Two current MIT affiliates and 7 additional alumni are amongst those named to the 2025 cohort of AI2050 Fellows.
Zongyi Li, a postdoc within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Tess Smidt ’12, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), were each named as AI2050 Early Profession Fellows.
Seven additional MIT alumni were also honored. AI2050 Early Profession Fellows include Brian Hie SM ’19, PhD ’21; Natasha Mary Jaques PhD ’20; Martin Anton Schrimpf PhD ’22; Lindsey Raymond SM ’19, PhD ’24, who will join the MIT faculty in EECS, the Department of Economics, and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in 2026; and Ellen Dee Zhong PhD ’22. AI2050 Senior Fellows include Surya Ganguli ’98, MNG ’98; and Luke Zettlemoyer SM ’03, PhD ’09.
AI2050 Fellows are announced annually by Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to speed up scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with essentially the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in areas poised for impact including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biosciences, climate, and space — in addition to supporting researchers in a wide range of disciplines through its science systems program.
Li is postdoc in CSAIL working with associate professor of EECS Kaiming He. Li’s research focuses on developing neural operator methods to speed up scientific computing. He received his PhD in computing and mathematical sciences from Caltech, where he was advised by Anima Anandkumar and Andrew Stuart. He holds undergraduate degrees in computer science and arithmetic from Washington University in St. Louis.
Li’s work has been supported by a Kortschak Scholarship, PIMCO Fellowship, Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, Nvidia Fellowship, and MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Fellowship. He has also accomplished three summer internships at Nvidia. Li will join the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences as an assistant professor of mathematics and data science in fall 2026.
Smidt, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), is the principal investigator of the Atomic Architects group on the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), where she works on the intersection of physics, geometry, and machine learning to design algorithms that aid within the understanding of physical systems under physical and geometric constraints, with applications to the design each of recent materials and recent molecules. She has a selected give attention to symmetries present in 3D physical systems, comparable to rotation, translation, and reflection.
Smidt earned her BS in physics from MIT in 2012 and her PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2018. Prior to joining the MIT EECS faculty in 2021, she was the 2018 Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a software engineering intern on the Google Accelerated Sciences team, where she developed Euclidean symmetry equivariant neural networks that naturally handle 3D geometry and geometric tensor data. Besides the AI2050 fellowship, she has received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award, the EECS Outstanding Educator Award, and a Transformative Research Fund award.
Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative aimed toward helping to resolve hard problems in AI. Inside their research, each fellow will contend with the central motivating query of AI2050: “It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely useful to society. What happened? What are crucial problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realized to make sure this consequence?”
