MIT senior Teresa Gao has been named one of many 12 winners of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship’s Class of 2024. After graduating subsequent spring with a double main in pc science and engineering in addition to mind and cognitive sciences, she’s going to research augmented and digital actuality at Trinity School Dublin. Gao is the fifth MIT pupil to be named a Mitchell Scholar.
Mitchell Students are chosen on the premise of educational achievement, management, and dedication to public service. The scholarship is known as in honor of U.S. Senator George Mitchell’s contributions to the Northern Eire peace course of. This 12 months, over 300 American college students had been endorsed to use for the celebrated fellowship, which is sponsored by the U.S.-Eire Alliance and funds a 12 months of graduate research in Eire.
“Teresa’s glorious work on the intersections of engineering, music, and science communication make the Mitchell Scholarship in Eire an ideal match for her subsequent step,” says Kim Benard, affiliate dean of distinguished fellowships in Profession Advising and Skilled Growth. “We’re proud that she will probably be representing MIT there, as she exemplifies the thoughts and hand ethos of our training.”
Gao, a resident of Provo, Utah, is concerned with synthetic intelligence and the event of autonomous brokers. She has carried out analysis in a spread of fields, together with psycholinguistics within the Division of Mind and Cognitive Sciences, social robots for psychological well being within the Media Lab, and machine studying architectures for organic photographs on the Broad Institute. At present, she is working to determine cognitive benchmarks for AI with the MIT Quest for Intelligence.
Gao’s love for science is just equaled by her ardour for creativity and the humanities. She hosts an academic radio present, “Psycholochat: The place Neuroscience Meets Philosophy,” on the MIT campus radio station WMBR 88.1 FM, the place she investigates matters in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.
Utterly self-taught on the viola, Gao earned a extremely aggressive seat within the MIT Chamber Music Society. She additionally serves as co-president of Ribotones, a pupil group that performs music in service to hospital sufferers and nursing residence residents all through the Better Boston neighborhood, and she or he performs with the aggressive MIT Bhangra dance workforce.
Outdoors of the humanities, Gao tutors fellow MIT college students by means of the IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Honor Society, manages logistics for the annual Battlecode programming competitors enjoyable by MIT’s pc science division, and volunteers with the peer assist nameless campus textline, Lean On Me.