2026 40 Under 40 Honoree: Fei Fang (37)
“I hope my students learn to look beyond the algorithm itself and think about the entire process required to make AI genuinely useful and responsible in the real world.”
PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA
Fei Fang
Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Fei Fang was still a PhD student when she got to see an algorithm she helped develop being used by the U.S. Coast Guard to schedule patrols around the Staten Island Ferry.
“I was so proud to see that my algorithm was working behind the scenes,” she says. The experience set the course for a career spent figuring out where computing can be useful outside academia.
Fang is now an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has taken her from anti-poaching patrols in Malaysia to Pittsburgh’s 412 Food Rescue, where she first volunteered to understand the organization from a volunteer’s perspective before working with its staff on tools to improve food-rescue operations.
The work has earned her the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship and the NSF CAREER Award. But Fang says solving a problem begins with understanding the people living with it.
“We cannot simply decide from a distance what people need,” she says. “We need to listen to the people who will actually use the technology.”
