MIT senior Sadhana Lolla has won the celebrated Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students a possibility to pursue graduate study in the sector of their selection at Cambridge University within the U.K.

Established in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship offers full-cost post-graduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside of the U.K. The mission of the scholarship is to construct a worldwide 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’s going to pursue an MPhil in technology policy.

In the long run, Lolla goals to guide conversations on deploying and developing technology for marginalized communities, reminiscent of the agricultural Indian village that her family calls home, while also conducting research in embodied intelligence.

At MIT, Lolla conducts research on secure and trustworthy robotics and deep learning on the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Her research has spanned 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, which has impacts across computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work on the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and 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 sophistication 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), considered one of the biggest AI courses on the planet, which reaches hundreds of thousands of scholars annually. She serves because the curriculum lead for Momentum AI, the one U.S. program that teaches AI to underserved students free of charge, and she or he has taught lots of of scholars in Northern Scotland as a part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.

Lolla was also the director for xFair, MIT’s largest student-run profession fair, and is an executive board member for Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible for college students across musical backgrounds. In her free time, she enjoys singing, solving crossword puzzles, and baking. 

“Between Sadhana’s impressive research within the Distributed Robotics Group, her volunteer teaching with Momentum AI, and her internship and extracurricular experiences, she has developed the abilities to be a pacesetter,” says Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships in Profession Advising and Skilled Development. “Her work at Cambridge will allow her the time to take into consideration reducing bias in systems and the moral implications of her work. I’m proud that she might be representing MIT within the Gates Cambridge community.”