The Department of EECS announces new Career Development chairs

Top row, left to right: Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang, Kuikui Liu Bottom row, left to right: Marzyeh Ghassemi, Kaiming He, Alex Rives

The Department is pleased to announce the new crop of career development chair recipients, which include:

Marzyeh Ghassemi has been named the Germeshausen Career Development Professor, effective July 1. Ghassemi earned two bachelor’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from New Mexico State University as a Goldwater Scholar; her MSc in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar; and her PhD in computer science from MIT. Following stints as a Visiting Researcher with Alphabet’s Verily and an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, Ghassemi joined EECS and the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES) as an assistant professor in July 2021. (IMES is the home of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.) She is affiliated with LIDS, the Jameel Clinic, IDSS and CSAIL. Ghassemi’s research in the Healthy ML Group creates a rigorous quantitative framework in which to design, develop and place ML models in a way that is robust and fair, focusing on health settings. Her contributions range from socially-aware model construction; to improving subgroup- and shift-robust learning methods; to identifying important insights in model deployment scenarios that have implications in policy, health practice and equity.

Among other awards, Ghassemi has been named one of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35; and has been awarded the 2018 Seth J. Teller Award, the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data, a 2024 NSF CAREER Award, and the Google Research Scholar Award. She founded the non-profit Association for Health, Inference and Learning (AHLI) and her work has been featured in popular press such as Forbes, Fortune, MIT News, and The Huffington Post.

Kaiming He has been named the Douglas Ross (1954) Career Development Professor of Software Technology, effective July 1. He earned his BS from Tsinghua University in 2007 and his PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011 before joining Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) as a Researcher and then Facebook AI Research (FAIR) as a Research Scientist. He joined the Department of EECS as an associate professor in February, and is affiliated with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research areas include deep learning and computer vision. He is best-known for his work on Deep Residual Networks (ResNets), which have made significant impact on computer vision and broader artificial intelligence; on visual object detection and segmentation, including Faster R-CNN and Mask R-CNN; and on visual self-supervised learning.

He’s awards include the PAMI Young Researcher Award in 2018; three best paper awards, at CVPR 2009, CVPR 2016, and ICCV 2017; two best paper honorable mentions (at ECCV 2018 and CVPR 2021); and an Everingham Prize for selfless contributions to computer vision. 

Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang SM ’08, who will join MIT in a shared position between EECS and Music and Theater Arts as an assistant Professor in September, has been named the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor. Huang holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, a BM in music composition and BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an MS from the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD from Harvard University.

She will help develop graduate programming focused on music technology. Previously, Huang spent eight years with Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music-making. She is the creator of Music Transformer and Coconet (which powered the Bach Google Doodle), and was a judge and organizer for the AI Song Contest.

Kuikui Liu has been named the Elting Morison Career Development Professor, effective July 1. Liu earned his BS in mathematics and computer science in 2017, an MS in computer science in 2018, and a PhD in computer science in 2022, all from the University of Washington, before coming to MIT as a Foundations of Data Science Institute postdoc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and an assistant professor in EECS. His research interests are in the design and analysis of Markov chains, with applications to statistical physics, high-dimensional geometry, and statistics. To study these complex stochastic dynamics, he develops and uses mathematical tools from fields such as high-dimensional expanders, geometry of polynomials, algebraic combinatorics, statistical physics, and more.

Among other honors, Liu was the co-recipient of a best paper award at STOC 2019; received the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award in 2022; and the 2023 EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Alexander Rives will become the Arthur J. Conner (1888) Career Development Professor, effective Jan 2025, when he is due to join the Department of EECS as an assistant professor, with a core membership in the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Rives received his BS in philosophy and biology from Yale University and is completing his PhD in computer science at NYU.

In his research, Rives is focused on AI for scientific understanding, discovery, and design for biology. Rives has previously worked with Meta, where he founded and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling team that developed large language models for proteins.

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