Investing in tomorrow’s leaders

MIT’s strategic initiatives are designed to bring the MIT community together to take on big global challenges and generate meaningful impact. On AI, life sciences, energy and climate, education, manufacturing, quantum, and human insight, the initiatives are forging deep collaborations with industry, bringing people together across disciplines, and catalyzing discovery and innovation.

The initiatives are also creating new opportunities for early career researchers to pursue their research interests through fellowships such as the nine postdoctoral fellowships announced last month by the MIT Quantum Initiative (QMIT). They join a broader set of fellowships across the Institute made possible by partners ranging from Amazon to MathWorks. Recently, the MIT x GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), the New Education Initiative (NEI) Project, and the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (HEALS) selected the fellows for the 2026-2027 academic year.

Together, these five new cohorts are working to advance leading-edge research in education, health sciences, energy, climate, and the humanities. As part of the interdisciplinarity that defines MIT’s research culture, the 58 students selected for this year’s initiative-led fellowships span many disciplines, including urban studies and planning, open learning, physics, biological engineering, neuroscience, operations research, and architecture.

For example, using large-scale computational auditing grounded in political communication theory, MITHIC fellows are analyzing how LLMs shape electoral understanding and democratic legitimacy. The research pursues three aims: measuring bias and implicit predictions in portrayals of elections, examining persuasion and personalization, and mapping politicization across models.

And NEI fellows aim to develop a STEM-focused, modular curriculum open and available to learners everywhere – free for institutions and employers to use. They’re working to create a repository for MIT-created engineering curriculum and lectures to scale some of the most innovative pedagogy available.

See the full list of fellows across all five cohorts below.

2026-2027 Fellowships

MIT x GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance Graduate Fellows

• Turner Adornetto | History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society | Advisor: Kate Brown
• Maranda Cherry | Aeronautics and Astronautics | Advisor: Carmen Guerra-Garcia
• Heejung Chun | Materials Science and Engineering | Advisor: Bilge Yildiz
• Eden Fleshler | Biological Engineering | Advisor: Ariel Furst
• Malo Lahogue | Civil and Environmental Engineering | Advisor: Saurabh Amin
• Ghadi Nehme | Mechanical Engineering | Advisor: Faez Ahmed
• Sanjana Paul | Urban Studies and Planning | Advisor: Larry Susskind
• Qidong Yang | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Advisor: Sherrie Wang

MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (HEALS)

• Grace Anderson | Materials Science and Engineering | Advisor: Ariel Furst
• Thea Applebaum Licht | History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society | Advisor: Robin Scheffler
• Foster Birnbaum | Computational and Systems Biology | Advisor: Amy Keating
• Honghao Cao | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Advisor: Sixian You
• Evan Collins | Biological Engineering | Advisor: Daniel Anderson
• Emma Cool | Chemistry | Advisor: Elizabeth Nolan
• Ada Erus | Mechanical Engineering | Advisor: Anette Hosoi
• Chujun He | Institute for Data, Systems, and Society | Advisor: Caroline Uhler
• Natalie Heitman | Chemistry | Advisor: Oleta Johnson
• Emma Ibanez | Biology | Advisor: Sara Prescott
• Emma Isella | Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences | Advisor: Andrew Babbin
• Anupama Jayaraman | Chemical Engineering | Advisor: Arup K. Chakraborty
• Litsa Kapsalis | Biological Engineering | Advisor: Ana Jaklenec
• Jane Kelleher | Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology/Institute for Medical Engineering and Science | Advisor: Ellen T. Roche
• Julia Laventhall | Brain and Cognitive Sciences | Advisor: Mark Harnett
• Kevin Lenzi | Biology | Advisor: Yiyin Erin Chen
• Chao (Charlie) Li | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Advisor: Dina Katabi
• Valeria Márquez-Pellegrin | Biological Engineering | Advisor: Angela Belcher
• Serena Negroni | Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences | Advisor: David Ralston
• Emma Odom | Brain and Cognitive Sciences | Advisor: Fan Wang
• Giannka Picache | Mechanical Engineering | Advisor: Ritu Raman
• Gerard Porter | Chemistry | Advisor: Laura Kiessling
• Elizabeth Roberts | Civil and Environmental Engineering | Advisor: David L. Des Marais
• Evan Ruesch | Brain and Cognitive Sciences | Advisor: Mriganka Sur
• Anna Sappington | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Advisor: Bonnie Berger
• Chenhan Shao | Urban Studies and Planning | Advisor: Mariana Arcaya
• Vasiliki Stoumpou | Operations Research Center | Advisor: Dimitris Bertsimas
• Ho Kyung Sung | Brain and Cognitive Sciences | Advisor: Mehrdad Jazayeri
• Benjamin Velez | Biology | Advisor: Iain Cheeseman
• Kenji Walker | Health Sciences and Technology | Advisor: Connor Coley
• Luyang (Avril) Wang | Microbiology | Advisor: Daniel Lew
• Tingran Wang | Physics | Advisor: Leonid Mirny
• Eric Weine | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Advisor: Tamara Broderick
• Yunjie (Jessie) Xiao | Biology | Advisor: Myriam Heiman
• Hyeokjun Yoon | Media Arts and Sciences | Advisor: Canan Dagdeviren

MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC)

• Nicolas Emmenegger | Operations Research Center | Advisor: Chara Podimata | SHASS, Project Lead: Adam Berinsky, Political Science
• Alessandro Morosini | Operations Research Center | Advisor: Chara Podimata | SHASS, Project Lead: Adam Berinsky, Political Science

The MIT NEI Project

• Youness Diouane | Curriculum Design and Development | Advisor: Ankur Moitra
• Catherine Fairfield | Curriculum Design and Development | Advisor: Christopher Capozzola
• Maribel Okiye | Curriculum Design and Development | Advisor: Ankur Moitra
• Jana Skirnewskaja | Curriculum Design and Development | Advisor: Daniel Jackson

MIT Quantum Initiative (QMIT)

• Kiryang Kwon | Physics / Research Laboratory of Electronics | Advisor: Richard Fletcher
• Mehmet Tuna Uysal | Physics / Research Laboratory of Electronics | Advisor: Vladan Vuletić
• Charlotte König | Physics | Advisor: Ronald F. Garcia Ruiz
• Kaavya Sahay | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science / Research Laboratory of Electronics | Advisor: Hengyun “Harry” Zhou
• Zhiyang Zeng | Physics / Research Laboratory of Electronics | Advisor: Nuh Gedik
• Neng-Chun Chiu | Physics / Research Laboratory of Electronics | Advisor: Martin Zwierlein
• Mytraya Gattu | Physics / Research Laboratory of Electronics | Advisor: Senthil Todadri
• Hyunsoo Ha | Physics | Advisor: Soonwon Choi
• Ivan Zhigulin | Mechanical Engineering | Advisor: Haoning Tang