latest molecules. Her particular focus is on symmetries in three-dimensional physical systems equivalent to rotation, translation and reflection.
Smidt earned her BS in physics from MIT in 2012 and her PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Before joining the EECS faculty at MIT in 2021, 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 equivariant neural systems with Euclidean symmetry networks that naturally process 3D geometry and geometric tensor data. In addition to the AI2050 grant, she received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award, the EECS Outstanding Educator Award, and a Transformative Research Fund Award.
AI2050 was conceived and co-led by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika. AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative designed to assist solve the issue difficult problems in AI. As a part of their research, each fellow will address the central motivating query of AI2050: “It is the yr 2050. AI has proven to be extremely useful to society. What happened? What are the important thing problems we have now solved, and what opportunities and opportunities have we identified to make sure this consequence?”
