Isabel Ferreira, a third-year PhD student in the School of Applied AI at Meridian, has been awarded a 2026 Google Fellowship in Machine Learning. The fellowship provides two years of funding, a summer research internship at Google DeepMind, and mentorship from a senior Google researcher. It is one of the most competitive fellowship programs available to ML PhD students.
Ferreira's research focuses on information retrieval systems that work well across languages with uneven representation in pretraining corpora. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Closing the Retrieval Gap: Multilingual IR in the Era of Large Language Models," is supervised by Dr. Elena Marchetti and co-supervised by Dr. Ingrid Holmberg.
"Isabel has done extraordinary work on the ML-IR Bench 2026 benchmark," said Dr. Marchetti. "She recruited and coordinated the native-speaker annotation team across 47 languages, designed the evaluation methodology, and wrote most of the technical implementation. The Google Fellowship is well deserved and long overdue."
Ferreira is originally from São Paulo and completed her undergraduate degree in computer science at Universidade de São Paulo before coming to Meridian. She said the research reflects a personal motivation: "When I was learning Portuguese, I noticed that AI tools performed noticeably worse for my language than for English. I thought: that seems like a solvable problem. I want to be one of the people who solves it."
The Google DeepMind internship will focus on multilingual query understanding for search, directly aligned with her dissertation work. She returns to Meridian after the internship to complete her degree, with an expected graduation date of spring 2028.
Ferreira is the third Meridian student to receive a major industry fellowship in the past 18 months, following Preet Ahluwalia's Open Philanthropy AI Safety Fellowship and Mei-Ling Zhu's Schmidt Futures AI fellowship.