Cambridge, Mass. (November 15) -- MIT senior men's cross country runner Matthew Kearney (Austin, Texas) has been selected for the 2023 cohort of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship program. One of three MIT students to receive the honor, they will begin fully funded postgraduate studies at Oxford University in the U.K. next fall. Each year, Rhodes awards 32 scholarships to U.S. citizens plus additional scholarships for citizens from non-U.S. constituencies.

The students were supported by Associate Dean Kim Benard and the Distinguished Fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development, and received additional mentorship from the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships.

"Matt is truly one-of-a-kind," said MIT head coach Riley Macon. "His leadership as a team captain is one of the primary factors for why we have performed at such a high level as a program. His work ethic, thoughtfulness, and empathy will make him an extraordinary leader as he progresses into the next chapter of his life. I am so pleased to see that he has been rewarded for his efforts with the most prestigious scholarship in the world, he has absolutely earned it."
 
On the cross country course, Kearney earned NEWMAC All-Conference for the third time in his career after placing fourth at the NEWMAC Championship. He is also a three-time USTFCCCA All-Region performer after finishing fourth in this year's NCAA New England Regional, as well as a returning USTFCCCA All-American after finishing 28th at the 2021 NCAA Division III National Championship.

At MIT, Kearney is majoring in both electrical engineering and computer science and philosophy. At Oxford, he will pursue an MSc in research in statistics. His goal is to redesign AI technologies and practices to both address their harms and reimagine them as tools for solutions to pressing societal issues such as climate change and economic inequality.

He has researched theoretical quantum computing with the Quanta Research Group, computer vision for 3D scene understanding with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), probabilistic climate downscaling with the Human Systems Lab, and explainability methods for natural language models with CSAIL. He also interned with Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle company, and Google X, the moonshot factory of Google.

Kearney also co-founded a project in 2020 with the goal of focusing individual efforts on the most effective solutions to climate change. He and his co-founder were awarded the PKG Fellowship and the IDEAS Fellowship to support this work. Additionally, as part of his studies in the humanities, he was selected as an MIT Burchard Scholar.

For the latest on MIT Athletics, follow the Engineers via social media on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.