MIT affiliates named 2026 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellows
Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni are honored with fellowships to advance research on beneficial AI.
MIT faculty members Eric Mullainathan and five others, along with two alumni, have been selected as the 2026 AI2050 Fellows. Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, awards this honor annually to accelerate scientific innovation in artificial intelligence. The Fellows aim to address the central question for AI2050: "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?"
AI2050 Senior Fellow Sendhil Mullainathan, a Peter de Florez Professor at MIT with dual appointments in Economics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will focus on translating AI patterns into testable theories. Mullainathan, a co-founder of ideas42 and Dandelion Health, is also a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Other AI2050 Fellows include Alex Damian, Bailey Flanigan, Yunha Hwang, Manish Raghavan, Irene Chen, and Allison Z. Koenecke.
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