MIT seniors Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla have won the celebrated Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students a chance to pursue graduate study in the sector of their selection at Cambridge University within the U.K.

Established in 2000, Gates Cambridge offers full-cost post-graduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside of the U.K. The mission of Gates Cambridge is to construct a worldwide network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.

Gosha Geogdzhayev

Originally from Latest York City, Geogdzhayev is a senior majoring in physics with minors in mathematics and computer science. At Cambridge, Geogdzhayev intends to pursue an MPhil in quantitative climate and environmental science. He’s considering applying these subjects to climate science and intends to spend his profession developing novel statistical methods for climate prediction.

At MIT, Geogdzhayev researches climate emulators with Professor Raffaele Ferrari’s group within the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and is a component of the “Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge” Grand Challenges project. He’s currently working on an operator-based emulator for the projection of climate extremes. Previously, Geogdzhayev studied the statistics of fixing chaotic systems, work that has recently been published as a first-author paper.

As a recipient of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) Hollings Scholarship, Geogdzhayev has worked on bias correction methods for climate data on the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He’s the recipient of several other awards in the sector of earth and atmospheric sciences, notably the American Meteorological Society Ward and Eileen Seguin Scholarship.

Outside of research, Geogdzhayev enjoys writing poetry and is actively involved together with his living community, Burton 1, for which he has previously served as floor chair.

Sadhana Lolla

Lolla, a senior from Clarksburg, Maryland, is majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, she’s going to pursue an MPhil in technology policy.

In the longer term, Lolla goals to steer conversations on deploying and developing technology for marginalized communities, comparable to the agricultural Indian village that her family calls home, while also conducting research in embodied intelligence.

At MIT, Lolla conducts research on protected and trustworthy robotics and deep learning on the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Her research has spanned debiasing strategies for autonomous vehicles and accelerating robotic design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis AI, she works on creating uncertainty-aware frameworks for deep learning, which has impacts across computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work on the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 

Outside of research, Lolla leads initiatives to make computer science education more accessible globally. She is an instructor for sophistication 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), considered one of the biggest AI courses on the planet, which reaches hundreds of thousands of scholars annually. She serves because the curriculum lead for Momentum AI, the one U.S. program that teaches AI to underserved students without spending a dime, and she or he has taught a whole bunch of scholars in Northern Scotland as a part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.

Lolla was also the director for xFair, MIT’s largest student-run profession fair, and is an executive board member for Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible for college students across musical backgrounds. In her free time, she enjoys singing, solving crossword puzzles, and baking.