MIT Schwarzman College of Computing welcomes new faculty

The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing welcomes 10 new faculty members.
 
This new cohort of faculty members, who have either recently started their roles at MIT or will start within the next year, includes those in core computing positions and in shared positions between the college and an academic department. They join 40 other faculty members that have been hired to date through a mix of 50 new college positions and existing positions in departments and schools.
 
Faculty with appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) report into both the Schwarzman College of Computing and School of Engineering.
 
The new college faculty include:
 
Stephen Bates joined the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in September 2023. He is also a member of the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS). Bates uses data and AI for reliable decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. In particular, he develops tools for statistical inference with AI models, data impacted by strategic behavior, and settings with distribution shift. Bates also works on applications in life sciences and sustainability. He previously worked as a postdoc in the Statistics and EECS departments at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Bates received a BS in statistics and mathematics at Harvard University and a PhD from Stanford University.
 
Abigail Bodner joined the Department of EECS and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences as a shared assistant professor in January 2024. She is also a member of LIDS. Bodner’s research interests span climate, physical oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, and turbulence. Previously, she worked as a Simons Junior Fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Bodner received her BS in geophysics and mathematics and MS in geophysics from Tel Aviv University, and her SM in applied mathematics, and PhD from Brown University.

Suraj Cheema will join the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of EECS, as an assistant professor in July 2024. His research explores atomic-scale engineering of electronic materials to tackle challenges related to energy consumption, storage, and generation, aiming for more sustainable microelectronics. This spans computing and energy technologies via integrated ferroelectric devices. He previously worked as a postdoc at UC Berkeley. Cheema earned a BS in applied physics and applied mathematics from Columbia University and a PhD in materials science and engineering from UC Berkeley.
 
Samantha Coday joined the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in July 2023. She is also a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Her research interests include ultra-dense power converters enabling renewable energy integration, hybrid electric aircraft and future space exploration. To enable high-performance converters for these critical applications her research focuses on the optimization, design, and control of hybrid switched-capacitor converters. Coday earned a BS in electrical engineering and mathematics from Southern Methodist University and an MS and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.

Mitchell Gordon will join the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in July 2025. He will also be a member of CSAIL. In his research, Gordon designs interactive systems and evaluation approaches that bridge principles of human-computer interaction with the realities of machine learning. He currently works as a postdoc at the University of Washington. Gordon received a BS from the University of Rochester, and MS and PhD from Stanford University, all in computer science.

Kaiming He joined the Department of EECS as an associate professor in February 2024. He is also a member of CSAIL. His research interests cover a wide range of topics in computer vision and deep learning. He is currently focused on building computer models that can learn representations and develop intelligence from and for the complex world. Long term, he hopes to augment human intelligence with improved artificial intelligence. Before joining MIT, He was a research scientist at Facebook AI. He earned a BS from Tsinghua University and a PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Anna Huang SM ’08 will join the Department of EECS and Music and Theater Arts as a shared assistant professor in September 2024. She will help develop graduate programming focused on music technology. Previously, she spent eight years with Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music-making. She is the creator of Music Transformer and Coconet (which powered the Bach Doodle). She was a judge and organizer for the AI Song Contest. Anna holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, a BM in music composition, and BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an MS from the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Yael Kalai PhD ’06 will join the Department of EECS as a professor in September 2024. She is also a member of CSAIL. Her research interests include cryptography, the theory of computation, and security and privacy. Kalai currently focuses on both the theoretical and real-world applications of cryptography, including work on succinct and easily verifiable non-interactive proofs. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a master’s degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a PhD from MIT.

Sendhil Mullainathan will join the Department of EECS and Department of Economics as a professor in July 2024. His research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and medicine. Previously, Mullainathan spent five years at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2004, and then the University of Chicago in 2018. He received his BA in computer science, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University.

Alex Rives will join the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in September 2024, with a core membership in the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In his research, Rives is focused on AI for scientific understanding, discovery, and design for biology. Rives worked with META as an New York University (NYU) graduate student, where he founded and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling team that developed large language models for proteins. Rives received his BS in philosophy and biology from Yale University and is completing his PhD in computer science at NYU.