The 2025 membership of AI2050 Fellows includes two current MIT members and seven additional alumni.
Zongyi Li, a postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Tess Smidt ’12, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), have both been named AI2050 Early Career Fellows.
Seven MIT alumni were also recognized. AI2050 Early Career Fellows include Brian Hie SM ’19, PhD ’21; Natasha Mary Jacques Ph.D. ’20; Martin Anton Schrimpf, Ph.D. ’22; Lindsey Raymond SM ’19, PhD ’24, will join the MIT EECS faculty, Department of Economics, and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in 2026. and Dr. Ellen Dee Zhong, 22 years. AI2050 Senior Fellows include Surya Ganguli ’98, MNG ’98; and Luke Zettlemoyer SM ’03, PhD ’09.
AI2050 Fellows are announced annually by Schmidt Science. Schmidt Science, founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge and breakthroughs using the most promising and advanced tools that support our planet’s prosperity. The organization prioritizes research in areas with the potential for high impact, such as AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biological sciences, climate, and space, and supports researchers in a variety of fields through its Science Systems Program.
Li is a postdoctoral researcher at CSAIL, collaborating with Associate Professor Kaiming He from EECS. Li’s research focuses on developing neural operator techniques to speed up scientific computing. He received his PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences from the California Institute of Technology, where he was advised by Anima Anandkumar and Andrew Stewart. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis.
Lee’s research is supported by a Kolchak Scholarship, a PIMCO Fellowship, an Amazon AI4Science Fellowship, an Nvidia Fellowship, and an MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Fellowship. He also completed three summer internships at Nvidia. Lee will join New York University’s Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences in fall 2026 as an assistant professor of mathematics and data science.
Smidt, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), is a principal investigator in the Atomic Architects group at the Research Institute for Electronics (RLE). There, I work at the intersection of physics, geometry, and machine learning to design algorithms that help understand physical systems under physical and geometric constraints, with applications to the design of both new materials and new molecules. She has a particular focus on symmetries present in 3D physical systems, such as rotation, translation, and reflection.
Smidt earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT in 2012 and a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Before joining the MIT EECS faculty in 2021, he was a 2018 Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a software engineering intern on the Google Accelerated Sciences team, where he developed Euclidean symmetry. Equivariant neural networks that naturally process 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.
Invented and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manica, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative aimed at helping solve difficult problems in AI. In their research, each fellow will address the central motivating questions of AI2050. “It’s 2050. AI has proven to be of great benefit to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we have solved and what opportunities and possibilities have we realized to ensure this outcome?”
