Communication Fellow
Graduate Student
Eugenie Lai is a fifth-year PhD student in the Data Systems Group at MIT CSAIL, advised by Professor Michael Cafarella. Her research focuses on automating and optimizing data-to-insight pipelines, with the goal of making data more accessible and usable for downstream applications such as modeling and analysis. Her work spans topics such as predicting tabular data transformation, explainable data discretization, and AI agentic systems for data science workflows.
As a CommLab Fellow at MIT EECS, she is especially enthusiastic about helping others with Statement of Purpose writing and preparing effective conference talks, and enjoys giving feedback that empowers others to present their best work.
In her free time, she loves to travel. As a student on a budget, she is highly motivated to do strong research in order to publish at top conferences — allowing her work trips to foreign destinations (e.g., Greece, China, Germany, UK, Spain). Since the start of her PhD, she has combined her passion for discovery both in research and around the world.