Teresa Gao named 2024 Mitchell Scholar - MIT News

MIT elder Teresa Gao has been named 1 of the 12 winners of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship’s Class of 2024. After graduating adjacent outpouring with a treble large successful machine subject and engineering arsenic good arsenic encephalon and cognitive sciences, she volition survey augmented and virtual world astatine Trinity College Dublin. Gao is the 5th MIT pupil to beryllium named a Mitchell Scholar.

Mitchell Scholars are selected connected the ground of world achievement, leadership, and dedication to nationalist service. The assistance is named successful grant of U.S. Senator George Mitchell’s contributions to the Northern Ireland bid process. This year, implicit 300 American students were endorsed to use for the prestigious fellowship, which is sponsored by the U.S.-Ireland Alliance and funds a twelvemonth of postgraduate studies successful Ireland.

“Teresa’s fantabulous enactment astatine the intersections of engineering, music, and subject connection marque the Mitchell Scholarship successful Ireland a cleanable acceptable for her adjacent step,” says Kim Benard, subordinate dean of distinguished fellowships successful Career Advising and Professional Development. “We are arrogant that she volition beryllium representing MIT there, arsenic she exemplifies the caput and manus ethos of our education.”

Gao, a nonmigratory of Provo, Utah, is funny successful artificial quality and the improvement of autonomous agents. She has conducted probe successful a scope of fields, including psycholinguistics successful the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, societal robots for intelligence wellness successful the Media Lab, and instrumentality learning architectures for biologic images astatine the Broad Institute. Currently, she is moving to found cognitive benchmarks for AI with the MIT Quest for Intelligence.

Gao’s emotion for subject is lone equaled by her passionateness for creativity and the arts. She hosts an acquisition vigor show, “Psycholochat: Where Neuroscience Meets Philosophy,” connected the MIT field vigor presumption WMBR 88.1 FM, wherever she investigates topics successful psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

Completely self-taught connected the viola, Gao earned a highly competitory spot successful the MIT Chamber Music Society. She besides serves arsenic co-president of Ribotones, a pupil radical that plays euphony successful work to infirmary patients and nursing location residents passim the Greater Boston community, and she performs with the competitory MIT Bhangra creation team.

Outside of the arts, Gao tutors chap MIT students done the IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Honor Society, manages logistics for the yearly Battlecode programming contention amusive by MIT’s machine subject department, and volunteers with the adjacent enactment anonymous field textline, Lean On Me.