Manling Li Named Kuruganti Junior Faculty Fellow
Effective September 1, the fellowship supports early-career faculty who are working in computational research with a focus on AI or machine learning
Northwestern Engineering’s Manling Li will hold the Kuruganti Junior Faculty Fellowship for a one-year term, effective September 1.
Established in 2024 through the generosity of Adi Kuruganti (’99, MBA ’06), the rotating fellowship supports early-career faculty at the McCormick School of Engineering who are working in computational research related to AI or machine learning.
“I am deeply honored to receive the Kuruganti Fellowship,” said Li, who joined Northwestern Engineering in 2024 as an assistant professor of computer science. “This support is a meaningful recognition of our lab’s efforts to advance multimodal AI. I am sincerely grateful for this investment in our work and in the next generation of researchers.”
Li is also an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems and of the Cognitive Science Program at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
Head of the Multimodal Learning and Language (MLL) Lab, Li and her team build intelligent language, vision, and robotics models that reason, plan, and interact with the physical world.
While current foundation models trained on static data perform with high-level, structured background knowledge, they lack grounded interactions with the dynamic and partially observable physical world. By equipping foundation models with an internal physics engine, Li aims to evolve AI models from passive observers into active, embodied agents.
The work of Li and her team were acknowledged in several top venues this year, including Nebius Science’s “ICML 2026 Papers That Matter” list, Best Paper Award at CVPR 2026 Workshop on Test-Time Scaling for Computer Vision, Outstanding Paper Awards at ICLR 2026 Workshop on World Models and Workshop on Lifelong Agents, Best Paper Award at the ACL 2026 TrustNLP Workshop, Best Paper Awards at AAAI 2026 Workshop on Trustworthy Agentic Systems and Workshop on Personalization in the Era of Large Foundation Models, Best Paper Honorable Mention at the NeurIPS 2025 LAW workshop, and Best Paper Award at the ICCV 2025 SP4V workshop. In 2025, Li was named to the MIT Tech Review Innovators Under 35 list and earned an ACL Inaugural Best Dissertation Award Honorable Mention.
“I am simply delighted that one of our super star faculty members has been recognized with this recognition,” said Samir Khuller, Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science at Northwestern Engineering. “All kudos to her and her amazing group.”
Niall Mangan, assistant professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics, currently holds the Kuruganti Fellowship. Her research seeks to combine data-driven modeling and mechanistic modeling to more quickly develop models that both describe system behavior and provide explanations that can support system optimization and engineering design.
About Adi Kuruganti
Kuruganti studied electrical engineering at Northwestern and returned to earn an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.
Now chief product and technology officer at Automation Anywhere, a San Jose-based company providing AI-powered automation solutions, Kuruganti unlocks opportunities for clients to automate mission-critical operations. It’s a disruptive endeavor demanding critical thinking, collaborative action, and data-fueled iteration—a challenge Kuruganti has embraced since his undergraduate years.