MIT student Sadhana Lolla has been awarded the renowned Gates Cambridge Scholarship. This prestigious scholarship was created in 2000 and covers all costs for post-graduate study at UK’s Cambridge University for exceptional students from countries outside of the UK. It aims to nurture a global community of aspiring leaders dedicated to enhancing the lives of people in their respective societies.
A senior hailing from Clarksburg, Maryland, Lolla majorly focuses on computer science complemented by minors in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, Lolla’s aim is to earn an MPhil degree in the field of technology policy. Lolla’s long-term goal is to pave the way for dialogues on the development and deployment of technology for disadvantaged communities. For instance, the rural Indian region where her family resides is one such community she’s looking forward to help. In parallel, her research interests include embodied intelligence.
At MIT, Lolla’s research is based within the Distributed Robotics Laboratory, under the guidance of Professor Daniela Rus. Her work encompasses crafting strategies for the debiasing of autonomous vehicles and expediting design processes for robots. Outside of MIT, she worked with Microsoft Research and Themis AI to develop frameworks for deep learning that account for uncertainty. This work has potential implications across a range of fields like computational biology, language modelling, and robotics. Her research has been presented at significant conferences like Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Additionally, Lolla strives to make computer science education access universal. She teaches MIT’s introductory course to AI, one of the largest of its kind, reaching millions of students every year. She also heads the curriculum of Momentum AI, the only program in the United States that offers AI education to underprivileged students at no cost. Alongside, she has taught hundreds of students in Northern Scotland under the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.
In extracurricular activities, Lolla was the director for xFair, the most significant student-led career fair at MIT. She is also an executive board member for Next Sing, an initiative working to democratize a cappella across various musical backgrounds. She spends her leisure time baking, solving crossword puzzles, and singing.
Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships at Career Advising and Professional Development, highlighted Lolla’s remarkable work in fields of research, teaching, and co-curricular activities. According to Benard, Lolla’s tenure at Cambridge will give her ample time to contemplate on ways of slashing bias in systems and ponder the ethical aspects of her work. Benard expressed pride in Lolla’s selection to represent MIT in the Gates Cambridge community.
