Two MIT seniors Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla have been awarded the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship. This scholarship provides full-cost education at Cambridge University in the U.K, for post-graduate courses of their choice. Established in 2000 for students from countries outside the U.K., the Gates Cambridge Scholarship aims to create a global network of future leaders dedicated to improving the lives of others.
Originally from New York City, Geogdzhayev is a physics major with minors in mathematics and computer science. He aims to pursue an MPhil in Quantitative Climate and Environmental Science at Cambridge. Geogdzhayev is passionate about climate science, and he plans to focus his career on creating novel statistical methods for climate prediction.
During his time at MIT, Geogdzhayev has been researching climate emulators alongside Professor Raffaele Ferrari. He has been a part of the “Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge” Grand Challenges project, and his recent work involves developing an operator-based emulator for predicting climate extremes. He has won several awards in the field of earth and atmospheric sciences and has contributed a first-author paper in the field.
Geogdzhayev is also a Hollings Scholar with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) and has worked on correcting biases in climate data at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Apart from academic pursuits, he enjoys writing poetry and holds an active role in his living community, Burton 1, at MIT.
Sadhana Lolla comes from Clarksburg, Maryland, and is majoring in computer science with minors in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, she plans to pursue an MPhil in Technology Policy. Her aim is to help enable the use and development of technology for marginalized communities, such as the rural Indian village where her family resides.
Lolla is doing research at MIT on secure and trustworthy robotics and deep learning at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Their work involves creating debiasing strategies for autonomous vehicles and speeding up robotic design processes. Lolla hopes to apply her research to computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work at major conferences including the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Lolla is also committed to making computer science education accessible. She teaches at MIT’s Introduction to Deep Learning and Momentum AI, two major AI educational platforms. She has also taught in Northern Scotland through MIT’s Global Teaching Labs program. An active member of her university community, she has served as the director of xFair, MIT’s largest student-run career fair, and helps make A capella music more accessible for students across musical backgrounds.
