Alondra Nelson Receives AI2050 Senior Fellowship from Schmidt Sciences

Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science, has been named by Schmidt Sciences as a 2026 AI2050 Senior Fellow. Nelson is one of six senior researchers to receive this $1,000,000 research award, which aims to support "talented researchers tackling consequential scientific and societal challenges."

Launched in 2022, the AI2050 program asks how AI can be guided to benefit society and, ultimately, be seen as a positive development by the year 2050. AI2050 grantees will focus their research on a working list of Hard Problems in AI, from ensuring that the technology does not cause danger to humans to finding ways it can address global issues.

Nelson's project as a Senior Fellow will examine how individuals and households navigate multiple AI systems simultaneously across school, work, healthcare, and finance. While existing scholarship predominantly analyzes AI technologies in isolation, her research will address a critical gap by capturing the compounding daily reality of living in an AI-saturated society. By combining survey methods with ethnographic study of multi-generational American families across diverse regions, Nelson will establish the first sustained record of the cumulative impact of this technological transition—that she terms the "algorithmic surround"—and build a foundation to help shape what comes next.

Schmidt Sciences also announced twenty-two AI2050 Early Career Fellows, which included Christopher Maddison, Member (2019–20) in the School of Mathematics. Maddison dedicated his time at IAS to the development of methods for machine learning, emphasizing those that work at scale in deep learning applications. He is now turning his expertise to the fundamental problem of "signal scarcity," namely that the most valuable scientific data is scarce and expensive to verify. Maddison’s project as an Early Career Fellow will develop new AI methods to begin addressing this, with the aim of accelerating the discovery of new medicines. He is now based at the University of Toronto.

Read the full announcement on the Schmidt Sciences website.