MIT graduate students Aziza Almanakly and Belinda Li have been selected by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) as recipients of the multi-year Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship for Women, an honor designed to encourage and support female graduates in STEM fields. The strict selection process for this prestigious scholarship took into account both students’ outstanding achievements in academic achievement and inquiry, as well as their contributions to the STEM community.
Importantly, the scholarships are the culmination of intense efforts by both the Institute and the EECS department. After MIT was selected by the Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM to submit a full application, EECS entered MIT’s internal competition and was selected to submit a full application on behalf of the Institute to a national competition hosted by the Henry Luce Foundation. Funding from the Luce Foundation, combined with EECS cost-sharing funding, will provide Almanakly and Li with full financial support for a period of two years.
“These scholarships are a strong endorsement of institutional support for women in STEM,” says Professor Asu Ozdaglar, head of EECS. “Our commitment to supporting women in STEM goes far beyond attracting the best candidates to our program; “We are committed to providing ongoing, specific support for their research careers once they arrive at MIT.” Both Almanakly and Li will defer the start of the CBL Graduate Fellowships until current fellowship awards are completed; both audiences are already attracting attention in red-hot technical fields like quantum computing and language modeling.
Aziza Almanakly, an early second-year PhD student advised by Professor Will Oliver, is conducting research on waveguide quantum electrodynamics and microwave quantum optics with superconducting qubits. During her first nine months at MIT, Almanakly successfully demonstrated the controlled, directional generation of single microwave photons on a up-to-date qubit chip of her own design—an creative achievement and an indicator of her exceptional talent. Of Almanakly’s work, Oliver says: “Her success is based on a combination of raw talent, strong intuition, perseverance, and a strong desire to improve herself, her research, her workplace, and the lives of those around her. I have absolutely no doubt that Aziza will be successful in her research and I fully expect that she will become a future leader in science and technology.” As a personal commitment to passing on the mentoring and encouragement received, Almanakly teaches the fundamentals of quantum computing to underrepresented high school students through IBM Quantum and Coding School. Before coming to MIT, Almanakly conducted research at Novel York University, Caltech, the City University of Novel York, and Princeton University. Almanakly won, among other awards, an award PD Soros Scholarship for New Americans.
Belinda Li, an up-and-coming second-year PhD student advised by Professor Jacob Andreas, conducts research on language models and natural language processing. Li’s interest in language models and natural language processing led to a year working with the AI Integrity team in the Facebook AI Applied Research group, where she worked on building automatic hate speech and disinformation detectors. About his work, Li says: “I am interested in examining the relationship between linguistic models (LMs) and the knowledge they encode: what exactly do LMs know about the external world? And how can we expand their ability to learn and systematically apply this knowledge? More fundamentally, what is the relationship between language/linguistic technologies and wider society?” Li’s ambitious research goals took her far during her first year at MIT. Her advisor Andreas reports: “Despite starting this year [during the pandemic]Belinda has already made significant discoveries in how information is organized in machine learning models trained for language processing tasks… In the six months she has been here, Belinda has essentially started running her own mini-lab.” Additionally, Li has taken on the responsibility of mentoring underrepresented students through MIT EECS GAAP program. Among many other awards, Li was the recipient of an Ida M. Green Memorial Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.
Founded by distinguished American journalist, playwright, ambassador and congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, CBL program for women in STEM was created to “encourage women to enter, enter, graduate and teach” in fields where they are still underrepresented, including science, mathematics and engineering. To date, the program has supported more than 2,800 undergraduate, graduate and early-career women, making the CBL program the premier source of private support for women pursuing science, mathematics and engineering in higher education in the United States.