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 examine augmented and digital actuality at Trinity College Dublin. Gao is the fifth MIT scholar to be named a Mitchell Scholar.
Mitchell Scholars 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 Ireland peace course of. This yr, over 300 American college students have been endorsed to use for the distinguished fellowship, which is sponsored by the U.S.-Ireland Alliance and funds a yr of graduate research in Ireland.
“Teresa’s excellent work at the intersections of engineering, music, and science communication make the Mitchell Scholarship in Ireland a perfect fit for her next step,” says Kim Benard, affiliate dean of distinguished fellowships in Career Advising and Professional Development. “We are proud that she will be representing MIT there, as she exemplifies the mind and hand ethos of our education.”
Gao, a resident of Provo, Utah, is interested by synthetic intelligence and the event of autonomous brokers. She has carried out analysis in a spread of fields, together with psycholinguistics within the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, social robots for psychological well being within the Media Lab, and machine studying architectures for organic photos on the Broad Institute. Currently, she is working to ascertain cognitive benchmarks for AI with the MIT Quest for Intelligence.
Gao’s love for science is simply equaled by her ardour for creativity and the humanities. She hosts an academic radio present, “Psycholochat: Where Neuroscience Meets Philosophy,” on the MIT campus radio station WMBR 88.1 FM, the place she investigates subjects in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.
Completely 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 scholar group that performs music in service to hospital sufferers and nursing dwelling residents all through the Greater Boston group, and she or he performs with the aggressive MIT Bhangra dance staff.
Outside 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 help nameless campus textline, Lean On Me.