Five in EECS Appointed to Career Development Professorships
Five EECS faculty members were recently appointed to Career Development professorships. They are, from left to right: Dylan Hadfield-Mennel; Yoon Kim; Jelena Notaros; Anand Natarajan; and Tess Smidt. The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has announced the appointment of five of its faculty members to Career Development Professorships, retroactively effective July 1, 2021. Those appointments are as follows:
Dylan Hadfield-Menell has been appointed Bonnie and Marty (1964) Tenenbaum Career Development Assistant Professor. Hadfield-Menell’s research focuses on algorithms that facilitate human-compatible artificial intelligence. He aims to develop frameworks that account for uncertainty about the objective being optimized. Hadfield-Menell is affiliated with CSAIL; he earned his PhD from the University of California Berkeley and his undergraduate degree from MIT.
Yoon Kim has been appointed NBX Career Development Assistant Professor. Kim’s work straddles the intersection between natural language processing and machine learning, and touches upon efficient training and deployment of large-scale models, learning from small data, neuro-symbolic approaches, grounded language learning, and connections between computational and human language processing. Affiliated with CSAIL, Kim earned his PhD in computer science at Harvard University; his MS in Data Science from New York University; his MA in Statistics from Columbia University; and his BA in both Math and Economics from Cornell.
Anand Venkat Natarajan has been appointed ITT Career Development Associate Professor in Computer Technology. Natarajan’s research is in theoretical quantum information, particularly nonlocality, quantum complexity theory, and semidefinite programming hierarchies. Natarajan earned his PhD in Physics from MIT, and an MS in Computer Science and BS in Physics from Stanford University. Prior to joining MIT, he spent time as a postdoc at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech; he is affiliated with CSAIL.
Jelena Notaros has been appointed Robert J. Shillman (1974) Career Development Assistant Professor in EECS. Notaros’s research interests are in integrated silicon photonics devices, systems, and applications, with an emphasis on augmented-reality displays, LiDAR sensing for autonomous vehicles, free-space optical communications, quantum engineering, and biophotonics. Affiliated with RLE and MTL, Notaros earned her her Ph.D. and MS degrees from MIT, and her undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Tess Smidt has been appointed X-Window Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor. Affiliated with RLE, Smidt earned SB in Physics from MIT and her PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on machine learning that incorporates physical and geometric constraints, with applications to materials design. Prior to joining the MIT EECS faculty, she was the 2018 Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellow in Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Software Engineering Intern on the Google Accelerated Sciences team.
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