Three engineering faculty members — Kelsey Hatzell, Aleksandra Korolova and Olga Russakovsky — have been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
The PECASE award is the highest honor given by the U.S. government to early career scientists and engineers. According to a White House press release, 400 researchers from across the country were recognized for exceptional leadership potential.
Hatzell is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. She works on understanding and designing materials for a more sustainable future, driving energy-storage technologies like next-generation batteries, carbon capture technologies that could reduce the impact of fossil fuels, and advanced membranes to desalinate water.
Hatzell is also an associated faculty member with the Princeton Materials Institute. Her past honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, an NSF CAREER Award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Materials Research Society’s Nelson “Buck” Robinson Award, and three teaching commendations from Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, among many others. Hatzell earned her Ph.D. from Drexel University. She joined Princeton from Vanderbilt University, where she was an assistant professor, in 2021.
Korolova, an assistant professor of computer science, researches the societal impacts of machine learning and AI. She develops algorithmic and systems advances for enabling data-driven innovations while preserving individual privacy and ensuring fairness.
Korolova also holds an appointment in the School of Public and International Affairs and is associated faculty in the Center for Information Technology Policy. She is the recipient of a 2020 NSF CAREER Award and a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship. Korolova completed her Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford and joined the Princeton faculty in 2022.
Russakovsky is an associate professor of computer science. She leads the Princeton Visual AI Lab, which develops AI systems that can better understand the visual world. This work brings together research in computer vision, machine learning and human-computer interaction. Her lab is also developing tools to make AI systems fairer and more representative.
Russakovsky is associate director of the Princeton AI Lab, an university-wide initiative to support and expand the scope of AI research at Princeton. In 2017, Russakovsky helped establish the national nonprofit AI4ALL, which works to increase diversity in computer science and artificial intelligence. She co-directs Princeton’s AI4All summer program, which brings together high school students from underrepresented groups to learn the basics of the field.
Her work has been recognized by a 2022 NSF CAREER Award, a 2022 IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Young Researcher Award and the AnitaB.org Emerging Leader Abie Award. She has also been awarded a Phi Betta Kappa Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from Princeton University and the Howard B. Wentz, Jr Junior Faculty Award from the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford and joined the Princeton faculty in 2017.
The PECASE Awards were established in 1996 and are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the White House. The recipients are nominated by government agencies. Hatzell, Korolova and Russakovsky were nominated by the National Science Foundation.
