MIT students Ben Lou, Srinath Mahankali, and Kenta Suzuki have been selected to receive Barry Goldwater Scholarships for the 2024-25 academic year. They are among just 438 recipients from across the country selected based on academic merit from an estimated pool of more than 5,000 college sophomores and juniors, approximately 1,350 of whom were nominated by their academic institution to compete for the scholarship.

Since 1989, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation has awarded nearly 11,000 Goldwater scholarships to support undergraduates who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering and have the potential to become leaders in their respective fields. Past scholars have gone on to win an impressive array of prestigious postgraduate fellowships. Almost all, including the three MIT recipients, intend to obtain doctorates in their area of research.

Ben Lou

Ben Lou is a third-year student originally from San Diego, California, majoring in physics and math with a minor in philosophy.

“My research interests are scattered across different disciplines,” says Lou. “I want to draw from a wide range of topics in math and physics, finding novel connections between them, to push forward the frontier of knowledge.”

Since January 2022, he has worked with Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science, and Hudson Loughlin, a graduate student in the LIGO group, which studies the detection of gravitational waves. Lou is working with them to advance the field of quantum measurement and better understand quantum gravity.

“Ben has enormous intellectual horsepower and works with remarkable independence,” writes Mavalvala in her recommendation letter. “I have no doubt he has an outstanding career in physics ahead of him.”

Lou, for his part, is grateful to Mavalvala and Loughlin, as well as all of his scientific mentors that have supported him along his research path. That includes MIT professors Alan Guth and Barton Zwiebach, who introduced him to quantum physics, as well as his first-year advisor, Richard Price; current advisor, Janet Conrad; Elijah Bodish and Roman Bezrukavnikov in the Department of Mathematics; and David W. Brown of the San Diego Math Circle.

In terms of his future career goals, Lou wants to be a professor of theoretical physics and study, as he says, the “fundamental aspects of reality” while also inspiring students to love math and physics.

In addition to his research, Lou is currently the vice president of the Assistive Technology Club at MIT and actively engaged in raising money for Spinal Muscular Atrophy research. In the future, he’d like to continue his philanthropy work and use his personal experience to advise an assistive technology company.

Srinath Mahankali

Srinath Mahankali is a third-year student from New York City majoring in computer science.

Since June 2022, Mahankali has been an undergraduate researcher in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Working with Pulkit Agrawal, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and head of the Improbable AI Lab, Mahankali’s research is on training robots. Currently, his focus is on training quadruped robots to move in an energy-efficient manner and training agents to interact in environments with minimal feedback. But in the future, he’d like to develop robots that can complete athletic tasks like gymnastics.

“The experience of discussing research with Srinath is similar to discussions with the best PhD students in my group,” writes Agrawal in his recommendation letter. “He is fearless, willing to take risks, persistent, creative, and gets things done.”

Before coming to MIT, Mahankali was a 2021 Regeneron STS scholar, which is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards for math and science students. In 2020, he was also a participant in the MIT PRIMES program, studying objective functions in optimization problems with Yunan Yang, an assistant professor of math at Cornell University.

“I’m deeply grateful to all my research advisors for their invaluable mentorship and guidance,” says Mahankali, extending his thanks to PhD students Zhang-Wei Hong and Gabe Margolis, as well as assistant professor of math at Brandeis, Promit Ghosal, and all of the organizers of the PRIMES program. “I’m also very grateful to all the members of the Improbable AI Lab for their support, encouragement, and willingness to help and discuss any questions I have,”

In the future, Mahankali wants to obtain a PhD and one day lead his own lab in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Kenta Suzuki

Kenta Suzuki is a third-year student majoring in mathematics from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Tokyo, Japan.

Currently, Suzuki works with professor of mathematics Roman Bezrukavnikov on research at the intersection of number and representation theory, using geometric methods to represent p-adic groups. Suzuki has also previously worked with math professors Wei Zhang and Zhiwei Yun, crediting the latter with inspiring him to pursue research in representation theory.

In his recommendation letter, Yun writes, “Kenta is the best undergraduate student that I have worked with in terms of the combination of raw talent, mathematical maturity, and research abilities.”

Before coming to MIT, Suzuki was a Yau Science Award USA finalist in 2020, receiving a gold in math, and he received honorable mention from the Davidson Institute Fellows program in 2021. He also participated in the MIT PRIMES program in 2020. Suzuki credits his PRIMES mentor, Michael Zieve at the University of Michigan, with giving him his first taste of mathematical research. In addition, he extended his thanks to all of his math mentors, including the organizers of MIT Summer Program in Undergraduate Research.

After MIT, Suzuki intends to obtain a PhD in pure math, continuing his research in representation theory and number theory and, one day, teaching at a research-oriented institution.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by U.S. Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry Goldwater, a soldier and national leader who served the country for 56 years. Awardees receive scholarships of up to $7,500 a year to cover costs related to tuition, room and board, fees, and books.

On April 9, a trailer with the words “Born by Fire” emblazoned on the back pulled down MIT’s North Corridor (a.k.a. the Outfinite). Students, clad in orange construction vests, maneuvered their futuristic creation out of the trailer, eliciting a surge of curious bystanders. The aerodynamic shell is covered by 5 square meters of solar panels. This multi-occupancy solar car, Gemini, designed and built by the Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT), is slated to race in the 2024 American Solar Challenge. Positioned just outside Building 13, Gemini made its inaugural public appearance at this year’s Edgerton Center Student Teams Showcase. The team’s first-place trophy from an earlier competition sat atop, glistening in the sunlight.

Next, MIT Motorsports arrived with their shiny red electric race car, MY24. SEVT, embodying MIT’s spirit of collaboration, paused their own installation to assist the Motorsports team in transporting MY24 into Lobby 13. Such camaraderie is commonplace among Edgerton teams. MY24 is slated to compete in two upcoming events: the FSAE Hybrid event in Loudon, New Hampshire on May 1, followed by the FSAE Motorsports event in Michigan, later in June.

At the Third Annual Edgerton Center Showcase, Lobby 13 was abuzz with students, faculty, and visitors drawn in by the passion and excitement of members of 14 Edgerton Center student teams. Team members excitedly unveiled a wide range of technologies, including autonomous waterborne craft, rockets, wind turbines, assistive devices, and hydrogen-powered turbine engines. “Seeing the culmination of what MIT students can build in so many different forms was inspiring. It was great to see everyone’s passion and creativity thriving in each of the team’s projects,” says junior Anhad Sawhney, president of the MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS) and captain of the Combat Robotics Club.

In one corner, children congregated around the Combat Robotics table, captivated by clips of the team competing on the Discovery channel’s Battlebots series. Nearby, towering rockets almost brushing the ceiling captured the gaze of onlookers. Suddenly, a symphony of electrical crackles filled the air. Visitors quickly discovered the source was not an AV malfunction, but a Tesla coil created by MITERS, where lightning danced to the pitch input using a computer keyboard. Established in 1973, MITERS — a member-run project space and machine shop — continues to give students the chance to tinker and create quirky inventions such as the motorized shopping cart, DOOMsled.

Adjacent to MITERS, students on the Spokes team dished ice cream into a bike-powered blender. A quick ride down the street created milkshakes for many to enjoy. Spokes is an Edgerton team of students who will bike across the country this summer, teaching STEM outreach classes along the way. Their curriculum is inspired by MIT’s hands-on approach to education.

One of the newest Edgerton Center teams, The Assistive Technology Club, showed an array of innovations poised to revolutionize lives. Their blind assistance team is designing an app that uses machine learning to describe the most relevant features of the environment to visually impaired users. Their adaptive game controller team is designing a one-handed game controller for a user who is paralyzed on one side of her body due to a stroke. Junior Ben Lou, from the robotic self-feeding device team, has a rare disease called spinal muscular atrophy. He shares, “Eating is a basic necessity, but current devices that help people like me eat are not versatile with different foods, unaccommodating to users with different positional needs, generally difficult to set up, and extremely expensive. The self-feeding team is completely re-imagining the way a self-feeding device can work. Instead of operating with a spoon, which cannot handle a wide range of foods and is prone to spillage (among other issues), our device operates with an entirely new utensil.”

Beyond showcasing projects, the event served as a forum for idea exchange and collaboration. The MIT Wind team brought their first working prototype of their model wind turbine, which they will use as a baseline for competing in the Collegiate Wind Competition next year. “We hope to continue working on rotor optimization and blade fabrication, power conversion, and offshore foundation design to be competitive with the other CWC teams next year,” says team captain Kirby Heck. “As a new Edgerton Center team, the showcase was an amazing opportunity for our team members to engage with industry partners, interact with the MIT community, and explore how we fit within the broader constellation of teams within Edgerton at MIT. We also received helpful feedback on our current design and have plenty of new ideas on how we can innovate for our next design iteration.” 

The event included a short program, where SEVT captain Adrienne Wing Suen Lai and first-year Rachel Mohommed of the Electric Vehicle Team gave a shout-out to all the teams. A special tribute was also paid to Peggy Eysenbach, the event’s organizer and the development officer at the Edgerton Center, with a bouquet of flowers. Edgerton Center Director and Professor Kim Vandiver welcomed the MIT community to the event and gave a brief review of the 30-year history of engineering teams sponsored by the Edgerton Center.

Vandiver believes that through all the fun and creativity, strong careers emerge. “Participation in an engineering team is great professional preparation. Upon graduation, these leaders are unafraid of hard problems, and rapidly rise in project management roles,” Vandiver says.