MIT seniors Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla have won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students the opportunity to pursue a master’s degree in a field of their choice at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom
Founded in 2000, Gates Cambridge offers full-fee postgraduate scholarships to outstanding candidates from countries outside the UK. Gates Cambridge’s mission is to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.
Gosha Geogdzhayev
Originally from Fresh York, Geogdzhayev is a final-year student majoring in physics, majoring in mathematics and computer science. At Cambridge, Geogdzhayev plans to pursue a master’s degree in quantitative climate and environmental science. He is interested in the application of these subjects to climate science and intends to spend his career developing novel statistical methods for climate prediction.
At MIT, Geogdzhayev, together with Professor Raffaele Ferrari’s group in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, studies climate emulators and participates in the Grand Challenges project “Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge”. Currently, he is working on a camera emulator for the projection of climate extremes. Previously, Geogdzhayev dealt with the statistics of changing cluttered systems; this work was recently published as the first author’s work.
As a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Hollings Fellow, Geogdzhayev worked on methods to correct for biases in climate data at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He is the recipient of several other awards in Earth and atmospheric sciences, most notably the American Meteorological Society Fellowship and the Eileen Seguin Fellowship.
Apart from his scientific work, Geogdzhayev likes to write poetry and is actively involved in the activities of his Burton 1 community, where he previously served as floor manager.
Sadhana Lolla
Lolla, a senior from Clarksburg, Maryland, is majoring in computer science and minoring in math and literature. At Cambridge, she will pursue a Masters in Technology Policy.
In the future, Lolla intends to lead conversations on the implementation and development of technology for marginalized communities, such as the Indian village her family calls home, while also conducting research on embodied intelligence.
At MIT, Lolla conducts research on unthreatening and trustworthy robotics and deep learning in the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Her research included questioning autonomous vehicle strategies and accelerating robot design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis AI, he works to create uncertainty-aware deep learning platforms with implications for computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
In addition to research, Lolla conducts initiatives to raise the availability of computer science education around the world. He is the instructor of 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), one of the largest AI courses in the world, reaching millions of students annually. She is the curriculum manager for Momentum AI, the only US program that teaches AI to disadvantaged students for free, and has taught hundreds of students in northern Scotland through the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.
Lolla also served as director of xFair, MIT’s largest student-run career fair, and as a board member of Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible to students of all musical backgrounds. In her free time, she likes singing, solving crosswords and baking cakes.