Manuel Cherep, an incoming PhD student in Fluid Interfaces and current master’s student at the Media Lab, has been selected for the prestigious 2024-2026 "la Caixa" Fellowship competitively awarded to students from Spain to pursue graduate degrees in any discipline and anywhere in the world. The ceremony held on June 5, 2024 was attended by the King of Spain, who personally awarded each diploma to the fellows.

Cherep is interested in interpretable and controllable generative models that can be used to gain insights into cognitive and affective processes. His research is currently centered on studying how we perceive and feel sound, leveraging these to explore affective interventions and creative applications. Part of this work will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), one of the leading venues in machine learning and AI.

Cherep holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) and a master's degree in data science from EPFL (Switzerland), with nearly six years of industry experience as a full-stack software engineer and as an AI engineer at Logitech.