EECS announces new hires for 2021

Top row, L to R: Ashia Wilson, Jelena Notaros, Marzyeh Ghassemi

Middle row, L to R: Anand Natarajan, Sixian You, Robert Yang

Bottom row, L to R: Sam Hopkins, Yoon Kim, Dylan Hadfield-Menell

2021 sees the addition of many new faculty members, including nine recent hires within EECS or in its collaborative scope. Learn more about their fascinating research below.

Marzyeh Ghassemi will join EECS as an assistant professor in July 2021 and will also be affiliated with the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and CSAIL. Her research focuses on machine learning in health care. She is working on clinical risk prediction with semi-supervised learning; optimal treatment discovery using expert demonstrations; and noninvasive patient phenotyping for behavioral conditions. 

Dylan Hadfield-Menell will join EECS as an assistant professor in July 2021 and will also be a member of CSAIL. His research focuses on algorithms that facilitate human-compatible artificial intelligence. He aims to develop frameworks that account for uncertainty about the objective being optimized. He is currently a fourth-year PhD student at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. 

Sam Hopkins will join EECS as an assistant professor in January 2022 and will also be a member of CSAIL. His research focuses on optimization, especially convex programming and its applications to algorithmic statistics. He is currently a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. 

Yoon Kim will join EECS as an assistant professor in 2021 and will also be a member of CSAIL. He is currently a research scientist in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. His work is at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning. He completed his PhD in computer science at Harvard University. 

Anand Natarajan joined EECS as an assistant professor in September 2020 and is also a member of CSAIL. His research is in theoretical quantum information. He is particularly interested in nonlocality, quantum complexity theory, and semidefinite programming hierarchies.

Jelena Notaros joined EECS in May 2020 as an assistant professor, a principal investigator in RLE and a core faculty member of MTL. Her research interests are in integrated silicon photonics devices, systems, and applications, with an emphasis on integrated optical phased arrays for LiDAR (light detection and ranging) and augmented reality. 

Ashia Wilson will join EECS as assistant professor in January 2021 and will be a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Her research interests are in providing rigorous guarantees for algorithmic performance and in developing frameworks for studying issues of fairness and governance in machine learning. 

Guangyu Robert Yang will join MIT as an assistant professor in July 2021. He will be based in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and will be assuming a shared position with the SCC in AI+D. His interests are in understanding the brain and building neural networks. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University. 

Sixian You will join EECS as an assistant professor in January 2021. She will be part of the EE Faculty. Her primary research interest is in developing innovative optical imaging solutions for biomedicine. She is particularly interested in next-generation, label-free multiphoton imaging technologies to study the tumor microenvironment.