Schmidt Sciences has selected nine MIT-affiliated researchers for their prestigious AI2050 Fellowship program, recognizing their exceptional work in addressing critical challenges in artificial intelligence. Two current MIT members and seven alumni will receive support to pursue ambitious research aimed at ensuring AI delivers substantial benefits to society by 2050.
Current MIT Recipients Leading AI Innovation
The 2025 cohort includes CSAIL postdoctoral researcher Zongyi Li and Associate Professor Tess Smidt, both named as AI2050 Early Career Fellows. Their selection highlights MIT’s continued leadership in developing responsible and transformative AI technologies.
Li, currently working under Associate Professor Kaiming He in CSAIL, specializes in neural operator methods that accelerate scientific computing applications. His impressive academic journey includes a PhD from Caltech in computing and mathematical sciences, where he studied under renowned AI researchers Anima Anandkumar and Andrew Stuart. Li’s talent has previously been recognized through multiple prestigious awards including the Nvidia Fellowship and MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Fellowship. In 2026, he will join NYU’s Courant Institute as an assistant professor.
Professor Smidt leads the Atomic Architects research group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Her groundbreaking work exists at the intersection of physics, geometry, and machine learning, with particular emphasis on developing algorithms that incorporate physical and geometric constraints. Smidt’s research has significant applications in both materials science and molecular design, especially in understanding how symmetries in 3D physical systems (rotation, translation, and reflection) can be leveraged in computational models. A 2012 MIT physics graduate who later earned her PhD from UC Berkeley, Smidt returned to MIT as faculty in 2021 after developing Euclidean symmetry equivariant neural networks at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Google’s Accelerated Sciences team.
MIT Alumni Making Their Mark
The program also recognized seven distinguished MIT alumni across two fellowship categories. The Early Career Fellows include Brian Hie (SM ’19, PhD ’21), Natasha Mary Jaques (PhD ’20), Martin Anton Schrimpf (PhD ’22), Lindsey Raymond (SM ’19, PhD ’24), and Ellen Dee Zhong (PhD ’22). Raymond is set to join MIT’s faculty in 2026 with a joint appointment across Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Economics, and the Schwarzman College of Computing.
Two alumni received the senior fellowship designation: Surya Ganguli (class of 1998) and Luke Zettlemoyer (SM ’03, PhD ’09), acknowledging their established contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.
The Vision Behind AI2050
The AI2050 initiative, conceived by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, takes a forward-looking approach to artificial intelligence development. Fellows are selected based on their potential to address a central question: