Michelle Contreras Catalan
MIT Department: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi
Research Supervisor: Kimia Hamidieh
Undergraduate Institution: Amherst College
Hometown: Santiago, Chile
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Michelle is a junior at Amherst College, majoring in computer science and mathematics. At her home institution, she’s part of the Data* Mammoths Research and Learning group, specializing in implementing algorithms for statistically-sound knowledge discovery. In the summer of 2023, Michelle joined the Healthy ML Lab, where she studied implicit social biases present in vision-language models and strategies to mitigate them. Her interest lies in human-centered machine learning, striving to develop models that demonstrate efficiency and robustness and ensure fairness for underrepresented minorities. Along with her research interests, she’s also passionate about education. She has coordinated the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science Study (2021-2022) and created educational resources for Python, both initiatives from her home institution. She hopes to continue democratizing STEM knowledge while fostering the inclusion of girls in these fields, especially in Latin America and her home country, Chile.
