Yiming Chen '24, Wilhelm Hector, Anushka Nair and David Oluigbo have been chosen as 2025 Rhodes Scholars and can begin fully-funded postgraduate studies on the University of Oxford within the United Kingdom next fall. In addition to MIT's two U.S. Rhodes winners, Ouigbo and Nair, two affiliates were awarded international Rhodes scholarships: Chen for Rhodes' China constituency and Hector for the Global Rhodes scholarship. Hector is the primary Haitian citizen to be named a Rhodes Scholar.
The fellows received profession counseling and skilled development support from Associate Dean Kim Benard and the Distinguished Fellowships team. They received additional support and guidance from the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships.
“It is deeply inspiring to work with our amazing students who’ve achieved a lot at MIT while pondering deeply about how they will have an effect on solving the world's great challenges,” says Professor Nancy Kanwisher, the co- chairs the committee along with Professor Tom Levenson. “These students have worked hard to develop and articulate their vision and learn to speak it to others with passion, clarity and confidence. We're thrilled, but not surprised, that so lots of them were named finalists and winners this yr.
Yiming Chen '24
Yiming Chen, from Beijing, China and the Washington metropolitan area, was named certainly one of 4 Rhodes China Scholars on September 28. At Oxford, she is going to undertake postgraduate study in engineering and work towards her ongoing goal of advancing AI safety and reliability in clinical workflows.
Chen graduated from MIT in 2024 with a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science and an MEng in Computer Science. She worked on several projects related to machine learning for healthcare and focused her master's research on medical imaging within the Medical Vision Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Working with IBM Research, Chen developed a neural framework for clinical-grade lumen segmentation in intravascular ultrasound and presented her findings on the MICCAI Machine Learning in Medical Imaging conference. Additionally, she worked at Cleanlab, a startup founded by MIT, and created an open source library to make sure the integrity of image datasets used for image processing tasks.
Chen was a teaching assistant within the mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science departments at MIT and received an award for teaching excellence. She taught mathematics to highschool students at Hampshire College Summer Studies and was chosen to take part in the MISTI Global Teaching Labs in Italy.
Chen learned the guzheng, a conventional Chinese instrument, since age 4, served as president of the MIT Chinese Music Ensemble, explored the synergies of Eastern and Western music with the MIT Chamber Music Society, and performed on the United Nations. On campus, she was also energetic in Asymptones a cappella, the MIT Ring Committee, Ribotones, the Figure Skating Club, and the Undergraduate Association Innovation Committee.
Wilhelm Hector
Wilhem Hector, a senior from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, majoring in mechanical engineering, was awarded a Global Rhodes Scholarship on Nov. 1. The first Haitian citizen to be named a Rhodes Scholar, Hector will pursue a Masters in Energy Systems at Oxford followed by a Masters in Education with a give attention to digital and social change. His long-term goals are two: to pioneer renewable energy infrastructure in Haiti and to expand practical opportunities within the country's national curriculum.
Hector developed his passion for energy through his research at MIT's Howland Lab, where he studied the uncertainty of wind energy production during energetic yaw control. He also helped found the MIT Renewable Energy Clinic through his work on the sources of resistance to energy projects within the United States. Beyond his research, Hector made notable contributions as an intern at Radia Inc. and DTU Wind Energy Systems, where he was involved in the event of computational wind agricultural modeling and simulation techniques.
Outside of MIT, he directs the Hector Foundation, a nonprofit organization that gives educational opportunities to young people in Haiti. He has raised over $80,000 over the past five years to fund their initiatives, including the development of Project Manus, Haiti's first open-use engineering makerspace. Hector's service efforts were supported by the MIT PKG Center, which awarded him the Davis Peace Prize, the PKG Fellowship for Social Impact, and the PKG Award for Public Service.
Hector is co-chair of the Class of 2025 Student Events Board and Senior Ball Committee and has served as social chair for Chocolate City and the African Students Association.
Anushka Nair
Anushka Nair of Portland, Oregon, will complete her BS and MEng degrees in computer science and engineering next spring, with concentrations in economics and AI. She plans to finish a DPhil in Social Data Science on the Oxford Internet Institute. Nair goals to develop ethical AI technologies that address pressing societal challenges, starting with combating misinformation.
For her master's thesis with Professor David Rand, Nair is developing LLM-powered fact-checking tools to detect nuanced misinformation that goes beyond human or automated capabilities. She also researches human-AI co-reasoning with Professor Thomas Malone on the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Previously, she conducted research on autonomous vehicle navigation at Stanford University's AI and Robotics Laboratory, worked on energy microgrid load balancing at MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and collaborated with Professor Esther Duflo in economics.
Nair interned on the Executive Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, where she integrated technology solutions and helped found the High-Level Advisory Board on AI. She also interned in Tesla's energy sector, contributed to Autobidder, an energy trading tool, and led the launch of a platform for monitoring distributed energy resources and renewable power plants. Her work has earned her recognition as a Social and Ethical Responsibility Scholar in Computer Science and a U.S. Presidential Scholar.
Nair served as president of the MIT Society of Women Engineers in addition to MIT and Harvard Women in AI and led outreach programs mentoring young women in STEM fields. She also served as president of the MIT Honors Societies Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi.
David Oluigbo
David Oluigbo of Washington is a senior majoring in artificial intelligence and decision-making and minoring in brain and cognitive sciences. At Oxford he’ll undertake an MSc in Applied Digital Health, followed by an MSc in Modeling for Global Health. Oluigbo then plans to review medicine with the goal of becoming a health care provider and scientist who researches and applies AI to deal with medical challenges in low-income countries.
Since his first yr at MIT, Oluigbo has conducted nerve and brain research with Ev Fedorenko on the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and with Susanna Mierau's Synapse and Network Development Group at Brigham and Women's Hospital. His work with Mierau led to several publications and a poster presentation on the annual meeting of the Federation of European Societies.
During a summer internship on the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, Oluigbo designed and trained machine learning models for CT scans to routinely detect neuroendocrine tumors, which led to first authorship on an International Society for Optics and Photonics meeting paper that he presented on the 2024 Annual Meeting. Oluigbo also accomplished a summer internship on the Anyscale Learning for All Laboratory on the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Oluigbo is an EMT and systems administrator officer at MIT-EMS. He is an advisor to Code for Good, a representative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Undergraduate Advisory Group, and holds leadership positions with the Undergraduate Association, the MIT Brain and Cognitive Society, and the MIT Running Club.
