Honoring the visionary legacy of the MIT Media Lab’s founding director

Nicholas Negroponte founded the MIT Media Lab on a radical belief: that invention happens at the edges, not in silos. 

The Nicholas Negroponte Fellowship honors the founding director of the MIT Media Lab by supporting visionary inventors and researchers whose ideas defy boundaries and shape the future. Inspired by Nicholas’s defining qualities—vision, risk, and care—it celebrates his belief that creativity emerges from difference, that bold experimentation is a duty, and that human connection fuels innovation. Nicholas championed trust, learning, and fearless invention. This fellowship continues that legacy by empowering students who, like him, imagine audaciously, take risks with purpose, and care deeply about the people their work serves.

The fellowship

The Nicholas Negroponte Fellowship will back students who embrace audacious ideas, cross disciplinary boundaries, and expand the circle of inclusion and innovation. It invests in visionaries—people whose thinking, like Nicholas’s, helps us imagine and build a better future.

We are seeking to raise $2 million to fully name and endow the Nicholas Negroponte Fellowship Fund. Once endowed, the Fellowship will support one Media Lab graduate student—at either the master’s or PhD level—enabling their full participation in the Lab’s radically interdisciplinary and boundary-crossing research community. This enduring fund will ensure that Nicholas’s legacy continues to empower future generations of fearless innovators.

Now is the time to act. 

Join us by contributing to the fellowship that will carry Nicholas’s legacy forward by empowering the next generation of fearless, boundary-crossing innovators.

Learn more + make a gift

Make a gift now

Follow the simple steps below when you make a gift now at: mitmedialab.info/mlssf
(MIT Media Lab: Student Support Fund 3891645)

   1.  Check the “Make this gift in honor or in memory of someone.”
   2.  Make sure the “In honor of” button is selected
   3.  Type “Nicholas Negroponte” in the “Full Name” field.
   4.  Select “Faculty” from the “Relation to MIT” dropdown.