Raechel Walker SM ‘23 conducts research in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.
PHOTO: JAKE BELCHER
The donor-supported program, administered by the Office of Graduate Education in coordination with the Office of the Provost, provides fellows with tuition, a monthly stipend, and medical insurance for their first academic year at MIT.
Raechel Walker SM ’23, a PhD candidate in the MIT Media Lab’s Media Arts and Sciences program working in the Personal Robots Group, says the Presidential Fellowship has helped her build on a passion for increasing diversity in computing through her Data Activism Program for African American high school and college students. During her master’s thesis, Walker introduced the concept of “liberatory computing,” which ensures African American students use their computing skills for societal transformation.
Today, she’s publishing the program’s results and sharing her data activism curriculum with a larger audience. She ran two programs last summer virtually and in person at the Media Lab with 34 students. While collaborating with four community organizations, students used computer programming and data analysis to create insightful data visualizations highlighting systemic issues such as AI bias in education, environmental injustice, health care disparities, and mass incarceration.
“What excites me the most about my research is seeing students view themselves as data activism researchers after completing my program,” Walker says. “I also love when students feel more empowered to become data scientists because they share a similar cultural background with their classmates and mentors, which is not usually the case in a typical computing environment.”
The Presidential Fellowship meant she received enough funding to pursue independent projects based on students’ needs. “This fellowship is important to me because it allows me to focus on ensuring that my research makes a positive impact on the world,” Walker says. “Additionally, the recognition from this fellowship gives me the confidence to expand my data activism program, knowing that other researchers and academic professionals find my research valuable.”
“The freedom to explore”
Walker is not alone. MIT established the annual Presidential Fellowship awards to recruit the most outstanding students worldwide to pursue graduate studies at the Institute and admitted the first class of fellows in September 1999.
Recent fellows include Courtney Golden, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who came to MIT with a broad set of interests and an open mind in terms of research. Now, with the goal of designing next-generation electronic systems, she concentrates on designing innovative computer hardware and orchestrating how mathematical computations run on that hardware to dramatically increase its performance and efficiency. This could save scientists time and energy on applications such as big weather simulations, circuit design, and even credit card fraud detection.
Photo: Sarah Bastille
“Where you store your data on a chip relative to where you physically do the computation involving data has a huge impact on performance,” she says. “If those computations can run faster, then scientists can iterate faster on their designs. They can solve problems and answer questions. Another exciting part is that we can provide the capability to do more complicated algorithms that we currently don’t have the resources to do.”
The Presidential Fellowship, she says, “really let me explore and kind of try out a few things during my first semester, before settling on a project.” She looked into how to accelerate MRI image reconstruction, for instance, before deciding on her current focus.
“It was a lot of reading papers, talking to people within MIT, and figuring out what different research areas would look like,” Golden says. “The ability to scale things up and be able to support computations for the modern world was very interesting, so I saw possibility in that direction.”
Economics to design social change
Pedro Carregã Sant’Anna, a PhD student in the Department of Economics, says it is unlikely he could afford to be at MIT without the Presidential Fellowship, much less in Indonesia assisting in conducting large-scale field experiments for the first time. Working last summer with Benjamin Olken, the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics, and with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, Carregã Sant’Anna interviewed a wide range of Indonesians to understand how two government programs related to poverty and unemployment could best be designed by his team and then tested and implemented.
Carregã Sant’Anna’s projects use economic tools and data to analyze and design policies related to inequality, discrimination, and social identity. His primary interests—motivated, he says, by his experiences growing up as a Black man in São Paulo, Brazil—focus on development, political economy, and behavioral economics. “Hopefully, this can improve our understanding of these issues, providing insights on how to design policies that make people’s lives better,” he says.
The fellowship was a “huge honor,” Carregã Sant’Anna says, and a sign that the university believes in his potential.
“I am confident that MIT is the ideal place for me to pursue the research that interests me,” he says. “In the economics department and at MIT in general, I have found an incredible community with supportive faculty who engage deeply with students’ ideas and inspiring colleagues who are very collaborative and have already become my great friends. At MIT, I am becoming a much better researcher, which would be impossible without the Presidential Fellowship.”
Going the distance
The fellowship also took Jensen Lawrence, a planetary science PhD student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, far away from Cambridge—from a geological mapping camp in Nevada to an observing run collecting data at a major research telescope in Chile. It’s no wonder: Lawrence’s research focuses on how planets and planetary systems form and evolve, primarily by studying protoplanetary disks (the disks of dust and gas that encircle newborn stars) and exoplanets (planets that orbit a star that is not the sun).
“The physics and chemistry of protoplanetary disks determine the characteristics of the planets they form,” says Lawrence, who works in the Planet Formation Lab under the supervision of Richard Teague, the Kerr-McGee Career Development Professor, and studies solar system surfaces in the lab of Assistant Professor Gaia Stucky de Quay. “Similarly, the physical, chemical, and orbital properties of existing planets provide hints about how they formed and how they’ve evolved since formation. I hope to leverage telescope observations and computational models to elucidate connections between protoplanetary disks, exoplanets, and the solar system.”
Thoroughly enjoying this period of his academic career, Lawrence says the Presidential Fellowship program helped set him up for success. He has been able to pursue the research that interests him and take the classes he wants without restriction or financial worries, particularly important to him as an international student from Canada.
“I’m very grateful for the freedom that this fellowship has enabled,” Lawrence says. “There are so many revolutionary discoveries just around the corner that will yield deep insights into planetary origins and evolution, and I can’t wait to be a part of them.”
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