Kristin Bergmann

Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Kristin Bergmann joined the EAPS faculty in 2015. Bergmann received a BA in geology and environmental studies from Carleton College in 2004, after which she spent three years teaching Earth and life sciences at The Pennington School in New Jersey. She pursued graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, earning an MS (2011) and a PhD (2013) in geology. Before coming to MIT, Bergmann was a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows.

More information on Prof. Bergmann can be found on the MIT Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences website.

Sili Deng

Doherty Professorship in Ocean Utilization, Associate Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering

Dr. Sili Deng joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT as an assistant professor in January 2019. She received her bachelor’s degree in Thermal Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2010 and her master’s and doctoral degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 2012 and 2016, respectively. From 2016 to 2018, Dr. Deng was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Dr. Deng received the Princeton Energy and Climate Scholarship in 2013 and the Gordon Wu Prize for Excellence in 2014, both from Princeton University. She also received the Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014 from Princeton University and was one of the five recipients of the Bernard Lewis Fellowship at the biennial International Symposium on Combustion in 2016.

Read more about Dr. Deng on the Deng Engery and NanoTechnology Group website.

David Des Marais

Amgen Career Development Professor

David Des Marais graduated with a BA in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley in 2000 and a PhD in Biology from Duke University in 2008.  He began working at MIT in 2017 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The primary focus of research in the Des Marais Lab is to understand the mechanisms of plant-environment interaction. We use tools from molecular, quantitative, and population genetics to identify the physiological basis of plant response to environmental cues and ask how these mechanisms constrain or facilitate plant breeding and evolutionary change. Des Marais has won the Walter Fitch Prize, Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, Maseeh Award for Teaching Excellence (2022), NSF CAREER Award (2023), Ole Madsen Mentoring Award (2023), and the SoE Samuel M. Seegal Prize (2025).

Read more about Prof. Des Marais on the Civil and Environmental Engineering website.

Roberto Rigobon

Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management, Professor in Applied Economics

Roberto is a macro-economist who concentrates on measurement issues: economic, social, and ethical. He studies financial contagion, and the propagation of shocks through economic networks. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project that produce alternative measures of inflation in many countries; And he is a cofounder and director of the Aggregate Confusion Project which studies how to improve ESG measures.

Roberto joined the business school in 1997. He has won the Teacher of the Year Award five times, and the Excellence in Teaching Award three times at the Sloan School. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in electrical engineering from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984.

Learn more about Prof. Rigobon and his research on the MIT Sloan website.

Ishani Saraf

Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society

Ishani Saraf is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT. She studies technoscientific discards and their methodological potential for interpreting social life and political matter. Her current work focuses on the trade and transformation of discarded machines and metal scrap across South Asian and the Indian Ocean spaces, exploring their uncharted transnational routes of circulation, the social worlds they become embedded in, and the novel contexts they in turn generate.

Ishani received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Davis, and her MA and MPhil in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. Prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at the University of Virginia. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds Mellon Research Initiative at UC Davis, and other interdisciplinary grants at UC Davis and UVA.

More information on Prof. Saraf can be found on the MIT Science, Technology, and Society website.