Sahil Pontula ’23 wins 2023 Hertz Basis Fellowship » MIT Physics
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Award acknowledges students who’ve the “extraordinary creativity essential to deal with issues others can’t clear up.”
The Fannie and John Hertz Basis has introduced that it has awarded graduate fellowships to 6 college students with ties to MIT. These prestigious awards present every scholar with 5 years of doctoral-level analysis funding (as much as a complete of $250,000), which provides them flexibility and autonomy to pursue their very own analysis pursuits, past the standard graduate coaching path.
Fellows additionally take pleasure in lifelong mentoring {and professional} assist from a community of over 1,200 former Hertz Fellows who’re students and leaders in science and expertise. The connections solid amongst these people within the 60 years for the reason that inception of the Hertz Basis have sparked collaborative startups, analysis, and expertise commercialization.
The six MIT recipients are amongst 15 doctoral students chosen from round the USA. “The innovation, creativity, deep and linked information, grit and dedication, and ambition to make an affect displayed by this cohort stand out and promise nice issues for the years to come back,” says Philip Welkhoff, a 2004 Hertz Fellow and board director who leads the choice course of. “We’re all excited to see the advances they develop over their careers that may drive progress throughout so many areas of endeavor, leading to new scientific information, new applied sciences, and strengthened nationwide safety.”
This yr’s MIT-affiliated awardees are Jeffrey Brown, Liyam Chitayat, Vaibhav Mohanty, Sahil Pontula ’23, Benjamin Spector ’22, MEng ’22, and Beatriz Yankelevich.
Jeffrey Brown is pursuing a PhD at MIT in electrical engineering and laptop science and is a member of the Artificial Neurobiology Group led by Professor Ed Boyden — who can be a Hertz Fellow. As an undergraduate at Stanford College, Brown majored in philosophy and accomplished two grasp’s levels, one in laptop science and one in electrical engineering. There, he developed a ardour for neural engineering, engaged on the Stanford Synthetic Retina Mission, an initiative to revive imaginative and prescient by means of retinal prostheses. At MIT, Brown needs to develop novel computational and organic instruments for seeing and controlling organic methods and create new computational strategies to seek out the hidden rules inside the knowledge. Drawing on these rules, he hopes to deal with understanding the mind and curing neuropsychiatric ailments from the bottom up.
Liyam Chitayat will start her doctoral program in computational and methods biology at MIT this fall. She goals to develop elementary applied sciences and organic interfaces to allow human enhancement on a physiological and molecular stage. Chitayat started her undergraduate research at Tel Aviv College at age 12, finishing double majors in chemistry and biology and graduating summa cum laude in each fields. She is at present finishing her grasp’s diploma in biomedical engineering, the place she has aimed to develop novel computational strategies for microbiome engineering. She has additionally served within the bioengineering division on the Israeli Ministry of Protection, Directorate of Protection Analysis and Innovation, main computational biology efforts.
Vaibhav Mohanty is a graduate scholar within the Harvard-MIT Program in Well being Sciences and Expertise, the place his analysis focuses on the intersection of theoretical physics, chemistry, and evolutionary biology to develop mutational “traps” to fight the fast evolution of proteins in infectious pathogens and in most cancers. He obtained his first PhD in theoretical physics from the College of Oxford, the place he studied as a Marshall Scholar. Previous to that, Mohanty earned a grasp’s diploma in chemistry and a bachelor’s diploma summa cum laude in chemistry and physics with a minor in music from Harvard College, the place he was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship.
Sahil Pontula ’23 accomplished two bachelor’s levels at MIT in physics and electrical engineering and can stay on the Institute to start a doctoral program in electrical engineering and laptop science within the fall. His doctoral analysis will middle on utilizing nonlinear and quantum optics to generate dependable sources of macroscopic quantum states of sunshine, which may revolutionize present quantum info and sensing platforms. As well as, he plans to discover extra unconventional paths, equivalent to pursuing his ardour for local weather activism by harnessing the ability of quantum optics and nanophotonics for power purposes, together with enhanced batteries and photovoltaic gadgets.
Benjamin Spector ’22, MEng ’22 is pursuing a PhD in laptop science at Stanford College, the place his analysis combines methods and machine studying; specifically, he focuses on creating new strategies and architectures for strong and clear synthetic intelligence whereas enabling adoption by a rising scientific and engineering neighborhood. He earned two bachelor’s levels at MIT in laptop science and engineering and arithmetic, in addition to a grasp’s in engineering in laptop science. Whereas on the Institute, Spector printed machine-learning analysis at conferences and offered work on computational plasma physics at an annual assembly of the American Bodily Society’s Division of Plasma Physics. He additionally began a nonprofit startup accelerator, Prod, whose cohort corporations raised $25 million below his management.
Beatriz Yankelevich is a doctoral scholar at MIT within the Engineering Quantum Techniques Group, researching waveguide quantum electrodynamics with the aim of creating a modular quantum computing structure. She can be deeply taken with science coverage and outreach and hopes to pursue a profession in academia centered on quantum computing analysis. A graduate of Stanford College, Yankelevich majored in engineering physics with a focus in quantum science and engineering. 4 years in the past, as an undergraduate, she based the Stanford Program for Inspiring the Subsequent Era of Ladies in Physics, a free, digital summer season program for high-school-age girls from underrepresented backgrounds in physics. Throughout this system, college students be taught Python and are launched to fashionable physics analysis subjects by Stanford college students and professors.
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