Five MIT Faculty Named Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows, From Deep Learning Math to Enzymes to Giving Lawmakers Public Input

Five MIT faculty members have been named to the 2026 cohort of AI2050 Fellows, a program run by Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropic initiative of Eric and Wendy Schmidt, MIT announced Friday. Two MIT alumni and a former MIT postdoc were also named.

AI2050, conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, funds research on hard problems in artificial intelligence. Each fellow works under the program's central question: "It's 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realized to ensure this outcome?"

Sendhil Mullainathan, the Peter de Florez Professor with appointments in economics and in electrical engineering and computer science, was named a senior fellow. He is also a principal investigator at MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. His AI2050 project focuses on translating patterns that AI can detect into testable theories, according to MIT.

Mullainathan's current work centers on launching The Bike Shop@MIT, a research center working toward more human-centered AI. He co-founded the behavioral science nonprofit ideas42, MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and Dandelion Health, and co-wrote "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much." He is a recipient of the MacArthur "Genius Grant," has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and a "Top 100 Thinker" by Foreign Policy, serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Four faculty were named early-career fellows. Alex Damian, an assistant professor of mathematics with a shared position in the Schwarzman College of Computing and EECS, studies the mathematical foundations of deep learning, focusing on optimization dynamics and representation learning. His project focuses on effective AI model training. He was previously a research fellow at Harvard's Kempner Institute and earned his PhD in applied and computational mathematics at Princeton and his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Duke.

Bailey Flanigan, the Theodore T. Miller (1922) Career Development Assistant Professor with a shared position in EECS and political science, combines social choice theory, game theory, algorithms, statistics and survey methods to strengthen public participation in democracy. She is interested in sampling algorithms, measuring opinions and designing democratic innovations such as deliberative minipublics and participatory budgeting. Her AI2050 project focuses on gathering structured public input that lawmakers can use when making complex decisions. She earned her PhD at Carnegie Mellon in 2024 and was a Harvard Data Science Initiative fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Innovation.

Yunha Hwang, the Samuel A. Goldblitch Career Development Assistant Professor with a shared position in EECS and biology, is co-founder and chief scientist of Tatta Bio, a nonprofit advancing genomic AI for biological discovery. Her research spans machine learning for microbial evolution, biomanufacturing and open science, and her project focuses on determining the functions of biological enzymes. She earned her PhD in biology at Harvard and her bachelor's in computer science at Stanford.

Manish Raghavan, the Drew Houston (2005) Career Development Professor at the Sloan School of Management with a shared position in EECS, studies computational techniques in areas of social concern, including algorithmic fairness and behavioral economics, with a focus on algorithmic tools used in hiring. His project focuses on reducing the negative effects, and strengthening the positive aspects, of widespread reliance on AI. He was a postdoc at Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society, and earned his bachelor's at the University of California at Berkeley and his PhD at Cornell.

All four early-career fellows hold shared positions between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and another department, a structure that places computing faculty across the institute. All five are principal investigators at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, according to the announcement.

MIT alumni Irene Chen PhD '22 and Allison Z. Koenecke '14, along with former MIT postdoc Juan Carlos Perdomo, were also named AI2050 early-career fellows.

Several of the projects connect to questions in the news this fall. Flanigan's work on public input for lawmakers and Raghavan's on AI reliance address how AI is used in civic life and hiring, while the MIT-led LLM Election Observatory, a separate project, is tracking how chatbots answer midterm questions.

MIT's announcement did not state the dollar value of the awards.

Still unknown: the size of each fellowship, and when the fellows will publish their first results.