MIT senior Sadhana Lolla has received the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which provides students with the opportunity to pursue graduate study in their chosen field at the University of Cambridge, England.
Established in 2000, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship offers a full postgraduate scholarship to outstanding applicants from countries outside the UK. The scholarship’s mission 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 plans to complete an MPhil in technology policy.
Going forward, Lolla aims to conduct research on embodied intelligence while leading the conversation on technology deployment and development for underserved communities, such as the rural Indian villages her family calls home.
At MIT, Lolla conducts research on safe and reliable robotics and deep learning with Professor Daniela Rus in the Distributed Robotics Lab. Her research spans debiasing strategies for autonomous vehicles and accelerating the robot design process. At Microsoft Research and Themis AI, she is working on creating an uncertainty-aware framework for deep learning with implications across computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her own research at the NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference and the ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning).
In addition to research, Lolla is leading initiatives to increase access to computer science education globally. She is an instructor for the 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning) class, one of the world’s largest AI courses, taken by millions of students each year. She serves as Curriculum Director for Momentum AI, the only U.S. program teaching AI to underrepresented students for free, and has taught hundreds of students in northern Scotland as part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.
Lolla also served on the board of xFair, MIT’s largest student-run fair, and serves on the executive board of Next Sing, working to make a cappella more accessible to students from diverse musical backgrounds. In her free time, she enjoys singing, doing crossword puzzles, and baking.
“Sadhana has developed the skills to become a leader through her impressive research at the Distributed Robotics Group, volunteer training with Momentum AI, internships, and extracurricular experiences,” says Kim Benard, associate dean for distinguished fellowships in Career Advising and Professional. . Development. “Her work at Cambridge will give her time to reduce bias in her system and think about the ethical implications of her own work. I am proud to have her represent MIT in the Gates Cambridge community.”