This article was updated on April 23 to reflect the promotion of Gosha Geogdzhayev from alternate to Gates Cambridge Scholarship winner.
MIT seniors Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla have won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students the opportunity to pursue graduate studies in the field of their choice at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Founded in 2000, Gates Cambridge offers full-cost postgraduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside the UK. Gates Cambridge's mission is to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.
Gosha Geogdzhayev
Originally from New York City, Geogdzhayev is a senior majoring in physics with minors in mathematics and computer science. At Cambridge, Geogdzhayev intends to pursue a master's degree in quantitative environmental and climate sciences. He is interested in applying these topics to climate science and intends to dedicate his career to developing novel statistical methods for climate prediction.
At MIT, Geogdzhayev researches climate emulators with Professor Raffaele Ferrari's group in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and is part of the Grand Challenges project “Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge.” He is currently working on an operator-based emulator for projecting climate extremes. Previously, Geogdzhayev studied the statistics of changing chaotic systems, work that was recently published as a first-author paper.
As a recipient of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) Hollings Fellowship, Geogdzhayev has worked on bias correction methods for climate data at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He has received several other awards in the field of earth and atmospheric sciences, notably the American Meteorological Society's Ward Fellowship and the Eileen Seguin Fellowship.
Outside of research, Geogdzhayev enjoys writing poetry and is actively involved in his living community, Burton 1, for which he previously served as floor president.
Sadhana Lolla
Lolla, a senior from Clarksburg, Maryland, is majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, she will pursue a master's degree in technology policy.
In the future, Lolla aims to lead conversations about technology deployment and development for underserved communities, like the rural Indian village her family calls home, while also conducting research on embodied intelligence.
At MIT, Lolla conducts research on safe and reliable robotics and deep learning in the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Her research has covered debiasing strategies for autonomous vehicles and accelerating robotic design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis ai, she works on creating uncertainty-aware frameworks for deep learning, impacting computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Outside of research, Lolla leads initiatives to make computer science education more accessible globally. She is an instructor for MIT class 6.s191 (Introduction to Deep Learning), one of the largest artificial intelligence courses in the world, served by millions of students annually. She serves as Curriculum Leader for Momentum ai, the only American program teaching ai to underserved students for free, and she has taught hundreds of students in northern Scotland as part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.
Lolla is also the former director of xFair, MIT's largest student-run career fair, and serves on the executive board of Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible to students of all musical backgrounds. In her free time she likes to sing, solve crossword puzzles and bake.
