By Hannah Newman for the Office of the Dean of the Faculty
Salma Abdel Magid and Tiwalayo Eisape join the Department of Computer Science as 2025 Princeton Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellows.
The fellowship program, now in its sixth year, recognizes and supports 15 outstanding scholars from disciplines spanning the humanities, engineering, sciences and social sciences. By bringing together scholars across academic fields, the program allows them to deepen their disciplinary expertise while testing out new ideas from other disciplines. These scholars will contribute to the University’s excellence and its diversity, broadly defined. The program is open to all eligible scholars, regardless of identity. Financial support is provided for up to two years at full salary.
“Having had the privilege of mentoring through this program, I can attest that the cohort experience, where scholars from sciences, humanities, engineering and social sciences come together, sparks interdisciplinary conversations that invigorate work in surprising ways,” said Jennifer Jennings, professor of sociology and public affairs, who is serving as the program’s acting faculty director for 2025-26. “The unique value of this model lies in that intersection: where bold ideas meet rigorous grounding, where community meets autonomy, and where early-career scholars are positioned not just to contribute, but to lead.”
Salma Abdel Magid researches developing interpretable computer vision and language models that are explainable to humans, aiming to improve their safety and alignment with human values. She also investigates how bias and spurious correlations propagate throughout the machine learning pipeline, with the goal of building more transparent, fair and responsible AI systems. Abdel Magid holds a doctorate in computer science from Harvard University, and an M.S. in computer science and engineering and a B.S. in computer science from Santa Clara University. She is advised by Olga Russakovsky, associate professor of computer science and associate director of Princeton Lab for Artificial Intelligence.
Tiwalayo Eisape applies methods from computational cognitive science to reverse-engineer the human capacity for language, and to study and build artificial intelligence that can use language with similar efficiency. Eisape holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in computer science from Boston College. He is advised by Tom Griffiths, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture of Psychology and Computer Science, and director of the Princeton Lab for Artificial Intelligence and by Adele Goldberg, the Moses Taylor Pyne Professor of Psychology.
Learn more about all the 2025 Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellows here.