Sadhana Lolla, a senior at MIT, has 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.
Established in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship offers full-cost postgraduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside the United Kingdom. The mission of the fellowship is to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.
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 ai courses in the world, serving 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.
“Between Sadhana's impressive research at Distributed Robotics Group, her volunteer teaching with Momentum ai, and her internships and extracurricular experiences, she has developed the skills to be a leader,” says Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished scholarship in Career Counseling and Career Counseling. . Development. “Her work at Cambridge will give her time to think about reducing bias in systems and the ethical implications of her work. I am proud that she represents MIT in the Gates Cambridge community.”
