Two from MIT named 2023 Marshall Scholars
MIT senior Rachel Chae and alumnus Sihao Huang ’22 have been chosen to affix the 2023 class of Marshall Students and can start graduate research within the U.Okay. subsequent fall. Funded by the British authorities, the Marshall Scholarship offers as much as 50 scholarships for distinctive American college students to pursue superior examine in any discipline at any college within the U.Okay.
MIT’s endorsed Marshall candidates are suggested and supported by the distinguished fellowships group, led by Affiliate Dean Kim Benard in Profession Advising and Skilled Improvement. They’re additionally mentored by the MIT Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships, co-chaired by professors Will Broadhead and Tamar Schapiro.
“Working with this 12 months’s Marshall candidates has been as rewarding and humbling as ever,” says Broadhead. “These superb college students interact in a months-long train in essential introspection and private development, supported by the professional mentorship supplied by Kim Benard and her group within the Distinguished Fellowships Workplace and by the devoted college, workers, and graduate college students who serve on the Distinguished Fellowships Committee. We on the committee have been impressed by all of this 12 months’s fellowship candidates and are particularly happy to congratulate Rachel and Sihao, whose knowledge, good humor, and future-minded optimism will serve them nicely as they take their hard-earned locations on this 12 months’s class of Marshall Students.”
Rachel Chae
Hailing from Irvine, California, senior Rachel Chae is majoring in electrical engineering and pc science and minoring in organic engineering. For her first 12 months as a Marshall Scholar, she is going to pursue an MSc in translational well being sciences at Oxford College, adopted by an MSc in well being coverage, planning, and financing at The London Faculty of Hygiene and Tropical Drugs in her second 12 months. An aspiring physician-scientist, Chae hopes to turn into a principal investigator on the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, pursuing translational analysis in medical imaging whereas treating and advocating for neglected populations in medication.
Within the Bouma Lab at MIT, Chae’s analysis has targeted on figuring out weak coronary artery plaques earlier than they progress. She created optical tissue phantoms with totally different lipid content material and predicted key spectral options utilizing S-OCT processing. She is at the moment engaged on ex vivo experiments to validate these predictions. Within the Langer Lab, Chae accelerated drug-screening procedures by coaching a machine-learning algorithm that helps establish podocyte-treating medicine. Chae has additionally interned on the Nationwide Coronary heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the place she labored on novel MRI imaging strategies for pulmonary illness.
All through her time at MIT, Chae has been concerned with MIT Hacking Drugs; as co-director she oversaw the group of hackathons that sort out medical points and encourage world well being care entrepreneurship. Chae was additionally the social media supervisor of Undertaking Prana Basis, a nonprofit spun out of Professor Giovanni Traverso’s lab that goals to ship progressive medical options to underserved populations. She has held management roles with the MIT Premedical Society, the MIT Pistol Group, and the MIT Borderline artwork mural venture.
Sihao Huang ’22
Sihao Huang grew up in China and Singapore earlier than transferring to New York Metropolis. He graduated from MIT in Might 2022 with a BS in physics, a BS in electrical engineering, and a minor in political science. Huang will examine for a DPhil in politics at Oxford. He aspires to use insights from complexity science to comparative politics, finally working on the intersection of academia and authorities on coverage design and analysis.
Earlier than arriving at MIT, Huang began a spacecraft techniques firm, Aphelion Orbitals. He later labored with MIT’s chapter of College students for the Exploration and Improvement of House on a student-run satellite tv for pc venture. After spending two years on the MIT Engineering Quantum Techniques Group researching the design of superconducting quantum processors, and publishing a first-author paper in PRX Quantum, Huang started working on the MIT Media Lab with Alexander Siegenfeld. There, he utilized insights from statistical physics to check electoral illustration and polarization.
Huang later carried out analysis on worldwide relations with Professor Taylor Fravel, interviewing diplomats and co-authoring a manuscript on Chinese language international coverage. He additionally labored on making use of symbolic AI to mannequin validation in social science and carried out analysis at Harvard College’s economics division.
Huang based the MIT Political Overview, the college’s first undergraduate politics journal, and designed and taught excessive school-level courses on quantitative social science. He spent his senior 12 months at Oxford, the place he labored on social motion research and points in AI governance. He’s at the moment pursuing a grasp’s in world affairs at Tsinghua College in China as a 2023 Schwarzman Scholar.