Those named to the 2025 group of AI2050 Fellows include two current MIT colleagues and seven additional alumni.
Zongyi Li, postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Tess Smidt ’12, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), were both named as AI2050 Early Career Fellows.
Seven additional MIT alumni were also honored. AI2050 Early Career Fellows include Brian Haigh SM ’19, PhD ’21; Natasha Marie Jacques PhD ’20; Martin Anton Schrimpf PhD ’22; Lindsay 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 DeZhong PhD ’22. AI2050 Senior Fellows include Surya Ganguly ’98, MNG ’98; and Luke Zettlemoyer SM ’03, PhD ’09.
The AI2050 Fellows are announced each year by Schmidt Sciences, a non-profit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in impact-ready areas including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, bioscience, climate and space – as well as supporting researchers across disciplines through its Science Systems Programme.
Li is a postdoc at CSAIL and is working with Associate Professor of EECS Kaiming He. Li’s research focuses on developing neural operator methods to accelerate scientific computing. He received his PhD in computing and mathematical sciences from Caltech, where he was advised by Anima Anandkumar and Andrew Stuart. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis.
Lee’s work has been supported by the Kortschek Scholarship, PIMCO Fellowship, Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, Nvidia Fellowship, and MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Fellowship. He has also completed three summer internships at Nvidia. Lee will join the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2026 as an assistant professor of mathematics and data science.
Smidt, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), is the principal investigator of the Atomic Architects group in the Electronics Research Laboratory (RLE), where she works at the intersection of physics, geometry, and machine learning to design algorithms that help understand physical systems under physical and geometric constraints, with applications in the design of both new materials and new molecules. He has a special focus on symmetries present in 3D physical systems, such as rotations, translations and reflections.
Smidt received a BS in physics from MIT in 2012 and a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2018. Before joining the MIT EECS faculty in 2021, she was a 2018 Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a software engineering intern on the Google Accelerated Science team, where she developed Euclidean symmetry equivalent neural networks. Naturally handle 3D geometry and geometric tensor data. In addition to the AI2050 Fellowship, he has received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award, the EECS Outstanding Educator Award, and the Transformative Research Fund Award.
Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manica, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative that aims to help solve hard problems in AI. Within their research, each partner will grapple with the central driving question of AI2050: “It’s 2050. AI has proven to be extremely beneficial to society. What happened? What were the most important problems we solved and what opportunities and possibilities did we realize to ensure this outcome?”
