Rada Mihalcea elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Rada Mihalcea, the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies recognizing excellence across academic and professional fields.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recognizes leaders who have made exceptional contributions to their fields and convenes its members to examine and address important societal issues. Mihalcea joins the Academy’s 2026 class of new members, which includes influential figures across academia, the arts, industry, journalism, public policy, science, and more.

Mihalcea is one of three U-M faculty elected to the Academy this year. She is the first faculty in CSE at U-M to be elected to the Academy, and among the first in the College of Engineering, following in the pioneering footsteps of Janice M. Jenkins—the first female faculty member in EECS at U-M—for whom her collegiate professorship is named.

“I am honored to be in the company of such extraordinary individuals, and excited to engage with the academy’s members,” Mihalcea said. “This recognition is shared with the many amazing students and collaborators from across the world that I have had the privilege to work with.”

Mihalcea is director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab and co-director of e-Health and Artificial Intelligence Initiative (e-HAIL) at U-M. Under her leadership, the AI Lab has grown significantly and has advanced collaboration and partnership-building across the AI research community through the establishment of an annual AI Symposium, an annual NLP Day, and an AI industry partners program, and has engaged the public through a community outreach program. The e-HAIL program connects Michigan Medicine and the College of Engineering researchers at U-M and provides resources to help form multidisciplinary partnerships at the intersection of healthcare and AI. 

Mihalcea’s research spans natural language processing, large language and language-vision models, and computational social science, with a focus on cross-cultural and cross-lingual modeling, fairness, interpretability, and responsible AI deployment. She conducts this work with her students in the Language and Information Technologies (LIT) Lab, a research group that over the years has included students from dozens of countries. Mihalcea also leads interdisciplinary efforts at U-M and across the field at the intersection of AI, health, education, and social impact, and has developed computational methods and datasets used by researchers worldwide.

A widely recognized leader in her field, Mihalcea is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). She has also received numerous U-M honors, including the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, the Sarah Goddard Power Award, and the Carol Hollenshead Award. In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Deeply committed to broadening participation in computing, Mihalcea has founded several outreach programs, including Girls Encoded, Discover CS, Explore CS Research, and AI Explorers, expanding opportunities for individuals from underrepresented communities.

Mihalcea received a PhD in Computer Science from Southern Methodist University and a second PhD in Linguistics from Oxford University. She joined CSE in 2013 after serving on the faculty at the University of North Texas.