Former Greek PM outlines strategies to strengthen EU
Encourages European autonomy while retaining trans-Atlantic dialogue
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Alexis Tsipras.
Photo by David Elmes
Stressing the need for European reform and unity in the face of multiple challenges, Aléxis Tsípras, the former prime minister of Greece, addressed a standing-room-only crowd at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies on March 25, which marked Independence Day in Greece.
Tsípras presented proposals for Europe to counter looming financial and trans-Atlantic turbulence, strengthen its cohesion, and elevate its geopolitical and economic position. The presentation was moderated by Peter A. Hall, Harvard’s Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies and a resident faculty member at CES, where Tsípras is a Policy Fellow this spring.
“We are seeing historical changes in the world that affect not only the geopolitical balance of power and the post-war liberal international order, but democracy itself,” said Tsípras, who currently serves as a member of the Hellenic Parliament for the SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance party.
He noted that the post-Cold War international order led not to fairly distributed growth but to the deregulation of financial markets, culminating in the global and European financial crises. He also said that the West had “underestimated the warnings that Russia would respond militarily if NATO insisted on adopting an open-door policy on Ukraine and Georgia in 2008.” U.S. engagement in the region has not allowed for the pivot to the Indo-Pacific to take place, leaving more space for China, “not only in the South China Sea but globally.”
These developments have heralded “a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world in which the United States remains the most powerful force but has lost its dominance,” Tsípras said. To counter, the U.S. is “disengaging itself from any obligation toward Europe and promoting a logic of might makes right.”
“We are seeing historical changes in the world that affect not only the geopolitical balance of power and the post-war liberal international order, but democracy itself.”
Alexis Tsipras
Tsípras called for Europe to enhance its strategic autonomy while retaining trans-Atlantic dialogue regardless of NATO’s future. “I believe strongly that Europe can and should use its common foreign and security policy to play a role not only of deterrence, but also as a force for peace and stability particularly in regions where NATO should not or cannot be present,” he said.
Tsípras then named several strategic goals. These include an EU — not NATO — strategy for Ukraine that brings “peace with the best possible terms for Kyiv,” enforced by an international peacekeeping force, as well as a future that gives Ukraine the choice to “move toward the EU.” He also called for an end to Israel’s bombing in Gaza, as well as the resumption of talks for a two-state solution. He stressed the need for a clear message to Turkey, and said that the “unacceptable” recent arrest of opposition leader and mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, must have consequences. “We cannot convince anyone, particularly in the Global South, of our principles if we prove to have double standards,” he said.
For Europe’s economy, Tsípras outlined four policy proposals. First, he referred to Germany’s €900 billion fiscal package as a permanent break from Wolfgang Schäuble’s ordoliberal mindset, reflecting how much faster Europe would have exited the economic crisis if this mindset had been abandoned 15 years ago. He proposed “raising the debt threshold for all member states to around 100 percent.”
His second proposal called for Germany’s new fiscal approach to be leveraged “in a way that benefits Europe as a whole, rather than being used to subsidize domestic firms of bigger countries.”
His third proposal was for “the EU to supplement its common monetary policy with a federal fiscal instrument. A treasury department, just like the United States, as any other successful monetary union does.”
This federal treasury department could be empowered “to issue common European debt to finance the strategic autonomy of the EU on energy and defense, to facilitate the green transition, to promote research and innovation, to restore Europe’s crumbling network infrastructure, and, more importantly, to increase our cohesion funds and to reduce inequalities through investments in the welfare state and education.”
“The EU needs a deepening of its internal market, on the basis of the Draghi and Letta Reports,” he concluded.
Tsípras moved on to the challenges facing EU cohesion. In recent years, he said, political parties have facilitated the rise of nationalist and extreme far right parties. “Conservative parties have adopted the rhetoric and policies of the extreme right to keep their votes. Center-left parties are seen as elitist and disconnected from the middle and working class. And left parties have been absorbed by doctrine and petty politics.” He said the lack of a comprehensive European migration policy has also contributed to the rise of the extreme right.
Returning to the issue of debt, Tsípras reiterated that fiscal solidarity and rebuilding are more important than an imaginary bottom line. “If it is necessary to finance not only the rearming of Europe, but also innovation, growth, and cohesion, then this is something that we’ll have to do,” he said.
“Europe must be a force both for deterrence and for peace,” Tsípras concluded. “The best option is to stand on our feet. That means to strengthen our internal markets, to strengthen our cohesion and convergence, and, of course, to decide for strategic autonomy, which means a common external policy and policy of defense.”
Knocking out a single gene reprograms part of the large intestine to function like the nutrient-absorbing small intestine; Weill Cornell investigators showed that this reversed the malnutrition that results when most of the small intestine is removed.
Lowell House Opera performs “Postcard from Morocco” by Dominick Argento. Baritone Marcus Schenck (center) and cast share the stage in the Lowell House dining hall, which has been transformed into a train station.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Niles Singer
Harvard Staff Photographer
2 min read
‘Postcard from Morocco’ brings opera back to Lowell House
After an eight-year hiatus, Lowell House Opera returned to its historical performance space — the Lowell House dining hall — with a production of “Postcard from Morocco.” Set in a train station in 1914, the opera explores the human mind through seven travelers, each of whom is characterized by a possession.
The February performance marked the company’s homecoming after having moved their productions to other campus venues during the two-year renovation of Lowell House, with COVID-19 causing a further delay.
For its winter performance, set designers used stained glass film to cover the dining hall’s windows and had colored lights cast architectural shadows; together they transformed the space into a bustling train station.
“We really value an equal playing field for seasoned professionals and emerging artists,” said Benjamin Rossen ’23, the Lowell House Opera’s executive director, as well as “Postcard’s” music director and conductor.
Among the show’s cast, orchestra, and crew are Harvard students, alumni, a faculty member, professional opera singers, and students from several Boston-area schools.
Planning for the show started in the summer of 2024. Between mid-January and opening night on Feb. 21, performers rehearsed three to four hours a day to prepare for their roles.
“The performers inhabited their roles with astonishing ease,” said stage director Haley Stark ’25. “With minimal direction, they brought their characters to life in ways that felt deeply intuitive.”
The Lowell House Opera is already working on its next production, “Parade in Concert: The Trial Behind the Tragedy,” in collaboration with Harvard Hillel. Performances will be held at Harvard Hillel on April 26-27.
Conductor and music director Benjamin T. Rossen ’23 leads the orchestra.Coloratura soprano Chen Wine sings “A Lady With a Hand Mirror.”
Marcus Schenck (top) and tenor Leo Balkovetz perform a scene together.
Alicia Chu ’28 in her role as “a foreign singer.”
Leo Balkovetz (left) and Chen Wine embrace their performance.A dramatic moment draws the audience’s full attention.
When the International Maritime Organization enacted a mandatory cap on the sulfur content of marine fuels in 2020, with an eye toward reducing harmful environmental and health impacts, it left shipping companies with three main options.
They could burn low-sulfur fossil fuels, like marine gas oil, or install cleaning systems to remove sulfur from the exhaust gas produced by burning heavy fuel oil. Biofuels with lower sulfur content offer another alternative, though their limited availability makes them a less feasible option.
While installing exhaust gas cleaning systems, known as scrubbers, is the most feasible and cost-effective option, there has been a great deal of uncertainty among firms, policymakers, and scientists as to how “green” these scrubbers are.
Through a novel lifecycle assessment, researchers from MIT, Georgia Tech, and elsewhere have now found that burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers in the open ocean can match or surpass using low-sulfur fuels, when a wide variety of environmental factors is considered.
The scientists combined data on the production and operation of scrubbers and fuels with emissions measurements taken onboard an oceangoing cargo ship.
They found that, when the entire supply chain is considered, burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers was the least harmful option in terms of nearly all 10 environmental impact factors they studied, such as greenhouse gas emissions, terrestrial acidification, and ozone formation.
“In our collaboration with Oldendorff Carriers to broadly explore reducing the environmental impact of shipping, this study of scrubbers turned out to be an unexpectedly deep and important transitional issue,” says Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), and senior author of the study.
“Claims about environmental hazards and policies to mitigate them should be backed by science. You need to see the data, be objective, and design studies that take into account the full picture to be able to compare different options from an apples-to-apples perspective,” adds lead author Patricia Stathatou, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, who began this study as a postdoc in the CBA.
Stathatou is joined on the paper by Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty and others at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece and the maritime shipping firm Oldendorff Carriers. The research appears today in Environmental Science and Technology.
Slashing sulfur emissions
Heavy fuel oil, traditionally burned by bulk carriers that make up about 30 percent of the global maritime fleet, usually has a sulfur content around 2 to 3 percent. This is far higher than the International Maritime Organization’s 2020 cap of 0.5 percent in most areas of the ocean and 0.1 percent in areas near population centers or environmentally sensitive regions.
Sulfur oxide emissions contribute to air pollution and acid rain, and can damage the human respiratory system.
In 2018, fewer than 1,000 vessels employed scrubbers. After the cap went into place, higher prices of low-sulfur fossil fuels and limited availability of alternative fuels led many firms to install scrubbers so they could keep burning heavy fuel oil.
Today, more than 5,800 vessels utilize scrubbers, the majority of which are wet, open-loop scrubbers.
“Scrubbers are a very mature technology. They have traditionally been used for decades in land-based applications like power plants to remove pollutants,” Stathatou says.
A wet, open-loop marine scrubber is a huge, metal, vertical tank installed in a ship’s exhaust stack, above the engines. Inside, seawater drawn from the ocean is sprayed through a series of nozzles downward to wash the hot exhaust gases as they exit the engines.
The seawater interacts with sulfur dioxide in the exhaust, converting it to sulfates — water-soluble, environmentally benign compounds that naturally occur in seawater. The washwater is released back into the ocean, while the cleaned exhaust escapes to the atmosphere with little to no sulfur dioxide emissions.
But the acidic washwater can contain other combustion byproducts like heavy metals, so scientists wondered if scrubbers were comparable, from a holistic environmental point of view, to burning low-sulfur fuels.
Several studies explored toxicity of washwater and fuel system pollution, but none painted a full picture.
The researchers set out to fill that scientific gap.
A “well-to-wake” analysis
The team conducted a lifecycle assessment using a global environmental database on production and transport of fossil fuels, such as heavy fuel oil, marine gas oil, and very-low sulfur fuel oil. Considering the entire lifecycle of each fuel is key, since producing low-sulfur fuel requires extra processing steps in the refinery, causing additional emissions of greenhouse gases and particulate matter.
“If we just look at everything that happens before the fuel is bunkered onboard the vessel, heavy fuel oil is significantly more low-impact, environmentally, than low-sulfur fuels,” she says.
The researchers also collaborated with a scrubber manufacturer to obtain detailed information on all materials, production processes, and transportation steps involved in marine scrubber fabrication and installation.
“If you consider that the scrubber has a lifetime of about 20 years, the environmental impacts of producing the scrubber over its lifetime are negligible compared to producing heavy fuel oil,” she adds.
For the final piece, Stathatou spent a week onboard a bulk carrier vessel in China to measure emissions and gather seawater and washwater samples. The ship burned heavy fuel oil with a scrubber and low-sulfur fuels under similar ocean conditions and engine settings.
Collecting these onboard data was the most challenging part of the study.
“All the safety gear, combined with the heat and the noise from the engines on a moving ship, was very overwhelming,” she says.
Their results showed that scrubbers reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 97 percent, putting heavy fuel oil on par with low-sulfur fuels according to that measure. The researchers saw similar trends for emissions of other pollutants like carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide.
In addition, they tested washwater samples for more than 60 chemical parameters, including nitrogen, phosphorus, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and 23 metals.
The concentrations of chemicals regulated by the IMO were far below the organization’s requirements. For unregulated chemicals, the researchers compared the concentrations to the strictest limits for industrial effluents from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and European Union.
Most chemical concentrations were at least an order of magnitude below these requirements.
In addition, since washwater is diluted thousands of times as it is dispersed by a moving vessel, the concentrations of such chemicals would be even lower in the open ocean.
These findings suggest that the use of scrubbers with heavy fuel oil can be considered as equal to or more environmentally friendly than low-sulfur fuels across many of the impact categories the researchers studied.
“This study demonstrates the scientific complexity of the waste stream of scrubbers. Having finally conducted a multiyear, comprehensive, and peer-reviewed study, commonly held fears and assumptions are now put to rest,” says Scott Bergeron, managing director at Oldendorff Carriers and co-author of the study.
“This first-of-its-kind study on a well-to-wake basis provides very valuable input to ongoing discussion at the IMO,” adds Thomas Klenum, executive vice president of innovation and regulatory affairs at the Liberian Registry, emphasizing the need “for regulatory decisions to be made based on scientific studies providing factual data and conclusions.”
Ultimately, this study shows the importance of incorporating lifecycle assessments into future environmental impact reduction policies, Stathatou says.
“There is all this discussion about switching to alternative fuels in the future, but how green are these fuels? We must do our due diligence to compare them equally with existing solutions to see the costs and benefits,” she adds.
This study was supported, in part, by Oldendorff Carriers.
Due to the inherent ambiguity in medical images like X-rays, radiologists often use words like “may” or “likely” when describing the presence of a certain pathology, such as pneumonia.
But do the words radiologists use to express their confidence level accurately reflect how often a particular pathology occurs in patients? A new study shows that when radiologists express confidence about a certain pathology using a phrase like “very likely,” they tend to be overconfident, and vice-versa when they express less confidence using a word like “possibly.”
Using clinical data, a multidisciplinary team of MIT researchers in collaboration with researchers and clinicians at hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School created a framework to quantify how reliable radiologists are when they express certainty using natural language terms.
They used this approach to provide clear suggestions that help radiologists choose certainty phrases that would improve the reliability of their clinical reporting. They also showed that the same technique can effectively measure and improve the calibration of large language models by better aligning the words models use to express confidence with the accuracy of their predictions.
By helping radiologists more accurately describe the likelihood of certain pathologies in medical images, this new framework could improve the reliability of critical clinical information.
“The words radiologists use are important. They affect how doctors intervene, in terms of their decision making for the patient. If these practitioners can be more reliable in their reporting, patients will be the ultimate beneficiaries,” says Peiqi Wang, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this research.
He is joined on the paper by senior author Polina Golland, a Sunlin and Priscilla Chou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the leader of the Medical Vision Group; as well as Barbara D. Lam, a clinical fellow at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Yingcheng Liu, at MIT graduate student; Ameneh Asgari-Targhi, a research fellow at Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB); Rameswar Panda, a research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; William M. Wells, a professor of radiology at MGB and a research scientist in CSAIL; and Tina Kapur, an assistant professor of radiology at MGB. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Decoding uncertainty in words
A radiologist writing a report about a chest X-ray might say the image shows a “possible” pneumonia, which is an infection that inflames the air sacs in the lungs. In that case, a doctor could order a follow-up CT scan to confirm the diagnosis.
However, if the radiologist writes that the X-ray shows a “likely” pneumonia, the doctor might begin treatment immediately, such as by prescribing antibiotics, while still ordering additional tests to assess severity.
Trying to measure the calibration, or reliability, of ambiguous natural language terms like “possibly” and “likely” presents many challenges, Wang says.
Existing calibration methods typically rely on the confidence score provided by an AI model, which represents the model’s estimated likelihood that its prediction is correct.
For instance, a weather app might predict an 83 percent chance of rain tomorrow. That model is well-calibrated if, across all instances where it predicts an 83 percent chance of rain, it rains approximately 83 percent of the time.
“But humans use natural language, and if we map these phrases to a single number, it is not an accurate description of the real world. If a person says an event is ‘likely,’ they aren’t necessarily thinking of the exact probability, such as 75 percent,” Wang says.
Rather than trying to map certainty phrases to a single percentage, the researchers’ approach treats them as probability distributions. A distribution describes the range of possible values and their likelihoods — think of the classic bell curve in statistics.
“This captures more nuances of what each word means,” Wang adds.
Assessing and improving calibration
The researchers leveraged prior work that surveyed radiologists to obtain probability distributions that correspond to each diagnostic certainty phrase, ranging from “very likely” to “consistent with.”
For instance, since more radiologists believe the phrase “consistent with” means a pathology is present in a medical image, its probability distribution climbs sharply to a high peak, with most values clustered around the 90 to 100 percent range.
In contrast the phrase “may represent” conveys greater uncertainty, leading to a broader, bell-shaped distribution centered around 50 percent.
Typical methods evaluate calibration by comparing how well a model’s predicted probability scores align with the actual number of positive results.
The researchers’ approach follows the same general framework but extends it to account for the fact that certainty phrases represent probability distributions rather than probabilities.
To improve calibration, the researchers formulated and solved an optimization problem that adjusts how often certain phrases are used, to better align confidence with reality.
They derived a calibration map that suggests certainty terms a radiologist should use to make the reports more accurate for a specific pathology.
“Perhaps, for this dataset, if every time the radiologist said pneumonia was ‘present,’ they changed the phrase to ‘likely present’ instead, then they would become better calibrated,” Wang explains.
When the researchers used their framework to evaluate clinical reports, they found that radiologists were generally underconfident when diagnosing common conditions like atelectasis, but overconfident with more ambiguous conditions like infection.
In addition, the researchers evaluated the reliability of language models using their method, providing a more nuanced representation of confidence than classical methods that rely on confidence scores.
“A lot of times, these models use phrases like ‘certainly.’ But because they are so confident in their answers, it does not encourage people to verify the correctness of the statements themselves,” Wang adds.
In the future, the researchers plan to continue collaborating with clinicians in the hopes of improving diagnoses and treatment. They are working to expand their study to include data from abdominal CT scans.
In addition, they are interested in studying how receptive radiologists are to calibration-improving suggestions and whether they can mentally adjust their use of certainty phrases effectively.
“Expression of diagnostic certainty is a crucial aspect of the radiology report, as it influences significant management decisions. This study takes a novel approach to analyzing and calibrating how radiologists express diagnostic certainty in chest X-ray reports, offering feedback on term usage and associated outcomes,” says Atul B. Shinagare, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with this work. “This approach has the potential to improve radiologists’ accuracy and communication, which will help improve patient care.”
The work was funded, in part, by a Takeda Fellowship, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT CSAIL Wistrom Program, and the MIT Jameel Clinic.
A new calibration method developed by MIT researchers can improve the accuracy of clinical reports written by radiologists by helping them express their confidence more reliably.
A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a method to fabricate personalised gingival (gum) tissue grafts using an innovative combination of 3D bioprinting and artificial intelligence (AI).
Led by Assistant Professor Gopu Sriram from NUS Faculty of Dentistry, the team’s approach presents a more customisable and less invasive alternative to traditional grafting methods, which often involve harvesting tissue from the patient’s mouth — a process that can be both uncomfortable and constrained by the availability of suitable tissue.
The 3D bioprinting and AI-enabled technique has the potential to address key challenges in dental procedures more effectively, such as repairing gum defects caused by periodontal disease or complications from dental implants. For instance, by enabling the precise fabrication of tissue constructs tailored to individual patients, the method can significantly improve treatment outcomes, reduce patient discomfort, and minimise the risk of complications, such as infections, during recovery.
The team’s research was published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials on 17 December 2024, and was supported by grants from National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Cluster (NAMIC) and National University Health System (NUHS).
Turbocharging the bioprinting process with AI
Gum tissue grafts are essential in dental care, particularly for addressing mucogingival defects such as gum recession, and complications arising from periodontal disease or dental implants. Typically, these grafts are harvested from the patient’s mouth. Though effective, these procedures come with significant drawbacks: patient discomfort, limited tissue availability, and a higher risk of postoperative complications.
To overcome these challenges, the researchers turned to 3D bioprinting, a technique that fabricates custom-made tissue grafts tailored to the specific dimensions of each patient’s defect. They developed a specialised bio-ink which supports the growth of healthy cells, while also ensuring the material can be printed accurately and holds its shape and structure.
However, the viability of 3D bioprinting is only as good as the parameters applied during the process. Factors such as extrusion pressure, print speed, nozzle dimensions, bio-ink viscosity and printhead temperature all play a crucial role in determining the final properties and performance of the printed component. Tuning these parameters has traditionally been done through tedious, manual trial-and-error experiments that are extremely time- and resource-consuming.
“To speed up the 3D bioprinting process, we integrated AI into our workflow to address this critical bottleneck,” said Professor Dean Ho, Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Design and Engineering at NUS, and co-corresponding author of the research paper. “This approach greatly streamlines the process by reducing the number of experiments needed to optimise the bioprinting parameters — from potentially thousands to just 25 combinations,” added Prof Ho, who is also Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and N.1 Institute for Health (N.1) at NUS.
This tremendous efficiency boost afforded by the team’s AI-driven workflow saves time and resources while ensuring the creation of tissue constructs with precise dimensions and structural integrity.
“Our study is among the first to specifically integrate 3D bioprinting and AI technologies for the biofabrication of customised oral soft tissue constructs,” said Asst Prof Sriram, who is also the Thrust Co-Lead of Dental and Craniofacial 3DP Applications at NUS Centre for Additive Manufacturing (AM.NUS). “3D bioprinting is by far more challenging than conventional 3D printing because it involves living cells, which introduce a host of complexities to the printing process.”
The bioprinted gum tissue grafts exhibited strong biomimetic properties, maintaining over 90% cell viability immediately after printing and throughout an 18-day culture period. The grafts also retained their shape and structural integrity, while histological analyses confirmed the presence of key proteins and a multi-layered structure closely resembling natural gum tissue.
The future of dental care
In dentistry, the ability to produce personalised gum tissue grafts with improved efficiency, structural integrity, and biomimetic properties could address longstanding clinical challenges associated with periodontal diseases and dental implants. “This research demonstrates how AI and 3D bioprinting can converge to solve complex medical problems through precision medicine,” added Asst Prof Sriram. “By optimising tissue grafts for individual patients, we can reduce the invasiveness of dental procedures while ensuring better healing and recovery.”
Excitingly, the potential implications of this research extend beyond dentistry. “3D bioprinting allows us to create tissue grafts that precisely match the dimensions of a patient’s wounds, potentially reducing or eliminating the need to harvest tissue from the patient’s body,” said Asst Prof Sriram.
“This level of customisation minimises graft distortion and tension during wound closure, reducing the risk of complications, surgery time and discomfort to the patients.” said Dr Jacob Chew, a periodontist, co-investigator of the study, and Academic Fellow at NUS Faculty of Dentistry.
Furthermore, the scarless healing characteristics of oral tissue provide a unique advantage, as insights from this study could inform the fabrication of similar grafts for other barrier tissues, such as skin, potentially aiding in the scarless healing of skin wounds.
Future research will focus on translating these findings from bench to bedside. The team plans to conduct in vivo studies to assess the integration and stability of the grafts in oral environments. They also aim to explore the integration of blood vessels into the grafts through multi-material bioprinting to create more complex and functional constructs. With these developments, the researchers hope to advance the field of regenerative dentistry while paving the way for broader applications in tissue engineering.
MIT Solve has launched its 2025 Global Challenges, calling on innovators worldwide to submit transformative, tech-driven solutions to some of the planet's most pressing and persistent problems. With over $1 million in funding available, selected innovators have a unique opportunity to scale their solutions and gain an influential network.
"In an era where technology is transforming our world at breakneck speed, we're seeing a profound shift in how innovators approach global problems," says Hala Hanna, executive director of MIT Solve. "The unprecedented convergence of technological capabilities and social consciousness sets our current moment apart. Our Solver teams aren't just creating solutions — they're rewriting the rules of what's possible in social innovation. With their solutions now reaching over 280 million lives worldwide, they're demonstrating that human-centered technology can scale impact in ways we never imagined possible."
Over 30 winning solutions will be announced at Solve Challenge Finals during Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Selected innovators join the 2025 Solver Class, gaining access to a comprehensive nine-month support program that includes connections to MIT's innovation ecosystem, specialized mentorship, extensive pro-bono resources, and substantial funding from Solve's growing community of supporters.
2025 funding opportunities for selected Solvers exceed $1 million and include:
Health Innovation Award (supported by Johnson & Johnson Foundation):All Solver teams selected for Solve's Global Health Challenge will receive an additional prize from Global Health Anchor Supporter, Johnson & Johnson Foundation
The Seeding the Future Food Systems Prize (supported by the Seeding The Future Foundation)
The GM Prize (supported by General Motors)
The AI for Humanity Prize (supported by The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation)
The Crescent Enterprises "AI for Social Innovation" Prize(supported by Crescent Enterprises)
The Citizens Workforce Innovation Prize (supported by Citizens)
The E Ink Innovation Prize (supported by E Ink)
Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Ocean Innovation Prize (supported by Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation)
Schmidt Marine Wavemaker’s Prize (supported by Schmidt Marine Technology Partners)
Since 2015, supporters of MIT Solve have catalyzed more than 800 partnerships and deployed more than $70 million, touching the lives of 280 million people worldwide.
For over a decade, through a collaboration managed by MIT.nano, MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec), one of the largest universities in Latin America, have worked together to develop innovative academic and research initiatives with a particular focus in nanoscience and nanotechnology and, more recently, an emphasis on design and smart manufacturing. Now, the collaboration has also expanded to include undergraduate education. Seven Tec undergrads are developing methods to manufacture low-cost, desktop fiber-extrusion devices, or FrEDs, alongside peers at MIT in an “in-the-lab” teaching and learning factory, the FrED Factory.
“The FrED Factory serves as a factory-like education platform for manufacturing scale-up, enabling students and researchers to engage firsthand in the transition from prototype development to small-scale production,” says Brian Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE).
Through on-campus learning, participants observe, analyze, and actively contribute to this process, gaining critical insights into the complexities of scaling manufacturing operations. The product of the FrED Factory are FrED kits — tabletop manufacturing kits that themselves produce fiber and that are used to teach smart manufacturing principles. “We’re thrilled to have students from Monterrey Tec here at MIT, bringing new ideas and perspectives, and helping to develop these new ways to teach manufacturing at both MIT and Tec,” says Anthony.
The FrED factory was originally built by a group of MIT graduate students in 2022 as their thesis project in the Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design program. They adapted and scaled the original design of the device, built by Anthony’s student David Kim, into something that could be manufactured into multiple units at a substantially lower cost. The resulting computer-aided design files were shared with Tec de Monterrey for use by faculty and students. Since launching the FrED curriculum at Tec in 2022, MIT has co-hosted two courses led by Tec faculty: “Mechatronics Design: (Re) Design of FrED,” and “Automation of Manufacturing Systems: FrED Factory Challenge.”
New this academic year, undergraduate Tec students are participating in FrED Factory research immersions. The students engage in collaborative FrED projects at MIT and then return to Tec to implement their knowledge — particularly to help replicate and implement what they have learned, with the launch of a new FrED Factory at Tec de Monterrey this spring. The end goal is to fully integrate this project into Tec’s mechatronics engineering curriculum, in which students learn about automation and robotics firsthand through the devices.
Russel Bradley, a PhD student in MechE supervised by Anthony, is the project lead of FrED Factory and has been working closely with the undergraduate Tec students.
“The process of designing and manufacturing FrEDs is an educational experience in itself,” says Bradley. “Unlike a real factory, which likely wouldn’t welcome students to experiment with the machines, the FrED factory provides an environment where you can fail and learn.”
The Tec undergrads are divided into groups working on specific projects, including Development of an Education 4.0 Framework for FrED, Immersive Technology (AR) for Manufacturing Operations, Gamifying Advanced Manufacturing Education in FrED Factory, and Immersive Cognitive Factory Twins.
Sergio Siller Lobo is a Tec student who is working on the development of the education framework for FrED. He and other students are revising the code to make the interface more student-friendly and best enable the students to learn while working with the devices. They are focused particularly on helping students to engage with the topics of control systems, computer vision, and internet of things (IoT) in both a digital course that they are developing, and in directly working with the devices. The digital course can be presented by an instructor or done autonomously by students.
“Students can be learning the theory with the digital courses, as well as having access to hands-on, practical experience with the device,” says Siller Lobo. “You can have the best of both ways of learning, both the practical and the theoretical.”
Arik Gómez Horita, an undergrad from Tec who has also been working on the education framework, says that the technology that currently exists in terms of how to teach students about control systems, computer vision, and IoT is often very limited in either its capability or quantity.
“A key aspect of the value of the FrEDs is that we are integrating all these concepts and a module for education into a single device,” says Gómez Horita. “Bringing FrED into a classroom is a game-changer. Our main goal is trying to put FrED into the hands of the teacher, to use it for all its teaching capabilities.”
Once the students return to Tec de Monterrey with the educational modules they’ve developed, there will be workshops with the FrEDs and opportunities for Tec students to use their own creativity and iterate on the devices.
“The FrED is really a lab in a box, and one of the best things that FrEDs do is create data,” says Siller Lobo. “Finding new ways to get data from FrED gives it more value.”
Tec students Ángel Alarcón and André Mendoza are preparing to have MIT students test the FrED factory, running a simulation with the two main roles of engineer and operator. The operator role assembles the FrEDs within the workstations that simulate a factory. The engineer role analyzes the data created on the factory side by the operator and tries to find ways to improve production.
“This is a very immersive way to teach manufacturing systems,” says Alarcón. “Many students studying manufacturing, undergraduate and even graduate, finish their education never having even gone to an actual factory. The FrED Factory gives students the valuable opportunity to get to know what a factory is like and experience an industry environment without having to go off campus.”
The data gained from the workstations — including cycle time and defects in an operation — will be used to teach different topics about manufacturing. Ultimately, the FrED factory at Tec will be used to compare the benefits and drawbacks of automation versus manual labor.
Bradley says that the Tec students bring a strong mechatronics background that adds a lot of important insights to the project, and beyond the lab, it’s also a valuable multicultural exchange.
“It’s not just about what the students are learning from us,” says Bradley, “but it’s really a collaborative process in which we’re all complementing each other.”
Undergraduate students from Tecnológico de Monterrey have been learning how to build low-cost fiber-extrusion devices alongside their MIT peers at an in-lab assembly factory set up by MIT graduate students. Back row, l-r: Kayra Ilkbahar (MIT), Arman Shantayev (MIT), Arik Gómez Horita (Tec), Russel Bradley (MIT), Sergio Siller Lobo (Tec), Leonardo Elioenait Galán Cruz (Tec), Rohan Sanghai (MIT), and André Mauricio Mendoza Quevedo (Tec); Middle row, l-r: Adán Flores Ramírez (Tec) and Gilberto Ramírez Tamez (Tec); Front row, l-r: Pedro Ponce Cruz, visiting scientist from Tecnológico de Monterrey, and Brian Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.
“What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of a level playing field,” said Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow, during a conference-opening keynote panel.
The theme of the two-day conference, which is organized each year by MIT students, was “Breakthrough to deployment: Driving climate innovation to market.” Speakers largely expressed optimism about advancements in green technology, balanced by occasional notes of alarm about a rapidly changing regulatory and political environment.
Deese defined what he called “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the current energy landscape. The good: Clean energy investment in the United States hit an all-time high of $272 billion in 2024. The bad: Announcements of future investments have tailed off. And the ugly: Macro conditions are making it more difficult for utilities and private enterprise to build out the clean energy infrastructure needed to meet growing energy demands.
“We need to build massive amounts of energy capacity in the United States,” Deese said. “And the three things that are the most allergic to building are high uncertainty, high interest rates, and high tariff rates. So that’s kind of ugly. But the question … is how, and in what ways, that underlying commercial momentum can drive through this period of uncertainty.”
A shifting clean energy landscape
During a panel on artificial intelligence and growth in electricity demand, speakers said that the technology may serve as a catalyst for green energy breakthroughs, in addition to putting strain on existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to building digital infrastructure responsibly, and part of that means catalyzing the development of clean energy infrastructure that is not only meeting the AI need, but also benefiting the grid as a whole,” said Lucia Tian, head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google.
Across the two days, speakers emphasized that the cost-per-unit and scalability of clean energy technologies will ultimately determine their fate. But they also acknowledged the impact of public policy, as well as the need for government investment to tackle large-scale issues like grid modernization.
Vanessa Chan, a former U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) official and current vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, warned of the “knock-on” effects of the move to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs, for example. “In reality, what you’re doing is undercutting every single academic institution that does research across the nation,” she said.
During a panel titled “No clean energy transition without transmission,” Maria Robinson, former director of the DoE’s Grid Deployment Office, said that ratepayers alone will likely not be able to fund the grid upgrades needed to meet growing power demand. “The amount of investment we’re going to need over the next couple of years is going to be significant,” she said. “That’s where the federal government is going to have to play a role.”
David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy venture builder at MIT, noted that extreme weather events have changed the climate change conversation in recent years. “There was a narrative 10 years ago that said … if we start talking about resilience and adaptation to climate change, we’re kind of throwing in the towel or giving up,” he said. “I’ve noticed a very big shift in the investor narrative, the startup narrative, and more generally, the public consciousness. There’s a realization that the effects of climate change are already upon us.”
“Everything on the table”
The conference featured panels and keynote addresses on a range of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy, and nuclear fusion, as well as a session on carbon capture.
Alex Creely, a chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explained that fusion (the combining of small atoms into larger atoms, which is the same process that fuels stars) is safer and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion facilities, he said, can be powered down instantaneously, and companies like his are developing new, less-expensive magnet technology to contain the extreme heat produced by fusion reactors.
By the early 2030s, Creely said, his company hopes to be operating 400-megawatt power plants that use only 50 kilograms of fuel per year. “If you can get fusion working, it turns energy into a manufacturing product, not a natural resource,” he said.
Quinn Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface facilities at geothermal energy supplier Fervo Energy, said his company is making the geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation, and economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the largest cost in producing geothermal power. Fervo has “completely flipped the cost structure” with advances in drilling, Woodard said, and now the company is focused on bringing down its power plant costs.
“We have to continuously be focused on cost, and achieving that is paramount for the success of the geothermal industry,” he said.
One common theme across the conference: a number of approaches are making rapid advancements, but experts aren’t sure when — or, in some cases, if — each specific technology will reach a tipping point where it is capable of transforming energy markets.
“I don’t want to get caught in a place where we often descend in this climate solution situation, where it’s either-or,” said Peter Ellis, global director of nature climate solutions at The Nature Conservancy. “We’re talking about the greatest challenge civilization has ever faced. We need everything on the table.”
The road ahead
Several speakers stressed the need for academia, industry, and government to collaborate in pursuit of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of sustainability for Microsoft, compared the challenge to the Apollo spaceflight program, and she said that academic institutions need to focus more on how to scale and spur investments in green energy.
“The challenge is that academic institutions are not currently set up to be able to learn the how, in driving both bottom-up and top-down shifts over time,” Luers said. “If the world is going to succeed in our road to net zero, the mindset of academia needs to shift. And fortunately, it’s starting to.”
During a panel called “From lab to grid: Scaling first-of-a-kind energy technologies,” Hannan Happi, CEO of renewable energy company Exowatt, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all the same,” he said. “The only thing [customers] care about with regards to electrons is that they are available when they need them, and that they’re very cheap.”
Melissa Zhang, principal at Azimuth Capital Management, noted that energy infrastructure development cycles typically take at least five to 10 years — longer than a U.S. political cycle. However, she warned that green energy technologies are unlikely to receive significant support at the federal level in the near future. “If you’re in something that’s a little too dependent on subsidies … there is reason to be concerned over this administration,” she said.
World Energy CEO Gene Gebolys, the moderator of the lab-to-grid panel, listed off a number of companies founded at MIT. “They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They all went from somebody’s idea, to a lab, to proof-of-concept, to scale. It’s not like any of this stuff ever ends. It’s an ongoing process.”
During a panel at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference, Lucia Tian (center), head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google, discusses the challenges and opportunities that AI and rapid electrification bring to electricity demand.
There are many categories of humor. Self-deprecating humor is its own category.
I use laughter and humor when treating people struggling with depression and anxiety. Self-deprecating humor can be useful in a clinical setting. I use it myself to show its power and invite connection. For example, I’m a mom and I’m constantly saying, “mom failing,” and things like that. I think that’s fine because to call yourself out like that provides a bit of the unexpected and sends the message that it’s OK not to take yourself so seriously. Bringing humor into that conversation is also beneficial because of the safety it signals. Humor lightens the load or defuses the intensity of that moment, and can help facilitate emotion regulation, which will help you re-establish some sense of clarity and perspective.
The term self-deprecating humor makes it sound much more negative than it is. For me, it is not making fun of yourself; it is taking yourself, or the situation that you’re in, less seriously. People who tend to use self-deprecating humor effectively are quite humble and self-aware. These are people who see themselves for who they are, for better or worse, and they have come to accept that. It signals some level of self-confidence. There is an openness and willingness to be vulnerable. It also highlights the likability of people who don’t take themselves very seriously.
Learning how to take yourself less seriously without putting yourself down is important.
What’s interesting about the use of self-deprecating humor is that it’s almost somewhat spontaneous, which can be very revealing. The language being used can sometimes be indicative of somebody who is coming from a place of hurt or low self-esteem. Extreme self-criticism and the use of very harsh language to talk about yourself, including the tone and the context, matter.
Sometimes, self-deprecation can be used as a bid for attention. Somebody might be using what sounds like humor, but what it’s drawing from us is sympathy. It may also be a little off-putting on the receivers. When you’re saying something that you think is funny, but other people are like, “Oh, that’s not funny,” then do a closer look within to see where some of that is originating from, and what’s the hope in expressing that. Also, when we take ourselves too seriously or take the situations that we find ourselves in too seriously, it can create a feedback loop, in which we are feeling negatively about ourselves and putting negativity out and having that also fed back to us.
Learning how to take yourself less seriously without putting yourself down is important. If you say something that comes into your mind, and you think it’s funny, when you say it, does it make you feel better, or does it make you feel worse? Or does it elicit the response that you were hoping for?
It’s interesting to note that self-deprecating humor tends to be more common in individualistic cultures, while collective cultures often make fun of others. Western cultures put more emphasis on relatability and approachability; being able to have people relate to you by signaling flaws and vulnerabilities sends the message that everybody has struggles and we are all in this together. Cultures that are more collective tend to poke fun at one another because there’s a different sense of community. It’s the same way in which you’d would poke fun at your sibling. It’s good-natured, and it’s not meant to cause ill or harm.
I see a lot of us taking things to an extreme in a way that’s not helpful and probably not healthy. Taking ourselves less seriously is a tool to bring us back into some better balance, either within ourselves or with other people. As an example, think about two people who disagree deeply about something and have trouble connecting with each other. In those situations, finding common ground through something that may be humorous could be a game-changer. That sounds like I’m exaggerating the power of humor, but when we take ourselves too seriously, we end up isolating ourselves and that prevents us from connecting with others.
Researchers ID 17 risk factors shared by age-related brain disease
Liana Wait
Mass General Brigham Communications
4 min read
Study finds that modifying one factor can reduce risk of stroke, dementia, and late-life depression
Seventeen modifiable factors have been identified that can lower people’s risk of age-related brain diseases such as stroke, dementia, and late-life depression, according to researchers at Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham.
The study found a reduced risk of all three conditions by modifying any one of the 17 factors. The results, which provide evidence to inform novel tools, such as the Brain Care Score, are published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry.
The researchers systematically searched the scientific literature for previously published meta-analyses of risk factors associated with stroke, dementia, and late-life depression. Then, they combined these data to identify modifiable risk factors (i.e., those that can be altered through behavioral change) shared amongst at least two out of the three diseases. They also estimated the relative impact of each risk factor on measures of quality of life and early death.
Altogether, the researchers identified risk factors shared by at least two of the diseases, including blood pressure, kidney disease, fasting plasma glucose, total cholesterol, alcohol use, diet, hearing loss, pain, physical activity, purpose in life, sleep, smoking, social engagement, and stress. Of these, high blood pressure and severe kidney disease had the biggest impact on the incidence and burden of stroke, dementia, and late-life depression.
Diabetes
Diabetes is a risk factor for stroke, dementia, and depression.
Blood Pressure
High blood pressure is a major risk factor for all three conditions.
Kidney Disease
Kidney disease can increase the risk of stroke, dementia, and depression.
Fasting Plasma Glucose
High blood sugar levels, as indicated by fasting plasma glucose, are a risk factor.
Total Cholesterol
High cholesterol levels can increase the risk of stroke and dementia.
Alcohol Use
Excessive alcohol consumption is linked to increased risk of stroke, dementia, and depression.
Diet
A poor diet can contribute to the development of all three conditions.
Hearing Loss
Hearing loss is a modifiable risk factor for dementia.
Pain
Chronic pain can increase the risk of depression and potentially other conditions.
Physical Activity
Lack of physical activity is a risk factor for all three conditions.
Purpose in Life
A lack of purpose in life can contribute to depression and potentially other conditions.
Sleep
Poor sleep quality and quantity can increase the risk of depression and potentially other conditions.
Smoking
Smoking is a major risk factor for stroke, dementia, and depression.
Social Engagement
Lack of social engagement can contribute to depression and potentially other conditions.
Stress
Chronic stress can increase the risk of depression and potentially other conditions.
Depression
Untreated depression can increase the risk of other conditions.
Obesity
Obesity is a risk factor for stroke, dementia, and depression.
In contrast, physical activity and engagement in leisure activities with a cognitive aspect (e.g., puzzles) were associated with a lower risk of disease, though the researchers suspect that these associations may be symptomatic rather than causal, since individuals with brain disease may be less capable of engaging in physical and cognitive leisure activities.
“Dementia, stroke, and late-life depression are connected and intertwined, so if you develop one of them, there’s a substantial chance you may develop another one in the future,” said first author Jasper Senff, postdoctoral fellow at the Singh Lab at the Brain Care Labs at Mass General Hospital and at Harvard Medical School. “And because they share these overlapping risk factors, preventive efforts could lead to a reduction in the incidence of more than one of these diseases, which provides an opportunity to simultaneously reduce the burden of age-related brain diseases.”
Mass General Brigham researchers developed and validated the Brain Care Score to measure efforts to protect brain health and offer guidance on how to improve it. The researchers have updated the Brain Care Score to reflect the latest scientific findings. They emphasize the need for more studies on modifiable risk factors of late-life depression and call for a randomized controlled trial to test an intervention using the Brain Care Score.
“Healthcare is increasingly complex. But these findings remind us that preventing disease can be very simple. Why? Because many of the most common diseases share the same risk factors,” said Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, founder of the Global Brain Care Coalition, and the JP Kistler Endowed Chair in Neurology at MGH.
In the fight against bacterial pathogens, researchers are combining vaccination with targeted colonisation of the intestine by harmless microorganisms. This approach could potentially mark a turning point in the antibiotics crisis.
The process of catalysis — in which a material speeds up a chemical reaction — is crucial to the production of many of the chemicals used in our everyday lives. But even though these catalytic processes are widespread, researchers often lack a clear understanding of exactly how they work.
A new analysis by researchers at MIT has shown that an important industrial synthesis process, the production of vinyl acetate, requires a catalyst to take two different forms, which cycle back and forth from one to the other as the chemical process unfolds.
There are two broad classes of catalysts: homogeneous catalysts, which consist of dissolved molecules, and heterogeneous catalysts, which are solid materials whose surface provides the site for the chemical reaction. “For the longest time,” Surendranath says, “there’s been a general view that you either have catalysis happening on these surfaces, or you have them happening on these soluble molecules.” But the new research shows that in the case of vinyl acetate — an important material that goes into many polymer products such as the rubber in the soles of your shoes — there is an interplay between both classes of catalysis.
“What we discovered,” Surendranath explains, “is that you actually have these solid metal materials converting into molecules, and then converting back into materials, in a cyclic dance.”
He adds: “This work calls into question this paradigm where there’s either one flavor of catalysis or another. Really, there could be an interplay between both of them in certain cases, and that could be really advantageous for having a process that’s selective and efficient.”
The synthesis of vinyl acetate has been a large-scale industrial reaction since the 1960s, and it has been well-researched and refined over the years to improve efficiency. This has happened largely through a trial-and-error approach, without a precise understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the researchers say.
While chemists are often more familiar with homogeneous catalysis mechanisms, and chemical engineers are often more familiar with surface catalysis mechanisms, fewer researchers study both. This is perhaps part of the reason that the full complexity of this reaction was not previously captured. But Harraz says he and his colleagues are working at the interface between disciplines. “We’ve been able to appreciate both sides of this reaction and find that both types of catalysis are critical,” he says.
The reaction that produces vinyl acetate requires something to activate the oxygen molecules that are one of the constituents of the reaction, and something else to activate the other ingredients, acetic acid and ethylene. The researchers found that the form of the catalyst that worked best for one part of the process was not the best for the other. It turns out that the molecular form of the catalyst does the key chemistry with the ethylene and the acetic acid, while it’s the surface that ends up doing the activation of the oxygen.
They found that the underlying process involved in interconverting the two forms of the catalyst is actually corrosion, similar to the process of rusting. “It turns out that in rusting, you actually go through a soluble molecular species somewhere in the sequence,” Surendranath says.
The team borrowed techniques traditionally used in corrosion research to study the process. They used electrochemical tools to study the reaction, even though the overall reaction does not require a supply of electricity. By making potential measurements, the researchers determined that the corrosion of the palladium catalyst material to soluble palladium ions is driven by an electrochemical reaction with the oxygen, converting it to water. Corrosion is “one of the oldest topics in electrochemistry,” says Lodaya, “but applying the science of corrosion to understand catalysis is much newer, and was essential to our findings.”
By correlating measurements of catalyst corrosion with other measurements of the chemical reaction taking place, the researchers proposed that it was the corrosion rate that was limiting the overall reaction. “That’s the choke point that’s controlling the rate of the overall process,” Surendranath says.
The interplay between the two types of catalysis works efficiently and selectively “because it actually uses the synergy of a material surface doing what it’s good at and a molecule doing what it’s good at,” Surendranath says. The finding suggests that, when designing new catalysts, rather than focusing on either solid materials or soluble molecules alone, researchers should think about how the interplay of both may open up new approaches.
“Now, with an improved understanding of what makes this catalyst so effective, you can try to design specific materials or specific interfaces that promote the desired chemistry,” Harraz says. Since this process has been worked on for so long, these findings may not necessarily lead to improvements in this specific process of making vinyl acetate, but it does provide a better understanding of why the materials work as they do, and could lead to improvements in other catalytic processes.
Understanding that “catalysts can transit between molecule and material and back, and the role that electrochemistry plays in those transformations, is a concept that we are really excited to expand on,” Lodaya says.
Harraz adds: “With this new understanding that both types of catalysis could play a role, what other catalytic processes are out there that actually involve both? Maybe those have a lot of room for improvement that could benefit from this understanding.”
This work is “illuminating, something that will be worth teaching at the undergraduate level," says Christophe Coperet, a professor of inorganic chemistry at ETH Zurich, who was not associated with the research. “The work highlights new ways of thinking. ... [It] is notable in the sense that it not only reconciles homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, but it describes these complex processes as half reactions, where electron transfers can cycle between distinct entities.”
The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation as a Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation; the Center for Interfacial Ionics; and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
A new analysis by researchers at MIT has shown that an important industrial synthesis process, the production of vinyl acetate, requires a catalyst to take two different forms, which cycle back and forth from one to the other as the chemical process unfolds.
The Potter Museum of Art, the flagship art museum of the University of Melbourne, has announced the full list of artists and details of the six new commissions for the 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art exhibition.
Patricia Lockwood wants you to admit the internet is real life
In Harvard talk, author riffs on ‘cloistered’ upbringing, crafting characters through dialogue, working in bed vs. on couch
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Patricia Lockwood thinks people are uncomfortable with the idea that the internet is real life. It’s why she believes novels about the internet — including her 2021 book, “No One Is Talking About This,” about a social media star whose online life gets upended by a family emergency — are often dismissed as frivolous.
“Honestly, it made people malfunction, like they didn’t know what to do,” Lockwood said about her debut novel at a recent Writers Speak event hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center. “There was still this idea that the internet couldn’t be in a book, and that really fascinated me.”
The discomfort, she theorized, stems from people perceiving their own online lives as private and embarrassing. To admit that the internet is real life is to admit a person’s online self is their authentic self, Lockwood told the Fong Auditorium audience.
The poet, novelist, and author of the 2017 memoir “Priestdaddy,” who is known for her sharp literary voice and irreverent social media presence, spoke with FAS Assistant Professor of English Tara K. Menon about crafting characters, writing long-form in an era of micro-content, and the art of inhabiting another writer’s mind.
“I think it’s worthwhile to spend your life reading and writing, and I think it’s worthwhile studying the way other people did those things,” said Lockwood, adding that, given a free day, she would probably spend eight hours of it reading.
Patricia Lockwood (right) with moderator Tara K. Menon.
Lockwood’s characters are vivid and complex on the page and in real life — none more so than her father, a gun-loving Navy veteran who became a Catholic priest despite being married with five children. Whether writing about him, or fictional characters, she said capturing their dialogue was key.
“If I can reproduce the speech patterns of my parents, if I can write down those odd turns of phrase, you have them,” Lockwood said. “You don’t necessarily need their interiority — because I don’t have that, I don’t understand why they do anything — but I know how they sound, and I know how they interact with each other, and I know how they interact with me.”
Lockwood said her extremely “cloistered” upbringing in the rectory where her family lived after her father became a priest helped her to keenly observe the world.
“I didn’t get out into the world the way that people did, so my encounters with it felt rare or cherished,” she said. “Walking around Harvard Square becomes a very, very rare experience, and you notice all aspects of it. If you notice all aspects, you set them down. That’s how it works for me.”
“I do it [literary criticism] because it is some sort of celestial homework. I do feel like you are working through someone’s mind.”
Lockwood, who didn’t go to college, said that exploring literature on her own gave her a sense of freedom that has helped rather than hindered her as a writer. She could choose her own translations of Tolstoy and not read any ancillary material and biographies if they weren’t interesting to her.
“I didn’t have anxiety about interpretation, really,” Lockwood said. “I was experiencing them as production of a mind, and I was trying to project myself into that mind, into that capability, from a very young age.”
Her preference is to write propped up in bed, notebook on her knees and a cat by her side, but chronic migraines have forced her to adopt a more ergonomic setup. These days, Lockwood writes perched at the end of one couch, legs stretched onto another. She demonstrated her signature posture on a sofa that was hastily dragged onstage, to the delight of the audience.
Menon so admires Lockwood’s literary criticism, especially her searing review of John Updike in the London Review of Books, that she compiled a list of what makes Lockwood such a good critic.
“One thing that I feel has become more and more rare is that you’re not afraid to do two things: say something is good or bad or a failure, and say whether you liked it or didn’t like it,” Menon said. “Even more impressive if you didn’t.”
“I do it because it is some sort of celestial homework,” Lockwood said. “I do feel like you are working through someone’s mind. You’re entering those times, how they thought, and you’re entering their talent. If you feel your own talent to be limited, it’s like you take on their abilities for a time. It’s really this transmutation. It’s amazing. You go above your own height.”
During the Q&A session, an audience member asked Lockwood if the form of the novel can survive in an era of micro-content and shrinking attention spans. Lockwood answered that some people welcome long-form fiction even when surrounded by micro-content. She cautioned against trying to find a prescription for shrinking attention spans or adopting new literary forms to follow a perceived trend.
“I don’t think that because we write this way online, that this is the appetite,” Lockwood said. “I think that the novel creates appetites. If you like the ‘fat,’ stick with the fat, you don’t have to sear that away. People who need solace, people who need to flee from that fragmentation, go to people like you for that sort of thing.”
Polymer-coated nanoparticles loaded with therapeutic drugs show significant promise for cancer treatment, including ovarian cancer. These particles can be targeted directly to tumors, where they release their payload while avoiding many of the side effects of traditional chemotherapy.
Over the past decade, MIT Institute Professor Paula Hammond and her students have created a variety of these particles using a technique known as layer-by-layer assembly. They’ve shown that the particles can effectively combat cancer in mouse studies.
To help move these nanoparticles closer to human use, the researchers have now come up with a manufacturing technique that allows them to generate larger quantities of the particles, in a fraction of the time.
“There’s a lot of promise with the nanoparticle systems we’ve been developing, and we’ve been really excited more recently with the successes that we’ve been seeing in animal models for our treatments for ovarian cancer in particular,” says Hammond, who is also MIT’s vice provost for faculty and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “Ultimately, we need to be able to bring this to a scale where a company is able to manufacture these on a large level.”
Hammond and Darrell Irvine, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Advanced Functional Materials. Ivan Pires PhD ’24, now a postdoc at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a visiting scientist at the Koch Institute, and Ezra Gordon ’24 are the lead authors of paper. Heikyung Suh, an MIT research technician, is also an author.
A streamlined process
More than a decade ago, Hammond’s lab developed a novel technique for building nanoparticles with highly controlled architectures. This approach allows layers with different properties to be laid down on the surface of a nanoparticle by alternately exposing the surface to positively and negatively charged polymers.
Each layer can be embedded with drug molecules or other therapeutics. The layers can also carry targeting molecules that help the particles find and enter cancer cells.
Using the strategy that Hammond’s lab originally developed, one layer is applied at a time, and after each application, the particles go through a centrifugation step to remove any excess polymer. This is time-intensive and would be difficult to scale up to large-scale production, the researchers say.
More recently, a graduate student in Hammond’s lab developed an alternative approach to purifying the particles, known as tangential flow filtration. However, while this streamlined the process, it still was limited by its manufacturing complexity and maximum scale of production.
“Although the use of tangential flow filtration is helpful, it’s still a very small-batch process, and a clinical investigation requires that we would have many doses available for a significant number of patients,” Hammond says.
To create a larger-scale manufacturing method, the researchers used a microfluidic mixing device that allows them to sequentially add new polymer layers as the particles flow through a microchannel within the device. For each layer, the researchers can calculate exactly how much polymer is needed, which eliminates the need to purify the particles after each addition.
“That is really important because separations are the most costly and time-consuming steps in these kinds of systems,” Hammond says.
This strategy eliminates the need for manual polymer mixing, streamlines production, and integrates good manufacturing practice (GMP)-compliant processes. The FDA’s GMP requirements ensure that products meet safety standards and can be manufactured in a consistent fashion, which would be highly challenging and costly using the previous step-wise batch process. The microfluidic device that the researchers used in this study is already used for GMP manufacturing of other types of nanoparticles, including mRNA vaccines.
“With the new approach, there’s much less chance of any sort of operator mistake or mishaps,” Pires says. “This is a process that can be readily implemented in GMP, and that’s really the key step here. We can create an innovation within the layer-by-layer nanoparticles and quickly produce it in a manner that we could go into clinical trials with.”
Scaled-up production
Using this approach, the researchers can generate 15 milligrams of nanoparticles (enough for about 50 doses) in just a few minutes, while the original technique would take close to an hour to create the same amount. This could enable the production of more than enough particles for clinical trials and patient use, the researchers say.
“To scale up with this system, you just keep running the chip, and it is much easier to produce more of your material,” Pires says.
To demonstrate their new production technique, the researchers created nanoparticles coated with a cytokine called interleukin-12 (IL-12). Hammond’s lab has previously shown that IL-12 delivered by layer-by-layer nanoparticles can activate key immune cells and slow ovarian tumor growth in mice.
In this study, the researchers found that IL-12-loaded particles manufactured using the new technique showed similar performance as the original layer-by-layer nanoparticles. And, not only do these nanoparticles bind to cancer tissue, but they show a unique ability to not enter the cancer cells. This allows the nanoparticles to serve as markers on the cancer cells that activate the immune system locally in the tumor. In mouse models of ovarian cancer, this treatment can lead to both tumor growth delay and even cures.
The researchers have filed for a patent on the technology and are now working with MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation in hopes of potentially forming a company to commercialize the technology. While they are initially focusing on cancers of the abdominal cavity, such as ovarian cancer, the work could also be applied to other types of cancer, including glioblastoma, the researchers say.
The research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Marble Center for Nanomedicine, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.
MIT researchers Paula Hammond, Ivan Pires, and Ezra Gordon have developed a way to rapidly manufacture specialized nanoparticles that can be used for targeted delivery of cancer drugs and other therapeutics.
Cambridge is leading one of four projects receiving new funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to model the risks and impacts of solar radiation modification (SRM).
Monuments tell stories, but not always the whole story. Professor of architecture Silke Langenberg on why we need to take a broader approach to heritage conservation and which sites also deserve protection, in this interview to mark the 50th anniversary of the European Architectural Heritage Year.
NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial arm of NUS, celebrated the opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo, its second office in Japan on 28 March 2025. The new Tokyo office strengthens NUS’ role in the global start-up ecosystem and opens new doors for entrepreneurs, made possible by strong collaborations with Japanese partners like JR East, its key partner for BLOCK71 Tokyo.
The partnership between NUS and JR East began in September 2023 with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to promote entrepreneurial opportunities between Singapore and Japan. That same year, NUS launched the NUS Enterprise Market Immersion Programme in Japan, with JR East as one of its partners. This programme has enabled NUS start-ups like M.I. Cloud Technologies and Mycotech Lab to explore the Japanese market and connect with potential corporate partners.
Building on this momentum, NUS teamed up earlier this year with JR East and ICMG Group, a leading business co-creation partner for Japanese companies, to launch a programme aimed at advancing open innovation strategies in Southeast Asia. This initiative encourages Japanese companies to collaborate with start-ups to create new products and services, accelerate growth, and bring innovative solutions to market faster.
The opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo marks a significant milestone in the collaboration between NUS and its Japanese partners, reinforcing the shared commitment to developing robust start-up ecosystems in both countries. Located at TAKANAWA GATEWAY Link Scholars’ Hub, BLOCK71 Tokyo will support the growth of Southeast Asian technology-driven start-ups in Japan, contributing to an urban development focus on environmental sustainability, mobility and robotics, and smart health. It will also provide Japanese start-ups with the resources needed to expand into Southeast Asia and beyond.
"Japan’s strong foundation in technology and research makes it an ideal environment for start-up growth. It ranks among the world’s top three countries for patent applications and invests over 3 per cent of its GDP in R&D, one of the highest globally,” said NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye at the opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo.
“This creates immense potential for innovation. With BLOCK71 Tokyo located in the country’s latest innovation hub, we have a strategic platform to connect start-ups and drive cross-border collaboration. To amplify our impact, we are partnering one of Japan’s top universities, a major corporation, and a leading venture capital firm, all sharing our vision to foster deep tech innovation and build a robust global ecosystem,” he added.
The BLOCK71 Japan team has since supported over 15 start-ups following the successful launch of BLOCK71 Nagoya in November 2024. BLOCK71 is NUS Enterprise’s global network of physical accelerators, providing start-ups with resources, mentorship, and access to international markets across 11 cities.
NUS collaborates with Japanese partners, who will invest about S$10 million to spur global venture creation
To deepen its impact, NUS inked three new partnerships in the lead-up to the opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo. Through these strategic collaborations, NUS will reinforce its position as a leading start-up university in the global innovation landscape, nurturing entrepreneurial mindsets and empowering the next generation of technology entrepreneurs.
Central Japan Innovation Capital
The first partnership is with Central Japan Innovation Capital (CJIC), a subsidiary of the Tokai National Higher Education and Research System. CJIC will invest up to 5 per cent of its assets under management in NUS-affiliated deep tech start-ups, supporting their growth and expansion into the Japanese and Southeast Asian markets. The fund aims to raise over S$40 million by November 2025. This collaboration will also provide broader opportunities for knowledge exchange and cross-border innovation.
Kyoto University
Beyond funding, NUS is enhancing entrepreneurial support for deep tech start-ups through its partnership with Kyoto University. As a first step, Kyoto University will send start-ups to join the NUS Graduate Research Innovation Programme (NUS GRIP). They will also become the first overseas university partner to offer a localised version of the programme. This will empower Kyoto University’s graduate students, researchers, and alumni to transform research into impactful deep tech ventures, addressing some of the social challenges in Asia and seizing new opportunities.
Both universities will also offer exchange programmes to foster cross-border entrepreneurial experiences. Kyoto University students will have the opportunity to intern at NUS GRIP start-ups, while NUS GRIP start-ups can gain hands-on experience from Kyoto University Innovation Capital Co. Ltd, the university’s venture capital arm.
TIS Inc
NUS will expand its entrepreneurship efforts to build a globally connected start-up ecosystem through a partnership with TIS Inc, one of Japan's leading IT companies. Together, they will launch the Deep Tech Seed to A Growth Expansion Programme (Deep-SAGE), a tailored start-up acceleration initiative to help seed-stage start-ups worldwide scale towards pre-Series A and Series A funding.
Over the next three years, TIS Inc will invest a total of S$7.6 million in Deep-SAGE, supporting up to 30 start-ups. As part of this commitment, at least S$500,000 will be allocated annually to fund a minimum of two start-ups per cohort. The programme, delivered by BLOCK71, will provide structured support through virtual mentorship sessions and workshops. Additionally, start-ups will gain access to incubation opportunities at BLOCK71 offices in 11 cities, including Singapore, Silicon Valley, Saigon and Suzhou.
Deepening market immersion and cultural exchange in Tokyo
Building on the collaboration between NUS and JR East, and riding on the success of its second Japan Immersion Programme in Nagoya held in 2024, BLOCK71 Japan will launch the third edition in Tokyo in May 2025. Start-ups that participated in the 2024 programme have gained valuable insights into Japan’s manufacturing landscape and went on to build industry connections, secure customers, and develop proof-of-concept projects, all of which are crucial for breaking into Japan’s competitive market.
Robotics firm RoPlus had a fruitful experience participating in the Japan Immersion Programme organised by BLOCK71 Japan in 2024, said Mr Low Jin Huat, the start-up’s co-founder. “We had the opportunity to engage in individual meetings with stakeholders, including end-users and potential investors. Additionally, we showcased our products at Messe Nagoya, where we connected with various industry partners and increased market awareness.”
“Through this programme, we successfully secured a distributor for the Japanese market and engaged two potential end-users,” Mr Low added, as he thanked BLOCK71 Japan for “fostering a supportive ecosystem and providing a strategic platform for NUS spin-offs to enter the Japanese market.”
Another start-up said the programme enabled it to make valuable connections with Japanese companies. “We were able to secure a pilot project with one of the companies we met during this programme. It has helped us shape our strategy for entering the Japanese market,” said Mr Zaid Ahmed Khan, CEO of M.I. Cloud Technologies.
The 2025 edition will focus on the three key themes of TAKANAWA GATEWAY CITY, namely, environmental sustainability, mobility and robotics, and smart health. It will welcome five Southeast Asian start-ups, who will have the chance to showcase their solutions at the upcoming GATEWAY Tech TAKANAWA, an event for large corporations and start-ups to exchange innovative ideas and solutions. This immersive experience will further strengthen ties between Southeast Asia and Japan, equipping start-ups with the knowledge and networks they need to enter new markets and drive innovation.
Panelist Neal McCluskey, who favors abolishing the Department of Education, expressed concern over the government’s “haphazard” methods.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Panelists weigh potential consequences of Trump plan to eliminate agency, transfer authority to states
A panel of experts convened Tuesday at the Graduate School of Education to weigh the potential consequences of President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education.
A cabinet-level executive branch agency, the department oversees policy, administers federal funding for schools, and ensures equal access to education. It also manages federal student aid programs, including Pell grants, supports research, and collects data. The agency oversees a budget of nearly $80 billion, of which about $34 billion helps low-income students and students with disabilities. It also manages more than $1.6 trillion in student loans.
In the days since the president’s order to “facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states,” the agency, led by Linda McMahon, has canceled research contracts and cut staff by nearly half. Democratic attorneys general, teachers’ unions, and education organizations, among others, have filed 19 separate lawsuits challenging the administration’s education agenda, arguing that the move to close down the agency is an illegal overreach. The department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, and opponents of the Trump order say that shutting it down would also require congressional action.
Martin West (from left), Brian Gill, Catherine Lhamon, Neal McCluskey, and Andrew Rotherham.
Educators, students, and families find themselves in a confusing and unsettling environment, said Martin West, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education, who moderated the conversation.
Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, favors abolishing the agency and restoring control of public schools to the states, but was critical of the government’s methods.
“My biggest concern is that this is being done so haphazardly — like a bull in a china shop,” he said. “I want to see the Department of Education go away, but if it’s done without any planning, in a way that is haphazard, that is just chaos, I’m afraid that it’ll make it look like what I want is horrendous.”
Andrew Rotherham, co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether, a national educational nonprofit, highlighted the potential fallout of lost funds in high-poverty areas across the country. Through Title I, the department provides financial assistance to schools with high numbers of children from low-income families.
“You’re obviously going to see impacts in high-poverty school districts,” said Rotherham. “In terms of the politics of this, it’s important to remember that that money gets spent in red communities, blue communities, red states, blue states, purple states. Everyone’s affected.”
“It’s important to remember that that money gets spent in red communities, blue communities, red states, blue states, purple states. Everyone’s affected.”
Andrew Rotherham, Bellwether
Catherine Lhamon, a former Ed Department assistant secretary for civil rights, lamented the implications for regional civil rights offices, which are responsible for enforcing protections guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law. Seven of 12 offices have been shuttered, she said.
“That means that fewer than half of the investigators who are struggling to do the work already are now left to do the entire nation’s civil rights enforcement work, and to guarantee that no one experiences discrimination based on race, sex, and disability in schools,” said Lhamon. “When I left on Jan. 20, our staff were carrying on average 50 cases per person, which is an untenable caseload.”
She added: “What we know is that schools are incubators for how to be in the world, how to participate in democracy, and how to be effective in our communities. … We are walking away from six decades of commitments to core protections for who each of us is. I find that terrifying.”
The panelists also voiced concerns about cuts to research administered through the agency’s Institute of Education Sciences, which has seen more than 100 layoffs. Brian Gill, a senior fellow at Mathematica, noted that his organization last month saw the cancelation of several projects contracted by the institute. The long-term effects are a big worry, he said.
“Changes to research aren’t going to have immediate effects in schools,” Gill said. “In the research world, it’s been a big deal. If you care about developing research and new programs in education, and making the schools work better in the long term, this is likely to matter.”
The MIT School of Science welcomes Jess Speedie, one of eight recipients of the 2025 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. The announcement was made March 27 by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, named after the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star, was established in 2017 to provide postdocs with the opportunity to conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy.
Speedie, who expects to complete her PhD in astronomy at the University of Victoria, Canada, this summer, will be hosted by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). She will be mentored by Kerr-McGee Career Development Professor Richard Teague as she uses a combination of observational data and simulations to study the birth of planets and the processes of planetary formation.
“The planetary environment is where all the good stuff collects … it has the greatest potential for the most interesting things in the universe to happen, such as the origin of life,” she says. “Planets, for me, are where the stories happen.”
Speedie’s work has focused on understanding “cosmic nurseries” and the detection and characterization of the youngest planets in the galaxy. A lot of this work has made use of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), located in northern Chile. Made up of a collection of 66 parabolic dishes, ALMA studies the universe with radio wavelengths, and Speedie has developed a novel approach to find signals in the data of gravitational instability in protoplanetary disks, a method of planetary formation.
“One of the big, big questions right now in the community focused on planet formation is, where are the planets? It is that simple. We think they’re developing in these disks, but we’ve detected so few of them,” she says.
While working as a fellow, Speedie is aiming to develop an algorithm that carefully aligns and stacks a decade of ALMA observational data to correct for a blurring effect that happens when combining images captured at different times. Doing so should produce the sharpest, most sensitive images of early planetary systems to date.
She is also interested in studying infant planets, especially ones that may be forming in disks around protoplanets, rather than stars. Modeling how these ingredient materials in orbit behave could give astronomers a way to measure the mass of young planets.
“What’s exciting is the potential for discovery. I have this sense that the universe as a whole is infinitely more creative than human minds — the kinds of things that happen out there, you can’t make that up. It’s better than science fiction,” she says.
The other 51 Pegasi b Fellows and their host institutions this year are Nick Choksi (Caltech), Yan Liang (Yale University), Sagnick Mukherjee (Arizona State University), Matthew Nixon (Arizona State University), Julia Santos (Harvard University), Nour Skaf (University of Hawaii), and Jerry Xuan (University of California at Los Angeles).
The fellowship provides up to $450,000 of support over three years for independent research, a generous salary and discretionary fund, mentorship at host institutions, an annual summit to develop professional networks and foster collaboration, and an option to apply for another grant to support a future position in the United States.
MIT welcomes 51 Pegasi b Fellow Jess Speedie, who will combine observational data and simulations to trace the imprints of newborn worlds and reveal hidden processes of planet formation. “Planets, for me, are where the stories happen,” she says.
For 100 years, a top stop for the world’s medievalists
Sean Gilsdorf, administrative director of the Committee on Medieval Studies, delivers opening remarks in Sanders Theatre.
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
800 academics convened in Harvard Yard for workshops, presentations, and discussion
The spread of misinformation online may feel like a modern problem. But more than 600 years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer, author of “The Canterbury Tales,” worried about the same thing.
According to Fernanda García-Oteyza, a Ph.D. candidate in religion at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, echoes of Chaucer’s Middle-English poem “The House of Fame,” where rumor is depicted as an uncontrollable force of distortion, can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This” (2021), a contemporary novel about the internet’s ability to alter truth and destroy literary voice.
“Both Lockwood and Chaucer take up questions of poetic authority, creativity, and inspiration, poking at the troubled relationship between reality and fiction, between rumor and fame, diving headfirst into the cacophony of speech that produces them all,” García-Oteyza explained to an audience at Sever Hall.
“It’s very exciting to be bringing the Medieval Academy back to our home and to be able to demonstrate how medieval studies has changed and grown over the past hundred years.”
Sean Gilsdorf
García-Oteyza was one of nearly two dozen Harvard students who presented at the Medieval Academy of America’s 100th annual meeting in late March. The gathering is a top destination for medievalists worldwide. This time around, more than 800 academics representing 23 countries convened in Harvard Yard for a three-day conference featuring 500 speakers, plenary addresses, workshops, exhibits, and concerts.
“It’s been really fascinating to see how interdisciplinary the field is,” García-Oteyza said of her first medieval studies-focused conference. “It’s been really generative, I’ve been able to meet a lot of people, and recognize faces that I’ve seen on book jackets.”
Elena Shadrina lectured on medieval trade agreements.
The event was a homecoming, of sorts, for the Medieval Academy of America, established in Cambridge and Boston in the early 1920s. The conference was last held on Harvard’s campus for the 50th anniversary in 1975.
“It’s very exciting to be bringing the Medieval Academy back to our home and to be able to demonstrate how medieval studies has changed and grown over the past hundred years,” said Sean Gilsdorf, administrative director of the Committee on Medieval Studies at Harvard as well as a lecturer on medieval studies and co-chair of the conference’s program committee. “These historical moments offer a really great opportunity to think retrospectively but also to think prospectively. Where are we going as a field? What’s the scholarship that’s going to move us into the next century?”
This year’s conference reflected the field’s expanding global scope, with presentations of papers on the medieval worlds of the Mediterranean, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Africa, Central and East Asia, and Islamic regions. A daylong pedagogy workshop on teaching the Global Middle Ages, organized by Assistant Professor of English Anna Wilson, encouraged graduate students to think more globally as medievalists.
Elena Shadrina, Ph.D. candidate in the History Department, presented her research on medieval Venetian trade agreements, focusing on how verbal contracts, witnesses, and forms of written documentation were used by merchants before implementation of an official register system. Colin Brady, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, presented his work on the revival of the Óenach Tailteann (Tailteann Games) regional assembly and sporting festival in 10th-century Ireland.
Emily Sun, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, presented her research on Meghan Purvis’ 2013 translation of “Beowulf,” focusing on Purvis’ perspective as an American woman approaching the Old English poem from across geographical and cultural distance. After the COVID-19 lockdowns, Sun said, she has renewed appreciation for attending conferences such as this one. These events provide opportunities to bring her work beyond the computer screen and into real conversations with other academics.
“This is a big part of what scholarship actually is — meeting your bibliography and having colleagues and professors and scholars from all rungs of the ladder at panels with you, watching your papers, and giving you ideas,” Sun said. “Seeing the recurring cast of characters who also happen to be your scholarly heroes is amazing.”
The annual event honored 420 staff members who achieved service milestones, as well as the winners of the President's Achievement Award and the Donald Griffin '23 Management Award.
The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 12 faculty members, including three full professors and nine assistant professors.
When major disasters hit and structures collapse, people can become trapped under rubble. Extricating victims from these hazardous environments can be dangerous and physically exhausting. To help rescue teams navigate these structures, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, developed the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT). SPROUT is a vine robot — a soft robot that can grow and maneuver around obstacles and through small spaces. First responders can deploy SPROUT under collapsed structures to explore, map, and find optimum ingress routes through debris.
"The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where even the most hardened technology struggles to operate. The fundamental way a vine robot works mitigates a lot of the challenges that other platforms face," says Chad Council, a member of the SPROUT team, which is led by Nathaniel Hanson. The program is conducted out of the laboratory's Human Resilience Technology Group.
First responders regularly integrate technology, such as cameras and sensors, into their workflows to understand complex operating environments. However, many of these technologies have limitations. For example, cameras specially built for search-and-rescue operations can only probe on a straight path inside of a collapsed structure. If a team wants to search further into a pile, they need to cut an access hole to get to the next area of the space. Robots are good for exploring on top of rubble piles, but are ill-suited for searching in tight, unstable structures and costly to repair if damaged. The challenge that SPROUT addresses is how to get under collapsed structures using a low-cost, easy-to-operate robot that can carry cameras and sensors and traverse winding paths.
SPROUT is composed of an inflatable tube made of airtight fabric that unfurls from a fixed base. The tube inflates with air, and a motor controls its deployment. As the tube extends into rubble, it can flex around corners and squeeze through narrow passages. A camera and other sensors mounted to the tip of the tube image and map the environment the robot is navigating. An operator steers SPROUT with joysticks, watching a screen that displays the robot's camera feed. Currently, SPROUT can deploy up to 10 feet, and the team is working on expanding it to 25 feet.
When building SPROUT, the team overcame a number of challenges related to the robot's flexibility. Because the robot is made of a deformable material that bends at many points, determining and controlling the robot's shape as it unfurls through the environment is difficult — think of trying to control an expanding wiggly sprinkler toy. Pinpointing how to apply air pressure within the robot so that steering is as simple as pointing the joystick forward to make the robot move forward was essential for system adoption by emergency responders. In addition, the team had to design the tube to minimize friction while the robot grows and engineer the controls for steering.
While a teleoperated system is a good starting point for assessing the hazards of void spaces, the team is also finding new ways to apply robot technologies to the domain, such as using data captured by the robot to build maps of the subsurface voids. "Collapse events are rare but devastating events. In robotics, we would typically want ground truth measurements to validate our approaches, but those simply don't exist for collapsed structures," Hanson says. To solve this problem, Hanson and his team made a simulator that allows them to create realistic depictions of collapsed structures and develop algorithms that map void spaces.
SPROUT was developed in collaboration with Margaret Coad, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an MIT graduate. When looking for collaborators, Hanson — a graduate of Notre Dame — was already aware of Coad's work on vine robots for industrial inspection. Coad's expertise, together with the laboratory's experience in engineering, strong partnership with urban search-and-rescue teams, and ability to develop fundamental technologies and prepare them for transition to industry, "made this a really natural pairing to join forces and work on research for a traditionally underserved community," Hanson says. "As one of the primary inventors of vine robots, Professor Coad brings invaluable expertise on the fabrication and modeling of these robots."
Lincoln Laboratory tested SPROUT with first responders at the Massachusetts Task Force 1 training site in Beverly, Massachusetts. The tests allowed the researchers to improve the durability and portability of the robot and learn how to grow and steer the robot more efficiently. The team is planning a larger field study this spring.
"Urban search-and-rescue teams and first responders serve critical roles in their communities but typically have little-to-no research and development budgets," Hanson says. "This program has enabled us to push the technology readiness level of vine robots to a point where responders can engage with a hands-on demonstration of the system."
Sensing in constrained spaces is not a problem unique to disaster response communities, Hanson adds. The team envisions the technology being used in the maintenance of military systems or critical infrastructure with difficult-to-access locations.
The initial program focused on mapping void spaces, but future work aims to localize hazards and assess the viability and safety of operations through rubble. "The mechanical performance of the robots has an immediate effect, but the real goal is to rethink the way sensors are used to enhance situational awareness for rescue teams," says Hanson. "Ultimately, we want SPROUT to provide a complete operating picture to teams before anyone enters a rubble pile."
Left to right: Summer research intern Ankush Dhawan and Lincoln Laboratory staff members Chad Council and Nathaniel Hanson test a vine robot in a laboratory setting.
When major disasters hit and structures collapse, people can become trapped under rubble. Extricating victims from these hazardous environments can be dangerous and physically exhausting. To help rescue teams navigate these structures, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, developed the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT). SPROUT is a vine robot — a soft robot that can grow and maneuver around obstacles and through small spaces. First responders can deploy SPROUT under collapsed structures to explore, map, and find optimum ingress routes through debris.
"The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where even the most hardened technology struggles to operate. The fundamental way a vine robot works mitigates a lot of the challenges that other platforms face," says Chad Council, a member of the SPROUT team, which is led by Nathaniel Hanson. The program is conducted out of the laboratory's Human Resilience Technology Group.
First responders regularly integrate technology, such as cameras and sensors, into their workflows to understand complex operating environments. However, many of these technologies have limitations. For example, cameras specially built for search-and-rescue operations can only probe on a straight path inside of a collapsed structure. If a team wants to search further into a pile, they need to cut an access hole to get to the next area of the space. Robots are good for exploring on top of rubble piles, but are ill-suited for searching in tight, unstable structures and costly to repair if damaged. The challenge that SPROUT addresses is how to get under collapsed structures using a low-cost, easy-to-operate robot that can carry cameras and sensors and traverse winding paths.
SPROUT is composed of an inflatable tube made of airtight fabric that unfurls from a fixed base. The tube inflates with air, and a motor controls its deployment. As the tube extends into rubble, it can flex around corners and squeeze through narrow passages. A camera and other sensors mounted to the tip of the tube image and map the environment the robot is navigating. An operator steers SPROUT with joysticks, watching a screen that displays the robot's camera feed. Currently, SPROUT can deploy up to 10 feet, and the team is working on expanding it to 25 feet.
When building SPROUT, the team overcame a number of challenges related to the robot's flexibility. Because the robot is made of a deformable material that bends at many points, determining and controlling the robot's shape as it unfurls through the environment is difficult — think of trying to control an expanding wiggly sprinkler toy. Pinpointing how to apply air pressure within the robot so that steering is as simple as pointing the joystick forward to make the robot move forward was essential for system adoption by emergency responders. In addition, the team had to design the tube to minimize friction while the robot grows and engineer the controls for steering.
While a teleoperated system is a good starting point for assessing the hazards of void spaces, the team is also finding new ways to apply robot technologies to the domain, such as using data captured by the robot to build maps of the subsurface voids. "Collapse events are rare but devastating events. In robotics, we would typically want ground truth measurements to validate our approaches, but those simply don't exist for collapsed structures," Hanson says. To solve this problem, Hanson and his team made a simulator that allows them to create realistic depictions of collapsed structures and develop algorithms that map void spaces.
SPROUT was developed in collaboration with Margaret Coad, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an MIT graduate. When looking for collaborators, Hanson — a graduate of Notre Dame — was already aware of Coad's work on vine robots for industrial inspection. Coad's expertise, together with the laboratory's experience in engineering, strong partnership with urban search-and-rescue teams, and ability to develop fundamental technologies and prepare them for transition to industry, "made this a really natural pairing to join forces and work on research for a traditionally underserved community," Hanson says. "As one of the primary inventors of vine robots, Professor Coad brings invaluable expertise on the fabrication and modeling of these robots."
Lincoln Laboratory tested SPROUT with first responders at the Massachusetts Task Force 1 training site in Beverly, Massachusetts. The tests allowed the researchers to improve the durability and portability of the robot and learn how to grow and steer the robot more efficiently. The team is planning a larger field study this spring.
"Urban search-and-rescue teams and first responders serve critical roles in their communities but typically have little-to-no research and development budgets," Hanson says. "This program has enabled us to push the technology readiness level of vine robots to a point where responders can engage with a hands-on demonstration of the system."
Sensing in constrained spaces is not a problem unique to disaster response communities, Hanson adds. The team envisions the technology being used in the maintenance of military systems or critical infrastructure with difficult-to-access locations.
The initial program focused on mapping void spaces, but future work aims to localize hazards and assess the viability and safety of operations through rubble. "The mechanical performance of the robots has an immediate effect, but the real goal is to rethink the way sensors are used to enhance situational awareness for rescue teams," says Hanson. "Ultimately, we want SPROUT to provide a complete operating picture to teams before anyone enters a rubble pile."
Left to right: Summer research intern Ankush Dhawan and Lincoln Laboratory staff members Chad Council and Nathaniel Hanson test a vine robot in a laboratory setting.
C. Cem Tasan has been appointed director of MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), effective March 15. The POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), Tasan succeeds Lionel “Kim” Kimerling, who has held the post of interim director since Carl Thompson stepped down in August 2023.
“MRL is a strategic asset for MIT, and Cem has a clear vision to build upon the lab’s engagement with materials researchers across the breadth of the Institute as well as with external collaborators and sponsors,” wrote Vice President for Research Ian Waitz, in a letter announcing the appointment.
The MRL is a leading interdisciplinary center dedicated to materials science and engineering. As a hub for innovation, the MRL unites researchers across disciplines, fosters industry and government partnerships, and drives advancements that shape the future of technology. Through groundbreaking research, the MRL supports MIT’s mission to advance science and technology for the benefit of society, enabling discoveries that have a lasting impact across industries and everyday life.
“MRL has a position at the core of materials research activities across departments at MIT,” Tasan says. “It can only grow from where it is, right in the heart of the Institute’s innovative hub.”
As director, Tasan will lead MRL’s research mission, with a view to strengthening internal collaboration and building upon the interdisciplinary laboratory’s long history of industry engagement. He will also take on responsibility for the management of Building 13, the Vannevar Bush Building, which houses key research facilities and labs.
“MRL is in very good hands with Cem Tasan’s leadership,” says Kimerling, the outgoing interim director. “His vision for a united MIT materials community whose success is stimulated by the convergence of basic science and engineering solutions provides the nutrition for MIT’s creative relevance to society. His collegial nature, motivating energy, and patient approach will make it happen.”
Tasan is a metallurgist with expertise in the fracture in metals and the design of damage-resistant alloys. Among other advances, his lab has demonstrated a multiscale means of designing high-strength/high-ductility titanium alloys; and explained the stress intensification mechanism by which human hair damages hard steel razors, pointing the way to stronger and longer-lasting blades.
“We need better materials that operate in more and more extreme conditions, for almost all of our critical industries and applications,” says Tasan. “Materials research in MRL identifies interdisciplinary pathways to address this important challenge.”
He studied in Turkey and the Netherlands, earning his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology before spending several years leading a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials in Germany. He joined the MIT faculty in 2016 and earned tenure in 2022.
“Cem has led one of the major collaborative research teams at MRL, and he expects to continue developing a strong community among the MIT materials research faculty,” wrote Waitz in his letter on March 14.
The MRL was established in 2017 through the merger of the MIT Materials Processing Center (MPC) and the Center for Materials Science and Engineering. This unification aimed to strengthen MIT’s leadership in materials research by fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and advancing breakthroughs in areas such as energy conversion, quantum materials, and materials sustainability.
From 2008 to 2017, Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, served as director of the MPC. During his tenure, he played a crucial role in expanding materials research and building partnerships with industry, government agencies, and academic institutions. With the formation of the MRL in 2017, Thompson was appointed its inaugural director, guiding the new laboratory to prominence as a hub for cutting-edge materials science. He stepped down from this role in August 2023.
At that time, Kimerling stepped in to serve as interim director of MRL. He brought special knowledge of the lab’s history, having served as director of the MPC from 1993 to 2008, transforming it into a key industry-academic interface. Under his leadership, the MPC became a crucial gateway for industry partners to collaborate with MIT faculty across materials-related disciplines, bridging fundamental research with industrial applications. His vision helped drive technological innovation and economic development by aligning academic expertise with industry needs. As interim director of MRL these past 18 months, Kimerling has ensured continuity in leadership.
“I’m delighted that Cem will be the next MRL director,” says Thompson. “He’s a great fit. He has been affiliated with MPC, and then MRL, since the beginning of his faculty career at MIT. He’s also played a key role in leading a renaissance in physical metallurgy at MIT and has many close ties to industry.”
Nicholas Burns on being U.S. envoy to China, returning to Harvard, lessons from long career in diplomacy
It was a challenging tour of duty.
Ambassador Nicholas Burns makes his return this week to teaching at Harvard Kennedy School after being tapped in 2021 to serve as the U.S. representative to China. Though U.S.-China relations historically are complicated, Burns’ tenure in Beijing came at a particularly difficult time.
Both countries were grappling with the pandemic, and while the U.S. economy slowly recovered, China’s faltered under its Zero COVID policy. The Biden administration imposed new, tougher sanctions on China over its human rights violations and limited exports of critical technology like semiconductors.
In this edited conversation, Burns, the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, spoke to the Gazette about his experience and about what gives the U.S. a strategic advantage over China.
Relations between China and the U.S. were particularly strained during your time as U.S. ambassador. What compelled you to leave Harvard to take on something this difficult?
I had been in the career Foreign Service for 27 years and then came to Harvard for 13 years. So public service was the main mission of my career, and it’s something that I found great value in and enjoyed.
When President Biden called me just after the 2020 election to ask me to go, how could I say no? First of all, I deeply believe in public service. Second, the U.S.-China relationship is one of the most important, if not the most important, relationship we have, and highly problematic, challenging, competitive, disputatious.
I felt it was a unique opportunity to get back into government, to go back into what Teddy Roosevelt called “the arena of public service.” I had been urging all of my students for many years to go into that arena, and I felt if I’m being asked, I’ve got to go, too. I’m very grateful for the opportunity. It was, in many ways, the most difficult job I’ve ever had, and in many ways, the most worthwhile, as well.
What made it worthwhile?
It’s a consequential relationship for both countries. China is our most important competitor in the world. It’s the second-largest economy; it’s the second-strongest military power next to us; it’s our strongest adversary and competitor in the world. A lot is riding on how we manage that relationship for the decades ahead.
In addition to the military and technology and trade competitions, we have competing ideas and opposite ideas about human freedom, about democracy, about human rights, and the ability of people to speak out. The lack of freedoms in China and increasingly repressive and fearful environment made the agenda between us extraordinarily difficult and contested.
How challenging was it to communicate U.S. policy and values to the Chinese people? Are they aware they have less freedom than others around the world?
They’re very much aware that they don’t have access to free information unless you have a virtual private network (VPN), which most Chinese don’t have.
They’re in a phase of Chinese history where a highly educated public does not have a complete view of its own history, and they’re not aware of dissenting views that might contradict and criticize Chinese Communist practices. That’s a major hill to climb if you’re a government like ours that is trying to both manage a difficult and competitive relationship with the government and have a relationship between our society and 1.4 billion Chinese.
So, we spent a lot of time trying to relate and connect with the Chinese people. The Chinese government puts enormous resources into its vast propaganda network to distort our history, to distort what our president or secretary of state was saying or doing, or what I was saying or doing, and we faced a high degree of censorship on Chinese social media. We were trying to get free and fair and factual information into the Chinese bloodstream, and the communist authorities were trying to keep it out.
I had a chance to visit many universities, to speak with many professors and many students. After a couple of minutes, people are frank. It was not that everybody agreed with us. Sometimes in those sessions with students or faculty, I would face a lot of criticism, but I thought that was fair. I came from a university environment here at Harvard. I’m used to the classroom. You want students to speak up, and I certainly felt that students in China had a right to speak up, and sometimes they were very grateful for the opportunity to talk to an American and were very admiring of many parts of the culture. Sometimes they were very critical. But just having the dialogue, I thought, was a step forward and having connection.
What was the most rewarding or the most difficult part of the job?
The most difficult was dealing with the Chinese authorities on issues where we have entirely opposite views, sometimes a different interpretation of the facts, sometimes a different set of facts. That made it hard to negotiate.
We brought speakers; we brought American artists, musicians, sports figures to China to show the Chinese people this side of American culture.
In 2024, my last full year there, on 98 separate occasions, the Chinese authorities interfered with those public diplomacy people-to-people efforts. They actually turned off the electricity in a hall where an American musical group was going to perform. They would actively warn Chinese students not to come to seminars or writers’ workshops.
So that set of problems — not agreeing on the same facts, having wildly different interpretation of facts, active measures taken by the Chinese government to disrupt normal programs that any two countries would want to have with each other — that was the most frustrating part of the job.
The most rewarding was to stand by the flag again, to be back in government, to represent the United States as ambassador in this extraordinarily important country to us and to work alongside the men and women of Mission China. That was the best part of the job, being part of that team, being the leader of that team, working alongside them, and being proud of what they represent for our country.
Is diplomacy any different today from when you first joined the State Department in 1980?
There’s an aspect of diplomacy that remains unchanged. Especially in a difficult relationship like the U.S. and China, you want to make sure that each capital has a very sophisticated and detailed understanding of the other’s position on issues and of their motivations, good or bad. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is communications technology, and the news cycle now is 24 hours a day. It comes from a million different sources. There’s much more transparency. There’s a greater obligation, certainly in the United States and democratic countries, to be open with their publics and to describe exactly what we’re doing and not to hide as many things as were hidden in the past. That’s something that we should be very good at.
That’s why I think it’s been a major mistake to try to deconstruct the federal workforce over the last couple of months, to abolish USAID, a great organization doing necessary and very important things for the American people around the world, and to take away Radio Free Europe/Liberty Radio, Radio Free Asia. Millions of people listen to those in authoritarian countries. It’s information that tells the truth about our society and about events that are happening in the world. I’m really concerned that we’re giving China an enormous propaganda advantage here, because we’re creating a vacuum.
“NATO is one of the most important institutions in American history. The fact that we’ve been able to lead it allowed us to keep the peace in the Cold War for five and a half decades.”
You once served as U.S. ambassador to NATO. At HKS, you were faculty chair of the Project on the Transatlantic Relationship. Where is that relationship today?
One of the key lessons I learned in a long diplomatic career is: Be nice to your allies and be faithful to them because they’re multipliers of American power and influence in the world. I certainly saw that at NATO on Sept. 11, 2001, when I was a very new ambassador.
The Canadian ambassador, David Wright, came to me hours after the attack, and said, “We should invoke Article Five of the NATO Treaty.” And within 24 hours, the Europeans and Canadians came to our defense.
They are the best allies we could hope to have. They share our values, and they share our interests. My job in China was made easier by the fact that the NATO countries were acting with us to try to constrain and limit what the Chinese could do in their very aggressive expansion of their own power.
NATO is one of the most important institutions in American history. The fact that we’ve been able to lead it allowed us to keep the peace in the Cold War for five and a half decades. Putin is trying to divide Europe. There’s no question that Russia, if it gets away with its crimes in Ukraine, if it’s a lenient peace agreement that favors Russian interests, then that will simply encourage Putin to be aggressive against Ukraine again, against Moldova, against the Baltic countries (now members of NATO), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
So, there are enormous stakes for the United States in being tough-minded with Russia. Everyone wants the war to end, and I agree that it should end. Let’s try to end the war but negotiate it in a way that makes it far more likely that Putin will be constrained and limited in the future and not emboldened.
How does our relationship with European and East Asian allies affect U.S.-China relations?
China has no real allies in the world. We have over 30 treaty allies in Europe and five treaty allies in the Indo Pacific. This is what gives the United States strategic advantage over China that will play out over the next 10 to 20 to 30 years. It will be one of the most important stories in American history if we are able to retain our strength and protect our democracy and protect democracy around the world, because we deter Chinese aggression.
It would be a mistake of historic proportions to forsake our Indo-Pacific allies and NATO and give up the leadership role that we’ve had. I don’t think the American people will support doing that, and certainly, I don’t think most of our elected politicians in Congress would support it.
“Our mission, particularly at the Kennedy School, is to encourage bright young women and men to go into public service. That mission is more important than ever right now given everything that’s happening in Washington.“
How does it feel to be back at Harvard?
I’m really grateful to return to Harvard. I loved teaching at the Kennedy School. We have a first-rate faculty; we have outstanding students from over 90 countries all around the world. I learned so much from them when I was a professor here, and I’m really pleased to come back.
I’m going to reconstitute the Future of Diplomacy Project to make sure that we’re bringing diplomacy into our studies about global affairs. I’m going to teach a joint course next year with Professor Jim Sebenius of Harvard Business School on negotiations and diplomacy.
It’s one of the greatest institutions I’ve been involved with, and it’s doing great good in the world. Our mission, particularly at the Kennedy School, is to encourage bright young women and men to go into public service. That mission is more important than ever right now given everything that’s happening in Washington.
It’s certainly understandable if students here and elsewhere would feel that a public service career is no longer available to them. Our job is to encourage students, to understand that at the municipal level, at the state level, at the national level, and at the global level, we need good people to go into public service. That is not going to change. The pendulum in the United States, at some point, will swing back to honor public service as we have always done in our history.
AC use to surge as world gets hotter. Harvard startup has a solution.
Novel system works like a coffee filter to dry, cool air more efficiently
Kirsten Mabry
Harvard Correspondent
7 min read
Today, systems that cool buildings account for as much as 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That may seem like a small fraction, but it’s significant: double the emissions associated with all air travel, for example.
As the world gets hotter due to climate change, the need for cooling is set to rise substantially. Air conditioning demand is expected to soar by up to 40 percent by 2030. Energy use, and the associated climate-warming emissions, will balloon along with it.
“There’s a climate-change solution here,” said Jonathan Grinham, assistant professor of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “The problem is big, and the market opportunity is big.”
Despite the revolution coming for demand, the technology used to cool spaces has remained relatively stagnant for more than a century. “We’ve lived in the status quo of the bigger industries delivering the same vapor-compression technology,” said Grinham.
Trellis Air, a Harvard startup, is set to disrupt that status quo. Thanks to collaborative efforts from across the University, the company recently launched with aims to drastically reduce the energy needed to run air conditioners with its novel approach to dehumidification.
‘Marriage of raw science and engineering breakthroughs’
Most air conditioners are not all that different from souped-up dehumidifiers. A cooling system pulls in room-temperature air and chills it using chemicals called refrigerants. Water vapor separated from the air is condensed — resulting in that “drip, drip, drip” that air conditioners are notorious for — while the cooler air is released into a room and heat is diverted outside.
Air-conditioning technology also makes air drier, and dehumidifiers use a similar process to condense water out of ambient air. The cool, dry air is then rewarmed and released back into the room.
“A dehumidifier burns a lot of energy,” said Russ Wilcox, Trellis Air CEO. “It’s like driving with one foot on the gas, the other foot on the brake: You’ve got one part making cold, the other part making heat.”
While refrigerants — which have significant planet-warming potential of their own — are at the core of most modern cooling systems, some industrial facilities that need incredibly dry air may also choose what’s called a desiccant air dryer, a system that uses a material like salt to absorb water.
Trellis Air, on the other hand, will rely on a “third way,” of pulling moisture from the air, said Wilcox. Harvard scientists developed a unique membrane capable of separating water vapor directly from the air — similar to a coffee filter. The system uses much less energy than traditional air conditioners and dehumidifiers and is more stable than desiccant systems.
A Trellis Air prototype, pictured alongside a traditional AC unit, is tested in Miami.
To develop the underlying tech, Grinham worked closely with staff scientist Jack Alvarenga and others in the lab of Joanna Aizenberg, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard. Leveraging his deep expertise in architecture and building science, Grinham collaborated with Alvarenga and other researchers in the Aizenberg Lab to prototype materials and conduct the foundational science needed to create Trellis Air’s product.
Membrane dehumidification systems have been attempted in the past, but struggled to achieve high-water selectivity with scalable and robust materials. In addition to developing a workable membrane, the Harvard team designed a novel, 3D-printed tile assembly that allows water to readily pass through while protecting the delicate membrane, which is just 15 microns thick — thinner than a human hair — for long periods of time.
“It was this really nice marriage of raw science and engineering breakthroughs,” said Christopher Petty, OTD’s director of business development for physical sciences.
‘If he says something is worth seeing, it’s usually worth seeing’
OTD protected the intellectual property of the innovations developed at Harvard and licensed it to Trellis Air for further development. Grinham and Alvarenga will stay involved as scientific advisers to the company, as will Aizenberg and Martin Bechthold from the School of Design.
Petty, a former entrepreneur himself, wasn’t initially familiar with the type of tech Grinham and the research team set out to develop. But what he learned about the scope of the air conditioning challenge stunned him, and convinced him of the business’s potential.
“Sometimes it’s enough that it’s a good business, it has to be,” says Petty. “But if you feel you can work on something that might have that kind of impact, then it helps you sleep at night too.”
He began networking to find an entrepreneur who could shepherd the idea from technological breakthrough to big-time business.
Wilcox, an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who had previously popularized the electronic paper-display technology that’s today used in millions of Kindles, was among Petty’s early calls. And his interest was immediately piqued. “If he says something is worth seeing, it’s usually worth seeing,” says Wilcox.
Still, it took more than a dozen meetings before Wilcox decided to become the company’s CEO. Wilcox was convinced from the beginning that the opportunity was a huge one, due to the sheer size of the AC industry, but he decided to make the jump after learning that several past colleagues from his former company, E Ink, were willing to sign on with him.
Starting a company that he believed in with past coworkers “just seemed like the most joyful thing I could do,” he said. “Nothing could be more exciting.”
Wilcox sees three roads to commercialization for Trellis Air: replacing desiccant systems in industrial applications, swapping basement dehumidifiers for more efficient models, and the big-time bet: integrating Trellis Air’s technology with air conditioners across the world. Wilcox says the company will pitch the tech as a “pre-drying module” that will allow ACs to run much more efficiently, consuming much less energy.
The CEO has backed nearly two dozen companies as an investor, and sees big possibilities for Trellis Air, in part because of the huge potential reward. “In order for a deep-tech startup to work, you need a big, bold goal that everyone will decide is worth the risk,” he said. The scope of the air conditioning challenge fits the bill.
To de-risk the tech and show that it can work, Trellis Air has spent the past year prototyping. Before the company launched, a proof-of-concept prototype was piloted in Miami through the team’s Department of Energy Grant with Forrest Meggers at Princeton University and Les Norford at MIT. Next, the team tested a fully integrated system at Harvard’s HouseZero, the headquarters of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, retrofitted as a “living lab” to test and collect data on the technology’s efficiency in a real-world setting. These demonstrations showed what Trellis Air’s tech can do in Boston’s hot, humid summers and the even more inhospitable Miami climate.
Those real-world examples should help give funders confidence in the system’s capabilities.
“It’s one thing to build energy models to say that this is possible, and it’s a whole other thing to actually deliver the physical prototype at scale,” said Alvarenga. “We were able to bring the idea into existence inside the lab and then move beyond the lab into pilot field studies. With Trellis Air we want to go further and scale up a commercial product that can meaningfully reduce the future massive energy and emissions needs of cooling.”
Harvard IP licensed to Trellis Air was funded in part by the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.
The undergraduate financial aid budget is projected to increase 8%, to $306 million, and total graduate student support is projected to rise 7%, to $365 million, for 2025-26.
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 1, 2025, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Robert Sanford Brustein was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
The legacy and influence of Robert Brustein, a major presence in American theater of the 20th century, live on in the 21st. As dean of the Yale School of Drama starting in 1966, Brustein founded the Yale Repertory Theatre, where he worked with playwrights such as Sam Shepherd and David Mamet and with players such as Meryl Streep. In 1980 at Harvard, he became director of the Loeb Drama Center and turned it into the home of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.). He later founded the Institute for Advanced Theater Training. While at Harvard, Brustein also taught as a full professor of English. He retired in 2003, becoming a research professor of English and creative consultant to the A.R.T.
While Brustein’s command of drama, from ancient Greek plays to avant-garde theater, was legendary, he was always a theatrical innovator, seeking and creating genuinely new, profound productions. He was a leader in the regional theater movement, which emphasized serious, intelligent engagement with past great authors and newly rising ones. His founding of repertory companies at Yale and Harvard established fresh relationships between research universities and the performing arts, a model copied at other schools. In 1990 he told The New York Times, “The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit” and “the basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”
Brustein believed deeply in textual criticism of plays and honored their interpretations both as literary works and as fluid dramas that demand different performances for different times. Coming to Harvard, he apparently worried that the institution might not always support theater of high quality. President Derek Bok was said to have given that guarantee. The joke was that if the box office did not provide enough for the A.R.T., then Bok’s Office would. Brustein’s concerns were not without merit. Two early A.R.T. productions witnessed audiences leave midway through performances, but he was willing to accept such risks to achieve unique qualities that a calculated, commercial theater could rarely equal.
At the A.R.T., Brustein succeeded in melding performance, scholarship, and dramaturgy, while bringing together professionals, amateurs, and students. Under his leadership, the A.R.T. championed directors such as Alvin Epstein, JoAnne Akalaitis, Peter Sellars, Julie Taymor, and Robert Wilson. Despite a demanding national and international schedule, Brustein regularly gave lecture courses on modern or post-modern drama from 1980 through 2001.
The current artistic director of the A.R.T., Diane Paulus, became acquainted with Brustein’s work when she was an undergraduate at Harvard. She thinks that his vision for theater remains bold and innovative. Sam Marks, a senior lecturer on playwriting in the Department of English, notes, “Not only does he leave an immense legacy in the theater, he changed the lives of so many of his students, whom he loved.”
Born in Brooklyn on April 21, 1927, the son of the businessman Max Brustein and the former Blanche Haft, Brustein grew up in Manhattan, attended the High School of Music and Art, then graduated from Amherst College. During college, he took time off to serve in the Merchant Marine. After receiving an M.A. in dramatic literature from Columbia University and two years at the University of Nottingham on a Fulbright fellowship, he pursued the Ph.D. at Columbia, then taught at Columbia, Vassar College, and Cornell University.
In 1964 Brustein published “The Theatre of Revolt,” a critical study. His publications are remarkably extensive. With his leading genres the review or chapter essay, he authored more than a dozen books, chapters in volumes edited by others, scores of reviews, articles in learned journals, a comedy about Shakespeare and Marlowe, and an autobiographical play, “Spring Forward, Fall Back.” His other plays include “Nobody Dies on Friday,” which satirizes the acting teacher Lee Strasberg, and “Shlemiel the First,” a klezmer musical based on stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Beginning in 1959, Brustein was a drama critic for The New Republic for 46 years. He contributed reviews and essays to The New York Review of Books. Among his books, one should mention “Letters to a Young Actor,” a variation on Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” Brustein advised young actors to obtain a broad liberal arts education rather than a narrow professional one. He edited Strindberg. Other favorite playwrights included Ibsen, O’Neill, Genet, Pirandello, and Shaw, all of whom he treated in “The Theater of Revolt” and whose works he showcased at the A.R.T. He continued to publish until shortly before his death, which occurred at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 29, 2023.
Brustein’s energy and productivity in directing, producing, teaching, mentoring, and writing were astounding. Feisty, he sometimes created controversy but to those encounters always brought opinions informed by knowledge, theatrical experience, and scholarly research. He seemed, at times unusually, to love the heat of friction. The more prominent his opponent, the grittier became his sandpaper.
Brustein and Samuel Beckett clashed over Akalaitis’s version of the set for Beckett’s “Endgame” at the A.R.T. Brustein retorted, “To threaten any deviations from a purist rendering of this or any other play . . . not only robs collaborating artists of their interpretive freedom but threatens to turn the theater into a waxworks.” Brustein also disputed with August Wilson about the nature and scope of Black theater in the United States.
Later in life, Brustein criticized what he believed was a renewed, even vicious, American worship of money and success, along with a concomitant decline in integrity, intelligence, and soul. He believed similar forces were eroding American theater. To The Boston Globe, he remarked in 2012, “I think the American theater reflects America now, as everything that happens is beginning to reflect America — one-percent America.”
First married to Norma Ofstrock, who died in 1979, Brustein in 1996 married Doreen Beinart, who survives him, as do his son, Daniel Brustein, stepchildren, and several grandchildren and step-grandchildren.
Pregnancy may offer some protection from developing long COVID, found a new study led by Weill Cornell Medicine, University of Rochester Medical Center, University of Utah Health and Louisiana Public Health Institute.
ETH Zurich has provided its final report to the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) on the “Leading House Asia” mandate. After more than 20 years and around 1,000 funded projects, the University has declined to apply for a new mandate period. The University of Zurich will take on the future role of Leading House for research cooperation with Asia.
Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place.
The company seeks to minimize costs while meeting a 23 percent increase in demand.
Wouldn’t it be easier for the company to just ask ChatGPT to come up with an optimal plan? In fact, for all their incredible capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often perform poorly when tasked with directly solving such complicated planning problems on their own.
Rather than trying to change the model to make an LLM a better planner, MIT researchers took a different approach. They introduced a framework that guides an LLM to break down the problem like a human would, and then automatically solve it using a powerful software tool.
A user only needs to describe the problem in natural language — no task-specific examples are needed to train or prompt the LLM. The model encodes a user’s text prompt into a format that can be unraveled by an optimization solver designed to efficiently crack extremely tough planning challenges.
During the formulation process, the LLM checks its work at multiple intermediate steps to make sure the plan is described correctly to the solver. If it spots an error, rather than giving up, the LLM tries to fix the broken part of the formulation.
When the researchers tested their framework on nine complex challenges, such as minimizing the distance warehouse robots must travel to complete tasks, it achieved an 85 percent success rate, whereas the best baseline only achieved a 39 percent success rate.
The versatile framework could be applied to a range of multistep planning tasks, such as scheduling airline crews or managing machine time in a factory.
“Our research introduces a framework that essentially acts as a smart assistant for planning problems. It can figure out the best plan that meets all the needs you have, even if the rules are complicated or unusual,” says Yilun Hao, a graduate student in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and lead author of a paper on this research.
She is joined on the paper by Yang Zhang, a research scientist at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; and senior author Chuchu Fan, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and LIDS principal investigator. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Optimization 101
The Fan group develops algorithms that automatically solve what are known as combinatorial optimization problems. These vast problems have many interrelated decision variables, each with multiple options that rapidly add up to billions of potential choices.
Humans solve such problems by narrowing them down to a few options and then determining which one leads to the best overall plan. The researchers’ algorithmic solvers apply the same principles to optimization problems that are far too complex for a human to crack.
But the solvers they develop tend to have steep learning curves and are typically only used by experts.
“We thought that LLMs could allow nonexperts to use these solving algorithms. In our lab, we take a domain expert’s problem and formalize it into a problem our solver can solve. Could we teach an LLM to do the same thing?” Fan says.
Using the framework the researchers developed, called LLM-Based Formalized Programming (LLMFP), a person provides a natural language description of the problem, background information on the task, and a query that describes their goal.
Then LLMFP prompts an LLM to reason about the problem and determine the decision variables and key constraints that will shape the optimal solution.
LLMFP asks the LLM to detail the requirements of each variable before encoding the information into a mathematical formulation of an optimization problem. It writes code that encodes the problem and calls the attached optimization solver, which arrives at an ideal solution.
“It is similar to how we teach undergrads about optimization problems at MIT. We don’t teach them just one domain. We teach them the methodology,” Fan adds.
As long as the inputs to the solver are correct, it will give the right answer. Any mistakes in the solution come from errors in the formulation process.
To ensure it has found a working plan, LLMFP analyzes the solution and modifies any incorrect steps in the problem formulation. Once the plan passes this self-assessment, the solution is described to the user in natural language.
Perfecting the plan
This self-assessment module also allows the LLM to add any implicit constraints it missed the first time around, Hao says.
For instance, if the framework is optimizing a supply chain to minimize costs for a coffeeshop, a human knows the coffeeshop can’t ship a negative amount of roasted beans, but an LLM might not realize that.
The self-assessment step would flag that error and prompt the model to fix it.
“Plus, an LLM can adapt to the preferences of the user. If the model realizes a particular user does not like to change the time or budget of their travel plans, it can suggest changing things that fit the user’s needs,” Fan says.
In a series of tests, their framework achieved an average success rate between 83 and 87 percent across nine diverse planning problems using several LLMs. While some baseline models were better at certain problems, LLMFP achieved an overall success rate about twice as high as the baseline techniques.
Unlike these other approaches, LLMFP does not require domain-specific examples for training. It can find the optimal solution to a planning problem right out of the box.
In addition, the user can adapt LLMFP for different optimization solvers by adjusting the prompts fed to the LLM.
“With LLMs, we have an opportunity to create an interface that allows people to use tools from other domains to solve problems in ways they might not have been thinking about before,” Fan says.
In the future, the researchers want to enable LLMFP to take images as input to supplement the descriptions of a planning problem. This would help the framework solve tasks that are particularly hard to fully describe with natural language.
This work was funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is collaborating with Microsoft Research Asia to drive deep scientific exploration in artificial intelligence (AI) and computing while fostering the next generation of tech talent across Asia and beyond.
NUS will focus on AI-driven research with Microsoft Research Asia in key areas such as healthcare, societal AI, spatial intelligence, as well as data-intensive computing. This collaboration will boost progress in these fields, enhance cross-disciplinary research capability, and aim to strengthen the region’s role in shaping the future of AI and computing on a global scale.
Talent is the key driver behind the development of AI. NUS has signed a five-year research collaboration agreement with Microsoft Research Asia for a Joint PhD Supervision Programme, bringing together NUS' academic and research excellence with Microsoft Research Asia’s global leadership in AI, computing research, and industrial applications to cultivate talent. As part of this collaboration, NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will nurture PhD students through the Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP), a programme supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) that enables globally leading companies to develop talent aligned with industry needs, as well as PhD programmes offered by the NUS School of Computing. This initiative will help to cultivate interdisciplinary, high-calibre tech professionals and drive the integration of AI technology across industries.
Through strategic research projects and workshops, NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will strive to strengthen Asia’s integration with the global AI research community and amplify the region’s impact on international technology innovation.
Professor Tan Eng Chye, NUS President, said, “In line with Singapore’s AI strategy to accelerate the growth of the digital economy, the collaboration between NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will strengthen local AI capabilities and create meaningful impact for society and industries. As a leader in AI research and innovation, Microsoft Research Asia has a strong track record of pioneering breakthroughs and fostering deep academic collaborations. By joining forces with Microsoft Research Asia, we hope to drive cutting-edge advancements, translate research into real-world applications, and nurture AI talent with a global perspective.”
Dr Lidong Zhou, Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, added, “Microsoft Research Asia is committed to driving technological innovation through cutting-edge open research and establishing long-term collaboration with leading academic institutions worldwide. Asia is a key global hub for AI innovation with a robust research ecosystem, strong industrial foundation, and international outlook. NUS, as one of the most influential academic institutions in Asia and beyond, has been our longstanding partner. We believe this collaboration will significantly advance AI technology and its applications and contribute to the global AI ecosystem.”
Mr Jermaine Loy, Managing Director, EDB said, "Talent development is central to Singapore’s vision to become a globally leading AI innovation hub. This collaboration between NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will offer our local students the opportunity to advance the development of frontier AI technology in Singapore under the mentorship of world-class researchers. At the same time, by fostering interdisciplinary expertise and industry-academia collaboration, this initiative will further strengthen Singapore’s AI talent pipeline and enhance the competitiveness of our companies and industries here."
Mortality rates between Black, white Americans narrow — except in case of infants
70-year study finds widening gap despite longer life expectancy for both racial groups
Anna Gibbs
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Americans are living longer than ever. And the disparity in overall mortality rates between Black and white Americans has narrowed since the 1950s. Among infants, however, the gap has widened, with Black infants dying at twice the rate of white infants, a new study reports.
A team of researchers, including Associate Professor Soroush Saghafian, founder and director of the Public Impact Analytics Science Lab at Harvard, collected and analyzed data across the U.S. from 1950 to 2019 to determine how mortality rates and disparities have changed over time.
In general, life expectancy has improved for both Black Americans (from 60.5 years in the 1950s to 76 years in the 2010s, a 20.4 percent increase) and white Americans (from 69 years in the 1950s to 79.3 years in the 2010s, a 13 percent rise), according to the new research. The racial gap has also improved, though Black adults still have an 18 percent higher mortality rate.
The picture for Black infants is far bleaker. While mortality rates for both Black and white infants have improved, the disparity between races has worsened. The mortality rate for Black infants was 92 percent higher than for white infants in the 1950s. Today the difference is 115 percent. Medical conditions during pregnancy were the leading cause of excess death in the 2010s.
In this edited conversation, Saghafian explains where these disparities have persisted and what needs to happen to address them.
Soroush Saghafian.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Life expectancy has been improving for 70 years, and yet the difference between mortality in Black and white infants has actually gotten worse. What’s happened since the 1950s?
There is a public understanding that healthcare has improved over time in the U.S., and that life expectancy and other healthcare metrics are improving. This study is showing that, while all that is true, there have been gaps between different races, specifically between Black and white Americans.
When focusing on adults, we see that, fortunately, things have improved. But in the case of Black infants, they are now dying twice as often as white infants. That’s just a huge number. And the fact that it has worsened since the 1950s is of great concern. Public policy and public health authorities should have put their utmost priority on at least improving such gaps. I mean, the ideal is to make measures like this equal between different races. But at least you can improve things.
What accounts for the disparity in infant rates?
We did look at the causes of death, and it turns out that, for infants, the main reasons for excess mortalities are medical. There is, unfortunately, a large amount of healthcare inequality, and it’s multidimensional. There’s access to care, but also quality of care. There’s a large set of factors that cause these disparities.
However, the goal of this particular study was not to study the reasons, but to point out the important differences. The hope is that it can inform other studies to get to the reasons, and to inform policymakers about what they should do. Our work raises the critical question of why, over seven decades post-World War II, we still haven’t figured out a solution for this enormous problem.
“This is like a red alarm. Our findings are saying: Look, we could have saved 5 million Black Americans if they had the same things as white Americans have.”
Several shorter-span studies have also found mortality rate disparities between races. What does this study tell us that the others didn’t?
This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the whole data over seven decades — the entire postwar era — has been collected and analyzed. When you look at shorter periods, you might not get the full picture.
Looking at a more extended period, we can think more carefully about all the claims that say, “Look, healthcare is improving” — which, to be clear, is mostly true. We are still seeing that, by and large, healthcare is improving for both Black and white Americans in most dimensions.
The problem is the comparisons. For instance, are things getting better for Black people compared to white people? When we look at measures like excess infant and childhood mortality among Black Americans during this whole seven-decade period, it becomes clear that not only have things not improved, but they have gotten worse. However, if you looked at, say, only three decades, instead of seven, you might not be able to see this full picture.
Your results showed that 5 million excess deaths of Black Americans could’ve been avoided over the past 70 years.Now that the disparities have been laid out, what needs to happen next?
As I mentioned, we didn’t go into the details of the causes, and I think that needs a lot more attention from both researchers and public policy and public health authorities. At the same time, our findings raise important questions for both researchers and authorities.
This is like a red alarm. Our findings are saying: Look, we could have saved 5 million Black Americans if they had the same things as white Americans have. This, in turn, raises an important question: What should the priorities for public policy and public health officials be now and in the next few decades?
Healthy Minds Survey asks students about mental health
University will use results to tailor resources and support to students’ needs
Nicole Rura
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
On Wednesday the University will launch the Healthy Minds Survey, which asks all degree-seeking undergraduate and graduate students about their current mental health, as well as their awareness and utilization of Harvard’s mental health resources and support. Sponsored by the Provost Office of Student Affairs and University Health Services, the confidential survey will be open until April 23.
The survey, developed at the University of Michigan and administered at hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, will provide Harvard with national benchmarking data to gauge progress and evaluate challenges related to student mental health. It is one of a series of steps Harvard has taken in response to the University’s Report of the Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health released in 2020.
To learn more about the survey and how the University will use its results, the Gazette sat down with Robin Glover, associate provost for student affairs, and Giang Nguyen, associate provost for campus health and well-being and executive director of Harvard University Health Services.
What is the Healthy Minds Survey?
Glover: The Healthy Minds Survey is a national survey based at the University of Michigan that has provided data for more than 15 years on the mental health of students in colleges and universities across the U.S. It includes a lot of the questions that we wanted to ask our students about their mental health and whether the resources and support we’re currently offering meet students’ needs. Without asking, we don’t really know how we’re doing. All of this information will inform decisions about any changes to the services and support we provide to our students.
Nguyen: The Healthy Minds Survey will also help us evaluate where we stand within the context of the broader mental health needs of college and university students all over the country. While the University has recently administered other surveys, such as the HESMA and Pulse surveys, Healthy Minds is the only University-wide survey specifically focused on student mental health and benchmarked against other universities.
How will the survey’s results be used?
Nguyen: In response to previous assessments of the student mental health experience, we improved student access to mental health support by implementing the 24/7 CAMHS Cares phone support line, providing access to TimelyCare for virtual mental health visits, and implementing a new clinical access coordinator team staffed by CAMHS licensed clinicians. We’ve also implemented campus-wide educational programs for members of our community to address mental health needs. Through the Healthy Minds Survey, we want to know whether our students know that these resources exist, what their experience has been with them, and which resources should be added or strengthened.
Periodically surveying students about their experiences and needs regarding health, and specifically mental health, is good public health practice. So, we will likely be conducting additional surveys every three years in the future.
Why is this survey important, and why should students take it?
Glover: We are really encouraging every student who is invited — every undergraduate and graduate student — to complete the survey. We want to hear as many different voices from as many different perspectives as possible. This will give us a complete picture of the mental health status of our students, as well as feedback about the programs that we offer here. A broad response across the University is important because an undergraduate student is different from a graduate student, and a professional student at the Medical School is different from one at the Business School.
What type of questions will be included and how long will it take?
Nguyen: In addition to asking about awareness and utilization of mental health services on campus, we do ask students to anonymously share with us their own experiences with mental health, which may include questions about depression, anxiety, body image issues, or other mental health diagnoses. We also ask questions about how connected they are with the community around them, as well as any exposures to trauma or substance abuse in the past. All of this feedback helps us to understand, in a more direct way, the experience of our students.
Glover: In total, the survey will take about 25 minutes, and we recognize that’s a significant commitment. As a thank-you for their time, students will receive a $15 gift card after completing the survey. Students may also exit the survey at any time, or they can pause taking it and pick it up again later using their personal survey link.
Mental health can be a difficult topic. How will the responses be kept confidential?
Nguyen: The folks at the national Healthy Minds Study have been doing this since 2007. Because they know how sensitive this subject matter is for participants, they have worked out very thoughtful and careful approaches to protecting students’ privacy.
Glover: That’s correct. They are contractually committed to anonymizing all responses and will not generate or maintain any internal connection logs with IP addresses. No information linking a student’s identity to their survey response, including an incomplete survey response, will be available to Harvard, any of the other participating universities, or any other party that may have access to the anonymized data.
Why is it important for Harvard to continue to invest in student mental health awareness services and resources?
Nguyen: We know that throughout academic life, our students face challenges. These are sometimes related to campus life and sometimes related to things going on in the broader world. We want to support our students throughout their academic journey at Harvard by helping them address their well-being and developing the capacity to strengthen their well-being in all its facets. And we recognize that one of the most critical facets of well-being is emotional well-being.
Glover: Our undergraduate and graduate students are here one year, two years, five years, seven years. Harvard is their home, their community during that time. It’s up to us to make sure that we’re offering them all the services and support that ensures their well-being, and that they feel comfortable about getting those services, support, and resources, where they need it, in a timely manner, and without judgment.
It’s very important for all of us to know that mental health is just as important as physical health. If someone says they’re getting a physical examination, people don’t think twice. And we want taking care of mental health to be the same way.
In ‘Make Your Own Job,’ Erik Baker explores how entrepreneurialism has altered Americans’ relationship with work
There are lots of entrepreneurs these days. Founders of businesses, of course, are entrepreneurs, and so are the managers below them. Ride-share drivers, influencers, life coaches: entrepreneurs. There are self-styled intrapreneurs, solopreneurs, and sidepreneurs, all of whom embody the ideals of entrepreneurialism in their own unique ways.
In “Make Your Own Job,” history of science lecturer Erik Baker explores the American embrace of entrepreneurialism and why, for all the popularity of the approach, it can feel so exhausting.
Baker got interested in the topic as his friends graduated from college, landed well-paying corporate jobs, and quickly became miserable. One told him that she felt like Natalie Portman’s character in the sci-fi movie “Annihilation,” who descends into a black pit and discovers a sinister doppelganger. There was something interesting, Baker thought, about how work changes our relationships with ourselves.
In “Make Your Own Job,” Baker traces America’s enthusiasm for entrepreneurialism to the end of the 19th century. It was the conclusion of the first era of American industrialization, and the rapid electrification of manufacturing plants, among other developments, depressed demand for factory labor. After high levels of job growth throughout the 1800s, Baker writes, “The rate of employment growth in manufacturing began to taper off in 1890 and became negative around 1920.”
Social scientists called this job loss “structural” or “technological” unemployment: “Unemployment that was not the product of transient, cyclical crises,” Baker writes, “but was rather a side effect of irreversible changes to the technical structure of American industry.”
In response, Americans shifted from an industrious work ethic to an entrepreneurial one infused with ideas of personal transcendence in New Thought. Instead of focusing on the inherent value of hard work, the new ethic emphasized that hard work wasn’t enough; one should apply one’s own unique skills to the task at hand with ceaseless ambition. A cohort of success writers, across racial and gender demographics, began preaching a similar ideology: “Make your own job.”
Baker chronicles how entrepreneurialism, and its very definition, expanded over time. In the early 1900s, orthodox management styles that focused primarily on production processes gave way to “entrepreneurial management,” which focused not on merely managing employees, but inspiring them. At Harvard Business School, among other institutions, management intellectuals preached the importance of leaders who made workers “not truly feel like subordinates,” in Baker’s words, “but like members of a team or a family, or even a revolutionary cadre.”
The new ethic emphasized that hard work wasn’t enough; one should apply one’s own unique skills to the task at hand with ceaseless ambition.
In Baker’s narrative, entrepreneurial fervor tends to increase during times of economic stress. During the Great Depression, “odd jobs” became something more. Doing freelance work was not just a way to make a few dollars, but, as the authors of the 1933 book “Make Your Own Job: Opportunities in Unusual Vocations” put it, a way for someone to build “a small one-man business of his own.” Women over 40, who often faced hiring discrimination, could embrace this individualistic ethic. “We Are Forty and We Did Get Jobs,” boasted the title of one self-help book aimed at women.
Baker uses these references to self-help literature to illustrate shifts in national sentiment. Authors such as Napoleon Hill, whose 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich” remains popular to this day, encouraged readers to turn work into a calling that relied on specialized knowledge, creativity, and self-promotion. “With the changed conditions ushered in by the world economic collapse,” Hill wrote, “came also the need for newer and better ways of marketing personal services.”
By the mid-20th century, Baker writes, interest in entrepreneurialism had surged into non-economic fields, with Abraham Maslow and other psychologists becoming cheerleaders. “The most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society,” Maslow wrote, “would be not 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs.”
It also became a catch-all explanation for a lack of economic development. As the fate of American cities sharply diverged with the relocation and shuttering of factories during the 1960s, certain experts blamed increasing unemployment in places like Detroit on a lack of entrepreneurial spirit.
With these mid-century changes, Baker argues, almost everyone could think of themselves as entrepreneurs: leaders of companies, managers who could inspire their co-workers, employees who could take more initiative, and even unemployed people looking for work. “It was far from obvious that high-tech corporate executives … were doing exactly the same sort of thing as a laid-off Black worker taking adult education classes, or a shopkeeper in India contemplating a change in management methods,” Baker writes. “But midcentury thinking about entrepreneurship and development depended upon precisely this equivalence.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn’t so much a scarcity of work that drew people toward entrepreneurialism, Baker argues, but a scarcity of jobs people found meaningful. This yearning was filled in part by leaders who encouraged employees to see their work as a source of enlightenment. Apple’s Steve Jobs would state that competing with IBM was not an economic imperative but a moral one — lest IBM win and stifle innovation. Ralph Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law was supported by young, ambitious employees. When asked how many hours he expected them to work, Nader deadpanned: “The ideal is 100.”
The popularity of entrepreneurialism continues to this day, Baker says, in part because it glorifies a perpetual state of risk. With fears of technological job displacement rising along with the number of people in freelance or temporary roles, more people can consider themselves the center of an entrepreneurial operation — even if the operation is just themselves.
Reading “Make Your Own Job,” one can see why Baker’s friend found herself experiencing science-fiction levels of misery. When failure always feels tangible, it’s hard to relax. For Baker, entrepreneurialism requires that everyone keep a solitary eye on the future — and remain anxious in the present.
Aramont Fellowships champion research at forefront of innovation
6 min read
Winning projects selected for potential to fuel scientific progress
Offering a better understanding of the universe. Revealing a possible layer of gene regulation in human cells. Treating muscular diseases with implantable neurotechnologies. These are examples of the research supported by the Aramont Fellowship Fund for Emerging Science Research, which acknowledges the visionary work of exceptional early career scientists.
Established in 2017 through a gift from the Aramont Charitable Foundation, the award recognizes groundbreaking scientific innovation and exploration by providing crucial funding for high-risk, high-reward research that otherwise might not be conducted. This year’s cohort includes five scholars spearheading projects with the potential to significantly impact their respective fields and advance novel discoveries with wide-ranging implications.
“The Aramont Fund’s transformative impact on the awardees’ work and careers is inspiring,” said Vice Provost for Research John Shaw. “Investing in our early career scholars is vital to driving scientific innovation and nurturing the next generation of researchers. We all look forward to following the newest cohort’s achievements.”
Guanhao Huang
“Exploring Gravitational Physics Using Nano-mechanics on a Chip”
Postdoctoral fellow in applied physics, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The nature of gravity at the quantum level and the mysterious properties of dark matter are two of the biggest open questions in modern physics. While past breakthroughs have come from large-scale international collaborations using massive scientific instruments, an exciting new approach is emerging: using nanomechanical devices in university labs to probe these mysteries. Unlike traditional methods that rely on laser-controlled individual atoms, these tiny but relatively heavy devices — often made of materials like diamonds — act as ultra-sensitive quantum force sensors and sources of gravity. This makes them uniquely suited to explore new gravitational effects at microscopic scales. Most current research focuses on only a few vibrational states and leaves many unexplored, which limits the potential for studying gravity. To overcome this challenge, Huang aims to develop ultra-precise sensors by engineering and controlling these devices at the quantum level across a broad range of vibrational states. This could open new doors for detecting dark matter and gravitational phenomena, offering fresh insights into both the microscopic and cosmic scales — all using compact, tabletop experiments within a university setting. His work has the potential to reshape the understanding of the universe in ways previously thought possible only with massive, billion-dollar facilities.
Giacomo Maddaloni
“Discovering Brain Circuits That Change Seasonally and Offer Clues to the Seasonal Exacerbation of Diseases from Neuropsychiatric to Cardiovascular”
Postdoctoral fellow in genetics, Harvard Medical School.
Credit: Ajja Photography
The ability to anticipate the light-dark cycle of the days and seasons — and to organize appropriate responses — are vital adaptive strategies that have been observed across the animal kingdom and in humans. When thrown off, the sleep-wake cycle and other biological rhythms can cause or exacerbate disease. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying such adaptations. Giacomo Maddaloni has undertaken studies that led to the discovery of a previously unappreciated mouse brain circuit and form of plasticity that proves critical for synchronizing activity and sleep-wake rhythms. As part of that work, he discovered that specialized neurons function as initial broadcasters of day length information in a region of the brain that controls many behaviors and physiological processes. Now Maddaloni is expanding on this work by characterizing the neurons’ molecular identity and deciphering how they decode and relay information to orchestrate whole-organism responses. He aims to identify a master brain hub vital for accurate circadian and seasonal adaptations, and molecular and circuit pathways, with far-reaching translational therapeutic potential.
Silvi Rouskin
“Unveiling Human Riboswitches Through High Throughput Detection and Analysis”
Assistant professor of microbiology, HMS.
Credit: Gretchen Ertl
Riboswitches are dynamic RNA structures that control various metabolic pathways in simple organisms. They have not been detected in humans, which is likely due to the technical limitations of research. The discovery of human riboswitches could enable new therapeutic targets for metabolic diseases and change our understanding of how gene expression is regulated. Silvi Rouskin has already identified promising riboswitch candidates, and her unique integration of experimental and computational approaches puts her team in a strong position to make this pivotal discovery — potentially revealing a previously unrecognized layer of gene regulation in human cells. This finding would fill a critical gap in the knowledge of cellular biology and open new avenues for medical research and drug development.
Shriya Srinivasan
“Accessible Neurotechnology and Human-Machine Interfacing”
Assistant professor of bioengineering, SEAS.
Eliza Grinnell/SEAS
Implantable neurotechnologies hold promise for treating muscular diseases and are expected to be available as a consumer technology within the next 10 to 15 years, but the significant invasiveness required to implant the devices will limit accessibility and exacerbate gaps in care and capabilities. Shriya Srinivasan aims to make neurotechnology scalable and accessible by developing neurostimulation devices that can be precisely implanted through a single skin injection. Preliminary prototypes in rats have demonstrated that Srinivasan’s lab can read high-resolution neural signals and stimulate discrete muscles for fine motor control. The system can stimulate the muscles to provide sensory feedback about the movement of a prosthesis or robotic, augment forces in weak muscles, and potentially relay complex physical data through the body’s neural processing centers. The implications of Srinivasan’s project are significant for treating neuromuscular diseases, studying human sensorimotor performance, and advancing consumer technology.
Melanie Weber
“Geometry-informed Foundation Models for Scientific Machine Learning”
Assistant professor of applied mathematics and of computer science, SEAS.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing scientific research, with foundation models driving breakthroughs that may hold the key to challenges such as climate change or currently incurable diseases. But there are limitations: Foundation models require extensive training data and substantial amounts of computing resources, posing challenges when the data is expensive or limited. For example, a foundation model for weather prediction may need training on millions of data points to provide accurate results. Encoding data geometry, such as symmetries arising from fundamental laws of physics, could significantly reduce the data and resources needed by providing the model with information it can use to avoid wasting resources on pursuing scenarios that we know cannot exist. Melanie Weber seeks to develop geometry-informed models that balance the strengths of current geometric models and general-purpose foundation models to produce models that are both resource-efficient and applicable to a wide range of scientific problems.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine developed a more effective model for predicting how patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer will respond to chemotherapy.
Set up in 2014 on a generous endowment by an anonymous donor, the NUS Singapore History Prize has been awarded to fiction and non-fiction books in 2018, 2021 and 2024 with the aim to spur interest in the understanding of Singapore’s history.
The 2027 NUS Singapore History Prize will, for the first time, recognise a non-print media work that engages deeply with Singapore’s history under the new ‘Arts and Multimedia’ category. Moving forward, the Prize will alternate between the ‘Books’ and ‘Arts and Multimedia’ categories every three years.
Thanks to a doubling of the endowment by the donor, prize money for the 2027 NUS Singapore History Prize winner will also increase twofold, from S$50,000 to S$100,000, to inspire more impactful works and submissions in the coming years.
These new developments broaden the Prize’s reach and seeks to further the objective of the Prize – that is, to make Singapore’s unique and complex history more accessible to non-academic audiences and to encourage greater discussion among Singaporeans and the world of Singapore’s rich and vibrant history, and its place in the world.
Head of the FASS Department of History, Associate Professor Joey Long said, “We firmly support our donor’s belief that Singaporeans can learn a lot more about Singapore’s rich history from different mediums. These include documentaries, films, visual arts, performing arts, installation art, podcasts, and videos (excluding audiobooks, books in printed form, and e-books). As such, we are glad that the Prize has now been expanded to recognise works beyond books, which also reflects NUS’ commitment to foster a comprehensive appreciation of Singapore’s past through accessible and modern platforms.”
A distinguished Jury Panel chaired by Mr Kishore Mahbubani will judge the Prize and announce a winner in 2027. Mr Mahbubani is a Distinguished Fellow at the NUS Asia Research Institute.
Mr Mahbubani said, “Thanks to our donor who has doubled the prize money and encouraged the creation of a new category, Singaporeans will be able to engage more deeply with their rich history. There is no doubt that for the next phase of Singapore’s national development, the Singaporean sense of national identity must be deepened and strengthened. The best way to do this is to develop a deep and common understanding of Singapore’s history. Hence, in addition to its academic and scholarly contributions, the NUS Singapore History Prize is also supporting a strong national imperative.”
Details of the 2027 NUS Singapore History Prize
The new Arts and Multimedia category will mirror the Book category in its selection process, with the winner determined through an open, public and global competition. For the 2025-2027 competition, the organisers will accept nominations from any artist, author, playwright, performer, producer, or publisher of a multimedia and artistic historical work delivered in the English language (works translated into the English language are also acceptable). There will be no limitations on the date of production as the goal is to open the admission window as wide as possible. The work should address any field, theme, or period of Singaporean history, with the goal of providing either new insights or new ways of exciting the imagination of Singaporeans about Singapore’s history. Nominations will be restricted to a maximum of three works per applicant and will have to be submitted by 31 May 2027.
For more information about the NUS Singapore History Prize, please email: hisbox11@nus.edu.sg.
How far would you go for a good meal? For some of the ocean’s top predators, maintaining a decent diet requires some surprisingly long-distance dives.
MIT oceanographers have found that big fish like tuna and swordfish get a large fraction of their food from the ocean’s twilight zone — a cold and dark layer of the ocean about half a mile below the surface, where sunlight rarely penetrates. Tuna and swordfish have been known to take extreme plunges, but it was unclear whether these deep dives were for food, and to what extent the fishes’ diet depends on prey in the twilight zone.
In a study published recently in the ICESJournal of Marine Science, the MIT student-led team reports that the twilight zone is a major food destination for three predatory fish — bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish. While the three species swim primarily in the shallow open ocean, the scientists found these fish are sourcing between 50 and 60 percent of their diet from the twilight zone.
The findings suggest that tuna and swordfish rely more heavily on the twilight zone than scientists had assumed. This implies that any change to the twilight zone’s food web, such as through increased fishing, could negatively impact fisheries of more shallow tuna and swordfish.
“There is increasing interest in commercial fishing in the ocean’s twilight zone,” says Ciara Willis, the study’s lead author, who was a PhD student in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program when conducting the research and is now a postdoc at WHOI. “If we start heavily fishing that layer of the ocean, our study suggests that could have profound implications for tuna and swordfish, which are very reliant on the twilight zone and are highly valuable existing fisheries.”
The study’s co-authors include Kayla Gardener of MIT-WHOI, and WHOI researchers Martin Arostegui, Camrin Braun, Leah Hougton, Joel Llopiz, Annette Govindarajan, and Simon Thorrold, along with Walt Golet at the University of Maine.
Deep-ocean buffet
The ocean’s twilight zone is a vast and dim layer that lies between the sunlit surface waters and the ocean’s permanently dark, midnight zone. Also known as the midwater, or mesopelagic layer, the twilight zone stretches between 200 and 1,000 meters below the ocean’s surface and is home to a huge variety of organisms that have adapted to live in the darkness.
“This is a really understudied region of the ocean, and it’s filled with all these fantastic, weird animals,” Willis says.
In fact, it’s estimated that the biomass of fish in the twilight zone is somewhere close to 10 billion tons, much of which is concentrated in layers at certain depths. By comparison, the marine life that lives closer to the surface, Willis says, is “a thin soup,” which is slim pickings for large predators.
“It’s important for predators in the open ocean to find concentrated layers of food. And I think that’s what drives them to be interested in the ocean’s twilight zone,” Willis says. “We call it the ‘deep ocean buffet.’”
And much of this buffet is on the move. Many kinds of fish, squid, and other deep-sea organisms in the twilight zone will swim up to the surface each night to find food. This twilight community will descend back into darkness at dawn to avoid detection.
Scientists have observed that many large predatory fish will make regular dives into the twilight zone, presumably to feast on the deep-sea bounty. For instance, bigeye tuna spend much of their day making multiple short, quick plunges into the twilight zone, while yellowfin tuna dive down every few days to weeks. Swordfish, in contrast, appear to follow the daily twilight migration, feeding on the community as it rises and falls each day.
“We’ve known for a long time that these fish and many other predators feed on twilight zone prey,” Willis says. “But the extent to which they rely on this deep-sea food web for their forage has been unclear.”
Twilight signal
For years, scientists and fishers have found remnants of fish from the twilight zone in the stomach contents of larger, surface-based predators. This suggests that predator fish do indeed feed on twilight food, such as lanternfish, certain types of squid, and long, snake-like fish called barracudina. But, as Willis notes, stomach contents give just a “snapshot” of what a fish ate that day.
She and her colleagues wanted to know how big a role twilight food plays in the general diet of predator fish. For their new study, the team collaborated with fishermen in New Jersey and Florida, who fish for a living in the open ocean. They supplied the team with small tissue samples of their commercial catch, including samples of bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish.
Willis and her advisor, Senior Scientist Simon Thorrold, brought the samples back to Thorrold’s lab at WHOI and analyzed the fish bits for essential amino acids — the key building blocks of proteins. Essential amino acids are only made by primary producers, or members of the base of the food web, such as phytoplankton, microbes, and fungi. Each of these producers makes essential amino acids with a slightly different carbon isotope configuration that then is conserved as the producers are consumed on up their respective food chains.
“One of the hypotheses we had was that we’d be able to distinguish the carbon isotopic signature of the shallow ocean, which would logically be more phytoplankton-based, versus the deep ocean, which is more microbially based,” Willis says.
The researchers figured that if a fish sample had one carbon isotopic make-up over another, it would be a sign that that fish feeds more on food from the deep, rather than shallow waters.
“We can use this [carbon isotope signature] to infer a lot about what food webs they’ve been feeding in, over the last five to eight months,” Willis says.
The team looked at carbon isotopes in tissue samples from over 120 samples including bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish. They found that individuals from all three species contained a substantial amount of carbon derived from sources in the twilight zone. The researchers estimate that, on average, food from the twilight zone makes up 50 to 60 percent of the diet of the three predator species, with some slight variations among species.
“We saw the bigeye tuna were far and away the most consistent in where they got their food from. They didn’t vary much from individual to individual,” Willis says. “Whereas the swordfish and yellowfin tuna were more variable. That means if you start having big-scale fishing in the twilight zone, the bigeye tuna might be the ones who are most at risk from food web effects.”
The researchers note there has been increased interest in commercially fishing the twilight zone. While many fish in that region are not edible for humans, they are starting to be harvested as fishmeal and fish oil products. In ongoing work, Willis and her colleagues are evaluating the potential impacts to tuna fisheries if the twilight zone becomes a target for large-scale fishing.
“If predatory fish like tunas have 50 percent reliance on twilight zone food webs, and we start heavily fishing that region, that could lead to uncertainty around the profitability of tuna fisheries,” Willis says. “So we need to be very cautious about impacts on the twilight zone and the larger ocean ecosystem.”
This work was part of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Ocean Twilight Zone Project, funded as part of the Audacious Project housed at TED. Willis was additionally supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the MIT Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability.
Frederick “Fred” Davis Greene II, professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Chemistry who was accomplished in the field of physical organic chemistry and free radicals, passed away peacefully after a brief illness, surrounded by his family, on Saturday, March 22. He had been a member of the MIT community for over 70 years.
“Greene’s dedication to teaching, mentorship, and the field of physical organic chemistry is notable,” said Professor Troy Van Voorhis, head of the Department of Chemistry, upon learning of Greene’s passing. “He was also a constant source of joy to those who interacted with him, and his commitment to students and education was legendary. He will be sorely missed.”
Greene, a native of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, was born on July 7, 1927 to parents Phillips Foster Greene and Ruth Altman Greene. He spent his early years in China, where his father was a medical missionary with Yale-In-China. Greene and his family moved to the Philippines just ahead of the Japanese invasion prior to World War Il, and then back to the French Concession of Shanghai, and to the United States in 1940. He joined the U.S. Navy in December 1944, and afterwards earned his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1949 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1952. Following a year at the University of California at Los Angeles as a research associate, he was appointed a professor of chemistry at MIT by then-Department Head Arthur C. Cope in 1953. Greene retired in 1995.
Greene’s research focused on peroxide decompositions and free radical chemistry, and he reported the remarkable bimolecular reaction between certain diacyl peroxides and electron-rich olefins and aromatics. He was also interested in small-ring heterocycles, e.g., the three-membered ring 2,3-diaziridinones. His research also covered strained olefins, the Greene-Viavattene diene, and 9, 9', 10, 10'-tetradehydrodianthracene.
Greene was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College for his research in free radicals. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society from 1962 to 1988. He was awarded a special fellowship form the National Science Foundation and spent a year at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, and was a member of the Chemical Society of London.
Greene and Professor James Moore of the University of Philadelphia worked closely with Greene’s wife, Theodora “Theo” W. Greene, in the conversion of her PhD thesis, which was overseen by Professor Elias J. Corey of Harvard University, into her book “Greene’s Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis.” The book became an indispensable reference for any practicing synthetic organic or medicinal chemist and is now in its fifth edition. Theo, who predeceased Fred in July 2005, was a tremendous partner to Greene, both personally and professionally. A careful researcher in her own right, she served as associate editor of the Journal of Organic Chemistry for many years.
Fred Greene was recently featured in a series of videos featuring Professor EmeritusDietmar Seyferth (who passed away in 2020) that was spearheaded by Professor Rick Danheiser. The videos cover a range of topics, including Seyferth and Greene’s memories during the 1950s to mid-1970s of their fellow faculty members, how they came to be hired, the construction of various lab spaces, developments in teaching and research, the evolution of the department’s graduate program, and much more.
Danheiser notes that it was a privilege to share responsibility for the undergraduate class 5.43 (Advanced Organic Chemistry) with Greene. “Fred Greene was a fantastic teacher and inspired several generations of MIT undergraduate and graduate students with his superb lectures,” Danheiser recalls. The course they shared was Danheiser’s first teaching assignment at MIT, and he states that Greene’s “counsel and mentoring was invaluable to me.”
The Department of Chemistry recognized Greene’s contributions to its academic program by naming the annual student teaching award the “Frederick D. Greene Teaching Award.” This award recognizes outstanding contributions in teaching in chemistry by undergraduates. Since 1993 the award has been given to 46 students.
Dabney White Dixon PhD ’76 was one of many students with whom Greene formed a lifelong friendship and mentorship. Dixon shares, “Fred Greene was an outstanding scientist — intelligent, ethical, and compassionate in every aspect of his life. He possessed an exceptional breadth of knowledge in organic chemistry, particularly in mechanistic organic chemistry, as evidenced by his long tenure as editor of the Journal of Organic Chemistry (1962 to 1988). Weekly, large numbers of manuscripts flowed through his office. He had an acute sense of fairness in evaluating submissions and was helpful to those submitting manuscripts. His ability to navigate conflicting scientific viewpoints was especially evident during the heated debates over non-classical carbonium ions in the 1970s.
“Perhaps Fred’s greatest contribution to science was his mentorship. At a time when women were rare in chemistry PhD programs, Fred’s mentorship was particularly meaningful. I was the first woman in my scientific genealogical lineage to study chemistry, and his guidance gave me the confidence to overcome challenges. He and Theo provided a supportive and joyful environment, helping me forge a career in academia where I have since mentored 13 PhD students — an even mix of men and women — a testament to the social progress in science that Fred helped foster.
“Fred’s meticulous attention to detail was legendary. He insisted that every new molecule be fully characterized spectroscopically before he would examine the data. Through this, his students learned the importance of thoroughness, accuracy, and organization. He was also an exceptional judge of character, entrusting students with as much responsibility as they could handle. His honesty was unwavering — he openly acknowledged mistakes, setting a powerful example for his students.
“Shortly before the pandemic, I had the privilege of meeting Fred with two of his scientific ‘granddaughters’ — Elizabeth Draganova, then a postdoc at Tufts (now an assistant professor at Emory), and Cyrianne Keutcha, then a graduate student at Harvard (now a postdoc at Yale). As we discussed our work, it was striking how much science had evolved — from IR and NMR of small-ring heterocycles to surface plasmon resonance and cryo-electron microscopy of large biochemical systems. Yet, Fred’s intellectual curiosity remained as sharp as ever. His commitment to excellence, attention to detail, and passion for uncovering chemical mechanisms lived on in his scientific descendants.
“He leaves a scientific legacy of chemists who internalized his lessons on integrity, kindness, and rigorous analysis, carrying them forward to their own students and research. His impact on the field of chemistry — and on the lives of those fortunate enough to have known him — will endure.”
Carl Renner PhD ’74 felt fortunate and privileged to be a doctoral student in the Greene group from 1969 to 1973, and also his teaching assistant for his 5.43 course. Renner recalls, “He possessed a curious mind of remarkable clarity and discipline. He prepared his lectures meticulously and loved his students. He was extremely generous with his time and knowledge. I never heard him complain or say anything unkind. Everyone he encountered came away better for it.”
Gary Breton PhD ’91 credits the development of his interest in physical organic chemistry to his time spent in Greene’s class. Breton says, “During my time in the graduate chemistry program at MIT (1987-91) I had the privilege of learning from some of the world’s greatest minds in chemistry, including Dr. Fred Greene. At that time, all incoming graduate students in organic chemistry were assigned in small groups to a seminar-type course that met each week to work on the elucidation of reaction mechanisms, and I was assigned to Dr. Greene’s class. It was here that not only did Dr. Greene afford me a confidence in how to approach reaction mechanisms, but he also ignited my fascination with physical organic chemistry. I was only too happy to join his research group, and begin a love/hate relationship with reactive nitrogen-containing heterocycles that continues to this day in my own research lab as a chemistry professor.
“Anyone that knew Dr. Greene quickly recognized that he was highly intelligent and exceptionally knowledgeable about all things organic, but under his mentorship I also saw his creativity and cleverness. Beyond that, and even more importantly, I witnessed his kindness and generosity, and his subtle sense of humor. Dr. Greene’s enduring legacy is the large number of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs whose lives he touched over his many years. He will be greatly missed.”
John Dolhun PhD ’73 recalls Greene’s love for learning, and that he “was one of the kindest persons that I have known.” Dolhun shares, “I met Fred Greene when I was a graduate student. His organic chemistry course was one of the most popular, and he was a top choice for many students’ thesis committees. When I returned to MIT in 2008 and reconnected with him, he was still endlessly curious — always learning, asking questions. A few years ago, he visited me and we had lunch. Back at the chemistry building, I reached for the elevator button and he said, ‘I always walk up the five flights of stairs.’ So, I walked up with him. Fred knew how to keep both mind and body in shape. He was truly a beacon of light in the department.”
Liz McGrath, retired chemistry staff member, warmly recalls the regular coffees and conversations she shared with Fred over two decades at the Institute. She shares, “Fred, who was already emeritus by the time of my arrival, imparted to me a deep interest in the history of MIT Chemistry’s events and colorful faculty. He had a phenomenal memory, which made his telling of the history so rich in its content. He was a true gentleman and sweet and kind to boot. ... I will remember him with much fondness.”
Greene is survived by his children, Alan, Carol, Elizabeth, and Phillips; nine grandchildren; and six great grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on April 5 at 11 a.m. at the First Congregational Church in Winchester, Massachusetts.
Harvard Business School’s Nien-hê Hsieh (standing) posed a hypothetical to the panel.
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
New Ethics Center events mull real-life conflicts, with first focusing on improving campus discourse on hard topics in social media age
Social media exerts a powerful influence on college campuses. Has the technology helped broker new connections across ideological difference? Or has it simply siphoned students into conversations with those who share their views?
This was the topic of last Thursday’s inaugural Ethics IRL (or, in real life,) a new series organized by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Its format, inspired by the 1980s PBS show “Ethics in America,” uses the Socratic method to engage Harvard community members on pressing issues.
Things got underway with moderator Nien-hê Hsieh, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, posing a hypothetical: Assigned reading for a general-education course covers immigration, with students required to post their responses to a class discussion board.
One student writes: “I don’t understand why people who want to defend their country are being called racist, are being called xenophobic nationalists. Since when did it become a crime to defend the borders of your country?”
“I don’t see how you can live in a country where federal agents are ripping children from the arms of their parents and families,” responds another. “This is basically state-sanctioned trauma.”
On the panel were a dean, an activist, a journalist, an influencer, and a current undergraduate who largely avoids the technology. Hsieh instructed the group to put themselves in the place of students.
“I think this prompt is missing a very important piece of context, and that is whether or not the responses posted are anonymous.”
Soleil Golden ’24
Soleil Golden.
“Would you give your honest opinion no matter what people might say in response to those posts? Would you carefully craft a neutral position and try not to attract your classmates’ attention?” he asked.
“I think this prompt is missing a very important piece of context, and that is whether or not the responses posted are anonymous,” answered Soleil Golden ’24, a premedical neuroscience student at Boston Children’s Hospital with more than 70,000 Instagram followers, who described using social media to hone her rhetorical skills. “If it’s anonymous, I think people would feel a lot freer in voicing their opinions.”
And what if the instructor pulled those comments into the lecture, pressing both students to elaborate on their positions?
“I think I’d be more inclined to speak out,” answered Brody Douglass ’27, an economics concentrator and Navy ROTC midshipman who said he limits social media in favor of in-person socializing. “I believe that, in general, better dialogue happens when it’s actually dialogue rather than just a series of discussion posts where words can be taken more easily out of context.”
Panelists offered a mix of deeply personal and evidence-based insights on the state of modern discourse. The series was introduced with support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Civil Discourse initiative.
“Can we imagine how this would have played out on social media?” Hsieh wondered.
“Perhaps there would have been some grains of interesting conversation,” replied researcher and activist Yaёl Eisenstat, a policy director at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, who noted the platforms’ influence on the very formulation of the assignment. “But chances are, in the way social media is constructed today, it would have been drowned out by the more emotional.”
And what if both students were doxed? What if the resulting fear drove one to withdraw from the university entirely?
“I think would be extremely sad if the first student left,” said Sewell Chan ’98, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Speaking directly to the charge that universities have become inhospitable to conservatives, he continued: “We live in a world in which 40 percent or more of the country not only agrees with student number one but would say things much harsher. If we’re acting like we’re so offended or bothered by student number one that we can’t handle what they said, that should say something about us.”
As the conversation progressed, panelists kept returning to the tension between the goals of higher education and the algorithmically driven platforms.
“Universities have a particular mission,” explained Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College. “Their mission is to search for Veritas, as close as they can get. They do that by bringing diverse perspectives and points of view to an environment. They create certain conditions that are different than free speech conditions, which is that you can say what you want to say but you have to defend it with reason and evidence.
“I can stand outside and say, ‘The Earth is flat;’it’s perfectly within my free speech rights,” he continued. “I can say it in the classroom, but don’t expect it to get marked correct in my Earth and Planetary Sciences class.”
But Eisenstat said that social media algorithms actively undermine the pursuit Khurana described.
“The world that social media has helped create affects how students interact with each other on campus,” she argued. “What the world of social media has done is made it easier and easier to both choose your silos but also be pushed into silos that you’re not aware you’re being pushed into. … It’s the personalization. It’s the using all your human behavioral data to then turn around and target you with the information that is going to most appeal to your lizard brain.”
The event ended with panelists sharing suggestions for community members who want to help foster a climate more conducive to open exchange.
“Push yourself to engage with people who are not like-minded,” Eisenstat said. “But do not therefore think it is too hard to create the social media environment we want and to push for the legislation that would help.”
“I’ve spent hours talking to people online,” Golden said. “While those conversations can be frustrating and you can feel like you’re losing the argument, I have not engaged in any social interaction online where I haven’t walked away with a new piece of knowledge.”
“I now try to discipline myself,” Khurana said. “When I find myself disagreeing with somebody, I assume we’re plugged into different algorithms.”
The Lifetime Research Award is given to individuals whose research in human-computer interaction (HCI) is considered both fundamental and influential to the field. Recipients are selected based on their cumulative contributions, influence on the work of others, new research developments, and being an active participant in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) community.
Her nomination recognizes her advocacy to place human agency at the center of HCI and artificial intelligence research. Rather than AI replacing human capabilities, Maes has advocated for ways in which human capabilities can be supported or enhanced by the integration of AI.
Pioneering the concept of software agents in the 1990s, Maes’ work has always been situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence and has helped lay the foundations for today’s online experience. Her article “Social information filtering: algorithms for automating 'word of mouth'” from CHI 95, co-authored with graduate student Upendra Shardanand, is the second-most-cited paper from ACM SIGCHI.
Beyond her contributions in desktop-based interaction, she has an extensive body of work in the area of novel wearable devices that enhance the human experience, for example by supporting memory, learning, decision-making, or health. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Maes has explored accessible and ethical designs while stressing the need for a human-centered approach.
“As a senior faculty member, Pattie is an integral member of the Media Lab, MIT, and larger HCI communities,” says Media Lab Director Dava Newman. “Her contributions to several different fields, alongside her unwavering commitment to enhancing the human experience in her work, is exemplary of not only the Media Lab’s interdisciplinary spirit, but also our core mission: to create transformative technologies and systems that enable people to reimagine and redesign their lives. We all celebrate this well-deserved recognition for Pattie!”
Maes is the second MIT professor to receive this honor, joining her Media Lab colleague Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Tangible Media research group.
“I am honored to be recognized by the ACM community, especially given that it can be difficult sometimes for researchers doing highly interdisciplinary research to be appreciated, even though some of the most impactful innovations often emerge from that style of research,” Maes comments.
On March 25, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT launched the global Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) with Community Jameel at an event in São Paulo, Brazil.
ADEPT is a network of universities, governments, and other members united by a shared vision: To empower the next generation of policymakers, decision-makers, and researchers with the tools to innovate, test, and scale the most effective social policies and programs. These programs have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.
Too often, policy decisions in governments and other organizations are driven by ideology or guesswork. This can result in ineffective and inefficient policies and programs that don’t always serve their intended populations. ADEPT will bring a scientific perspective to policymaking, focusing on topics like statistical analysis, data science, and rigorous impact evaluation.
Together with J-PAL, members will create innovative pathways for learners that include virtual and in-person courses, develop new academic programs on policy evaluation and data analysis, and cultivate a network of evidence-informed policy professionals to drive change globally.
At the launch event at Insper, a Brazilian higher education institution, MIT economists Esther Duflo, co-founder of J-PAL, and Sara Fisher Ellison, faculty director of ADEPT, spoke about the importance of building a community aligned in support of evidence-informed policymaking.
“Our aim is to create a vision-driven network of institutions around the world able to equip far more people in far more places with the skills and ambition for evidence-informed policymaking,” said Duflo. “We are excited to welcome Insper to the movement and create new opportunities for learners in Brazil.”
Members of the alliance will also have access to the MITxMicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), which offers online courses taught by MIT Department of Economics faculty through MIT’s Office of Open Learning. The program offers graduate-level courses that combine the tools of economics and policy design with a strong foundation in economic and mathematical principles.
Early members of the alliance include Insper, a leading research and training institution in Brazil; the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics of Abidjan in collaboration with the Cote d’Ivorian government; the Paris School of Economics; and Princeton University.
“This unprecedented initiative in Latin America reinforces Insper’s commitment to academic excellence and the internationalization of teaching, providing Brazilian students with access to a globally renowned program,” says Cristine Pinto, Insper’s director of research. “Promoting large-scale impact through research and data analysis is a core objective of Insper, and shared by J-PAL and the expansion of ADEPT.”
Learners who obtain the DEDP MicroMasters credential through ADEPT can accelerate their pursuit of a master’s degree by applying to participating universities, including Insper and MIT, opening doors for learners who may not otherwise have access to leading economics programs.
By empowering learners with the tools and ambition to create meaningful change, ADEPT seeks to accelerate data-driven decision-making at every step of the policymaking process. Ultimately, the hope is that ADEPT’s impact will be felt not only by alliance members and their individual learners, but by millions of people reached by better policies and programs worldwide.
At an event marking the launch of the Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) at Insper in São Paulo, Brazil, Sarah Kopper (right), director of ADEPT and associate director of research and education at J-PAL, speaks alongside (left to right) MIT Professor Esther Duflo, MIT Professor Sara Fisher Ellison, and Community Jameel Director George Richards.
Exercise can help colon cancer survivors live longer
Post-treatment physical activity narrows gap between patients and general population, study shows
Dana-Farber Communications
3 min read
Regular physical activity after treatment for stage 3 colon cancer reduces and may even eliminate disparities in survival between those with cancer and those in a general population of similar age and sex, according to new Dana-Farber Cancer Institute research.
Colon cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. People with the disease face higher rates of premature death than people in the general population with matched characteristics such as age and sex.
“This study suggests that exercise can have a meaningful impact on long-term survival for patients,” said senior author Jeffrey Meyerhardt, co-director of the Colon and Rectal Care Center at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
For patients whose cancer returned, those with low activity levels had overall survival rates 50.5 percent lower than a matched general population.
Previous research suggested that colon cancer patients who are more active after treatment have longer survival. This study looked at data from two National Cancer Institute–sponsored Cancer and Leukemia Group B clinical trials — now part of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology — for patients with stage 3 colon cancer. In both trials, CALGB 89803 and CALGB 80702, patients underwent surgery, were treated with chemotherapy, and were offered an option to self-report about lifestyle factors during and after treatment.
A total of 2,875 patients self-reported physical activity across the two trials. Survival rates were calculated after a median of six and 5.9 years of follow up, respectively, for CALGB 89803 and CALGB 80702. Reported activity levels were converted into metabolic-equivalent hours per week, or MET-hours. A person who walks most days of the week for about an hour will get about 18 MET-hours of activity, Meyerhardt said.
The researchers found that for patients who were alive three years after treatment, those with high activity levels (18 or more MET-hours per week) had subsequent overall survival rates that were closer to those of the matched general population than those with low activity levels (fewer than three MET-hours per week).
For instance, in the analysis of data from CALGB 89803, three-year survivors with low levels of activity had overall survival rates that were 17.1 percent lower than the matched general population, while those with high activity levels had 3.5 percent lower overall survival rates.
In both trials, more activity was associated with improved survival rates and the benefits were seen in patients regardless of their age at the time of diagnosis. “Some exercise is better than none,” says Meyerhardt. “If you can’t get out for an hour, try 10 or 20 minutes.”
In a pooled analysis of data from the two trials, the researchers focused on the 1,908 patients who were alive without a recurrence of their cancer after three years. Among those who reported low activity levels, overall survival rates were 3.1 percent lower than the matched general population. Those with high activity levels had overall survival rates that were 2.9 percent higher than the matched general population.
Exercise also reduced survival disparities in patients whose cancer came back within three years. Most tumor recurrences are seen within two or three years of diagnosis with stage 3 colon cancer. In these cases, treatment becomes very difficult. For patients whose cancer returned, those with low activity levels had overall survival rates 50.5 percent lower than a matched general population. Those with high activity levels had overall survival rates 33.2 percent lower.
“Those who were more active had improvements in survival even if their cancer recurred,” Meyerhardt said. “And for those who did not experience a recurrence, their overall survival rates looked better than the matched general population.”
The research described in this study received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Specialized teams have ensured the safe caretaking and reinstallation of numerous large, heavy and fragile works, including the sixteenth-century Mallorcan staircase, the medieval French stone window and the ancient Roman mosaics.
Historian Joyce Chaplin’s latest book on Benjamin Franklin (center) explores one of his lesser-known inventions: a stove (left). The science behind it helped further understanding of atmospheric phenomena such as the Gulf Stream (right), which Franklin helped map for the first time.
Images via Library of Congress; illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
When a stove’s virtues amount to more than just hot air
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Science historian examines how Benjamin Franklin’s invention sparked new thinking on weather, technology
Joyce Chaplin thought she was done with Benjamin Franklin.
“But then I was reading about the Little Ice Age and the particularly bad winter of 1740 to 1741,” said Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. “Major harbors were reported as freezing over — in Boston, in London, in Venice. The consequence was famine in several places including Ireland, where as much as 20 percent of the population may have died — that’s a bigger toll than the more famous Great Hunger of the 19th century.
“And all along I kept thinking, ‘I know the dates 1740 and 1741 from somewhere.’”
Chaplin, an expert on early American science, technology, and medicine, eventually put things together. These were the years when Franklin — a humble printer who went on to become a world-renowned scientist, inventor, and statesman — devised the prototype for his Pennsylvania fireplace, a flatpack of iron plates colonists could assemble and insert into their hearths to improve heating.
“It was developed during this very, very cold winter as a climate adaptation,” explained Chaplin, who has written at length on Franklin’s scientific contributions. “The design was supposed to burn less wood yet make a room even warmer than an ordinary fireplace.”
Franklin went on to develop at least five separate iterations of the influential technology over half a century, moving from wood to coal for fuel. Chaplin’s newly released “The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution” finds this seemingly modest invention catalyzing new thinking on weather, technology, and comfort.
We sat down with Chaplin, who is also affiliated faculty in the History of Science Department, to ask about the book and its many lessons for the 21st century. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Joyce Chaplin.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
You published an intellectual biography of Benjamin Franklin in 2006 and edited an edition of his autobiography for Norton a few years later. What draws you to this 18th-century figure time and again?
The popular conception is “Poor Richard,” Franklin’s alter ego from the almanacs he published. But he’s far more complicated than that. He was the youngest son of a Boston chandler, somebody who worked with his hands making soap and candles out of animal fat. It was a completely respectable but not very distinguished background.
The classic ways of getting ahead that were available to a man like Franklin included war or some kind of military career that would advance him beyond the rank he was born to. Politics, if he could get a foot in. Writing, perhaps. Science had also become a part of popular culture, with Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle becoming household names in the wake of their big discoveries.
I think Franklin looked over all these options. He eventually looked at Newton and thought: “Why not try that route?”
Is it fair to call the Franklin stove one of his lesser-known inventions?
For the moment, I think that’s fair. A lot of people know about Franklin inventing the lightning rod. Those who need progressive glasses at some point probably know he invented bifocals. Others have heard about his more charming inventions — his swimming fins, his folding chair/step stool for reaching books in the library. But given the climate framing of this particular invention, perhaps the public will start to embrace the stove as central to his life in science.
Let’s dig into the environmental issues Franklin faced during the winter of 1740 and ’41. It was more than frigid weather.
Franklin was aware that as more settlers were arriving, being born, and spreading across the landscape, they were going to deforest the territory and make firewood more expensive and possibly even inaccessible to the poor. We have his accounts of people stealing firewood or ripping off pieces of fences.
But the most ambitious part of his plan was to make people more comfortable than ever before. And the fact that it was colder than ever before makes that a really interesting manifestation of enlightenment confidence — that humans could use science and technology to make life better, whatever the circumstances.
“Atmosphere was a relatively new word in terms of describing the envelope around the Earth, and this is what Franklin thought a good heating system could create indoors.”
How did the stove help further understanding of the natural world?
Atmosphere was a relatively new word in terms of describing the envelope around the Earth, and this is what Franklin thought a good heating system could create indoors. He explained in a self-published pamphlet how his fireplace worked through the principle of convection: that air, when it’s warmed, will expand and rise. And what you want is some kind of heat source that does this layer by layer until the entire room is warmed.
But Franklin also used this concept to explain atmospheric phenomena outdoors. He used it to explain how storm systems move up the Atlantic coast. He eventually used it to explain the Gulf Stream — how heated air moves up from the Gulf of Mexico and out over the Atlantic Ocean with a relationship to the warmer current of water underneath. When making these grand statements, Franklin would often write something like: “Just like there’s a draft of air from your fireplace to the door.” It was a brilliant strategy for making science accessible to a reading public.
Franklin is known for his late-in-life abolitionism, but your book adds one more entry to the list of ways he profited from slavery before that. What new information did you uncover?
I knew from reading my colleague John Bezís-Selfa’s “Forging America” (2004) that there had been an iron industry in the colonies, including Pennsylvania. I also had a sense from reading Bezís-Selfa that enslaved Black people performed some of the labor on these estates.
I went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which holds most of the surviving records of the Pennsylvania iron industry, and indeed found these two enslaved men — Cesar and Streaphon — who worked in the iron establishment that made most of the Pennsylvania fireplaces.
One of these men — Streaphon — managed to buy his own freedom. That, to me, was an important indication that the desire to be free was a constant. It can be seen everywhere in early American history.
What compelled Franklin to try minimizing emissions from his stove?
He was appalled at the filthy air in places like London. So, he tried to design the last three versions of his stove to re-burn smoke — by sending the smoke that would otherwise be ascending into the chimney back into the fire.
Franklin pointed out, correctly, that smoke is really particles of unburned fuel. If you could burn it again, at least it’s more efficient. You’re wasting less fuel. You’re putting less junk into the air. He’s so concerned with doing this that a friend teases him for being “a universal smoke doctor.”
To me, it’s a very interesting statement about questioning the level of emissions that already seemed to be compromising human health. Of course, what gets identified decades after his death in 1790 is that some of these emissions are invisible. The American scientific observer and experimenter Eunice Foote documented the climate-altering effects of CO2 in 1856.
You connect today’s techno-optimism to Franklin and other inventors of his era, who thought they could invent their way out of a climate crisis. What lessons does your book hold for inheritors of this philosophy?
I don’t think Franklin meant to validate burning coal in the industrial sense, but he did validate it as an energy source. That says to me: Don’t pick the quick and obvious solution. Or at least be suspicious and monitor how it’s doing.
We should be wary of this silver bullet fantasy, that we need to find just one thing to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. Or that we can just shift to sustainable energy in the absence of climate mitigation before chemical changes in the atmosphere become too dire.
We’ll need more than one inventor, one device, one hero. There are just too many variables for one solution to be possible. We need to modify our course as soon as possible with a lot of solutions working together.
Play should be a core feature of children’s healthcare in forthcoming plans for the future of the NHS, according to a new report which argues that play ‘humanises’ the experiences of child patients.
The report, by University of Cambridge academics for the charity Starlight, calls for play, games and playful approaches to be integrated into a ‘holistic’ model of children’s healthcare – one that acknowledges the emotional and psychological dimensions of good health, alongside its physical aspects.
Both internationally and in the UK, health systems have, in recent decades, increasingly promoted play in paediatric healthcare. There is a growing understanding that making healthcare more child-friendly can reduce stress and positively improve younger patients’ experiences.
Despite this recognition, play often remains undervalued and inconsistently integrated across healthcare contexts. For the first time, the report compiles evidence from over 120 studies to make the case for its more systematic incorporation.
In the case of the UK, the authors argue that the Government’s forthcoming 10-year health plan for the NHS offers an important opportunity to embed play within a more holistic vision for childhood health.
The report was produced by academics at the Centre for Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Starlight, which commissioned the review, is a national charity advocating to reduce trauma through play in children’s healthcare.
Dr Kelsey Graber, the report’s lead author, said: “Play and child-centred activities have a unique capacity to support the emotional and mental aspects of children’s healthcare experiences, whether in hospital or during a routine treatment at the GP. It won’t directly change the course of an illness, but it can humanise the experience by reducing stress and anxiety and enhancing understanding and comfort. Hospital-based play opens up a far more complete understanding of what it means for a child to be a healthy or well.”
Adrian Voce, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Starlight, said: “With the government promising to create the healthiest generation of children ever as part of its new long term health plan, this compelling evidence of the benefits of play to children’s healthcare is very timely. We encourage ministers and NHS leaders to make health play teams an integral part of paediatric care.”
The report synthesised evidence from 127 studies in 29 countries. Most were published after 2020, reflecting intensified interest in children’s healthcare interventions following the COVID-19 outbreak.
Some studies focused on medically-relevant play. For example, hospital staff sometimes use role-play, or games and toys like Playmobil Hospital to familiarise children with medical procedures and ease anxiety. Other studies focused on non-medical play: the use of activities like social games, video games, arts and crafts, music therapy and storytelling to help make patients more comfortable. Some hospitals and surgeries even provide “distraction kits” to help children relax.
In its survey of all these studies, the report finds strong evidence that play benefits children’s psychological health and wellbeing. Play is also sometimes associated with positive physical health; one study, for example, found that children who played an online game about dentistry had lower heart rates during a subsequent dental procedure, probably because they felt more prepared.
The authors identify five main ways in which play enhances children’s healthcare based on the available body of evidence:
Reducing stress and discomfort during medical procedures. Play is sometimes associated with physiological markers of reduced distress, such as lower heart rates and blood pressure. Therapeutic play can also ease pain and anxiety.
Helping children express and manage emotions. Play can help to alleviate fear, anxiety, boredom and loneliness in healthcare settings. It also provides an outlet for emotional expression among all age groups.
Fostering dignity and agency. In an environment where children often feel powerless and a lack of personal choice, play provides a sense of control which supports mental and emotional wellbeing.
Building connection and belonging. Play can strengthen children’s relationships with other patients, family members and healthcare staff, easing their experiences in a potentially overwhelming environment. This may be particularly important for children in longer term or palliative care.
Preserving a sense of childhood. Play helps children feel like children, and not just patients, the report suggests, by providing “essential moments of happiness, respite and emotional release”.
While play is widely beneficial, the report stresses that its impact will vary from child to child. This variability highlights a need, the authors note, for informed, child-centred approaches to play in healthcare settings. Unfortunately, play expertise in these settings may often be lacking: only 13% of the studies reviewed covered the work of health play specialists, and most of the reported activities were directed and defined by adults, rather than by children themselves.
The report also highlights a major gap in research on the use of play in mental healthcare. Just three of the 127 studies focused on this area, even though 86% emphasised play’s psychological benefits. The report calls for greater professional and academic attention to the use of play in mental health support, particularly in light of escalating rates of mental health challenges among children and young people. More work is also needed, it adds, to understand the benefits of play-based activities in healthcare for infants and adolescents, both of which groups were under-represented in the research literature.
Embedding play more fully in healthcare as part of wider Government reforms, the authors suggest, could reduce healthcare-related trauma and improve long-term outcomes for children. “It is not just healthcare professionals, but also policy leaders who need to recognise the value of play,” Graber said. “That recognition is foundational to ensuring that children’s developmental, psychological, and emotional health needs are met, alongside their physical health.”
The Cambridge report argues that play should be a recognised component of children’s healthcare in the Government’s forthcoming 10-year plan for the NHS.
Hospital-based play opens up a far more complete understanding of what it means for a child to be a healthy or well
It’s tricky to predict precisely what the impacts of climate change will be, given the many variables involved. To predict the impacts of a warmer world on plant life, some researchers look at urban “heat islands,” where, because of the effects of urban structures, temperatures consistently run a few degrees higher than those of the surrounding rural areas. This enables side-by-side comparisons of plant responses.
But a new study by researchers at MIT and Harvard University has found that, at least for forests, urban heat islands are a poor proxy for global warming, and this may have led researchers to underestimate the impacts of warming in some cases. The discrepancy, they found, has a lot to do with the limited genetic diversity of urban tree species.
The findings appear in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT postdoc Meghan Blumstein, professor of civil and environmental engineering David Des Marais, and four others.
“The appeal of these urban temperature gradients is, well, it’s already there,” says Des Marais. “We can’t look into the future, so why don’t we look across space, comparing rural and urban areas?” Because such data is easily obtainable, methods comparing the growth of plants in cities with similar plants outside them have been widely used, he says, and have been quite useful. Researchers did recognize some shortcomings to this approach, including significant differences in availability of some nutrients such as nitrogen. Still, “a lot of ecologists recognized that they weren’t perfect, but it was what we had,” he says.
Most of the research by Des Marais’ group is lab-based, under conditions tightly controlled for temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration. While there are a handful of experimental sites where conditions are modified out in the field, for example using heaters around one or a few trees, “those are super small-scale,” he says. “When you’re looking at these longer-term trends that are occurring over space that’s quite a bit larger than you could reasonably manipulate, an important question is, how do you control the variables?”
Temperature gradients have offered one approach to this problem, but Des Marais and his students have also been focusing on the genetics of the tree species involved, comparing those sampled in cities to the same species sampled in a natural forest nearby. And it turned out there were differences, even between trees that appeared similar.
“So, lo and behold, you think you’re only letting one variable change in your model, which is the temperature difference from an urban to a rural setting,” he says, “but in fact, it looks like there was also a genotypic diversity that was not being accounted for.”
The genetic differences meant that the plants being studied were not representative of those in the natural environment, and the researchers found that the difference was actually masking the impact of warming. The urban trees, they found, were less affected than their natural counterparts in terms of when the plants’ leaves grew and unfurled, or “leafed out,” in the spring.
The project began during the pandemic lockdown, when Blumstein was a graduate student. She had a grant to study red oak genotypes across New England, but was unable to travel because of lockdowns. So, she concentrated on trees that were within reach in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then collaborated with people doing research at the Harvard Forest, a research forest in rural central Massachusetts. They collected three years of data from both locations, including the temperature profiles, the leafing-out timing, and the genetic profiles of the trees. Though the study was looking at red oaks specifically, the researchers say the findings are likely to apply to trees broadly.
At the time, researchers had just sequenced the oak tree genome, and that allowed Blumstein and her colleagues to look for subtle differences among the red oaks in the two locations. The differences they found showed that the urban trees were more resistant to the effects of warmer temperatures than were those in the natural environment.
“Initially, we saw these results and we were sort of like, oh, this is a bad thing,” Des Marais says. “Ecologists are getting this heat island effect wrong, which is true.” Fortunately, this can be easily corrected by factoring in genomic data. “It’s not that much more work, because sequencing genomes is so cheap and so straightforward. Now, if someone wants to look at an urban-rural gradient and make these kinds of predictions, well, that’s fine. You just have to add some information about the genomes.”
It's not surprising that this genetic variation exists, he says, since growers have learned by trial and error over the decades which varieties of trees tend to thrive in the difficult urban environment, with typically poor soil, poor drainage, and pollution. “As a result, there’s just not much genetic diversity in our trees within cities.”
The implications could be significant, Des Marais says. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases its regular reports on the status of the climate, “one of the tools the IPCC has to predict future responses to climate change with respect to temperature are these urban-to-rural gradients.” He hopes that these new findings will be incorporated into their next report, which is just being drafted. “If these results are generally true beyond red oaks, this suggests that the urban heat island approach to studying plant response to temperature is underpredicting how strong that response is.”
The research team included Sophie Webster, Robin Hopkins, and David Basler from Harvard University and Jie Yun from MIT. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Bullard Fellowship at the Harvard Forest, and MIT.
Meghan Blumstein studied red oak genotypes across New England, concentrating on trees that were within reach in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then collaborated with people doing research at the Harvard Forest, a research forest in rural central Massachusetts.
As a college student in Serbia with a passion for math and physics, Ana Trišović found herself drawn to computer science and its practical, problem-solving approaches. It was then that she discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, and decided to study a course on Data Analytics with Python in 2012 — something her school didn’t offer.
That experience was transformative, says Trišović, who is now a research scientist at the FutureTech lab within MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
“That course changed my life,” she says. “Throughout my career, I have considered myself a Python coder, and MIT OpenCourseWare made it possible. I was in my hometown on another continent, learning from MIT world-class resources. When I reflect on my path, it’s incredible.”
Over time, Trišović's path led her to explore a range of OpenCourseWare resources. She recalls that, as a non-native English speaker, some of the materials were challenging. But thanks to the variety of courses and learning opportunities available on OpenCourseWare, she was always able to find ones that suited her. She encourages anyone facing that same challenge to be persistent.
“If the first course doesn’t work for you, try another,” she says. “Being persistent and investing in yourself is the best thing a young person can do.”
In her home country of Serbia, Trišović earned undergraduate degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering before going on to Cambridge University and CERN, where she contributed to work on the Large Hadron Collider and completed her PhD in computer science in 2018. She has also done research at the University of Chicago and Harvard University.
“I like that computer science allows me to make an impact in a range of fields, but physics remains close to my heart, and I’m constantly inspired by it,” she says.
MIT FutureTech, an interdisciplinary research group, draws on computer science, economics, and management to identify computing trends that create risk and opportunities for sustainable economic growth. There, Trišović studies the democratization of AI, including the implications of open-source AI and how that will impact science. Her work at MIT is a chance to build on research she has been pursuing since she was in graduate school.
“My work focuses on computational social science. For many years, I’ve been looking at what's known as 'the science of science' — investigating issues like research reproducibility," Trišović explains. “Now, as AI becomes increasingly prevalent and introduces new challenges, I’m interested in examining a range of topics — from AI democratization to its effects on the scientific method and the broader landscape of science.”
Trišović is grateful that, way back in 2012, she made the decision to try something new and learn with an OpenCourseWare course.
“I instantly fell in love with Python the moment I took that course. I have such a soft spot for OpenCourseWare — it shaped my career,” she says. “Every day at MIT is inspiring. I work with people who are excited to talk about AI and other fascinating topics.”
ChemFORWARD, winner of Belfer Center award, explains how its database of industrial chemicals can help protect human, environmental health
Have you ever thought of the chemicals that went into making your iPhone? Your favorite pleather chair? The shirt on your back? It takes thousands of chemicals to produce things we use every day, and some of them could be harmful to both your health and the planet’s.
Heather McKenney, the science and safer chemistry lead at ChemFORWARD, was joined by Kennedy School experts as well as David Bourne, lead sustainability strategist at Google, in a panel last week at the Kennedy School’s Malkin Penthouse to discuss the company’s work as well as challenges the private sector faces in trying to reduce chemical hazards.
“We live in a world with thousands of chemicals,” said Henry Lee, Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of the Kennedy School’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and senior lecturer in Public Policy. “They are present in the clothes we wear, what we eat and drink, the furniture in our homes, and even in the health products that we buy. Thus, focusing on what society can do to ensure the protection of public health in this chemical-intense world is especially important.”
ChemFORWARD, a Washington D.C.-based 501c3, compiles and maintains a digital repository of “verified chemical hazard assessments,” or CHAs, available to corporate subscribers in order to make informed and environmentally sound decisions about the chemicals used in their supply chains.
“There’s no requirement across all industries that all chemicals must be vetted before use,” said McKenney, who was a lead for the toxicology and product safety team at Honest Company, a baby and beauty products maker, for six years.
“There’s no requirement across all industries that all chemicals must be vetted before use.”
Heather McKenney, ChemFORWARD
Heather McKenney and David Bourne.
Benn Craig/Belfer Center
McKenney said there are well-intentioned companies that want to certify their products as safe, but struggle keeping track of every chemical used in their supply chain, and what the impacts of those chemicals are.
“There’s tons of toxicology data out there, and how do we start to apply and share that information such that it’s not just siloed in a REACH dossier in the EU or in an individual organization who’s developed that data?” she said, referring to the EU’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals regulation. “We’ve developed a methodology that houses the chemical hazard assessments across 24-plus human and environmental health endpoints.”
On the human side, ChemFORWARD assesses a chemical’s carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, reproductive toxicity, skin irritation, eye irritation, and neurotoxicity, among other things. On the environmental side, they measure things like persistence, or the ability of chemicals to break down.
“Looking at the totality of the data, we then take the totality of the hazards and send an overall hazard classification, or what we call our hazard bands,” McKenney said.
ChemFORWARD hazard bands fall into alphabetical rankings (A, B, C, etc.,) but are also categorized based on how much data is available about a given substance. There are chemicals marked with a question mark when the data is deemed insufficient.
Bourne said companies like his are partnering with ChemFORWARD as an important step toward creating healthier products at his firm and across the private sector.
“What we realize in partnership with ChemFORWARD is that every time we do a chemical hazard assessment, it’s not just proprietary information for Google or for whoever did the assessment. It’s now available to anyone who wants to try to platform. And so the scalability that creates is really what we saw as transformational,” he said. “The analogy I like to give is if you wanted to watch a great TV show, and you had to pay a Hollywood studio to make a show just for you, it would cost you an absurd amount of money. Because they have lots of subscribers to a streaming platform, everyone can contribute and get access to a whole body of content that is valuable.”
Charles Taylor, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, said this type of information-gathering could have important benefits beyond the private sector.
“This kind of information is really important to get out to researchers and others who can … assess if we see chronic effects or downstream effects,” he said.
The Roy Family Award is presented biannually to celebrate an outstanding cross-sector partnership that enhances environmental quality through novel and creative approaches.
How has the internet changed fiction? 8 writers weigh in.
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Fiction is as old as time. From the ancient “Epic of Gilgamesh” to contemporary novels and short stories, fiction has explored the human condition and pushed us to think outside ourselves and expand our imaginations. The internet, on the other hand, is less than 50 years old. It’s evolved exponentially over the last four decades, and inarguably changed the way we communicate, live, and think.
In these edited responses, writers of the genre share how they believe the internet has changed fiction.
Readers have become audiences
Greg Jackson ’06 is the author of several short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His debut novel, “The Dimensions of a Cave,” was published in 2023.
Fiction is fundamentally about one privacy addressing another. Its power and meaning depend on the writer speaking with uncomfortable candor, channeling a brave private truth, and the reader receiving this message as a solitary conscience. “Write as though your parents are dead,” writers are counseled. But in the age of the internet, writers must go further and write as though the unignorable sphere of a vast judging public did not exist. This is increasingly hard to do.
The internet — what we refer to, in shorthand, as social media — has made personal taste into a matter of public enthusiasm and, as often, condemnation. It has turned “readers” into “audiences.” Taste has become something impersonal, conditioned by influencers, likes, star ratings, Tweets, and lists. Traditional tastemakers — critics, editors, booksellers — have seen their influence overtaken by mass opinion and viral acclaim. Without them, we have few champions of challenging, difficult, and subversive work. Sensitive to their audiences’ whims and the viability of their careers, writers adapt their work to what they think a mass public wants and believes. The imperative to startle readers with what they don’t know they want, with a truth pitched at a deeper place than superficial opinion, disappears. Readers may well forget that this is what fiction offers.
Are there positives? I don’t see many and I think pairing the minuses with some pluses obscures what is, on balance, a negative equation. Sometimes a net effect is simply bad. Literature is a vital companion to self-discovery, illuminating our condition. It addresses a realm of experience prior to politics, mass conviction, commonplace belief, and rote speech. You cannot discover what you already know. Fiction’s radiant core — private truth — may well turn out to be the chief casualty of our age of social media.
A time-saver and a time-suck
Scott Turow, J.D. ’78, is a lawyer and the author of 13 fiction and three nonfiction books including “Presumed Innocent” and the memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, “One L.”
I use the internet for research, and the ease of it is sometimes striking. In my most recent novel, “Presumed Guilty,”I learned about the minutiae of the Nike Air Force 1 sneaker and the question of how far cell signals travel, both with days less time than it would have taken me when I started out 40 years ago. Because of that, I think my books are probably more research-intensive than they would have been decades ago.
Fiction exists on the assumption that we can learn the inmost thoughts and feelings of others. That people have an appetite for learning that is no surprise, but it makes storytelling a profoundly moral enterprise, because it sharpens our empathy for others. I don’t think posts or emails generally have the same depth.
The internet obviously competes for readers’ time, and I think it’s true that book sales began to drop when people started “cruising the net,” as it used to be called when people just gave themselves over to wandering through the online world. But the internet carries benefits as well, especially the easy accessibility of eBooks. Readers connect online and share word-of-mouth about books they like. So, it’s not all one way.
The one thing I am sure of is that the novel has withstood technological changes since the 18th century — or the 13th century, depending on how you figure its birth. And it’s not going away soon.
We lost a major plot device
Jennifer Finney Boylan was the 2022-2023 Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett Schlesinger Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of 19 books, including her latest, “Cleavage” (2025), president of PEN America, and the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.
A major plot hook used to be people losing each other, or getting lost, or not knowing where they were, and so on. And this particular situation is now one that’s very unlikely — since we’re always tied into the web somehow. Think of the film “After Hours” (by Martin Scorsese), in which Griffin Dunne’s money flies out of a taxicab window one night and he’s then left stranded downtown, unable to get home. This kind of twist is pretty rare now, isn’t it? And if you think about it, so many great stories — from the “Odyssey” to, say, “Ulysses” — are about people who have gotten lost, or who are trying to find their way home, and the obstacles to their journey consist of not knowing where they are, or being unable to tell their loved ones of their fate.
In my heart I think we’d all have been better off if the internet — and the iPhone and its knockoffs — had never been invented. We would spend more of our time looking at each other, rather than our screens. We would read more, scream less. Is that world so much worse than the one we live in now?
A time machine for research
Julie Orringer was the 2013-2014 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of three award-winning books: “The Invisible Bridge,” “How to Breathe Underwater” and “The Flight Portfolio,” a novel about Harvard alumnus Varian Fry, an American journalist who traveled to France in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. Her work has also appeared in Granta and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction, and she is the winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize.
Two things that have been really helpful to research are doors that open via the internet. One is newspaper archives. It’s incredibly helpful to be able to go into Times Machine via The New York Times, for example, and look at the newspaper pages exactly as they were laid out and to see the article that you’re trying to read in context, and for that article to be searchable. It used to be that researchers would have to go and look at microfilm, which was just impossible. And so you can page through the day-by-day events of a particular historical moment, but also you get all the context of the other articles, and the ads for hats and suits and foods and theater shows and modes of transportation, and a lot of the other kind of contextual cues that would help to place you in a particular temporal setting.
And then the other thing that I’ve found that’s similarly helpful is radio archives, because we tend to forget what a constant presence radio was in people’s lives, especially when we’re writing about the 20th century. And there are numerous archives that allow you access to the radio shows that people were listening to regularly every day. If you don’t hear the voices that were speaking into people’s ears about the political events and the artistic events and the fashions of a time, then you don’t really have the whole picture.
Less time at the library, for better and for worse
Weike Wang ’11 is the author of several novels, including “Chemistry,” “Joan is Okay,” and “Rental House.” She is the recipient of a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories, and she has won an O. Henry Award.
I learned to read at the library. My mother would take me and she would be in the adult section, looking through job listings in newspapers, and I would be in the kids section, reading “Anne of Green Gables” or “Goosebumps” and playing the Oregon Trail. I’m not sure if the internet changed fiction but it changed reading. Without the internet or a phone with internet access, I read for longer, deeper periods. I would spend whole days reading. Now I can’t do that. Also I have more responsibilities and reading has become part of my job rather than my leisure.
The internet has certainly made research easier for stories. Instead of going to the library, I can find more things online. I can Google. I can watch YouTube videos. I also can use Google Maps to see what the area I’m writing about looks like. Without the internet, I would have to go there. I would also have to interview people if I’m interested in writing a character with that occupation. Nowadays, so many people post online about their experiences that writers have easy access to this kind of material.
We need emotional truth too
Min Jin Lee was the 2018-2019 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of the novels “Free Food for Millionaires” and “Pachinko,” a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Lee is also the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence.
Apart from the fact that the internet may have contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary 2024 Word of the Year, “brain rot,” and that neoliberalism has made our attention the commodity to exploit without mercy, I remain unreasonably hopeful that fiction will emerge as the primary vehicle of enduring narrative. We may love nonfiction in many of its forms, but fiction has the capacity to enlarge our grasp of emotional truth through the prism of non-fact.
Expanding knowledge
Andrè Aciman, Ph.D. ’88, is the author of several New York Times bestselling novels, including “Call Me by Your Name,” “Out of Egypt,” and “Eight White Nights.” He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Books are important. They mold who you are, and they give you an aperture into history and into the universe that is not available elsewhere. Does “Crime and Punishment” give you a better sense of who human beings are? Absolutely. Does Shakespeare? Yes. But a small article on the net that appears and then disappears? That’s the way people think nowadays, and I have no argument against it.
My experience has been that young people, people under 35 with the exception of a few, don’t read or they are constantly online, reading the newspaper, the magazines. They know all sorts of things that I would never have even imagined existed. I, on the other hand, know nothing except for what I read in The New York Times, and I don’t even read that very thoughtfully. My sons, for example, seem to know so much, as all their friends do, but none of them read books.
Some things ‘can only be experienced through face-to-face interactions’
Yxta Maya Murray is the current Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a law professor, writer, social practice artist, and beginning filmmaker. She also is the David P. Leonard Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, where she writes legal scholarship examining the relationship among law, social justice, and the arts. She has published 11 books.
I have written several novels that are steeped in legal, scientific and archival research. And these books would have been impossible for me without the internet. My 2020 book, “The World Doesn’t Work that Way, but It Could” is a collection of stories reflecting President Donald Trump rolling back the administrative state, by which I mean unraveling safety regulations in the Department of the Interior and EPA. I did legal and scientific research and asked the web to deliver me reports. But the research alone can’t enliven the text. There are things that are not available on the web, and that can only be experienced through face-to-face interactions. So I did interviews. Fiction is important so that we can imagine other people’s lives, so that we can develop empathy, so that we can move outside of ourselves, and we can see ourselves mirrored. It’s galactically important, because only a very small part of reality can be expressed, and if you confine yourself to nonfiction and are trying to do a good ethical job of that, then you strangle the ability to express all sorts of other parts of human experience.
When Jinah Kim learned in 2016 that Museum of Fine Arts conservation scientist Michele Derrick had detected cobalt in a 15th-century Indian manuscript, she was presented with an obvious explanation: the document had probably been retouched later, potentially with synthetic pigments. After all, European-made cobalt-based pigments like smalt were widely imported to South Asia only in the 17th century, and synthetic cobalt blue was popularized only in the early 19th century.
But Kim, who was gathering data on pigments as research for her second book, wasn’t convinced.
“What do we know about actual pigment usage in this region at this time period?” Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art in the Department of History of Art & Architecture, asked herself. “Does it all have to come from Europe? It’s possible there are indigenous knowledge of colorants that we don’t know about.”
Further analysis by Katherine Eremin, Patricia Cornwell Senior Conservation Scientist at Harvard Art Museums, confirmed that the smalt found in the Jain manuscript had a different composition from European-manufactured smalt, indicating it came from a different source.
It was a “eureka” moment for Kim, who hypothesized that some pigments believed to have gotten to South Asia as imports from Europe may in fact have been used in South Asia long before. The result was the “Mapping Color in History Project,” an ongoing effort since 2018 to create an object-based pigment database for historical research on art from this region.
“I realized a lot of pigment databases available out there are based on a Western European canon, because that’s where the research has been,” Kim said. “If you look at Asian materials, especially South Asia, Himalaya, and Southeast Asia, everything is so colorful but the baseline understanding of what colorants were available is not known.”
“I realized a lot of pigment databases available out there are based on a Western European canon, because that’s where the research has been.”
Jinah Kim
The open-access database allows users to search by painting title, keyword, pigment, color, or element, and filter results by artist, date, and more. There’s also a map to search by location of origin. On each artwork’s page, users can view an analysis of what pigments were found in the painting, what method was used to identify them, and the scientists’ confidence level. Kim wants the database to be useful for “anyone interested in color,” including people in the cultural heritage field, art historians, curators, teachers, and students.
Kim describes Mapping History as highly collaborative, bringing together experts in digital humanities, conservation science, and art history.
“I do describe it as a three-legged stool,” Kim said. “It cannot be done by one person because it requires a lot of different expertise. You need to do computer programming to make this database, you need to work with material analysis, and you need art historical research to map it in history and time.”
“Hindu Goddess Ganga with Two Female Attendants Carrying Fly-Whisks,” Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of James E. Robinson III in honor of Stuart Cary Welch and Alve John Erickson
Kim worked with Rashmi Singhal and the Arts & Humanities Research Computing (DARTH) team and Jeff Steward from Harvard Art Museums on the technology aspects of the project. The database was built from scratch.
Tracy Stuber, digital humanities specialist with DARTH who acts as bridge between the research teams and software engineers, said the Mapping Color website is unique because it links two types of data that are usually siloed and used by separate audiences: data about the artwork itself and data about the scientific analysis.
“Because we know approximately where or when an artwork was made, we’re then able to say, ‘This pigment that we’ve identified in this artwork was therefore made approximately in that place at that time,’” Stuber said. “Linking them together in a database not only makes that data accessible to the other audience but facilitates more collaboration and conversation between those two disciplines.”
Katherine Eremin (left) and Jinah Kim observe a manuscript under a microscope.
Photos by Grace DuVal
Working with ancient art means that scientists can’t usually take samples for analysis. Mapping Color’s scientists rely 99% of the time on non-destructive methods, according to Eremin, who is one of the project’s core partners.
When Eremin analyzes an artwork, she typically starts with imaging which can identify certain pigments that behave differently in infrared and ultraviolet lights. Indian Yellow, for example, glows under UV light. She also examines the pigment under a microscope to see the blend of colors used.
“You look at them to begin with and you think, ‘Oh that’s beautiful,’ but then you actually look down the microscope and see the really fine details,” she said. “You think, ‘that’s just blue,’ and then you look at it and see that actually it’s lots of different things mixed together.”
She will then try to identify elements using x-ray fluorescence to see what characteristic x-rays are emitted from the painting. For example, a green can be identified as copper green if there are visible copper rays, or yellow orpiment (an arsenic sulfide mineral) blended with blue if there are visible arsenic rays. To gather information at the molecular level, Eremin uses Raman spectroscopy, a non-invasive laser technology which can reveal if a copper green is either malachite or atacamite.
On rare occasions if an artwork is already flaking, it may begin a conversation between conservators, curators, and scientists about whether to take a sample. Eremin used an infrared light technique known as Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy on one tiny particle taken from a crumbling 16th-century Indian manuscript, and identified that kaolin clay was used for the white border detail.
The findings give insight into the vision of the artists. In an analysis of a 1588 “Divan of Anvari” manuscript series, Mapping Color scientists realized the artist used an Indian yellow pigment for the pure yellow of figure’s clothing, but used orpiment, an older arsenic sulfide yellow, for highlighting leaves on a tree.
“What that tells me is that artists are trying to get to that pure form of brilliant yellow, and they’re discerning between different shades,” Kim said.
“Krishna’s Manifest Vision through Sound (Kavitt),” from a Rasikapriya series, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Philip Hofer
With support from the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, the Mapping Color in History Project has also collaborated with Jaipur-based traditional Indian painter Babulal Marotia to analyze samples of pigments he uses in his studio. It’s helpful to study materials used by contemporary artists like Marotia, who are carrying on artistic traditions that have been passed down for generations, according to Kim.
“You can’t dissolve a 700-year-old painting to see what has happened.” Kim said. “This gives us an access point to that historical moment through this type of material that’s still being used.”
Mapping the origin locations of the paintings in the database isn’t easy, as historic paintings from South Asia often lack precise information about the date, location, and artist.
Mapping the origin locations of the paintings in the database isn’t easy, as historic paintings from South Asia often lack precise information about the date, location, and artist.
“If you look up certain Indian painting in a museum’s database, it will say, ‘North India, 17th-18th century,” Kim said. “You cannot map “North India, 17th -18th century” in any point in time and place. That’s where we need to do more research on objects, find more relevant information and answer comparative studies to narrow it down and come up with better attribution.”
Kim has a list of ideas for how to improve the database (adding more artworks, visualization tools, and certainty indicators) that she is excited to implement.
“I want to understand certain trends, I want to be able to see patterns, I want to see things that were not visible before,” Kim said. “But a database is only as good as the data itself, so there’s a lot of work that still needs to go in.”
Some of the work on the database was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy joined President Eisgruber and representatives from Microsoft, CoreWeave and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) for an official ribbon cutting March 27.
New miniature laboratories are ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t make mistakes. They provide a controlled test environment where algorithms and AI models can be checked before being put to work under real-life conditions. The aim is for AI to work reliably.
You’re an aerospace engineer on a tight timeline to develop a component for a rocket engine. No sweat, you think — you know the concepts by heart, and the model looks appropriate in CAD. But you inspect the 3D-printed part that you’ve outsourced for manufacturing, and something is wrong. The impeller blade angle is off, and the diameter is larger than the design intent. The vendor won’t get back to you. Suddenly you’re over budget. Something is leaking. Running the pump test rig, you’re not sure where that vibration is coming from.
Successfully navigating nightmares like this can make or break an engineer, but real-time problem-solving during assembly is something few undergraduates experience as part of their curriculum. Enter class 16.811 (Advanced Manufacturing for Aerospace Engineers), a new communication-intensive laboratory course that allows juniors and seniors to drive a full engineering cycle, gaining experience that mirrors the challenges they’ll face as practicing engineers.
In just 13 weeks, students design, build, and test a laboratory-scale electric turbopump, the type of pump used in liquid rocket propulsion systems to deliver fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber under high pressure. Teams of two or three students work through the entire production process while balancing budgets, documenting, and testing.
The course was developed and taught by Zachary Cordero, Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor, and Zoltán Spakovszky, the T. Wilson Professor in Aeronautics, along with a team of teaching assistants (TAs), technical instructors, and communication experts. It ran for the first time last fall, open to students who had completed Unified Engineering, the foundational Course 16 curriculum covering the four disciplines at the core of aerospace engineering. It generated so much interest upon its announcement that spots were allocated via lottery.
“Sometimes it’s assumed that students will get hands-on experience through their extracurriculars, but they may not. Students in this class gain that experience through exposure to cutting-edge design and manufacturing tools, like metal 3D printing,” says Cordero. “They don’t just learn how to solve a problem set — they learn how to be an engineer.”
Training for a rapidly evolving field
The course was born out of feedback from participants at an annual workshop that Cordero organizes each summer addressing materials challenges in reusable rocket engines. Attendees representing industry, government, and academic sectors consistently emphasized the need for the next generation of engineers to be familiar with advanced engineering concepts, in addition to having strong fundamentals. Experience with new computational design tools and processes like additive manufacturing is becoming essential for success in the aerospace industry. “Our mission is to train, inspire, and motivate the next generation of aerospace engineers. We have to listen to what our industry partners want from engineers and adapt our curriculum to meet those needs,” says Cordero.
Spakovszky, Cordero, and the team built the course over two years of Independent Activities Period workshops, developing independent modules that teach concepts for constructing the turbopump. The first set of labs focuses on the impellers — the rotating bladed-disk component that draws fluid into the pump to pressurize it. The second lab breaks down the rotor system that supports the pump impeller, and the third covers integration of the rotor assembly into the casing and final testing.
Throughout the course, students receive instruction in technical communication and training on the full array of machine shop tools available in the Arthur and Linda Gelb Laboratory. Beyond learning the concepts and tools, the majority of the design and implementation is up to the students.
“They are pushed to learn how to learn on their own,” says Spakovszky. “The key differentiator here is that there is no solution. In other classes, you have a problem, and the instructor has the solution. This is open ended, and every team has a different design.” Project management is left up to each team, with instructors and TAs serving as resources, rather than leads. Each team works with vendors to help bring their designs to life. The students conducted their machinery analysis using the Agile Engineering Design System (AEDS) and Advanced Rotating Machine Dynamics (ARMD) software tools from Concepts NREC. Impellers were printed at the MIT SHED (Safety Health Environmental Discovery lab), with support from Tolga Durak, managing director of environment, health and safety, and by industry collaborators at Desktop Metal.
“A lot of the design questions we were working with don’t have firm answers,” says junior Danishell Destefano. “I learned a lot about how to read technical literature and compare design trade-offs to make my own decisions.”
On the floor
“Making things is really hard,” says Spakovszky. “In addition to manufacturing parts and components, the assembly of rotating machinery requires careful tolerancing of the part dimensions and precision manufacturing of the interfaces to meet design specification.”
At the core of the curriculum is the manufacturing process itself, with its myriad components posing a unique challenge for students who may not have experienced the kind of rapid design cycle that is becoming more and more common in the field. The course uses concurrent engineering as a methodology to emphasize the close connections between fundamental concepts, functional requirements, design, materials, and manufacturing.
Student teams document their lab results in written reports and give regular progress presentations. Lecturer Jessie Stickgold-Sarah instructed the class on professional communication. At the end of the semester, students walk away with the ability to not only create new things, but communicate about their creations.
“I really enjoyed working with this group of students,” says Stickgold-Sarah. “The main paper and presentations required students to express the reasoning using the design-build-test sequence, and to explain and justify their choices based on their technical understanding of core topics. They were incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and the papers and presentations they produced exceeded my expectations.”
The course culminates in a final presentation, where teams showcase their findings and get feedback from their MIT instructors and industry representatives — potential future colleagues and employers.
Whether or not students go directly into a career in rocket or jet propulsion, the breadth of skills they learn in class has applications across disciplines. “The biggest skill I’ve gained is time and project management. To build a pump in a semester is a pretty tough timeline challenge, and learning how to manage my time and work with a team has been a great soft skill to learn,” says Destafano.
The course drives home the reality that the manufacturing process can be just as important as the product. “I hope through this, they gain confidence to explore the unknown and deal with uncertainty in engineering systems,” says Cordero. “In the real world, things are leaking. Things aren’t as you initially anticipated or behaving as you thought they would behave. And the students had to react and respond. That's real life. It's kind of intuitive, kind of common sense, sure — but you can hone that skill, and develop confidence in that skill.”
Class 16.811 (Advanced Manufacturing for Aerospace Engineers) allows juniors and seniors to drive a full engineering cycle, gaining experience that mirrors the challenges they’ll face as engineers.
Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have demonstrated that a single, standard silicon transistor, the fundamental building block of microchips used in computers, smartphones and almost every electronic system, can function like a biological neuron and synapse when operated in a specific, unconventional way.
Led by Associate Professor Mario Lanza from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering, NUS, the research team’s work presents a highly scalable and energy-efficient solution for hardware-based artificial neural networks (ANNs). This brings neuromorphic computing — where chips could process information more efficiently, much like the human brain — closer to reality. Their study was published in the journal Nature on 26 March 2025.
Putting the brains in silicon
The world’s most sophisticated computers already exist inside our heads. Studies show that the human brain is, by and large, more energy-efficient than electronic processors, thanks to almost 90 billion neurons that form some 100 trillion connections with each other, and synapses that tune their strength over time — a process known as synaptic plasticity, which underpins learning and memory.
For decades, scientists have sought to replicate this efficiency using artificial neural networks (ANNs). ANNs have recently driven remarkable advances in artificial intelligence (AI), loosely inspired by how the brain processes information. But while they borrow biological terminology, the similarities run only skin deep — software-based ANNs, such as those powering large language models like ChatGPT, have a voracious appetite for computational resources, and hence, electricity. This makes them impractical for many applications.
Neuromorphic computing aims to mimic the computing power and energy efficiency of the brain. This requires not only re-designing system architecture to carry out memory and computation at the same place — the so-called in-memory computing (IMC) — but also to develop electronic devices that exploit physical and electronic phenomena capable of replicating more faithfully how neurons and synapses work. However, current neuromorphic computing systems are stymied by the need for complicated multi-transistor circuits or emerging materials that are yet to be validated for large-scale manufacturing.
“To enable true neuromorphic computing, where microchips behave like biological neurons and synapses, we need hardware that is both scalable and energy-efficient,” said Professor Lanza.
The NUS research team has now demonstrated that a single, standard silicon transistor, when arranged and operated in a specific way, can replicate both neural firing and synaptic weight changes — the fundamental mechanisms of biological neurons and synapses. This was achieved through adjusting the resistance of the bulk terminal to specific values, which allow controlling two physical phenomena taking place into the transistor: punch through impact ionisation and charge trapping. Moreover, the team built a two-transistor cell capable of operating either in neuron or synaptic regime, which the researchers have called "Neuro-Synaptic Random Access Memory", or NS-RAM.
“Other approaches require complex transistor arrays or novel materials with uncertain manufacturability, but our method makes use of commercial CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology, the same platform found in modern computer processors and memory microchips,” explained Professor Lanza. “This means it’s scalable, reliable and compatible with existing semiconductor fabrication processes.”
Through experiments, the NS-RAM cell demonstrated low power consumption, maintained stable performance over many cycles of operation and exhibited consistent, predictable behaviour across different devices — all of which are desired attributes for building reliable ANN hardware suited for real-world applications. The team’s breakthrough marks a step change in the development of compact, power-efficient AI processors that could enable faster, more responsive computing.
Metamaterials are artificially-structured materials with extraordinary properties not easily found in nature. With engineered three-dimensional (3D) geometries at the micro- and nanoscale, these architected materials achieve unique mechanical and physical properties with capabilities beyond those of conventional materials — and have emerged over the past decade as a promising way to engineering challenges where all other existing materials have lacked success.
Architected materials exhibit unique mechanical and functional properties, but their full potential remains untapped due to challenges in design, fabrication, and characterization. Improvements and scalability in this space could help transform a range of industries, from biomedical implants, sports equipment, automotive and aerospace, and energy and electronics.
“Advances in scalable fabrication, high-throughput testing, and AI-driven design optimization could revolutionize the mechanics and materials science disciplines, enabling smarter, more adaptive materials that redefine engineering and everyday technologies,” says Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
In a Perspective published this month in the journal Nature Materials, Portela and James Surjadi, a postdoc in mechanical engineering, discuss key hurdles, opportunities, and future applications in the field of mechanical metamaterials. The paper is titled “Enabling three-dimensional architected materials across length scales and timescales.”
“The future of the field requires innovation in fabricating these materials across length scales, from nano to macro, and progress in understanding them at a variety of time scales, from slow deformation to dynamic impact,” says Portela, adding that it also demands interdisciplinary collaboration.
A Perspective is a peer-reviewed content type that the journal uses to invite reflection or discussion on matters that may be speculative, controversial, or highly technical, and where the subject matter may not meet the criteria for a Review.
“We felt like our field, following substantial progress over the last decade, is still facing two bottlenecks: issues scaling up, and no knowledge or understanding of properties under dynamic conditions,” says Portela, discussing the decision to write the piece.
Portela and Surjadi’s paper summarizes state-of-the-art approaches and highlights existing knowledge gaps in material design, fabrication, and characterization. It also proposes a roadmap to accelerate the discovery of architected materials with programmable properties via the synergistic combination of high-throughput experimentation and computational efforts, toward leveraging emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for their design and optimization.
“High-throughput miniaturized experiments, non-contact characterization, and benchtop extreme-condition methods will generate rich datasets for the implementation of data-driven models, accelerating the optimization and discovery of metamaterials with unique properties,” says Surjadi.
The Portela Lab’s motto is “architected mechanics and materials across scales.” The Perspective aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and real-world applications of next-generation architected materials, and it presents a vision the lab has been working toward for the past four years.
Promising directions in the design, fabrication, characterization, and application of 3D architected materials (from left to right, top to bottom): 3D woven metamaterials, aperiodic self-assembled morphologies, microscale impact experiments, and pressure sensing functionalities.
Photos by Justin Knight; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Sy Boles
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Exhibit traces scholar’s quest to reconstruct abbey destroyed after French Revolution
Cluny III, once the largest building in Europe, was little more than rubble when Harvard architectural historian Kenneth Conant laid eyes on it in the 1920s. His efforts to painstakingly recreate the medieval abbey as it looked in the Middle Ages — outlined as part of an exhibition now on view at the Graduate School of Design — illustrate how architects learn to see what isn’t there.
“The exhibit is the story of a man and his passion, which is the Cluny abbey church, and how we can experience it today using modern tools,” said Matt Cook, digital scholarship program manager at Harvard Library, who worked closely with curator and architectural historian Christine Smith. “Several teams across Harvard Library allowed Christine to realize her vision for the exhibit with emerging technology.”
Construction began on the Benedictine abbey of Cluny III, located in the Burgundy region of France, in 1088. It stood for more than 700 years, growing to more than 500 feet long and 100 feet high; at one time, it was home to about 1,000 monks. But after the French Revolution, the impressive structure was demolished and sold for scrap materials.
When Conant first arrived at Cluny decades after its destruction, all that remained was the south transept and eight partially destroyed capitals, or the decorative tops of columns, which once stood behind the altar.
Conant received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard and taught architectural history at the University from 1920 to 1954. It was an era when architectural historians were still learning to classify medieval architecture and to understand what a building might have looked like in its original form before pieces were added or taken away over the centuries.
Kenneth Conant as a student at Harvard University.
Conant inside an excavation at Cluny III.
“It’s a kind of an idealism,” said Smith, who is the Robert C. and Marian K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History.
The “idealist” task that Conant gave himself was to imagine Cluny III as it once was, in excruciating detail, based on what he knew of similar buildings and on 20 years of excavations.
Conant tried to identify the original form of the abbey church before later additions were built.
Conant made precise illustrations of the inside of Cluny III from a variety of perspectives, all without ever seeing the building.
“It was unimaginably immense,” Christine Smith said of Cluny III.
Like Conant himself, “Envisioning Cluny” attempts to recreate the feeling of being inside one of medieval Europe’s largest buildings, long since ruined.
“In my own work, when I’m studying something, I try to know it in such reality and detail that I live it,” Smith said. “I think that’s what he’s doing: He’s living it. He wants to see it. He wants to feel it in many different ways. He wants to understand it objectively, but also in terms of the color, the light, how you moved around in it, how it felt to be there.”
Technology allows viewers to interact with architectural designs in ways Conant’s contemporaries could not have imagined.
The enduring mystery of the Cluny capitals
The eight capitals discovered at Cluny III fascinated Conant. They were damaged, with key details missing, but each seemed to feature ornate designs of people, plants, and musical instruments. It wasn’t clear which sides ought to face the front, or what order they should go in, or if they even told a cohesive story.
Some of the Cluny III capitals are theorized to represent the four seasons, the four winds, and the eight modes of music.
It’s possible that sculptors drew inspiration from the columns from the illustrations in contemporary manuscripts.
“Some people think they’re all by one sculptor; other people think they’re by two identifiable sculptors; other people think we don’t know,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about them, which is what’s fun.”
Early in his career, Conant hoped the columns told a single story about the virtues of monastic life, Smith said. But eventually, he came to believe there was little uniting them as an octet. To this day, there are no firm answers, but they remain an object of study as one of the earliest examples of figural sculpture in the Romanesque era.
From plaster casts to 3D
Contemporary students of architectural history don’t have to rely on the stone capitals themselves, or even the unwieldy plaster casts that scholars have traditionally used as aids.
Use your cursor or fingers to manipulate these 3D recreations of Cluny casts.
Using a method called photogrammetry, Harvard Library Imaging Services photographed the plaster casts of the Cluny columns to create the 3D models that are featured in the exhibit. The team took hundreds of individual photos of each capital cast to create each model. Additionally, library conservators, archivists, and curators prepared the print and photo reproductions on display.
Viewers can interact with historic architectural designs up close.
With the 3D scans, Smith and her students can zoom in, rotate, and rearrange the eight capitals and each of their designs in a way previous generations never could, giving them new insight into the enduring puzzle of the octet.
“I can compare them in a way that I can’t with the plaster cast,” Smith said. “I can look at all eight of them in a row.”
It’s a different experience for today’s architectural students than for Conant and his contemporaries, she said. But at the core, the exercise is the same: Learning to see what’s there, and learning to imagine what’s not.
“Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025” is on display through April 4 in the Druker Design Gallery.
Rakesh Khurana shares lessons learned at helm — and as an influencer, off- and online
Melih Cevik ’27
Harvard Correspondent
long read
Danoff Dean of Harvard College to step down at end of academic year after 11-year tenure of advances, innovation, and challenges (including pandemic)
For Rakesh Khurana, understanding the mission comes first. Without it, the what-do-we-do-next-and-how are meaningless.
That principle helped guide Khurana, who will step down at the end of the academic year after 11 years as the Danoff Dean of Harvard College and return to teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at Harvard Business School.
Khurana, the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development and a professor of sociology, first arrived at Harvard in 1993 for graduate school, earning a master’s in sociology in 1997 and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 1998.
During his tenure as dean, Khurana worked to enhance opportunities in the arts and public service, reorganized office infrastructure to better align supports for students, helped launch the Intellectual Vitality initiative, and defended the goal of recruiting students to the University from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences.
And, of course, he built a presence on Instagram affectionately known as the Deanstagram. In this edited conversation, Khurana talks about the work he’s done and the lessons he’s learned — about himself and the community.
You’re one of the longest serving deans of Harvard College. Can you talk a bit about aspects of your tenure that you found particularly gratifying?
I think I’ve had the best role in higher education. As an immigrant to this country, growing up in a family that held higher education and education as sacred and Harvard as being one of the institutions that embodied that idea, I feel lucky.
Part of what we accomplished from the start was knowing that we were going to be a mission-oriented organization and institution, going back to the founding. Our aim has been to educate citizen leaders and be clear how we do it — through the transformative experience of a liberal arts and science education and developing specificity around the intellectual, the social, and personal transformation.
One of the things that I feel good about is that there’s a strong sense of understanding of the College’s mission. That clarity has let us take numerous actions on everything ranging from adopting an honor code, which is emblematic of the kind of aspiration that we want to have for our students, to the renewal of the Gen Ed program, which occurred at a time when there was a debate over whether it would even continue.
The commitment to the idea of a general education that’s broad and anchored in the liberal arts and that centers on important questions of society is really critical. Professor Michael Sandel’s renewed class “Justice” is one example of creating a intergenerational connection between our students and alumni who took that class decades earlier that both honors the past, but that’s also relevant/critical for the issues of today.
I am also proud of our work on the Intellectual Vitality initiative, which was something the team had been focused on for several years. Having a data-informed but also flexible approach helped us recognize how Harvard could avoid the fashion of the day and rather commit to substance on these issues. I hope the approach of holding true to our mission and at the same time evolving is remembered as one of the mainstays of my deanship.
“To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege.”
During your tenure as dean, you faced various challenges. Is there one you think you learned the most from?
Universities reflect the world, but they can also magnify what is happening beyond our campus. Bringing together people who are, for the first time, living with and learning from people with very different backgrounds and experiences is probably the greatest opportunity we have.
But creating this community requires building a lot of capacities and skills and role modeling. Maybe in the past we could take for granted that this all existed, but I think we can’t assume that students and faculty and staff are coming here with this understanding.
We have to recognize that Harvard is not a perfect institution. I think recognizing this work of bringing together people with different backgrounds and experiences has existed in this institution from Day One. This is an institution that recognizes that excellence comes in a variety of forms. In the process of that evolving understanding we get closer to our motto of veritas.
How different was the job of being dean from what you expected?
My background is as an organizational sociologist, and my particular focus is studying institutions, leadership, and bureaucracy. In that field, you learn a lot of theory, do empirical work, write case studies.
There’s a lot of knowing, and then there’s the doing, and then you discover the knowing/doing gap. While some of what you teach are concepts that are helpful and useful, they’re often ideal types that don’t take into account all the particular contingencies and challenges of the specific experiences.
There are three things that, for me, held true. A sense of mission — “What is our purpose?” The vision — “Where are we going?” And the values, or “How are we going to get there?” The power of that is something I’d been teaching about for years, and it’s so interesting to see how powerful it is and how easy it is to forget. I start every meeting with the College mission. If people who are leading are not minding the mission and the vision and the values, who is?
The second lesson that I learned is the microscope that we’re under. When you’re in a position of responsibility, you are constantly role modeling. People are not just paying attention to what you say, but to what you do. Your walk has to be your talk. In fact, your walk is probably more important than your talk.
Something you learn working with students and your team is that you’re a coach, and you’re often trying to figure out what people’s aspirational skills are, what their motivations are. While you’re coaching them to try to help connect those two, in the process you’re coaching yourself.
The other thing I learned is that we’re all works in progress. We’re all trying to become better versions of ourselves. If you’re surrounded by people who care about the mission, who understand the vision of where we’re going, and desire to operate with those values, you can create incredible trust, allowing you to do important things, including getting through some really difficult moments.
Structurally, the most difficult moment was COVID-19.
In many ways we had to live without the things that made us distinctive, the day-to-day being on this campus: the serendipity, the sense of learning to see behind each other’s eyes and hear from each other’s perspectives, not only in the classroom but in the dining halls, in our student organizations. To de-densify campus in a short time period, to try to deal with the reality of the situation, the uncertainty that it presented, and keep academic continuity. Keeping the academic mission going and then restarting and bringing people back to campus in a safe way with the protocols and the testing. That was the most challenging moment, but it was the moment where the University worked as one institution to move forward in a really powerful way.
“Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game.”
You’ve been vocal in warning about the challenge higher education faces with declining trust. How do we rebuild that?
Rebuilding trust is not something that can be done overnight. Part of what we have to do is to make sure that our core is quite strong. The basic functions that people expect of a university around teaching and research must be rock-solid.
For a place like Harvard our legitimacy has depended on two things: a commitment to academic excellence and a commitment to meritocracy.
I would say there are three things that institutions like ours should be doing. One is that we convene excellence — in our faculty, our students, and staff. We should be highlighting excellence in bringing people together.
Second is our commitment to veritas. The reason we depend on academic excellence and meritocracy is that it gets you to a better understanding of the truth. We need to be an institution that lives with an uncomfortable truth rather than a comfortable delusion.
The third thing we need to do is streamline as an institution.
In our commitment to being a place where people across differences and backgrounds and experiences can openly and thoughtfully discuss complex issues, we have two responsibilities.
First, we have to make sure that if we’re asking families to invest in our education, we have to educate effectively.
Then there’s the moral responsibility. Any institution that takes on the responsibility of educating youth is a moral institution at the same time. And this cannot be politicized. When you are politicized, people believe you are producing biased research, not encouraging independent thinking, inculcating ideology, or not allowing for conversations on difficult topics.
Many in the community think one of your defining characteristics is your approachability. Is that something that you’ve always had, or did you develop that over time, and if so how?
It would probably surprise people that during the time I spent in college, I could count on my hands how many times I ate a meal with somebody. I had a small group of friends, but they kept very different hours than I did. They were all artists and painters, and so they would work like night owls. I was in social science and would get up early, go to the library to study.
I ate most of my meals by myself, but I never felt lonely. I had my books. I always felt I was in conversation with scholars like Max Weber, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, and others. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people. I was using the four years I had in college to do something I didn’t think I’d ever have the time to do again — work on my thinking and understanding of the world.
In hindsight, I think I should have realized that I had just as much to learn from my peers. Something I learned from my mother and from Stephanie, my partner, is that everybody has an important and interesting story to tell.
My mother would always say, “Nobody’s better than you, but you’re also not better than anyone else.” That kind of humility is something that I just love my parents for because when I came to graduate school I just found myself being friends with and getting to know everybody — not only my peers, but also the custodial staff and the staff at the sociology department and at HBS. I just started realizing that everybody had such an interesting story to tell.
I would often look for the student who was sitting by themselves at a meal and think to myself, “I wish somebody would have sat with me at that time.” I always found myself drawn to sitting with students, which culminated in us becoming faculty deans at Cabot House. That’s when I became comfortable with being uncomfortable in terms of just sitting with somebody new and asking them a couple of questions, and it has become one of the most joyful parts of my day.
Something that you’ve often spoken about is being an immigrant kid who attended New York City public schools. Did that kid ever think he would be the dean of one of the world’s leading educational institutions?
I was born in India. My parents immigrated to the U.S. the same way millions of other families have for the same reason of trying to build a better life for their kids, and primarily for the educational opportunities.
My mother was a public school teacher in the Bronx, and my dad was an accountant for the city. I always remember that we would move because my mom would look at which schools had higher Regents scores, even a couple of blocks, so that we would be zoned for that school. I know firsthand the transformative power that education has — not just on the individual life, but the generational impact that it has.
My higher education experience began at SUNY Binghamton, and then I transferred to Cornell when a professor came up to me after class and said, “You’re doing well in this class. You should think about transferring to Cornell.” I was like, “Why?” He said, “I went there, and I think you would do really well.”
I had never had a teacher say something like that. It showed the power of a teacher seeing something in you that you didn’t even see yourself. This highlights the power of the mission. How do you create those opportunities for interaction where a conversation, question, or suggestion ends up shaping and changing the trajectory of your life?
After college, I worked in a small tech startup that ended up growing. Somebody from HBS came to write a case study on the company and that conversation led me to apply to graduate school. The next year I was at Harvard.
What does working on this campus mean to you now that you’ve been teaching and leading for so many years?
One of the things I love to do is just go to higher education institutions and visit campuses. I remember the first time seeing the libraries, the first place I would go when visiting. Visiting Cornell’s Sage Hall library, Widener and Baker libraries at Harvard, and dropping off my brothers at Dartmouth and Wesleyan.
To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege. At times when things can feel challenging, we need to remember that colleges and universities are a candle in the darkness. We have a special responsibility to make sure that that candle is burning bright.
Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game. Our aspirations should always run ahead of our reality.
Final question: Are we going to have to go to Allston to get a selfie?
It will be interesting to highlight the life of a professor, so I plan on continuing my Instagram. I think sharing our experiences on campus helps also with the element of rebuilding trust, because it takes away the mythology that institutions like ours don’t have people who are working hard and trying to do their best for the world. As former President Drew Faust said, “Harvard’s not trying to be the best in the world. It’s trying to be the best for the world.” My sense is that is what the community is, but you can’t tell that. You have to show it.
Weill Cornell Medicine and Weill Bugando School of Medicine collaborate to strengthen medical education, health care and innovative global health research at both institutions.
Metamaterials are artificially-structured materials with extraordinary properties not easily found in nature. With engineered three-dimensional (3D) geometries at the micro- and nanoscale, these architected materials achieve unique mechanical and physical properties with capabilities beyond those of conventional materials — and have emerged over the past decade as a promising way to engineering challenges where all other existing materials have lacked success.
Architected materials exhibit unique mechanical and functional properties, but their full potential remains untapped due to challenges in design, fabrication, and characterization. Improvements and scalability in this space could help transform a range of industries, from biomedical implants, sports equipment, automotive and aerospace, and energy and electronics.
“Advances in scalable fabrication, high-throughput testing, and AI-driven design optimization could revolutionize the mechanics and materials science disciplines, enabling smarter, more adaptive materials that redefine engineering and everyday technologies,” says Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
In a Perspective published this month in the journal Nature Materials, Portela and James Surjadi, a postdoc in mechanical engineering, discuss key hurdles, opportunities, and future applications in the field of mechanical metamaterials. The paper is titled “Enabling three-dimensional architected materials across length scales and timescales.”
“The future of the field requires innovation in fabricating these materials across length scales, from nano to macro, and progress in understanding them at a variety of time scales, from slow deformation to dynamic impact,” says Portela, adding that it also demands interdisciplinary collaboration.
A Perspective is a peer-reviewed content type that the journal uses to invite reflection or discussion on matters that may be speculative, controversial, or highly technical, and where the subject matter may not meet the criteria for a Review.
“We felt like our field, following substantial progress over the last decade, is still facing two bottlenecks: issues scaling up, and no knowledge or understanding of properties under dynamic conditions,” says Portela, discussing the decision to write the piece.
Portela and Surjadi’s paper summarizes state-of-the-art approaches and highlights existing knowledge gaps in material design, fabrication, and characterization. It also proposes a roadmap to accelerate the discovery of architected materials with programmable properties via the synergistic combination of high-throughput experimentation and computational efforts, toward leveraging emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for their design and optimization.
“High-throughput miniaturized experiments, non-contact characterization, and benchtop extreme-condition methods will generate rich datasets for the implementation of data-driven models, accelerating the optimization and discovery of metamaterials with unique properties,” says Surjadi.
The Portela Lab’s motto is “architected mechanics and materials across scales.” The Perspective aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and real-world applications of next-generation architected materials, and it presents a vision the lab has been working toward for the past four years.
Promising directions in the design, fabrication, characterization, and application of 3D architected materials (from left to right, top to bottom): 3D woven metamaterials, aperiodic self-assembled morphologies, microscale impact experiments, and pressure sensing functionalities.
Six current MIT affiliates and 27 additional MIT alumni have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The 2024 class of AAAS Fellows includes 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators, spanning all 24 of AAAS disciplinary sections, who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.
Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, life member of the MIT Corporation, was named a AAAS Fellow “for outstanding leadership in biotechnology, in particular mRNA therapeutics, and for advocacy for recognition of the contributions of immigrants to economic and scientific progress.” Afeyan is the founder and CEO of the venture creation company Flagship Pioneering, which has built over 100 science-based companies to transform human health and sustainability. He is also the chairman and cofounder of Moderna, which was awarded a 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the development of its Covid-19 vaccine. Afeyan earned his PhD in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987 and was a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management for 16 years, starting in 2000. Among other activities at the Institute, he serves on the advisory board of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and delivered MIT’s 2024 Commencement address.
Cynthia Breazeal SM ’93, ScD ’00 is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group in the MIT Media Lab. At MIT Open Learning, she is the MIT dean for digital learning, and in this role, she leverages her experience in emerging digital technologies and business, research, and strategic initiatives to lead Open Learning’s business and research and engagement units. She is also the director of the MIT-wide Initiative on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (raise.mit.edu). She co-founded the consumer social robotics company, Jibo, Inc., where she served as chief scientist and chief experience officer. She is recognized for distinguished contributions in the field of artificial intelligence education, particularly around the use of social robots, and learning at scale.
Alan Edelman PhD ’89 is an applied mathematics professor for the Department of Mathematics and leads the Applied Computing Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the MIT Julia Lab. He is recognized as a 2024 AAAS fellow for distinguished contributions and outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, random matrix theory, computational science, and in particular for the development of the Julia programming language. Edelman has been elected a fellow of five different societies — AMS, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and AAAS.
Robert B. Millard '73, life member and chairman emeritus of the MIT Corporation, was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for outstanding contributions to the scientific community and U.S. higher education "through exemplary leadership service to such storied institutions as AAAS and MIT." Millard joined the MIT Corporation as a term member in 2003 and was elected a life member in 2013. He served on the Executive Committee for 10 years and on the Investment Company Management Board for seven years, including serving as its chair for the last four years. He served as a member of the Visiting Committees for Physics, Architecture, and Chemistry. In addition, Millard has served as a member of the Linguistics and Philosophy Visiting Committee, the Corporation Development Committee, and the Advisory Council for the Council for the Arts. In 2011, Millard received the Bronze Beaver Award, the MIT Alumni Association’s highest honor for distinguished service.
Jagadeesh S. Moodera is a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics. His research interests include experimental condensed matter physics: spin polarized tunneling and nano spintronics; exchange coupled ferromagnet/superconductor interface, triplet pairing, nonreciprocal current transport and memory toward superconducting spintronics for quantum technology; and topological insulators/superconductors, including Majorana bound state studies in metallic systems. His research in the area of spin polarized tunneling led to a breakthrough in observing tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) at room temperature in magnetic tunnel junctions. This resulted in a huge surge in this area of research, currently one of the most active areas. TMR effect is used in all ultra-high-density magnetic data storage, as well as for the development of nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM) that is currently being advanced further in various electronic devices, including for neuromorphic computing architecture. For his leadership in spintronics, the discovery of TMR, the development of MRAM, and for mentoring the next generation of scientists, Moodera was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow. For his TMR discovery he was awarded the Oliver Buckley Prize (2009) by the American Physical Society (APS), named an American National Science Foundation Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow (2008-10), won IBM and TDK Research Awards (1995-98), and became a Fellow of APS (2000).
Noelle Eckley Selin, the director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, uses atmospheric chemistry modeling to inform decision-making strategies on air pollution, climate change, and toxic substances, including mercury and persistent organic pollutants. She has also published articles and book chapters on the interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations, in particular focusing on global efforts to regulate hazardous chemicals and persistent organic pollutants. She is named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for world-recognized leadership in modeling the impacts of air pollution on human health, in assessing the costs and benefits of related policies, and in integrating technology dynamics into sustainability science.
Additional MIT alumni honored as 2024 AAAS Fellows include: Danah Boyd SM ’02 (Media Arts and Sciences); Michael S. Branicky ScD ’95 (EECS); Jane P. Chang SM ’95, PhD ’98 (Chemical Engineering); Yong Chen SM '99 (Mathematics); Roger Nelson Clark PhD '80 (EAPS); Mark Stephen Daskin ’74, PhD ’78 (Civil and Environmental Engineering); Marla L. Dowell PhD ’94 (Physics); Raissa M. D’Souza PhD ’99 (Physics); Cynthia Joan Ebinger SM '86, PhD '88 (EAPS/WHOI); Thomas Henry Epps III ’98, SM ’99 (Chemical Engineering); Daniel Goldman ’94 (Physics); Kenneth Keiler PhD ’96 (Biology); Karen Jean Meech PhD '87 (EAPS); Christopher B. Murray PhD ’95 (Chemistry); Jason Nieh '89 (EECS); William Nordhaus PhD ’67 (Economics); Milica Radisic PhD '04 (Chemical Engineering); James G. Rheinwald PhD ’76 (Biology); Adina L. Roskies PhD ’04 (Philosophy); Linda Rothschild (Preiss) PhD '70 (Mathematics); Soni Lacefield Shimoda PhD '03 (Biology); Dawn Y. Sumner PhD ’95 (EAPS); Tina L. Tootle PhD ’04 (Biology); Karen Viskupic PhD '03 (EAPS); Brant M. Weinstein PhD ’92 (Biology); Chee Wei Wong SM ’01, ScD ’03 (Mechanical Engineering; and Fei Xu PhD ’95 (Brain and Cognitive Sciences).
Among the 2024 AAAS Fellows are six current faculty, research staff, and MIT Corporation members. Top row (l-r): Noubar Afeyan, Cynthia Breazeal, and Alan Edelman; bottom row (l-r) Robert Millard, Jagadeesh Moodera, and Noelle Selin.
Scholar in literacy development and early learning has served as interim dean since July 2024
Nicole Rura
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
Nonie K. Lesaux, the Roy Edward Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development, has been named dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Lesaux has served as interim dean since July.
“For the past eight months, Nonie has led as interim dean with a wonderful combination of energy and insight,” said Harvard President Alan M. Garber. “Amid unprecedented challenges to both K-12 and higher education, she has demonstrated her ability to meet the moment, bringing to her work courage, humility, and respect in equal measure, motivated always by a deep sense of obligation to the School and its vital mission.”
Lesaux is a developmental psychologist whose career has focused on strategies and innovations to improve learning opportunities and literacy outcomes for children and youth and on leading system-level change in education.
She is currently co-director of the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative at the Ed School, which addresses the global challenge of scaling and improving the quality of early education through research, professional development for educational leaders, and graduate training. The Zaentz initiative includes the Early Learning Study at Harvard, a first-of-its-kind statewide study that examines the effects of early education and care settings on children’s learning and development.
“This is a complex time for the education sector, but I can think of no institution better matched to address today’s needs,” Lesaux said. “In the eight months since I assumed the role of interim dean, I have witnessed the ways in which our Ed School community has stepped up to think both critically and collaboratively about our mission and work in service to society. Our collective effort matters more today than perhaps ever.”
A widely respected scholar and educator, Lesaux has written and edited numerous scholarly publications on children’s literacy development and learning. She has also translated ideas from her research into several books for school leaders and educators.
This work has informed how states and districts approach the teaching of reading across the country, including inspiring Massachusetts legislation intended to advance third-grade reading proficiency. Her research was also used to establish a framework for literacy reform in the New York City and Chicago public schools.
Lesaux has served in leadership roles on the national and state level, including as a member of the U.S. Department of Education’s Reading First Advisory Committee and the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council’s Committee on the Science of Children Birth to Age 8.
In addition, she chaired the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care from 2015 to 2022, which provided oversight of the state agency that licenses and supports childcare and community-based public programs for young children.
Her previous institutional leadership roles at the Ed School include academic dean and faculty director of doctoral studies.
“I’m delighted that Nonie Lesaux will become dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,” said Provost John F. Manning. “She is a collaborative, creative, and inspiring leader, who will lead HGSE with distinction.”
Lesaux joined the Ed School faculty in 2003 as an assistant professor. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia and was a postdoctoral research fellow at BC Children’s Hospital. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology, with honors, from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada.
Lesaux has earned numerous honors, including the William T. Grant Scholars Award and the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young professionals beginning their independent research careers. In 2019 she was elected to the National Academy of Education.
She serves on the board of the Spencer Foundation and as an expert consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.
Lesaux succeeds Bridget Long, the Saris Professor of Education and Economics at the Ed School and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, who left the post at the end of the last academic year.
With just over 2 weeks to go until the showdown on the River Thames, the Light Blues are gearing up to defend their titles. Cambridge leads the historic tally in both the men’s and women’s events and will be looking to extend their dominance when they take on Oxford on Sunday 13 April 2025.
Men’s Blue Boat:
• Cox: Ollie Boyne (Downing College)
• Stroke: Douwe de Graaf (St Edmund’s)
• Luca Ferraro (Peterhouse)
• James Robson (Peterhouse)
• George Bourne (Peterhouse)
• Gabriel Mahler (Peterhouse)
• Tom Macky (St Edmund’s)
• Noam Mouelle (Hughes Hall)
• Bow: Simon Hatcher (Peterhouse)
Countdown to The Boat Race 2025
The prestigious race, one of the oldest amateur sporting events in the world, will take place along the 6.8 km Championship Course from Putney to Mortlake. The Women's Boat Race will commence at 1:21pm British Summer Time (BST), followed by the Men's Boat Race at 2:21pm BST.
Cambridge’s women’s crew enters the race as the defending champions and currently leads the overall tally at 48-30. Meanwhile, Cambridge’s men’s crew also holds the advantage, leading Oxford 87-81, with one historic dead heat in 1877.
Praise for the athletes
Siobhan Cassidy, Chair of The Boat Race Company, congratulated the athletes on their selection for one of the Blue Boats. “I am not sure that everyone appreciates just what it takes to compete at this level,” she told the event.
“Having witnessed the intense training over a number of years, I can tell you these guys are no ordinary students; they combine their academic courses with a high-performance rowing programme. Their commitment to excellence on and off the water is truly extraordinary. It is nothing short of superhuman.”
Renowned BBC Sport commentator Andrew Cotter, who hosted the event, emphasised the purity of The Boat Race in today’s sporting landscape. “In the modern era of sport, when so much is inflated by money and professionalism, this is sport stripped back to its essence,” he said.
“It is pure competition, it is about winning and losing. And I know that’s how the athletes feel about it, but they also feel that this is where they will make friendships that will last a lifetime.”
Historic firsts and environmental commitments
This year’s event will also see a landmark moment in Boat Race history. Sarah Winckless MBE will become the first woman to umpire the Men’s Boat Race on the Championship Course. Sir Matthew Pinsent CBE will oversee the Women’s Boat Race.
Additionally, The Boat Race Company, alongside the Cambridge and Oxford University Boat Clubs, have given their support to the London Rivers’ Pledge, a 10-year environmental initiative focused on improving water quality and sustainability on the Thames and beyond.
With the crews now announced and excitement continuing to build, all eyes will be on the Thames this April as Cambridge and Oxford prepare to write the next chapter in their historic rivalry.
The stage has been set for The Boat Race 2025, with Cambridge University Boat Club announcing its Women’s and Men’s Blue Boats at the historic Battersea Power Station in London.
Four leading research institutions, including Weill Cornell Medicine, have united under the Weill Cancer Hub East, an innovative, collaborative partnership that aims to transform cancer treatment.
Joshua Rabinowitz will direct Princeton’s role in the Weill Cancer Hub East, a collaboration with The Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research dedicated to making immunotherapy more effective for cancer patients.
On 27 March 2025, Gaia’s control team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre switched off the spacecraft’s subsystems and sent it into a ‘retirement orbit’ around the Sun.
Though the spacecraft’s operations are now over, the scientific exploitation of Gaia’s data has just begun.
Launched in 2013, Gaia has transformed our understanding of the cosmos by mapping the positions, distances, motions, and properties of nearly two billion stars and other celestial objects. It has provided the largest, most precise multi-dimensional map of our galaxy ever created, revealing its structure and evolution in unprecedented detail.
The mission uncovered evidence of past galactic mergers, identified new star clusters, contributed to the discovery of exoplanets and black holes, mapped millions of quasars and galaxies, and tracked hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets. The mission has also enabled the creation of the best visualisation of how our galaxy might look to an outside observer.
“The data from the Gaia satellite has and is transforming our understanding of the Milky Way, how it formed, how it has evolved and how it will evolve,” said Dr Nicholas Walton from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, lead of the Gaia UK project team. “Gaia has been in continuous operation for over 10 years, faultless, without interruption, reflecting the quality of the engineering, with significant elements of Gaia designed and built in the UK. But now it is time for its retirement. Gaia has finished its observations of the night sky. But the analysis of the Gaia mission data continues. Later in 2026 sees the next Gaia Data Release 4, to further underpin new discovery unravelling the beauty and mystery of the cosmos.”
Gaia far exceeded its planned lifetime of five years, and its fuel reserves are dwindling. The Gaia team considered how best to dispose of the spacecraft in line with ESA’s efforts to responsibly dispose of its missions.
They wanted to find a way to prevent Gaia from drifting back towards its former home near the scientifically valuable second Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun-Earth system and minimise any potential interference with other missions in the region.
“Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job,” said Gaia Spacecraft Operator Tiago Nogueira. “But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off.
“We had to design a decommissioning strategy that involved systematically picking apart and disabling the layers of redundancy that have safeguarded Gaia for so long, because we don’t want it to reactivate in the future and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sunlight.”
On 27 March, the Gaia control team ran through this series of passivation activities. One final use of Gaia’s thrusters moved the spacecraft away from L2 and into a stable retirement orbit around the Sun that will minimise the chance that it comes within 10 million kilometres of Earth for at least the next century.
The team then deactivated and switched off the spacecraft’s instruments and subsystems one by one, before deliberately corrupting its onboard software. The communication subsystem and the central computer were the last to be deactivated.
Gaia’s final transmission to ESOC mission control marked the conclusion of an intentional and carefully orchestrated farewell to a spacecraft that has tirelessly mapped the sky for over a decade.
Though Gaia itself has now gone silent, its contributions to astronomy will continue to shape research for decades. Its vast and expanding data archive remains a treasure trove for scientists, refining knowledge of galactic archaeology, stellar evolution, exoplanets and much more.
“No other mission has had such an impact over such a broad range of astrophysics. It continues to be the source of over 2,000 peer-reviewed papers per year, more than any other space mission,” said Gaia UK team member Dr Dafydd Wyn Evans, also from the Institute of Astronomy. “It is sad that its observing days are over, but work is continuing in Cambridge, and across Europe, to process and calibrate the final data so that Gaia will still be making its impact felt for many years in the future.”
A workhorse of galactic exploration, Gaia has charted the maps that future explorers will rely on to make new discoveries. The star trackers on ESA’s Euclid spacecraft use Gaia data to precisely orient the spacecraft. ESA’s upcoming Plato mission will explore exoplanets around stars characterised by Gaia and may follow up on new exoplanetary systems discovered by Gaia.
The Gaia control team also used the spacecraft’s final weeks to run through a series of technology tests. The team tested Gaia’s micro propulsion system under different challenging conditions to examine how it had aged over more than ten years in the harsh environment of space. The results may benefit the development of future ESA missions relying on similar propulsion systems, such as the LISA mission.
The Gaia spacecraft holds a deep emotional significance for those who worked on it. As part of its decommissioning, the names of around 1500 team members who contributed to its mission were used to overwrite some of the back-up software stored in Gaia’s onboard memory.
Personal farewell messages were also written into the spacecraft’s memory, ensuring that Gaia will forever carry a piece of its team with it as it drifts through space.
As Gaia Mission Manager Uwe Lammers put it: “We will never forget Gaia, and Gaia will never forget us.”
The Cambridge Gaia DPAC team is responsible for the analysis and generation of the Gaia photometric and spectro-photometric data products, and it also generated the Gaia photometric science alert stream for the duration of the satellite's in-flight operations.
Adapted from a media release by the European Space Agency.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been powered down, after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
We were delighted to welcome pupils from Warrington’s Lymm High School, Ipswich High School, The Charter School in North Dulwich, Rickmansworth School, Sutton Valance School in Maidstone as well as schools closer to home such as St Peter’s Huntingdon, Fenstanton Primary School, Barton Primary School, Impington Village College and St Andrews School in Soham.
Running over two days (25/26 March 2025) and held in the Cambridge Sports Centre, students went on a great alien hunt with Dr Matt Bothwell from the Institute of Astronomy, stepped back in time to explore Must Farm with Department of Archaeology and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit as well as learning to disagree well with Dr Elizabeth Phillips from The Woolf Institute.
Schools had a choice of workshops from a range of departments including, how to think like an engineer and making sustainable food with biotechnology with researchers from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, as well as the chance to get hands-on experience in the world of materials science and explore how properties of materials can be influenced by temperature at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy.
The Department of Veterinary Medicine offered students the opportunity to find out what a career in veterinary medicine may look like with workshops on animal x-rays, how different professionals work together to treat animals in a veterinary hospital as well as meeting the departments horses and cows and learn how veterinarians diagnose and treat these large animals.
Students also had the opportunity to learn about antibodies and our immune system with the MRC Toxicology Unit. The students learnt about the incredible job antibodies do defending our bodies against harmful invaders like bacteria and viruses.
Alongside this, a maths trail, developed by Cambridgeshire County Council, guided students around the West Cambridge site whilst testing their maths skills with a number of problems to solve.
Now in their third year, the Cambridge Festival schools days are offering students the opportunity to experience studying at Cambridge with a series of curriculum linked talks and hands on workshops.
The Cambridge Festival runs from 19 March – 4 April and is a mixture of online, on-demand and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening at Cambridge. The public have the chance to meet some of the researchers and thought-leaders working in some of the pioneering fields that will impact us all.
Over 500 KS2 and KS3 students from as far away as Warrington got the chance to experience studying at the University of Cambridge with a selection of lectures and workshops held as part of the Cambridge Festival.
Students make antibody keychains during a workshop with the MRC Toxicology Unit
The memorable evening, witnessed by over 2,000 spectators, set the perfect stage for the announcement of a new formal partnership between Cambridge University Association Football Club (CUAFC) and Cambridge United FC, strengthening the bond between the historic footballing institutions of the city.
The women’s match opened the night in dramatic fashion, with Cambridge securing a thrilling 3-2 comeback victory. Despite trailing 1-0 at halftime, the Light Blues displayed resilience and attacking intent in the second half. Johanna Niggemann (Gonville & Caius) equalised before Sakina Dhirani (Newnham) put Cambridge ahead. Oxford responded with a goal to level the score, but Alissa Sattentau (King’s) struck late to seal a hard-fought win, sending the home fans into jubilation.
Buoyed by the women’s success, the men’s team delivered a commanding performance, clinching a dominant 4-1 victory to secure their first Varsity triumph since 2019. Cambridge's attacking pressure paid off in the 38th minute when Cai La-Trobe Roberts (Jesus) broke the deadlock with a composed finish. Moments before halftime, he doubled his tally from the penalty spot. Asa Campbell (Fitzwilliam) extended the lead early in the second half, before La-Trobe Roberts completed his hat-trick with another spot-kick, sealing a comprehensive win. Although Oxford’s Captain, Noah Fletcher, converted a penalty late on, Cambridge’s dominance was never in doubt, with midfielders Captain Reece Linney (Girton) and Jesse Tapnack (Trinity) controlling the game throughout.
Following the Light Blues’ sensational Varsity double, Cambridge United FC and CUAFC announced a groundbreaking new partnership intended to deepen and develop collaboration between the two clubs to benefit the wider City of Cambridge community.
Professor David Cardwell, President Elect of CUAFC, highlighted the significance of the partnership, stating:“Cambridge can rightly lay claim to being the global birthplace of football, and CUAFC is proud to be unofficially ‘the oldest football club in the world’. The DNA of the game was discovered here in the city in 1848 when the first game took place on Parker’s Piece under what are now the modern rules.
“Over the last two years, Cambridge United and the University have developed a strong partnership in a number of different areas. We were very grateful that the Varsity matches were once again hosted so well at the Cledara Abbey Stadium. We agree that now is the right time to build on this and seek to deepen the relationship between our two football clubs. There is much we can potentially do together to help each other as clubs, and we share a desire to do more to help the City of Cambridge celebrate its status as the birthplace of the global game.”
Godric Smith CBE, Chair of the Cambridge United Foundation and Director at the Club, echoed these sentiments, emphasising the potential benefits of the collaboration: “Cambridge United is proud to be the professional football club from the university city that gave football to the world, so it is logical and long overdue to have a formal partnership between our two football clubs on both the men’s and women’s side.
“We are at the beginning and will work out the detail of the first steps over the coming months, but there is a united desire to explore how we can best help each other and, most importantly, the City of Cambridge. Areas of collaboration could include merchandising, facilities, sports science and coaching, data, community work and mentoring. We have a lot of resources and expertise between us, and it will be exciting to see how we can potentially make best use of them together over the months and years ahead.”
The announcement of the partnership capped off a remarkable night of football at the Cledara Abbey Stadium. With both the men’s and women’s teams showcasing their talent and determination on the pitch, and a new era of cooperation between Cambridge United and CUAFC beginning, the city’s footballing future looks brighter than ever.
Cambridge University football teams enjoyed a historic night on Friday 21 March, as both the men’s and women’s squads claimed stunning victories over Oxford in the football Varsity matches at Cambridge United FC’s Cledara Abbey Stadium.
Professor Ariando and Dr Stephen Lin Er Chow from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Physics have designed and synthesised a groundbreaking new material—a copper-free superconducting oxide—capable of superconducting at approximately 40 Kelvin (K), or about minus 233 degrees Celsius (deg C), under ambient pressure. This discovery further advances NUS’ and Singapore’s leadership at the forefront of high-temperature superconductivity research.
Nearly four decades after the discovery of copper oxide superconductivity, which earned the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics, the NUS researchers have now identified another high-temperature superconducting oxide that expands the understanding of unconventional superconductivity beyond copper oxides.
The promise of superconductors
Modern electronics generate heat and consume energy during operation. Superconductors, however, possess a unique property known as the zero-resistance state, which eliminates energy loss due to electrical resistance. In theory, this makes them ideal for modern electronic applications, addressing the world's growing energy demands.
Despite the discovery of thousands of superconducting materials, the vast majority function only at extremely low temperatures near absolute zero (0 K), or about minus 273 deg C, making them impractical for widespread use.
The 1987 Nobel Prize Breakthrough
Nearly 40 years ago, physicists Johannes Bednorz and Karl Müller discovered a new class of superconductors—copper oxides—which exhibit superconductivity at temperatures above 30 K, significantly higher than any previously known superconductors.
This breakthrough, which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics, laid the foundation for high-temperature superconductivity research. To this day, copper oxides remain the only superconducting oxides that function at temperatures above 30 K, or about minus 243 dec C, under ambient pressure, without requiring lattice compression.
A breakthrough beyond copper
In a series of studies, Prof Ariando and Dr Chow identified a direct correlation between interlayer interactions in layered systems and superconducting temperatures.
Building on this insight, the researchers developed a phenomenological model that predicted several compounds capable of high-temperature superconductivity, similar to copper oxides, but without copper.
The team successfully synthesised (Sm-Eu-Ca)NiO₂ nickel oxide, one of the predicted materials, and confirmed zero electrical resistance (superconductivity) well above 30 K in this compound.
Dr Chow stated, "As we predicted and designed, this non-copper-based superconducting oxide demonstrates high-temperature superconductivity under atmospheric pressure at sea level, without the need for additional compression—just like copper oxides. This finding suggests that unconventional high-temperature superconductivity is not exclusive to copper but could be a more widespread property among elements in the periodic table."
“This observation has profound implications for both theoretical understanding and experimental realisation of a broader scope of superconducting materials with practical applications in modern electronics,” added Prof Ariando.
The research breakthrough was published in the scientific journal Nature on 20 March 2025.
Expanding the frontier of high-temperature superconductors
"This is the first time since the Nobel-winning discovery that a copper-free high-temperature superconducting oxide has been found to function under ambient pressure," emphasised Prof Ariando.
"Additionally, this new material is highly stable under ambient conditions, significantly improving its accessibility."
This discovery has sparked growing interest, not only in the material itself but also in the broader potential for a new class of high-temperature superconductors.
Further research and future implications
The research team continues to investigate the material’s unique properties, exploring tuning parameters such as electronic occupancy shifting and hydrostatic pressure. These efforts aim to deepen the understanding of high-temperature superconducting mechanisms and pave the way for synthesising a broader family of superconductors with even higher operating temperatures.
Another contributor to this work includes Mr Zhaoyang Luo, an NUS PhD student with the research team, who demonstrated the high crystallinity and pure-phase nature of the synthesised material using electron microscopy.
This breakthrough represents a major step toward the development of next-generation superconducting materials, with practical applications in modern electronics and energy-efficient technologies.
The ETH spin-off Flink Robotics wants to revolutionize the handling of packages. Its founders Moritz Geilinger and Simon Huber have developed software that allows robots to work together and quickly take on new tasks.
Results from global collaboration raise questions about future of universe
Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. Tafreshi
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
3 min read
CfA astronomers play crucial role in DESI analysis of dark energy, matter
New results from the international Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, which includes researchers from Harvard, suggest that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be weakening over time. This suggests the standard model of how the universe works may need an update.
The fate of the universe hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy, which is the force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. DESI tracks dark energy’s influence by studying how matter is spread across the universe. The new analysis, using the largest 3D map of our universe ever made, looked at dark energy’s influence over the past 11 billion years.
The results, using the first three years of collected DESI data, were announced in a March 19 press release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Events in the very early universe left subtle patterns in how matter is distributed, a feature called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. That pattern acts as a standard ruler, with its size at different times directly affected by how the universe is expanding. Measuring the ruler at different distances shows researchers the strength of dark energy throughout history.
Combining the data of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars with the results from other experiments, scientists have stronger evidence that the impact of dark energy may be evolving in unexpected ways.
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) researchers, led by Harvard Professor Daniel Eisenstein and his group, were crucial contributors to the DESI collaboration in multiple ways, including co-developing algorithms and simulations that led to the latest results.
Cristhian Garcia Quintero is one of the collaboration leads on the cosmological interpretations of the results. Michael Rashkovetskyi performed calculations that are critical for the distance measurements. Claire Lamman is the co-chair of the DESI education and public outreach committee and helped create the visual material for the public. Eisenstein served as co-spokesperson of the collaboration from 2014 to 2020.
DESI involves more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab. The collaboration shared its findings in multiple papers to be posted on the online repository arXiv and in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California.
Alongside unveiling its latest dark energy results at the summit, the DESI collaboration also announced that its Data Release 1 is now available for anyone to explore. With detailed information on many millions of celestial objects, the data set will support a wide range of astrophysical research at CfA and elsewhere.
In addition to contributing to DESI’s cosmology goals, CfA researchers are using the collaboration to study galaxy evolution, the cosmic web, and the structure of the Milky Way. The DESI survey continues each clear night, extending its map of the cosmos and giving astronomers a continually improving view of the physics of the Universe.
Declassified JFK files provide ‘enhanced clarity’ on CIA actions, historian says
Declassified documents related to the President John F. Kennedy assassination were released on March 18.
George Walker IV/AP Photo
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer winner writing three-volume Kennedy biography, shares takeaways from declassified docs
Six decades later, Americans know a bit more about the CIA’s clandestine operations in the early 1960s, particularly in Cuba and Mexico, thanks to a new tranche of declassified documents concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy released last week.
The more than 77,000 pages released by the National Archives and Records Administration do not appear to contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusion that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. But historians say the papers hold important new details about the CIA’s involvement in foreign elections during the Cold War and its infiltration of Fidel Castro’s inner circle.
In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Fredrik Logevall, a professor of history and the Kennedy School’s Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs, highlights key details in the documents, shares what he’d still like to know, and offers some thoughts on why the assassination of JFK remains fodder for conspiracy theorists. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Logevall published the first book in a three-volume series on Kennedy in 2020. The second volume will be published next year.
What’s your impression of this new tranche of JFK records? Have you seen anything noteworthy so far?
With respect to the assassination, there’s little or nothing that’s new, at least in terms of what I’ve been able to see thus far. I can’t say I’m surprised — going in I didn’t expect we’d learn anything that would overturn our understanding of what happened in Dallas. The releases are, however, quite interesting on U.S. covert operations in the Cold War in the early 1960s. Some of them range beyond Kennedy’s years, but it’s for this period that they’re most interesting, especially with respect to Latin America. That’s actually been quite revealing to me.
“Interesting” in terms of what the CIA was doing or the volume of things they were doing back then?
In a way, it’s both. A lot of the “new” documents had been released before; the difference now is that they are unredacted. In 2017, for example, we got some really important CIA documents, but they would have certain words or passages blocked out. What’s been illuminating for me, even though it’s sometimes just a handful of words, is to have those words inserted. This matters, because as we know even a few words can change the meaning of a sentence or a passage dramatically. What we see with enhanced clarity is just how involved the United States was in other countries, not least in interfering in elections. In the past, country names or the names of leaders would have been omitted. Now they are there in black and white. There’s just something about seeing it say “Brazil” or “the Finnish elections,” for example, that makes this more clear, more stark. Also, you see just how large the presence of the CIA was. In certain embassies, those who are attached to the CIA could make up almost half the total personnel. Even those of us who are historians of the Cold War were somewhat taken aback by these figures. If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said that in this or that key embassy, there’s probably 20 percent max secretly attached to the CIA. I had no idea that it was sometimes approaching 40 or 50 percent.
Fredrik Logevall.
Photo by Peter Hessler
Did we learn more about why Kennedy had a fraught relationship with the CIA?
We have not, though this could be buried in there and I just haven’t seen it yet. I thought we might learn more about that important relationship. You’re right to say that there was a wariness between JFK and the agency for various reasons. Some authors have exaggerated the depth and width of the schism, but it was there.
What’s something notable that you discovered?
In one CIA document, dated April 24, 1963, we learn that 14 Cuban diplomats were our agents. That’s quite significant — the degree to which there were people inside the Cuban government who were, in fact, working for the agency. In terms of the so-called Operation Mongoose, which was the effort to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban government, this helps us better understand to what extent were Cubans assisting in that effort. Later in the same document, we learn that there were two Cuban ambassadors on the payroll who provided first-rate reports and were closest to the bone in what Castro was thinking.
What are some key questions historians still have about the Kennedy assassination? Is there much left to learn?
I would like to know more about Oswald’s movements before Dallas. I would like to know more about his visit to Mexico City, which was in late September-early October 1963, just a few weeks before the assassination. He was flirting with defecting to Cuba, and so, in Mexico City, he met with both Cuban diplomats and Soviet diplomats. What exactly was said in those conversations? I’m interested, more broadly, in what U.S. intelligence agencies knew and didn’t know about his whereabouts in these weeks. That’s maybe the biggest issue for me.
The JFK assassination is often cited as the progenitor of modern conspiracy theory culture. Why is there still so much suspicion around it?
Part of it is simply because a president was killed, a president seemingly in the prime of life. I think we human beings have a natural inclination to believe that great events must have great causes. It seems somehow impossible that it was a lone misfit named Lee Oswald who took it upon himself to shoot the president. There’s got to be more to it than that, we tell ourselves. And so, the conspiracies will continue to fly. Regardless of what these documents would or would not have revealed, it would not have satisfied people who believe others were involved.
Someone asked me why we don’t seem to have the same consuming interest in, say, Lincoln’s or RFK’s assassination. It might have something to do with a few things. First there’s the fact that Oswald himself was killed two days later. Understandably, this makes people say, “How was that allowed to happen?” Second, the Warren Commission, which was a government commission formed to investigate the murder, was serious and thorough, but it made mistakes, notably in neglecting to interview everyone it might. Third, the fact that the assassination was captured on film might make a difference. So many of us have seen the Zapruder film, and it lives on in our mind, makes the whole thing more real, more eternal. Finally, there’s the oft-heard suggestion — the implications of which I’m still trying to sort out myself — that something important was lost on that day in Dallas, that it marked the end of American innocence somehow.
Put all of that together, maybe you have part of the explanation for why this particular event has been such fodder for conspiracy theories.
A year into role, Chan School dean focused on driving change amid deep challenges
Andrea Baccarelli has laid out a vision for expanding the School’s impact while navigating a rapidly shifting landscape for federally funded research
9 min read
Andrea Baccarelli has been managing change since he started as dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in January 2024.
On his very first day, Baccarelli entered an environment where the war in Gaza exerted pressures across campus. More recently, rapid shifts in federal policies have raised immediate implications for the Chan School. With about 60 percent of its revenue coming from research grants, primarily from the federal government, the School would face a significant blow to its budget if deep cuts proposed by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies were implemented. Baccarelli has convened a financial planning group of senior leadership, including academic department chairs, to plan for the potential effects.
Amid these challenges, Baccarelli has been developing plans to expand Harvard Chan School’s reach by nurturing high-quality, interdisciplinary, solutions-focused science. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Baccarelli discusses this vision and his approach to current funding uncertainties.
You recently introduced your “AAA Vision” for Harvard Chan School. What does it look like?
Our work is all about saving lives through the highest quality science. That hasn’t changed since our School was founded 112 years ago. We have an exceptional track record. For instance, scientists at our School created a low-cost, easy-to-ship rehydration solution that has saved more than 25 million children from death due to diarrheal disease. They engineered infertile mosquitos to eradicate malaria and are developing new therapies to treat diabetes. Rooted in this record of excellence, the AAA Vision is a strategic path to expanding our impact still further. The three As, which grew out of my listening tour, stand for agile, accessible, and accountable.
Agility is all about being able to pivot quickly to respond to new opportunities. As a School, we must be more entrepreneurial. That will require forging collaborations — inside and outside of Harvard — with all sorts of people who are not traditional partners for public health, like engineers and industry CEOs. The way I see it, we all share an interest in developing solutions to problems with immense human and economic costs, like rising rates of Alzheimer’s disease and the spread of multi-drug-resistant infections. Public health is all about taking on these challenges, and we stand ready to work with anyone who can help.
The second A, accessibility, relates to both education and research. I hope to significantly expand our educational offerings by creating more short courses and certificate programs and by delivering more content online. There’s a tremendous need for public health knowledge in just about every profession, and Harvard Chan School has the potential to be a hub for people who want to expand their skills at any stage of their careers.
On the research front, we need to keep working to get our findings in front of pharma executives, biotech investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, the public, and potential collaborators — to make our science accessible. After all, our goal is not just to advance knowledge in the abstract, but to develop solutions that will make a real difference in people’s lives.
The final A is for accountable. We must be accountable to our mission, delivering the very best education and conducting the highest-impact research to improve health for all communities. We must also be accountable to our values. Public health starts at home, and I am committed to building a pluralistic and inclusive community where everyone feels welcomed and valued.
The uncertainties driven by shifts in federal policy are especially acute at Harvard Chan School, which relies heavily on federal grants. What impacts are you seeing at this point?
Unfortunately, we have had more than a dozen federal grants terminated so far because they do not align with new priorities at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. Those terminations have abruptly cut off important research.
Like the rest of the University, we are also closely monitoring the proposed NIH cut to facilities and administration funding. F&A funding is often called “indirect” funding, but there’s nothing indirect about it. It truly is essential funding for research. A cut of the size the NIH has proposed — to a flat rate of 15 percent — would be devastating. It would have huge impacts on our ability to do critical research in fields like preventing cancer, slowing neurodegeneration, and identifying dietary factors that contribute to longevity.
As dean, how are you considering addressing this gap in federal funding to support research at the School? Can philanthropy make up the difference?
Philanthropy plays a very important role in supporting our research and education mission, but it’s unrealistic to imagine it could make up for our long-standing partnership with the federal government. That said, we are working hard to connect with potential donors to explain why our work matters. In fact, I just got back from a trip to Europe where I talked to supporters in several countries. The top message I shared was that our research has tangible impacts in the real world, helping to shape policies and programs that keep us healthy. And donors can make that research happen.
As one example, private philanthropy just funded a 10-year study of the health impacts of wildfires. This is groundbreaking work: A multi-institutional team led by Harvard Chan researchers is assessing all the pollutants that people living near the Los Angeles wildfires have been exposed to, mapping how these toxins spread or dissipate over time, and tracking the short- and long-term health effects. It’s an incredibly important study, made possible entirely by a generous donor who loves L.A. and wants to protect the public’s health. I hope to encourage more such partnerships with philanthropists who are aligned with our mission of using science to build a world where everyone can thrive.
Returning to the AAA Vision: Can you share a bit more about how you’re approaching accountability and what that looks like with respect to the mission?
Yes, In fact, it’s fundamental to what we do at the Harvard Chan School.
We must put in place processes that ensure that our School’s courses and degree programs consistently offer the highest level of excellence. As a starting point, I recently appointed a faculty working group to review processes and criteria for appointing and renewing instructors. At Harvard Chan School, instructors are non-ladder appointees who play a crucial role in classroom teaching. I tasked this working group to ensure rigor and consistency in how our instructors are appointed and renewed and ensure they have the excellent academic credentials and specific expertise they need to teach classes with the depth and rigor our students deserve. We will then go through a similar process for each tier of academic appointment at Harvard Chan School — lecturers, research scientists, adjuncts, etc. To complement this initiative, I also plan to strengthen our internal review processes for courses and degree programs to ensure they consistently meet the highest academic standards.
To a similar end, I have also relaunched periodic reviews of our centers and programs to ensure the highest quality of scholarship and teaching excellence. For instance, late last summer we initiated a comprehensive review of our FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. We have appointed a blue-ribbon panel of experts to conduct this review, which will conclude this spring. The charge to the review panel is to rigorously evaluate the FXB Center’s current status and future potential, offering candid, forthright, and thorough feedback, including any shortcomings or areas of concern, to ensure the Center meets — and is held to — the highest standards of excellence expected of a University-wide center at Harvard. While this review is ongoing, we have halted the formal collaboration between the FXB Center and Birzeit University. This allows the panel to objectively evaluate partnerships and collaborations and ensure the center exemplifies academic excellence in alignment with our mission. We will conduct similar periodic reviews of all our centers and programs.
I’m also putting a lot of focus on building a pluralistic culture that is accountable to our values. From my earliest messages to the community, I have tried to make clear that all of us can expect to be exposed to speech that we disagree with, even speech that offends us, during our time at Harvard. That’s to be expected at any university with a commitment to free speech and academic freedom. Of course, I have zero tolerance for any speech or conduct that constitutes discrimination or harassment — such behavior is wholly unacceptable and will be addressed decisively at our School. But I’ve emphasized how important it is to be open to learning from people with different views — and how important it is to be able to communicate respectfully and with integrity.
To build those skills, my team and I launched an initiative called Harvard Chan LEADs, which stands for Learn and Engage Across Differences. We created a new module for orientation to engage students in these values as soon as they arrive on campus. Since then, we have hosted quite a few workshops and events, including special trainings to help faculty foster respectful conversations in the classroom, even when the topics are divisive.
I’m also launching the Harvard Chan Citizenship Awards. This award will be given each year to three people — a student, a staff member, and an academic appointee — who best represent our values and who have done the most to create a culture of pluralism and inclusivity. It’s all part of making sure we are accountable to our mission, our values, and one another.
What are some of the key ways you’re mobilizing around the other two As, agile and accessible?
We have taken some promising steps toward making both our education and our research more accessible. On the education front, I set up a working group to assess opportunities for expanding our non-degree offerings. On the research front, our Center for Health Communication has launched an innovative project to connect our faculty to social media creators, with the goal of expanding the amount of scientific content on platforms like TikTok.
In terms of agility, I’m very excited to be collaborating with Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on a research project that models the kind of interdisciplinary problem-solving I’d like to see more of. Our goal is to develop new models for prioritizing and incentivizing preventive healthcare in the U.S. We could save a lot of money and prevent a lot of suffering with a shift to prevention, so this is a project with immense potential.
An exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums asks what we can learn from Edvard Munch’s 40-year obsession with a man and woman at the shore.
Two figures, a man and a woman, stand at a shoreline. They face away from the viewer and toward the sea, side by side and yet isolated from one another.
Sometimes the woman is on the left. Sometimes she’s on the right. Sometimes these figures, and the rocky shore around them, are rendered in careful brushstrokes; other times, perhaps there is a sense of urgency, of haste, of canvas left untouched.
This is “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones,)” one of the most famous motifs by the Norwegian painter and printmaker Edvard Munch (1863-1944.) Munch returned to this motif again and again over more than 40 years, in paintings, metal-plate etchings, and a series of woodcut prints, each with slight differences in color, shape, or technique.
“He couldn’t let go,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums and the co-curator of the exhibition “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking,” on view through July 27. “There are so many more iterations of [‘Two Human Beings’] … in black and white, in grayscale, all violet, monochromatic but in different color schemes, totally different color combinations. There was one we saw in neon color, and the whole thing became psychedelic. With the intensity of variations, the motif starts to have less and less singularity and it can be a vehicle, an exploration of pretty much anything under the sun.”
Munch’s repeated returns to the motif demonstrate the way his paintings informed his prints, and vice versa. He first painted it in 1892, but the painting was destroyed in 1901 in an explosion onboard a ship that was transporting his works for exhibition. When he next painted the motif in about 1906-1908 (above left), he had already experimented with woodblock prints of the theme. The figures appear in reverse from the original painting and were thus likely based on the printed versions, which he would have had as a ready reference.
“He’s mixing a huge range of different painting techniques,” said Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, co-curator of the exhibition. Munch left some of the canvas unpainted; in some places, he applied paint thickly or scratched color away. It’s more than a demonstration of versatility, Roth said: “It also creates a kind of vibration, a sensation of these figures, a dynamism in the painting itself.”
The final version, made in about 1935 (above right), appears more spontaneous than its predecessor, with exposed lines from Munch’s preparatory sketch, large swatches of color, and areas of exposed canvas.
“It was something we were hoping to highlight,” Roth said. “Why this return? What is he learning over time and through the different techniques?”
In his prints, Munch exploded “Two Human Beings” and put it back together again. He used a jigsaw method, inscribing his design onto a block of wood and using a fretsaw to cut each element into its own piece. Then, he could ink each piece separately, push them back together, and run the reunited composition through the press, creating endless variations of color.
Munch incorporated the male figure into the landscape but cut the woman into her own solitary block.
“She almost feels like a doll,” Roth said. “You can take her out, as opposed to the man, who becomes a part of the printing of the landscape. In many of the prints, he begins to feel like he’s more a part of the landscape, whereas she is able to be this very singular figure and a very important one for Munch.”
“He embraced the non-perfect alignment, the break in the block that would be seen then in later prints, the fact that in the painting, things are dripping, things are imperfect. That was something he emphasized: That the too-perfect finish was actually the enemy of the good in a work of art.”
Lynette Roth
“Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)” has long been understood as a rumination on isolation, on the sense of loneliness that one can feel even in the company of someone else. But after spending time with Munch’s multiple iterations on the motif, Roth said she’s not so sure that’s the only interpretation.
A savvy businessman, Munch originally titled the work simply “Two Human Beings.” But when others ascribed loneliness to the figures, Munch leaned into it.
“The more I engaged with this, I started to feel like they actually aren’t that lonely,” Roth said. “They’re connected to the landscape; they’re connected also to each other in the way that color unites them, and the way he’s inching toward her. … For me, it’s also companionship and contemplation, which doesn’t have to be devastating or alienating or cause for anxiety.”
A question of finishMunch’s contemporaries sometimes critiqued a lack of polish in his pieces. But Munch embraced the flaws, imperfections, and empty spaces in his work.
In the final painted version of “Two Human Beings,” Munch leaves exposed sketch lines and areas of bare canvas on the woman’s dress.
“Inger in a Red Dress” is composed on board, a cheap support that artists often use when creating studies. But the painting is a fully realized portrait.
Munch has long been understood as a deeply troubled artist whose struggles with mental health are apparent in psychologically evocative works like “The Scream.” But “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” invites viewers to disentangle Munch’s artwork from his biography and to view his recurring motifs not only as a window into his psyche but as another material, like paint or charcoal, a vehicle through which Munch explored his artistic practice.
“We know that people will react emotionally or psychologically to what’s on view,” said Peter Murphy, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. “Two things can be true: Munch did suffer psychologically; although he was wealthy and well-off, he did have a lot of crises in his life. And he was also a mastermind of getting his work out there and exploring it.”
Edvard Munch
(1863-1944)
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was one of the most significant artists of the Modernist movement, and an innovator in printmaking, painting, and other arts. He is best known for his painting “The Scream,” which is seen as an expression of modern spiritual angst. He was active for more than 60 years, from the 1880s until his death.
“Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” is on display through July 27 in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on Level 3 at the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition showcases 70 works, primarily from the Harvard Art Museums collection. Thanks to a transformative gift from Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus, the museums now house one of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the U.S.
During their conversation with President Eisgruber, the Princeton Mayor and Council expressed appreciation for town-gown collaborations and the University's important contributions to the community.
A summary of the many ways in which Princeton University currently contributes to and engages with the Princeton community. Submitted in a memo to the Princeton mayor and council on March 21, 2025.
Earle Leonard Lomon PhD ’54, MIT professor emeritus of physics, died on March 7 in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 94.
A longtime member of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Lomon was interested primarily in the forces between protons and neutrons at low energies, where the effects of quarks and gluons are hidden by their confinement.
His research focused on the interactions of hadrons — protons, neutrons, mesons, and nuclei — before it was understood that they were composed of quarks and gluons.
“Earle developed an R-matrix formulation of scattering theory that allowed him to separate known effects at long distance from then-unknown forces at short distances,” says longtime colleague Robert Jaffe, the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics.
“When QCD [quantum chromodynamics] emerged as the correct field theory of hadrons, Earle moved quickly to incorporate the effects of quarks and gluons at short distance and high energies,” says Jaffe. “Earle’s work can be interpreted as a precursor to modern chiral effective field theory, where the pertinent degrees of freedom at low energy, which are hadrons, are matched smoothly onto the quark and gluon degrees of freedom that dominate at higher energy.”
“He was a truly cosmopolitan scientist, given his open mind and deep kindness,” says Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus of physics.
Early years
Born Nov. 15, 1930, in Montreal, Quebec, Earle was the only son of Harry Lomon and Etta Rappaport. At Montreal High School, he met his future wife, Ruth Jones. Their shared love for classical music drew them both to the school's Classical Music Club, where Lomon served as president and Ruth was an accomplished musician.
While studying at McGill University, he was a research physicist for the Canada Defense Research Board from 1950 to 1951. After graduating in 1951, he married Jones, and they moved to Cambridge, where he pursued his doctorate at MIT in theoretical physics, mentored by Professor Hermann Feshbach.
Lomon spent 1954 to 1955 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen. “With the presence of Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Willem V.R. Malkus, there were many physicists from Europe and elsewhere, including MIT’s Dave Frisch, making the Institute for Physics an exciting place to be,” recalled Lomon.
In 1956-57, he was a research associate at the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He received his PhD from MIT in 1954, and did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Denmark, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Cornell. He was an associate professor at McGill from 1957 until 1960, when he joined the MIT faculty.
In 1965, Lomon was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was a visiting scientist at CERN. In 1968, he joined the newly formed MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He became a full professor in 1970 and retired in 1999.
Los Alamos and math theory
From 1968 to 2015, Lomon was an affiliate researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During this time, he collaborated with Fred Begay, a Navajo nuclear physicist and medicine man. New Mexico became the Lomon family’s second home, and Lomon enjoyed the area hiking trails and climbing Baldy Mountain.
Lomon also developed educational materials for mathematical theory. He developed textbooks, educational tools, research, and a creative problem-solving curriculum for the Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools. His children recall when Earle would review the educational tools with them at the dinner table. From 2001 to 2013, he was program director for mathematical theory for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Theoretical Physics research hub.
Lomon was an American Physical Society Fellow and a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists.
Husband of the late Ruth Lomon, he is survived by his daughters Glynis Lomon and Deirdre Lomon; his son, Dylan Lomon; grandchildren Devin Lomon, Alexia Layne-Lomon, and Benjamin Garner; and six great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial service at a later date; instead of flowers, please consider donating to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation.
Harvard launches pilot initiative to tackle some of today’s biggest challenges
Harvard Impact Labs will provide funding and support for faculty to conduct solutions-focused research and drive real-world impact
Harvard Kennedy School Communications
5 min read
Harvard announced Wednesday the launch of a pilot for a new University-wide initiative called Harvard Impact Labs. The initiative will support faculty working in collaboration with leaders in government, nonprofits, and the private sector to develop solutions to pressing societal problems.
Universities have long led the way in generating scientific knowledge to improve the human condition through research in the life sciences and engineering. Harvard Impact Labs seeks to support the impact-focused work of social scientists, harnessing the tools of scientific research to help public leaders solve the problems they confront every day. Each lab will focus on a specific societal challenge, such as local economic development, affordable housing, educational achievement, high-quality healthcare, or public safety.
During the pilot phase, the initiative will have three core components: (1) a fellowship program to support faculty as they develop meaningful scientific collaborations with leaders in the public and social sectors, (2) start-up funding to support these types of collaborations as they design, test, and scale solutions in real-world settings, and (3) public service leaves to give faculty the opportunity to embed in governments or nonprofits to learn more deeply about the problems they wish to work on. Through these functions, Harvard Impact Labs will support faculty who are already doing this critical work and provide others with the skills and resources they need to put their research and expertise to work for society.
“Just as Harvard faculty in the life sciences have long worked to develop medical cures that save and improve lives, Harvard Impact Labs will help faculty and students in other disciplines address the real-world challenges that our society faces,” said Hopi Hoekstra, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the C.Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Sciences, and the Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences.
“In this moment of dissatisfaction with the status quo, declining faith in expertise, and skepticism of government and democracy, there has never been a more important time for an initiative like this,” said Jeremy Weinstein, dean of Harvard Kennedy School and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. “By giving faculty and students the support they need — and connecting them with real-world practitioners — Harvard Impact Labs can help tackle our biggest challenges and improve lives across the world.”
“Harvard Impact Labs builds on the extraordinary work being done by many of our faculty in partnership with communities across the nation and around the globe, whether improving education, healthcare, housing, public safety, the environment, or a host of other issues,” said Nonie K. Lesaux, the interim dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development. “Communities and leaders are working hard to develop solutions, and we can help accelerate more of that work.”
“We are eager to enable more Harvard faculty to work with public- and private-sector changemakers to develop, test, and scale solutions to a range of social problems,” said Jeffrey Liebman, the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School and co-faculty director of Harvard Impact Labs. “At the Government Performance Lab, I’ve seen firsthand how faculty and students can simultaneously change lives and advance scientific understanding by working directly with those on the front lines of society’s biggest challenges — and I’m thrilled to be building upon that mission with Harvard Impact Labs.”
“Many Harvard faculty are eager to put their expertise to work making a difference outside of Harvard, but it can be hard to know where to start,” said Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor, co-faculty director of this initiative, and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. “This initiative is going to make it possible for more faculty to have impact at scale and lead to more rapid progress on some of the nation’s and the world’s most difficult social problems.”
Faculty at all Harvard Schools will be eligible for funding and support. The initiative will be housed at Harvard Kennedy School and report to the deans of the Kennedy School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Education. It will be guided by a distinguished group of faculty advisers from across the University and led by co-faculty directors Danielle Allen; Jeffrey Liebman; James S. Kim, professor of education; and Amanda Pallais, the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics. Its executive director, Pauline Abernathy, brings a wealth of experience creating reform at the national, state and local levels while in senior positions in government, nonprofits, and philanthropy. She is a graduate of the Kennedy School’s Master in Public Policy program.
This pilot is made possible by a generous donation from Julian Baker, who graduated from Harvard College in 1988 with an A.B. in social studies.
More information on the initiative can be found on the Harvard Impact Labs website.
Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.
“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.”
Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.
The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.
“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”
Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.
MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.
The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.
“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS.
“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”
Representatives from across the MIT Maritime Consortium attended a signing ceremony at MIT. Left to right: Fotini Christia (MIT), Anantha Chandrakasan (MIT), Chara Papaefthymiou (Navios), Amulya Mohapatra (Foresight Group Services), Kwangpil Chang (HD KSOE), Chris Wiernicki (ABS), Miltiadis Marinakis (Capital), John Lycouris (Dorian LPG), Daniel Huttenlocher (MIT), and Themis Sapsis (MIT).
The new athletic facilities on the West Windsor side of Lake Carnegie support student-athletes and promote a culture of health and wellness for the entire University community
Panelists look at challenges, opportunities of GAI tools
New initiative advances conversations about role of AI
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
When asked if it’s appropriate to use generative AI to grade student papers, write letters of recommendation, or screen job applicants the audience couldn’t come to a consensus.
First up: Matthew Kopec, program director and lecturer for Embedded EthiCS, who opined, “Science is less fun because of all these tools.”
Quick to push back were Gary King, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, and Michael Brenner, Michael F. Cronin Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics at SEAS.
“We’re in the business of making discoveries to improve the world for humans,” Brenner said. “We should use every tool that we have at our disposal to do that.” He and King posited that while GAI may make certain scientific endeavors easier, it can also encourage researchers to work on harder problems.
King, who is also the director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, noted that Harvard has long taught its students the latest technology to address problems faster and more easily, and GAI is no different.
“The first mathematics books had long passages trying to explain how to do mathematical calculations without wasting valuable paper. Most of us now spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do calculations without blowing up our computers,” he said. “You should be the kind of person that uses whatever the best tools are to progress the fastest and go the farthest.”
The hourlong panel was the first installment in the spring GAI Dialogues series, part of a wider initiative exploring the impact generative AI has on the FAS educational mission. The initiative, a priority of Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra, is being led by her senior adviser on artificial intelligence, Chris Stubbs, the Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy.
The conversation also examined concerns with ethical issues. Despite being an enthusiastic proponent for the use of GAI in science and math fields, Brenner acknowledged the need for scrutiny over who can or should control GAI tools.
King was blunter. “Yes, this technology can be used for harm. Any technology can be used for that. The causal factor isn’t the technology, it’s the humans that decided to use it,” he said.
A question from an audience member on AI’s potential environmental impact had all the panelists agreeing that the technology heavily consumes energy. King answered that AI may ruin the environment, or incent faster creation of new industries to generate clean energy.
“Before you single-handedly eliminate these incredibly visible tools, let’s just figure out the cost and benefits,” he said.
Upcoming events in this spring’s GAI Dialogues include “Teaching With Integrity in the Age of AI” with the College’s offices of Undergraduate Education and Academic Integrity at the Smith Campus Center on Monday. The faculty workshop will explore best practices for using AI in the classroom, potential coursework violations, and prevention strategies. Other events will focus on critical reading and writing in the age of AI, on April 3 and 24, respectively, and “Preparing Students for the Future: AI Literacy in the Liberal Arts” on May 5.
A key goal of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has been to see further than ever before into the distant past of our Universe, when the first galaxies were forming after the Big Bang, a period know as cosmic dawn.
Researchers studying one of those very early galaxies have now made a discovery in the spectrum of its light, that challenges our established understanding of the Universe’s early history. Their results are reported in the journal Nature.
Webb discovered the incredibly distant galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1, observed at just 330 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers used the galaxy’s brightness in different infrared filters to estimate its redshift, which measures a galaxy’s distance from Earth based on how its light has been stretched out during its journey through expanding space.
The NIRCam imaging yielded an initial redshift estimate of 12.9. To confirm its extreme redshift, an international team led by Dr Joris Witstok, previously of the University of Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology, observed the galaxy using Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.
The resulting spectrum confirmed the redshift to be 13.0. This equates to a galaxy seen just 330 million years after the Big Bang, a small fraction of the Universe’s present age of 13.8 billion years.
But an unexpected feature also stood out: one specific, distinctly bright wavelength of light, identified as the Lyman-α emission radiated by hydrogen atoms. This emission was far stronger than astronomers thought possible at this early stage in the Universe’s development.
“The early Universe was bathed in a thick fog of neutral hydrogen,” said co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino from Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology. “Most of this haze was lifted in a process called reionisation, which was completed about one billion years after the Big Bang.
“GS-z13-1 is seen when the Universe was only 330 million years old, yet it shows a surprisingly clear, telltale signature of Lyman-α emission that can only be seen once the surrounding fog has fully lifted. This result was totally unexpected by theories of early galaxy formation and has caught astronomers by surprise.”
Before and during the epoch of reionisation, neutral hydrogen fog surrounding galaxies blocked any energetic ultraviolet light they emitted, much like the filtering effect of coloured glass. Until enough stars had formed and were able to ionise the hydrogen gas, no such light — including Lyman-α emission — could escape from these fledgling galaxies to reach Earth.
The confirmation of Lyman-α radiation from this galaxy has great implications for our understanding of the early Universe. “We really shouldn’t have found a galaxy like this, given our understanding of the way the Universe has evolved,” said co-author Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona. “We could think of the early Universe as shrouded with a thick fog that would make it exceedingly difficult to find even powerful lighthouses peeking through, yet here we see the beam of light from this galaxy piercing the veil.”
The source of the Lyman-α radiation from this galaxy is not yet known, but it may include the first light from the earliest generation of stars to form in the Universe. “The large bubble of ionised hydrogen surrounding this galaxy might have been created by a peculiar population of stars — much more massive, hotter and more luminous than stars formed at later epochs, and possibly representative of the first generation of stars,” said Witstok, who is now based at the Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen. A powerful active galactic nucleus, driven by one of the first supermassive black holes, is another possibility identified by the team.
The team plans further follow-up observations of GS-z13-1, aiming to obtain more information about the nature of this galaxy and origin of its strong Lyman-α radiation. Whatever the galaxy is concealing, it is certain to illuminate a new frontier in cosmology.
JWST is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The data for this result were captured as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).
Astronomers have identified a bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in the very early Universe. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.
This result was totally unexpected by theories of early galaxy formation and has caught astronomers by surprise
Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.
“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.”
Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.
The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.
“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”
Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.
MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.
The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.
“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS.
“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”
Representatives from across the MIT Maritime Consortium attended a signing ceremony at MIT. Left to right: Fotini Christia (MIT), Anantha Chandrakasan (MIT), Chara Papaefthymiou (Navios), Amulya Mohapatra (Foresight Group Services), Kwangpil Chang (HD KSOE), Chris Wiernicki (ABS), Miltiadis Marinakis (Capital), John Lycouris (Dorian LPG), Daniel Huttenlocher (MIT), and Themis Sapsis (MIT).
Torsten Hoefler wins the prestigious ACM Prize in Computing for his pioneering work in high-performance computing. The fact that supercomputers have become so powerful that AI models can be trained very quickly with very large volumes of data is partly down to his research.
When visiting Singapore, most people immediately notice the city’s cleanliness, and so did Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University when he visited for the first time at the invitation of the NUS Sustainable and Green Finance Institute (SGFIN) to be its keynote presenter at the SGFIN Sustainability Summit 2025 held on 13-14 March 2025.
He observed that maintaining Singapore’s clean streets takes not just extensive cleaning efforts, but also a sense of social responsibility to recognise that littering transfers the cost of disposal onto other people and is simply “not okay”.
“When are we going to get to the stage where dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and imposing the cost of disposing of or coping with the impact of your carbon dioxide on other people is also not okay?” asked Prof Allen, who is Head of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics in the Department of Physics and Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and Environment, both at the University of Oxford.
Calling for climate policy to be reframed from the traditional focus on changing corporate and citizen behaviour to a focus on product and waste disposal, Prof Allen’s keynote presentation outlined a roadmap to halt global warming within 30 years, which would limit future warming to less than the amount that has occurred since the 2000s.
“We could stop global warming within a generation, but it requires a fresh approach to climate policy, and one that I think should be inspired by the turbulence we’re seeing over climate policy around the world,” he said.
Prof Allen’s suggestion was among several cautiously optimistic messages about climate action shared during the summit, held to the theme “Commitments, Challenges, and Innovations in the Transition to Sustainable Economy”. The event was attended by about 200 representatives from the global sustainable finance community, including academics, industry leaders, policymakers and regulators, financial institutions, and legal experts.
Optimism amid policy turbulence
In her opening address, Guest of Honour Ms Grace Fu, Minister for Sustainability and the Environment and Minister-in-charge of Trade Relations, noted that the challenges in the fight against climate change are “complex… but not insurmountable.”
Although global momentum appears to be wavering, Singapore is pressing forward with collaborations and contributions to key enablers of the green transition, she said.
Similarly, industry keynote speaker Ms Emily Chew, Head of Sustainability at GIC, said the sovereign wealth fund’s assessment of global climate policies indicates that “despite the headlines, it’s not a one-way pullback on climate policy around the world.”
Policy momentum in the European Union, China, Australia, and the United Kingdom remains strong, and Europe’s focus on renewable energy and related products has intensified, driven by energy cost concerns due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and a desire to compete with China on key components in the clean energy value chain.
Ms Chew noted that demand for energy continues to outstrip supply at a pace that cannot be met with fossil fuel energy alone. This will drive growth in renewable energy capacity, as renewable energy technology development, advances in energy efficiency, improvements in grid management, and innovations in energy storage like battery technology and liquid storage are expected to ramp up even more rapidly to fill the gap.
Nevertheless, through its climate scenarios research, GIC sees growing conviction that the world may face a “too little, too late” scenario when it comes to the global transition. In this scenario, policy responses to address emissions would be insufficient to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. It is thus looking at investing in not just climate solutions and climate transition, but also climate adaptation, which will be inevitable in a world that is 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.
Achieving Geological Net Zero
To avert this crisis, the world must address the issue of carbon dioxide disposal, said Prof Allen.
Progress on replacing fossil fuels with clean energy and reversing deforestation has been far from satisfactory, especially with the reluctance of certain economies and industries to give up fossil fuels. In addition, these methods do not reduce carbon emissions enough to meet net-zero goals.
“If we don’t avoid producing carbon dioxide, we have to take up the slack by increasing the amount we put back in the Earth’s crust, because the amount we can store at the surface by restoring forests is actually quite limited,” Prof Allen said.
“We need to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming, and we need to do it before the world stops using fossil fuels.”
The climate goal should be Geological Net Zero, incorporating capture and storage of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s crust to balance the existing and ongoing emissions, he said. With this approach, getting to net zero by 2055 would entail capturing and storing underground 10 per cent of carbon dioxide produced from fossil sources by 2035, 50 per cent by 2045, and 100 per cent by 2055.
Carbon capture solutions are already available and effective, but more capital is needed to scale up such projects, which currently receive less than 1 per cent of transition investments. The high cost of direct air capture of carbon dioxide, about US$600 per tonne, could be managed by pricing it into fossil fuel costs over time, Prof Allen argued. For example, he estimates that doing so for petrol would increase prices by only 60 US cents per litre over 30 years.
Prof Allen also warned that there is a risk of miscalculating the emissions reduction needed to achieve net-zero targets, due to ambiguous wording in Article 4 of the Paris Agreement. The article calls for striking a balance between carbon emissions and removals to stop global warming but does not specify exactly what removals are included, which leaves the door open for natural carbon uptake by forests and oceans to be “double counted” as part of removal efforts.
“If we only aim for net zero with this definition of emissions, then we stabilise the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rather than allowing it to fall as it should. We would see constant concentrations (of carbon dioxide) resulting, and that allows ongoing warming,” Prof Allen said.
He ended on a positive note, urging those present to take the helm and not wait for direction from elsewhere.
“There is an opportunity here for Asia to lead the way to a more effective, less intrusive, more pragmatic climate future based on the principle that if you generate carbon dioxide, you have the responsibility to dispose of it responsibly and not just dump it into the atmosphere for somebody else to clean up – a policy that I might say is inspired by the clean streets of Singapore.”
By Dr Goh Jing Wen, Research Fellow, and Dr Lia Troeung, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Ageing Research & Education at Duke-NUS Medical School
Diabetic wounds often lead to severe complications that can result in amputations. These chronic and non-healing wounds are marked by persistent inflammation, affecting more than six per cent of the global population. In Singapore, there are about four lower limb amputations daily due to non-healing diabetic wounds. A study focusing on diabetic wounds in Singapore estimated that the gross amputation-related healthcare cost per patient was S$23,000 in 2017.
To address this challenge of great national and global importance, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed two microneedle technologies that have shown efficacy in accelerating diabetic wound healing in preclinical models by preserving the functions of proteins called growth factors, and removing undesirable inflammatory compounds.
The two novel innovations were developed by a team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Andy Tay from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering at NUS, and the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology. “Growth factors are important for wound healing because they regulate key cellular functions. However, in diabetic wounds, these growth factors are rapidly broken down by other enzymes known as proteases. This dramatically slows down wound recovery. At the same time, diabetic wounds are characterised by persistently high levels of inflammation,” he explained.
“We wanted to tackle these two issues by using microneedles for both delivery and extraction. It is minimally invasive, can be fabricated with precision, and allows for the active compounds to be painlessly administered directly into wounds. Microneedle patches are excellent materials for wound healing,” he said.
The results of the two related studies, which were published online in the scientific journals Biomaterials and Advanced Functional Materials on 4 July 2024 and 24 July 2024 respectively, demonstrate the potential of this innovative approach in treating various skin conditions such as psoriasis or chronic diabetic wounds.
Two unique approaches to accelerate wound healing
In the market, hydrogel is used to deliver growth factors to wounds. However, this method is not as effective because the protease-rich environment of chronic wounds rapidly degrades and inactivates the growth factors. This means that the growth factors need to be delivered in high doses repeatedly, which can be costly and time-consuming.
In the first approach developed by the NUS research team, instead of delivering the growth factors directly, they first increased the production of growth factors within the wound.
They achieved this by developing sucralfate microneedles (SUC-MN) to deliver an important immunomodulatory protein, interleukin-4 (IL-4), to stimulate the production of growth factors in diabetic tissues. IL-4 helps to regulate the immune response and promote tissue regeneration, while sucralfate, a medication commonly used to treat gastrointestinal ulcers, protects growth factors from degradation.
The microneedles dissolve in the wound, delivering IL-4 and sucralfate directly to the wound. This localised delivery system minimises systemic side effects, and also avoids secondary damage to delicate, newly formed tissues caused by traditional adhesive dressing that is currently used clinically. The researchers found that SUC-MN significantly accelerated wound healing twice as fast when compared to traditional treatments.
First-of-its-kind extractive microneedles to remove pro-inflammatory compounds
Although a majority of microneedle technology uses the material for delivery, the NUS team explored the novel use of microneedles to extract undesirable pro-inflammatory proteins and immune cells in the second approach. To do so, the NUS team needed to find a suitable coating material that could act as a sponge to soak up pro-inflammatory compounds, known as chemokines, which are ‘messenger’ molecules that recruit and trap pro-inflammatory immune cells called monocytes in wound tissues.
The research team screened different materials and eventually used heparin-coated porous microneedles (HPMN) to address the issue of persistent inflammation in skin wounds at the source. Based on previous studies, heparin has been found to bind readily to chemokines. The team demonstrated that HPMN could effectively deplete chemokines and monocytes from the wound site, leading to a 50 per cent reduction in tissue inflammation as well as a 90 per cent reduction in wound size by the 14th day of treatment.
These initial findings highlight the potential of HPMN as a promising strategy for the treatment of inflammatory skin disorders. The ability of HPMN to remove chemokines and inflammatory cells deep within the skin tissue offers a unique advantage over existing treatments that only target surface-level inflammation. HPMN could be further developed for personalised wound care and tailored treatment of various inflammatory skin conditions such as psoriasis.
Next steps
The development of SUC-MN and HPMN represents a significant step forward in the field of wound healing and skin disease management. The team intends to conduct further studies to explore the potential of this technology and bring it to market.
For extractive microneedles in particular, the team will fabricate microneedles with more controllable pore sizes using advanced technologies, such as 3D printing, and integrate antibacterial properties into the microneedles as clinical non-healing wounds often accompany infections. They are also designing flexible microneedle patches to ensure that they fit well to various tissue shapes.
“We are excited about the potential impact of our research and look forward to advancing this technology towards clinical translation. The two approaches developed by our team would provide much-needed relief for patients with diabetic wounds, as well as many patients suffering from skin conditions like atopic dermatitis or psoriasis,” said Asst Prof Tay.
Rob Devlin helped develop innovative mini-lens as grad student. Now the startup he runs produces millions of them for consumer electronics.
Over the course of his Harvard doctoral studies, Rob Devlin must have made 100 of a new kind of mini-lens, experimenting with materials and prototyping new designs to bend light like a traditional camera only using a series of tiny pillars on a millimeter-thin wafer.
This new device would be smaller, cheaper, and able to be mass produced — if demand ever warranted it — in semiconductor chip foundries.
Today, demand warrants it.
Metalenz, a startup founded in 2016 with exclusive rights to commercialize the device Devlin helped develop in the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics, says some 100 million of its light-focusing metasurfaces have been made and are installed in an array of consumer electronic devices.
Metalenz — with Devlin now as CEO — wouldn’t disclose which companies are using its devices in their products, but at least one report from a company that does teardowns of consumer products, Yole Group, says metasurfaces are in the iPad, Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and Google’s Pixel 8 Pro.
“It’s remarkable to think that something that started at Harvard — during my Ph.D. and with the work of all the other folks in the Capasso lab — is now out there and people are using it,” Devlin said. “There are many examples of university technology that have great promise, and having metasurfaces actually end up in real-world devices at the scale that we’re now talking about definitely has a great feel to it.”
Sam Liss, executive director of strategic partnerships at Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, said Metalenz emerged from a group that was cross-disciplinary, leveraging different scientific backgrounds and perspectives into a product that is breaking new ground.
“[Former University President] Drew Faust once said that companies create new products; university research creates new industries.”
Sam Liss, Harvard Office of Technology Development
“It’s really taking conventional optics, which have been around for a very, very long time, and disrupting that industry,” Liss said. “That’s what I think university startups are really great at: true disruption. [Former University President] Drew Faust once said that companies create new products; university research creates new industries. And that always resonated with me.”
Capasso’s early work on metasurfaces began in 2007 or 2008. By 2012, when Devlin arrived at the lab, the science was mostly figured out. In a 2011 paper in the journal Science, which has garnered more than 10,000 citations, Capasso and members of his lab showed they could tune nanostructures on the metasurface to control light at will.
Shortly after, they demonstrated the first metalens, which was able to focus light — albeit inefficiently — on a single spot. From there, Devlin added his expertise in materials and nanofabrication, working with other members of the lab to refine the product. And Capasso set the bar even higher: He wanted not only a product that worked, but one that could be mass-produced using existing fabrication methods so they could go to market quickly.
“In record time, metalenses went from a research prototype in 2016 to the creation of Metalenz in the same year and mass manufacturing for the consumer market in the following years,” Capasso said. “Kudos to Rob Devlin for successfully leading this transition.”
All along, researchers knew the device had the potential to disrupt the traditional business of making lenses from curved pieces of polished glass or plastic. As manufacturers crammed more and more features into smartphones, tablets, and other devices, it became clear that the real estate taken up by bulky lenses was a bottleneck to more advanced designs.
A major early victory for Metalenz came in 2021, when the startup signed a contract with STMicroelectronics to put its metasurfaces into STMicro’s FlightSense module.
The distance-measuring module uses near-infrared light for 3D sensing, and the metasurface is involved in both emitting light and in detecting its reflections. The time taken for the infrared light to bounce back provides key data in drawing the 3D picture. It is used in facial recognition, 3D room mapping, augmented reality, and similar applications.
Though these metasurfaces are not typically used for visual images, they can provide depth information that helps focus visual camera lenses.
Rob Devlin.
Photo courtesy of Metalenz
Metalenz is currently based in Boston’s North End and has doubled in size to about 45 employees over the last three years. The company doesn’t need all that much space, because the manufacturing is left to large semiconductor foundries, which turn out more than a trillion chips a year for the global technology industry.
At Metalenz, Devlin said, the staff focuses on improving performance of their current product and developing what they hope will be the next big breakthrough: Polar ID.
Polar ID uses polarization of light to provide an additional layer of security for smartphones with a dramatic reduction in cost and size.
Devlin said that a traditional polarization camera is about 100 millimeters long and costs $500 to $1,000. Smaller versions have been created but are found only on top-end devices. Metalenz’s polarization metasurface is about 5 millimeters long and costs roughly $5, Devlin said, which would allow their deployment at low cost in many more devices.
“I can get a standard image of you. I can recognize the distance between your eyes and how far your eyes are from your nose and all of these key landmarks,” Devlin said. “But the polarization signature of you is unique, meaning that even if someone came with a perfect 3D mask of you and put it in front of the device, the polarization signature of that 3D mask would be different than your polarization signature.”
Polarization can be used in other applications as well. For example, skin cancer’s polarization signature is different from healthy skin, so it can be used to detect dangerous growths. It can also be used to monitor air quality.
“There are a lot of exciting things stemming from the power of the metasurface to take complex modules, shrink them down, and let you do entirely new things,” Devlin said.
As with any successful product, other companies are working to catch up, Devlin said. Metalenz’s strategy is to continue to improve current products and develop new ones that leverage the technology to do new and interesting things.
He also counted among advantages their continued relationship with Capasso — a Metalenz founder — providing a pipeline to new developments from his lab.
“There’s a lot of competition and folks are trying to catch up to us,” Devlin said. “The benefit we have is really the first applications we’ve already deployed, and we’ve already started to move on to something where we’re using even more of the unique aspects of the metasurface.”
New AI method lets researchers get better handle on brain-behavior link, may offer insights into disorders like autism
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
It’s all about the body language.
A new AI method for tracking the social lives of rats may help researchers better understand the relationship between the brain and social behavior, with possible implications for human conditions such as autism.
The machine-learning technique was detailed in a paper, “Mapping the Landscape of Social Behavior,” recently published in Cell. Bence P. Ölveczky, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology (OEB) and co-author of the paper, explained: “We are really mapping the social life of rats by capturing the details of their every movement. We see how they interact with each other, and we see the same forms of engagement over and over again.
“We see personalities in these animals that are intriguing. In many ways, these variations can help us understand the basis for a lot of interesting behavioral phenomena, including sociality,” he added.
Rats are social creatures. Much like humans, they interact with each other in ways that influence their behavior through complex social patterns of touching and body language. These rat interactions are not that far from our own, the researchers say.
Ölveczky gave a real-life example: “When people come into my lab, I scratch my head a little bit and soon after they will scratch their heads, or I cross my legs, and they cross their legs. We are subconsciously communicating with each other.”
Although studies of rat behavior have existed for years, in the past they relied on observation and a limited number of data points.
From videos, a machine-learning pipeline extracted more than 110 million 3D poses tracking various points on the rats’ bodies as they moved and interacted.
“The standard in the field is for somebody to just watch hours and hours of rat videos and say, ‘Oh, I think that they touched each other there. I think that this guy was mimicking the other guy,’” Ölveczky said.
The new study was able to take an in-depth look at how those social behaviors are communicated thanks to groundbreaking technology. From videos of the interactions, a machine-learning pipeline extracted more than 110 million 3D poses tracking various points on the rats’ bodies as they moved and interacted. Researchers could then graph how these animals behaved around others, including how they learned and changed through these exchanges.
“By having this methodology, we can replace the subjective human observer with a very rigorous and reproducible method for behavioral quantification and identification of particular gestures or even interaction motifs,” said Ölveczky.
AI also allowed the researchers to “analyze amounts of data that would take humans years and years to scroll through,” said Ugne Klibaite, a postdoctoral fellow in the Ölveczky Lab and lead author on the paper.
“Given how far computer vision and deep learning has progressed and the technology, the cameras, and the computers we have, we can actually get high-resolution animal movement in 3D,” said Klibaite. Now, she continued, “we have a chance to think about what that might mean.”
This advance is already opening new areas for research into autism. A complex disorder, autism probably has environmental components, said Ölveczky. It also seems clear, however, that there is a genetic component, with certain high-risk genes predisposing an individual to autism.
“The question then is how does a mutation or a knockout in this gene affect the brain, and how does that lead to changes in social behavior?”
With funding from the Simons Foundation for Autism Research, which provided rats that had variations in these specific genes, the researchers were able to look at how these genetically modified rats socialized.
While stressing that autism is a human condition, the researchers did find some intriguing parallels.
“This is a spectrum disorder, and we see some of that variability in our different rat models as well,” said Ölveczky.
Noting that children on the autism spectrum often socialize in different ways than children not on the spectrum, he said, “We also see a whole variety of different types of differences in social interactions in these rats that depend on the particular gene that was knocked out.”
Ongoing research will explore these similarities and how they might relate to the altered genes.
“Using this platform, we are going to ask questions about how different parts of the brain process social gestures,” said Ölveczky. “Can we go deeper and really pinpoint the circuits that are responsible for this difference in behavior? And when we can do that — if we can do that — then that could very well inspire new approaches to therapy.”
Adding to the value of the study, the data — the films of the rats and the movement trajectories distilled from them — will be shared, said Klibaite, who led the data collection and behavioral analysis.
“Hopefully by releasing this to the community and getting people to engage with the data as well, we’ll have people in the conversation making better models of how the brain underlies social behavior.”
Funding for this research came, in part, from the National Institutes of Health.
The MIT women's swimming and diving team won the program's first national championship, jumping ahead of New York University by erasing a 20-point deficit as the Engineers finished with 497 points at the 2025 NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving National Championships, hosted by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference March 19-22 at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.
MIT entered the event ranked as the top team in the country. Overall, MIT won three individual national titles and four relay titles. The head coach, Meg Sisson French, was named the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America Women’s Swim Coach of the Year.
On day 1 of the championships, the 400 Medley Relay team of senior Kate Augustyn (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), first-year Sarah Bernard (Brookline, Massachusetts), sophomore Sydney Smith (Atlanta, Georgia), and graduate student Alexandra Turvey (Vancouver, British Colombia) touched the wall first in 3:38.48, just beating the NYU team by 0.8 second and setting a new school record.
Day 2 highlights included Smith posting a winning time of 53.96 in the 100 fly, beating out Nicole Ranile of NYU by under a second. The 200 freestyle relay team of Turvey, Smith, sophomore Ella Roberson (Midland, Michigan) and junior Annika Naveen (Wynnewood, Pennsylvania) held off Pomona-Pitzer for the gold as Naveen brought the title home and gave the Engineers a national record time of 1:30.00.
MIT opened day 3 with another national title, this time in the 200 medley relay. Augustyn led off, followed by Bernard and Naveen. Ella Roberson brought the title home for MIT as she completed her anchor leg in 22.02, which gave the team a combined time of 1:39.51. Roberson was able to hold off a late charge by Kenyon College, which finished second in 1:40.26 as the Engineers set another national record. Augustyn later defended her title in the 100 backstroke as she clocked in with a time of 53.41, tying her own national record.
The final day of action saw MIT pull ahead of NYU with two more national titles. In the 200 backstroke, Augustyn held the lead through most of the event, but Sophia Verkleeren of Williams College caught up to the defending champion in the last half of the race. With just 25 yards left, Augustyn pulled away to defeat Verkleeren with a time of 1:55.85. Augustyn shaved almost 2 seconds off her preliminary time and fell just short of the national record time of 1:55.67. With the win, the Engineers pulled to within one point of NYU for the top spot.
The Engineers sealed the overall national championship by winning their fourth relay of the championship, besting the team from NYU. Turvey set the pace with her lead-off, followed by Smith and Augustyn. Roberson, swimming the anchor leg, held off Kaley McIntyre of NYU, who earlier set the national record in the 100 freestyle, to give MIT the win with a time of 3:19.03 as the Violets took second in 3:19.36.
Augustyn defended her title in the 200 backstroke while sweeping the National Championship in both the 100 and 200 backstroke in consecutive years. She concludes her career as one of the most decorated swimmers in program history, collecting four individual national championships, four relay national championships, and 27 all-America honors, the most in program history.
Researchers develop at-home test to ID those at risk of Alzheimer’s years before symptoms appear
When it comes to early detection of cognitive impairment, a new study suggests that the nose knows.
Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham developed olfactory tests — in which participants sniff odor labels that have been placed on a card — to assess people’s ability to discriminate, identify, and remember odors. They found that participants could successfully take the test at home and that older adults with cognitive impairment scored lower on the test than cognitively normal adults. Results are published in Scientific Reports.
“Early detection of cognitive impairment could help us identify people who are at risk of Alzheimer’s disease and intervene years before memory symptoms begin,” said senior author Mark Albers of the Laboratory of Olfactory Neurotranslation, the McCance Center for Brain Health, Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “Our goal has been to develop and validate a cost-effective, noninvasive test that can be performed at home, helping to set the stage for advancing research and treatment for Alzheimer’s.”
Albers and colleagues are interested in whether olfactory dysfunction — the sometimes-subtle loss of sense of smell — can serve as an early warning sign for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and traumatic brain injury. Albers helped found a company that makes the Aromha Brain Health Test, which is the test used by the research team to conduct the current study.
To evaluate the olfactory test, the team recruited English- and Spanish-speaking participants with subjective cognitive complaints (those with self-reported concerns about memory) and participants with mild cognitive impairment. They compared these participants’ test results with those from people who had no sense of smell and with cognitively normal individuals.
The research team found that odor identification, memory, and discrimination declined with age. They also found that older adults with mild cognitive impairment had lower scores for odor discrimination and identification compared with older adults who were cognitively normal. Overall, the researchers found that test results were similar across English- and Spanish-speakers, and participants performed the test equally successfully regardless of whether they were observed by a research assistant.
The authors note that future studies could incorporate neuropsychological testing and could follow patients over time to see if the tool can predict cognitive decline.
“Our results suggest that olfactory testing could be used in clinical research settings in different languages and among older adults to predict neurodegenerative disease and development of clinical symptoms,” said Albers.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
An international team including engineers from Princeton has devised a way to watch, in stunning detail, as the hollow tendrils of fungi forage for nutrients and then transport those nutrients to the plants’ roots.
Bar graphs and other charts provide a simple way to communicate data, but are, by definition, difficult to translate for readers who are blind or low-vision. Designers have developed methods for converting these visuals into “tactile charts,” but guidelines for doing so are extensive (for example, the Braille Authority of North America’s 2022 guidebook is 426 pages long). The process also requires understanding different types of software, as designers often draft their chart in programs like Adobe Illustrator and then translate it into Braille using another application.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now developed an approach that streamlines the design process for tactile chart designers. Their program, called “Tactile Vega-Lite,” can take data from something like an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into both a standard visual chart and a touch-based one. Design standards are hardwired as default rules within the program to help educators and designers automatically create accessible tactile charts.
The tool could make it easier for blind and low-vision readers to understand many graphics, such as a bar chart comparing minimum wages across states or a line graph tracking countries’ GDPs over time. To bring your designs to the real world, you can tweak your chart in Tactile Vega-Lite and then send its file to a Braille embosser (which prints text as readable dots).
This spring, the researchers will present Tactile Vega-Lite in a paper at the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. According to lead author Mengzhu “Katie” Chen SM ’25, the tool strikes a balance between the precision that design professionals want for editing and the efficiency educators need to create tactile charts quickly.
“We interviewed teachers who wanted to make their lessons accessible to blind and low-vision students, and designers experienced in putting together tactile charts,” says Chen, a recent CSAIL affiliate and master's graduate in electrical engineering and computer science and the Program in System Design and Management. “Since their needs differ, we designed a program that’s easy to use, provides instant feedback when you want to make tweaks, and implements accessibility guidelines.”
Data you can feel
The researchers’ program builds off of their 2017 visualization tool Vega-Lite by automatically encoding both a flat, standard chart and a tactile one. Senior author and MIT postdoc Jonathan Zong SM ’20, PhD ’24 points out that the program makes intuitive design decisions so users don’t have to.
“Tactile Vega-Lite has smart defaults to ensure proper spacing, layout, and texture and Braille conversion, following best practices to create good touch-based reading experiences,” says Zong, who is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an incoming assistant professor at the University of Colorado. “Building on existing guidelines and our interviews with experts, the goal is for teachers or visual designers without a lot of tactile design expertise to quickly convey data in a clear way for tactile readers to explore and understand.”
Tactile Vega-Lite’s code editor allows users to customize axis labels, tick marks, and other elements. Different features within the chart are represented by abstractions — or summaries of a longer body of code — that can be modified. These shortcuts allow you to write brief phrases that tweak the design of your chart. For example, if you want to change how the bars in your graph are filled out, you could change the code in the “Texture” section from “dottedFill” to “verticalFill” to replace small circles with upward lines.
To understand how these abstractions work, the researchers added a gallery of examples. Each one includes a phrase and what change that code leads to. Still, the team is looking to refine Tactile Vega-Lite’s user interface to make it more accessible to users less familiar with coding. Instead of using abstractions for edits, you could click on different buttons.
Chen says she and her colleagues are hoping to add machine-specific customizations to their program. This would allow users to preview how their tactile chart would look before it’s fabricated by an embossing machine and make edits according to the device’s specifications.
While Tactile Vega-Lite can streamline the many steps it usually takes to make a tactile chart, Zong emphasizes that it doesn’t replace an expert doing a final check-over for guideline compliance. The researchers are continuing to incorporate Braille design rules into their program, but caution that human review will likely remain the best practice.
“The ability to design tactile graphics efficiently, particularly without specialized software, is important for providing equal access of information to tactile readers,” says Stacy Fontenot, owner of Font to Dot, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Graphics that follow current guidelines and standards are beneficial for the reader as consistency is paramount, especially with complex, data-filled graphics. Tactile Vega-Lite has a straightforward interface for creating informative tactile graphics quickly and accurately, thereby reducing the design time in providing quality graphics to tactile readers.”
Chen and Zong wrote the paper with Isabella Pineros ’23, MEng ’24 and MIT Associate Professor Arvind Satyanarayan. The researchers’ work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant.
The CSAIL team also incorporated input from Rich Caloggero from MIT’s Disability and Access Services, as well as the Lighthouse for the Blind, which let them observe technical design workflows as part of the project.
The Tactile Vega-Lite system can take data from something like an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into both a standard visual chart and a touch-based one. Design standards are hardwired as default rules within the program, helping educators and designers automatically create accessible tactile charts.
Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.
A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.
The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.
A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.
Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.
Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.
The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.
They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.
In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.
“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.
The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.
In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.
“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”
Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.
“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”
Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.
In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”
And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.
Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”
AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.”
Early support for this research effort was provided by the Tata Center for Technology and Design, a part of the MIT Energy Initiative.
Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers could decrease polluting runoff, while at the same time cutting farmers’ costs and perhaps enhancing productivity.
An international team of scientists have uncovered a thriving underwater ecosystem off the coast of Antarctica that had never before been accessible to humans.
The team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, were working in the Bellingshausen Sea off the coast of Antarctica when a massive iceberg broke away from the George VI Ice Shelf in January of this year.
The team, on board Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too), changed their plans and reached the newly exposed seafloor 12 days later, becoming the first to investigate the area.
Their expedition was the first detailed study of the geology, physical oceanography, and biology beneath such a large area once covered by a floating ice shelf. The A-84 iceberg was approximately 510 square kilometres (209 square miles) in size, and revealed an equivalent area of seafloor when it broke away from the ice shelf.
"We seized upon the moment, changed our expedition plan, and went for it so we could look at what was happening in the depths below," said expedition co-chief scientist Dr Patricia Esquete from the University of Aveiro, Portugal. "We didn't expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years.”
Using Schmidt Ocean Institute’s remotely operated vehicle, ROV SuBastian, the team observed the deep seafloor for eight days and found flourishing ecosystems at depths as great as 1300 meters.
Their observations include large corals and sponges supporting an array of animal life, including icefish, giant sea spiders, and octopus. The discovery offers new insights into how ecosystems function beneath floating sections of the Antarctic ice sheet.
Little is known about what lies beneath Antarctica’s floating ice shelves. In 2021, British Antarctic Survey researchers first reported signs of bottom-dwelling life beneath the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in the Southern Weddell Sea. The current expedition was the first to use an ROV to explore this remote environment.
The team was surprised by the significant biomass and biodiversity of the ecosystems and suspect they have discovered several new species.
Deep-sea ecosystems typically rely on nutrients from the surface slowly raining down to the seafloor. For centuries, the ecosystems under the ice shelf have been covered by ice almost 150 metres thick, completely cutting them off from surface nutrients. "The fact that we found long-living species suggests that the lateral transport, which mostly consists of glacial meltwater from the ice shelf, could be the source of the nutrients to sustain the life we found," said team member Dr Laura Cimoli, from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
The newly exposed Antarctic seafloor also allowed the team, with scientists from Portugal, the United Kingdom, Chile, Germany, Norway, New Zealand, and the United States, to gather critical data on the past behaviour of the larger Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet has been shrinking and losing mass over the last few decades due to climate change.
“The ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet is a major contributor to sea level rise worldwide,” said expedition co-chief scientist Sasha Montelli of University College London (UCL). “Our work is critical for providing longer-term context of these recent changes, improving our ability to make projections of future change — projections that can inform actionable policies. We will undoubtedly make new discoveries as we continue to analyse this data.”
“We were thrilled by the opportunity to explore the newly exposed seafloor,” said team member Dr Svetlana Radionovskaya from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “The research will provide key insights into ice sheet dynamics, oceanography and sub-ice shelf ecosystems. At a time when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting at an alarming rate, understanding these dynamics and their impacts is crucial.”
The oceanography team, led by Cimoli in collaboration with the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, used autonomous underwater vehicles to characterise the ocean circulation of the region and study the impacts of glacial meltwater on the physical and chemical seawater properties. "Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are a nexus point for ocean circulation, so changes that happen around Antarctica can affect global ocean circulation and global climate," said Cimoli.
The researchers are also investigating how the iceberg calving event has contributed to mix the upper ocean, not just in the recently exposed area, but also further downstream as the iceberg floats away. As the giant iceberg drifts, it can generate turbulence that mixes water properties and could potentially mix the deep nutrient-rich water with the surface waters, fuelling biological productivity.
The expedition was part of Challenger 150, a global cooperative focused on deep-sea biological research and endorsed by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) as an Ocean Decade Action.
“The science team was originally in this remote region to study the seafloor and ecosystem at the interface between ice and sea,” said Schmidt Ocean Institute Executive Director, Dr Jyotika Virmani. “Being right there when this iceberg calved from the ice shelf presented a rare scientific opportunity. Serendipitous moments are part of the excitement of research at sea – they offer the chance to be the first to witness the untouched beauty of our world.”
Svetlana Radionovskaya is a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Laura Cimoli is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
Adapted from a media release by the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Inset image: Dr Cimoli (right) and Dr Meyer (UEA, left) prepare an underwater glider for deployment. Credit: Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Scientists explore a seafloor area newly exposed by iceberg A-84; discover vibrant communities of ancient sponges and corals.
By Dr Chew Han Ei, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, and Ms Isabelle Tan, Research Assistant, both at the Institute of Policy Studies, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS
Professor Liu Bin, NUS Deputy President (Research and Technology), has been inducted into the prestigious Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame, in honour of her outstanding contributions as a scientist, engineer, innovator, and academic leader. The Induction Ceremony was held on 21 March 2025, during the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations’ (SCWO) 45th Anniversary Gala Dinner. As an honouree of the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame, Prof Liu joins an esteemed community of trailblazing women who have shaped our nation, pushed boundaries in their fields and paved the way for future generations.
The Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame was launched by SCWO on 14 March 2014 as an expansion of the Wall of Fame that was established earlier to honour Singapore’s pioneering women activists, educators, and philanthropists. The Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame aims to recognise and salute the outstanding women of Singapore in all fields of endeavour.
“I am deeply honoured and grateful to be inducted into the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame alongside other outstanding women who have made profound impact on Singapore. This recognition affirms my commitment to scientific excellence, innovation, and my role as an academic leader and mentor. I hope it serves as an inspiration for more young women to pursue their passions and make their own meaningful contributions that help shape a better, more inclusive world for all,” said Prof Liu.
From a childhood passion to global impact
Since young, Prof Liu had a wide range of interests ─ she was passionate about mathematics and chemistry. She was also interested in artwork and cooking. Despite having a background in arts and social sciences, Prof Liu’s father understood the crucial role that science plays in shaping our world and he encouraged her to pursue a career in science and engineering.
Prof Liu enrolled into NUS to further her studies and earned her PhD in Chemistry, after obtaining her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Nanjing University. Soon after completing her postdoctoral training at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Prof Liu returned to NUS in 2005 to serve as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering at NUS.
Prof Liu is world-renowned in the field of organic functional materials, particularly for her work in polymer chemistry and applications of organic nanomaterials in medicine, environmental monitoring, and energy systems. One of her most significant research contributions to the study of biocompatible luminogens began in 2011. Her findings led to the development of highly sensitive light-up molecular probes and nanoparticle probes that allow for long-term cell tracing and tumour imaging, crucial for cancer research and cell-based therapies.
Leveraging her research on biocompatible luminogens, Prof Liu co-founded Luminicell, an NUS start-up, to commercialise this cutting-edge technology.
Throughout her academic career, Prof Liu has received numerous accolades in recognition of her innovative and groundbreaking research. Some notable ones from the past year include the President’s Science Award 2024 for her team’s breakthrough discovery of the role of carbazole isomers in room temperature phosphorescence of carbazole, an organic semiconductor, resolving a 95-year debate in the field. She was also inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows Class of 2024, in recognition of her distinguished contributions to the development of nanomaterials for biomedical and energy applications.
Shaping the future of research through visionary leadership and mentorship
Prof Liu has been a key driver in elevating NUS’ international research reputation, forging strong partnerships with leading global universities to promote knowledge exchange and collaborative research initiatives. As NUS’ Deputy President (Research and Technology), Prof Liu’s leadership has been instrumental in fostering innovation across faculties at NUS. A notable initiative, where Prof Liu played a crucial role, was the development of the NUS Sustainability Cluster, which aligned the University’s research efforts with global priorities in sustainable development.
Prof Liu is a strong advocate for women in STEM and encourages more women to pursue careers in science and engineering. She believes that girls should be granted the same opportunities as boys to pursue their interests and thrive in STEM fields. Prof Liu’s active interest in promoting opportunities for girls and women in science and engineering has contributed to the diversity and inclusivity of Singapore's scientific community.
Prof Liu is also committed to nurturing the next generation of research leaders and innovators. During her 18 years at NUS, she has mentored 36 PhD students and 63 post-doctoral fellows and visiting professors.
Taking great pride in her multiple roles - as a researcher, academic leader, and mentor - Prof Liu aims to continue to inspire innovation, foster collaboration, and empower emerging scientists to achieve groundbreaking advancements in their respective fields.
When asked to share some advice with young women aspiring to excel in their fields, Prof Liu said,“As we progress in scientific fields, the number of female scientists tends to decrease. I encourage young women interested in STEM to believe in their potential and boldly pursue their passions. Don’t let fears or assumptions limit what you can achieve. Seek out mentors who can support and guide you along the way.”
Life needs sufficient phosphorus. However, the element is scarce, not only today but also at the time of the origin of life. So where was there sufficient phosphorus four billion years ago for life to emerge? A team of origin-of-life researchers has an answer.
Two years ago, MIT professor of literature Arthur Bahr had one of the best days of his life. Sitting in the British Library, he was allowed to page through the Pearl-Manuscript, a singular bound volume from the 1300s containing the earliest versions of the masterly medieval poem “Pearl,” the famous tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and two other poems.
Today, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is commonly read in high school English classes. But it probably would have been lost to history without the survival of the Pearl-Manuscript, like the other works in the same volume. As it stands, no one knows who authored these texts. But one thing is clear: the surviving manuscript is a carefully crafted volume, with bespoke illustrations and the skilled use of parchment. This book is its own work of art.
“The Pearl-Manuscript is just as extraordinary and unusual and unexpected as the poems it contains,” Bahr says of the document, whose formal name is “British Library MS Cotton Nero A X/2.”
Bahr explores these ideas in a new book, “Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight,” published this month by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Bahr combines his deep knowledge of the volume’s texts with detailed examination of its physical qualities — thanks to technologies such as spectroscopy, which has revealed some manuscript secrets, as well as the good, old-fashioned scrutiny Bahr gave the book in person.
“My argument is that this physical object adds up to more than the sum of its parts, through its creative interplay of text, image, and materials,” Bahr says. “It is a coherent volume that evokes the concerns of the poems themselves. Most manuscripts are constructed in utilitarian ways, but not this one.”
Ode to the most beautiful poem
Bahr first encountered “Pearl” as an undergraduate at Amherst College, in a course taught by medievalist Howell D. Chickering. The poem is an intricate examination of Christian ethics; a father, whose daughter has died, dreams he is discussing the meaning of life with her.
“It is the most beautiful poem I have ever read,” Bahr says. “It blew me away, for its formal complexity, and for the really poignant human drama.” He adds: “It’s in some sense why I’m a medievalist.”
And since Bahr’s first book, “Fragments and Assemblages,” studies how medieval bound volumes were often collections of disparate documents, it was natural for him to apply this scholarly lens to the Pearl manuscript as well.
Most scholars think the Pearl manuscript has a single author — although we cannot be certain. After beginning with “Pearl,” the manuscript follows with two other poems, “Cleanness” and “Patience.” Closing the volume, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is an eerie, surreal tale of courage and chivalry set in the (possibly fictional) court of King Arthur.
In the book, Bahr finds the four texts to be thematically linked, analyzing the “connective tissue” through which the “manuscript starts to cohere into a wrought, imperfect, temporally layered whole,” as he writes. Some of these links are broad, including recurring “challenges to our speculative faculties”; the works are full of seeming paradoxes and dreamscapes that test the reader’s interpretive capacity.
There are other ways the text seem aligned. “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” each have 101 stanzas. The texts have numerically consistent structures, in the case of “Pearl” based around the number 12. All but one of its stanzas has 12 lines (and Bahr suspects this imperfection is intentional, like a fine rug with a deliberate flaw, which may be the case for the “extra” 101st stanza). There are 36 lines per page. And from examining the manuscript in person, Bahr found 48 places with decorated initials, although we do not know whose.
“The more you look, the more you find,” Bahr says.
Materiality matters
Some of our knowledge about the Pearl-Manuscript is quite new: Spectroscopy has revealed that the volume originally had simple line drawings, which were later filled in with colored ink.
But there is no substitute for reading books in person. That took Bahr to London in 2023, where he was permitted an extended look at the Pearl-Manuscript in the flesh. Far from being a formality, that gave Bahr new insights.
For instance: The Pearl-Manuscript is written on parchment, which is animal skin. At a key point in the “Patience” poem, a reworking of the tale of Jonah and the whale, the parchment has been reversed, so that the “hair” side of the material faces up, rather than the “flesh” side; it is the only case of this in the manuscript.
“When you’re reading about Jonah being swallowed by the whale, you feel the hair follicles when you wouldn’t expect to,” Bahr says. “At precisely the moment when the poem is thematizing an unnatural reversal of inside and outside, you are feeling the other side of another animal.”
He adds: “The act of touching the Pearl-Manuscript really changed how I think this poem would have worked for the medieval reader.” In this vein, he says, “Materiality matters. Screens are enabling, and without the digital facsimile I could not have written this book, but they cannot ever replace the original. The ‘Patience’ chapter reinforces that.”
Ultimately, Bahr thinks the Pearl-Manuscript buttresses his view in the “Fragments and Assemblages” book, that the medieval reading experience was often bound up with the way volumes were physically constructed.
“My argument in ‘Fragments and Assemblages’ was that medieval readers and book constructors thought in a serious and often sophisticated way about how the material construction and the selection of the texts into a physical object made a difference — mattered — and had the potential to change the meanings of the texts,” he says.
Good grade on the group project
“Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript” has received praise from other scholars. Jessica Brantley, professor and chair of the English Department at Yale University, has said that Bahr “offers an adventurous multilayered reading of both text and book and provides an important reinterpretation of the codex and its poems.”
Daniel Wakelin of Oxford University has said that Bahr “sets out an authoritative reading of these poems” and presents “a bold model for studying material texts and literary works together.”
For his part, Bahr hopes to appeal to an array of readers, just as his courses on medieval literature appeal to students with an array of intellectual interests. In the making of his book, Bahr also credits two MIT students, Kelsey Glover and Madison Sneve, who helped the project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), studying the illustrations and distinctive manuscript markings, among other things.
“It’s a very MIT kind of poem in the sense that not only is the author, or authors, obsessed with math and geometry and numbers and proportion, they are also obsessed with artifact construction, with architectural details and physical craft,” Bahr says. “There’s a very ‘mens et manus’ quality to the poems that’s reflected in the manuscript,” he says, referring to MIT’s motto, “mind and hand.” “I think helps explain why these extraordinary MIT students helped me so much.”
MIT literature professor Arthur Bahr’s new book, “Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight,” was published this month by the University of Chicago Press.
If you filled out a March Madness bracket this month, you probably faced the same question with each college match-up: What gives one team an edge over another? Is it a team’s record through the regular season? Or the chemistry among its players? Maybe it’s the experience of its coaching staff or the buzz around a top scorer.
All of these factors play some role in a team’s chance to advance. But according to a new study by MIT researchers, there’s one member who consistently boosts their team’s performance: the data analyst.
The new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Sports Economics, quantifies the influence of basketball analytics investment on team performance. The study’s authors looked in particular at professional basketball and compared the investment in data analytics on each NBA team with the team’s record of wins over 12 seasons. They found that indeed, teams that hired more analytics staff, and invested more in data analysis in general, tended to win more games.
Analytics department headcount had a positive and statistically significant effect on team wins even when accounting for other factors such as a team’s roster salary, the experience and chemistry among its players, the consistency of its coaching staff, and player injuries through each season. Even with all of these influences, the researchers found that the depth of a team’s data analytics bench, so to speak, was a consistent predictor of the team’s wins.
What’s more, they were able to quantify basketball analytics’ value, based on their impact on team wins. They found that for every four-fifths of one data analyst, a team gains one additional win in a season. Interestingly, a team can also gain one additional win by increasing its roster salary by $9.6 million. One way to read this is that one data analyst’s impact is worth at least $9 million.
“I don’t know of any analyst who’s being paid $9 million,” says study author Henry Wang, a graduate student in the MIT Sports Lab. “There is still a gap between how the player is being valued and how the analytics are being valued."
While the study focuses on professional basketball, the researchers say the findings are relevant beyond the NBA. They speculate that college teams that make use of data analytics may have an edge over those who don’t. (Take note, March Madness fans.) And the same likely goes for sports in general, along with any competitive field.
“This paper hits nicely not just in sports but beyond, with this question of: What is the tangible impact of big data analytics?” says co-author Arnab Sarker PhD ’25, a recent doctoral graduate of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). “Sports are a really nice, controlled place for analytics. But we’re also curious to what extent we can see these effects in general organizational performance.”
The study is also co-authored by Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
Data return
Across the sports world, data analysts have grown in number and scope over the years. Sports analytics’ role in using data and stats to improve team performance was popularized in 2011 with the movie “Moneyball,” based on the 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, who chronicled the 2002 Oakland Athletics and general manager Billy Beane’s use of baseball analytics to win games against wealthier Major League Baseball teams.
Since then, data analysis has expanded to many other sports, in an effort to make use of the varied and fast-paced sources of data, measurements, and statistics available today. In basketball, analysts can take on many roles, using data, for instance, to optimize a player’s health and minimize injury risk, and to predict a player’s performance to inform draft selection, free agency acquisition, and contract negotiations.
A data analyst’s work can also influence in-game strategy. Case in point: Over the last decade, NBA teams have strategically chosen to shift to shooting longer-range three-pointers, since Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey SM ’00 determined that statistically, shooting more three-pointers wins more games. Today, each of the 30 NBA teams employs at least one basketball analytics staffer. And yet, while a data analyst’s job is entirely based on data, there is not much data on the impact of analysts themselves.
“Teams and leagues are spending millions of dollars on embracing analytical tools without a real sense of return-on-investment,” Wang notes.
Numbers value
The MIT researchers aimed in their new study to quantify the influence of NBA team analysts, specifically on winning games. To do so, they looked to major sources of sports data such as ESPN.com, and NBAstuffer.com, a website that hosts a huge amount of stats on NBA games and team stats, including hired basketball analytics staff, that the website’s managers compile based on publicly available data, such as from official team press releases and staff directories, as well as LinkedIn and X profiles, and news and industry reports.
For their new study, Wang and his colleagues gathered data on each of the 30 NBA teams, over a period from 2009 to 2023, 2009 being the year that NBAstuffer.com started compiling team data. For every team in each season during this period, the researchers recorded an “analyst headcount,” meaning the number of basketball operations analytics staff employed by a team. They considered an analyst to be data analysts, software engineers, sports scientists, directors of research, and other technical positions by title, but also staff members who aren’t formally analysts but may be known to be particularly active in the basketball analytics community. In general, they found that in 2009, a total of 10 data analysts were working across the NBA. In 2023, that number ballooned to 132, with some teams employing more analysts than others.
“What we’re trying to measure is a team’s level of investment in basketball analytics,” Wang explains. “The best measure would be if every team told us exactly how much money they spent every year on their R&D and data infrastructure and analysts. But they’re not going to do that. So headcount is the next best thing.”
In addition to analytics headcount, the researchers also compiled data on other win-influencing variables, such as roster salary (Does a higher-paid team win more games?), roster experience (Does a team with more veterans win more games?), consistent coaching (Did a new coach shake up a team’s win record?) and season injuries (How did a team’s injuries affect its wins?). The researchers also noted “road back-to-backs,” or the number of times a team had to play consecutive away games (Does the wear and tear of constant travel impact wins?).
The researchers plugged all this data into a “two-way fixed effects” model to estimate the relative effect that each variable has on the number of additional games a team can win in a season.
“The model learns all these effects, so we can see, for instance, the tradeoff between analyst and roster salary when contributing to win total,” Wang explains.
Their finding that teams with a higher analytics headcount tended to win more games wasn’t entirely surprising.
“We’re still at a point where the analyst is undervalued,” Wang says. “There probably is a sweet spot, in terms of headcount and wins. You can’t hire 100 analysts and expect to go in 82-and-0 next season. But right now a lot of teams are still below that sweet spot, and this competitive advantage that analytics offers has yet to be fully harvested.”
According to a new study by MIT researchers, there’s one member of a professional basketball team who consistently boosts their team’s performance: the data analyst.
By Prof Hsu Li Yang, Vice-Dean (Global Health) from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at NUS, and Director of the Asia Centre for Health Security at the same school
The National University of Singapore (NUS) will appoint a distinguished scientist, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, to its Board of Trustees on 1 April 2025.
Dr Swaminathan is former Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization and previously Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research. She is a paediatrician from India and a globally recognised expert in tuberculosis and HIV research. She is now Chairperson at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and Principal Advisor to the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme in India.
As part of board renewal, two members of the NUS Board of Trustees, Professor Cheong Koon Hean and Mr Loh Chin Hua, will retire from the Board on 31 March 2025 after serving for 12 years and 9 years respectively. Prof Cheong is Chairman of the Centre for Liveable Cities and former Chief Executive Officer of the Housing & Development Board, while Mr Loh is Chief Executive Officer of Keppel Ltd.
Mr Hsieh Fu Hua, Chairman of the NUS Board, said, “We warmly welcome Soumya to our Board. With her expertise and deep experience in research translation, she will bring valuable insights to guide the University’s thrusts in this respect. Her international perspective will enrich discussions on charting the growth of NUS towards becoming a leading global university.”
“We also want to extend our deepest appreciation to Koon Hean and Chin Hua for their many contributions and dedication to NUS. Both have served the Board and its committees very well. From their broad experience, they have provided guidance on many strategic issues. We will miss them indeed,” Mr Hsieh added.
With the latest changes, the NUS Board of Trustees will have 19 members.
Members of the Board of Trustees are appointed by the Minister for Education. The Board is made up of eminent leaders from the public sector, academia, business and various professions. The Board works closely with the management and stakeholders of the University to shape its vision, chart major directions, and guide significant initiatives to produce a strong and enduring impact for the University, and for Singapore and beyond.
More information on new Trustee Dr Soumya Swaminathan can be found in Annexe 1. The full list of Trustees can be found in Annexe 2.
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Kevin Rader is the senior preceptor in statistics and associate director of undergraduate studies.
Typically, you’re talking about the perfect bracket of 64 games. Sixty-three teams lose and one team doesn’t, and to get the perfect bracket, you have to pick right in each of those games. The equation is 1 over 263, which is some astronomical number, it’s in the quintillions. It’s like winning the Powerball two drawings in a row.
No one has gotten a perfect bracket ever, or at least not that has been reported. This year, we’re about halfway through the games, and there are no perfect brackets remaining of all the publicly available ones. It’s unlikely to happen in anyone’s lifetime.
The top seeds almost never lose, at least not in the first round. So it’s not really like flipping 63 coins; it’s like flipping 47 coins. So the chances are more like winning the lottery twice out of the next three draws.
The best chance for anyone to get a perfect bracket is if all the best teams win. But there are always going to be some upsets — and good luck correctly picking those.
Winning your office pool is almost a more difficult question. It mainly depends on how many people are in the pool. You need to distinguish yourself from your competition. Yes, you pick the favorites most of the time, but you have to pick a few upsets to distinguish yourself from other people, especially if it’s in a big pool with lots of entries.
To pick the upsets correctly, use the information you can. At a certain point, it’s almost a coin flip, but when there’s a big discrepancy between the teams, you shouldn’t use a coin flip; you should pick chalk.
Next time you cross a crowded plaza, crosswalk, or airport concourse, take note of the pedestrian flow. Are people walking in orderly lanes, single-file, to their respective destinations? Or is it a haphazard tangle of personal trajectories, as people dodge and weave through the crowd?
MIT instructor Karol Bacik and his colleagues studied the flow of human crowds and developed a first-of-its-kind way to predict when pedestrian paths will transition from orderly to entangled. Their findings may help inform the design of public spaces that promote safe and efficient thoroughfares.
In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers consider a common scenario in which pedestrians navigate a busy crosswalk. The team analyzed the scenario through mathematical analysis and simulations, considering the many angles at which individuals may cross and the dodging maneuvers they may make as they attempt to reach their destinations while avoiding bumping into other pedestrians along the way.
The researchers also carried out controlled crowd experiments and studied how real participants walked through a crowd to reach certain locations. Through their mathematical and experimental work, the team identified a key measure that determines whether pedestrian traffic is ordered, such that clear lanes form in the flow, or disordered, in which there are no discernible paths through the crowd. Called “angular spread,” this parameter describes the number of people walking in different directions.
If a crowd has a relatively small angular spread, this means that most pedestrians walk in opposite directions and meet the oncoming traffic head-on, such as in a crosswalk. In this case, more orderly, lane-like traffic is likely. If, however, a crowd has a larger angular spread, such as in a concourse, it means there are many more directions that pedestrians can take to cross, with more chance for disorder.
In fact, the researchers calculated the point at which a moving crowd can transition from order to disorder. That point, they found, was an angular spread of around 13 degrees, meaning that if pedestrians don’t walk straight across, but instead an average pedestrian veers off at an angle larger than 13 degrees, this can tip a crowd into disordered flow.
“This all is very commonsense,” says Bacik, who is a instructor of applied mathematics at MIT. “The question is whether we can tackle it precisely and mathematically, and where the transition is. Now we have a way to quantify when to expect lanes — this spontaneous, organized, safe flow — versus disordered, less efficient, potentially more dangerous flow.”
The study’s co-authors include Grzegorz Sobota and Bogdan Bacik of the Academy of Physical Education in Katowice, Poland, and Tim Rogers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.
Right, left, center
Bacik, who is trained in fluid dynamics and granular flow, came to study pedestrian flow during 2021, when he and his collaborators looked into the impacts of social distancing, and ways in which people might walk among each other while maintaining safe distances. That work inspired them to look more generally into the dynamics of crowd flow.
In 2023, he and his collaborators explored “lane formation,” a phenomenon by which particles, grains, and, yes, people have been observed to spontaneously form lanes, moving in single-file when forced to cross a region from two opposite directions. In that work, the team identified the mechanism by which such lanes form, which Bacik sums up as “an imbalance of turning left versus right.” Essentially, they found that as soon as something in a crowd starts to look like a lane, individuals around that fledgling lane either join up, or are forced to either side of it, walking parallel to the original lane, which others can follow. In this way, a crowd can spontaneously organize into regular, structured lanes.
“Now we’re asking, how robust is this mechanism?” Bacik says. “Does it only work in this very idealized situation, or can lane formation tolerate some imperfections, such as some people not going perfectly straight, as they might do in a crowd?”
Lane change
For their new study, the team looked to identify a key transition in crowd flow: When do pedestrians switch from orderly, lane-like traffic, to less organized, messy flow? The researchers first probed the question mathematically, with an equation that is typically used to describe fluid flow, in terms of the average motion of many individual molecules.
“If you think about the whole crowd flowing, rather than individuals, you can use fluid-like descriptions,” Bacik explains. “It’s this art of averaging, where, even if some people may cross more assertively than others, these effects are likely to average out in a sufficiently large crowd. If you only care about the global characteristics like, are there lanes or not, then you can make predictions without detailed knowledge of everyone in the crowd.”
Bacik and his colleagues used equations of fluid flow, and applied them to the scenario of pedestrians flowing across a crosswalk. The team tweaked certain parameters in the equation, such as the width of the fluid channel (in this case, the crosswalk), and the angle at which molecules (or people) flowed across, along with various directions that people can “dodge,” or move around each other to avoid colliding.
Based on these calculations, the researchers found that pedestrians in a crosswalk are more likely to form lanes, when they walk relatively straight across, from opposite directions. This order largely holds until people start veering across at more extreme angles. Then, the equation predicts that the pedestrian flow is likely to be disordered, with few to no lanes forming.
The researchers were curious to see whether the math bears out in reality. For this, they carried out experiments in a gymnasium, where they recorded the movements of pedestrians using an overhead camera. Each volunteer wore a paper hat, depicting a unique barcode that the overhead camera could track.
In their experiments, the team assigned volunteers various start and end positions along opposite sides of a simulated crosswalk, and tasked them with simultaneously walking across the crosswalk to their target location without bumping into anyone. They repeated the experiment many times, each time having volunteers assume different start and end positions. In the end, the researchers were able to gather visual data of multiple crowd flows, with pedestrians taking many different crossing angles.
When they analyzed the data and noted when lanes spontaneously formed, and when they did not, the team found that, much like the equation predicted, the angular spread mattered. Their experiments confirmed that the transition from ordered to disordered flow occurred somewhere around the theoretically predicted 13 degrees. That is, if an average person veered more than 13 degrees away from straight ahead, the pedestrian flow could tip into disorder, with little lane formation. What’s more, they found that the more disorder there is in a crowd, the less efficiently it moves.
The team plans to test their predictions on real-world crowds and pedestrian thoroughfares.
“We would like to analyze footage and compare that with our theory,” Bacik says. “And we can imagine that, for anyone designing a public space, if they want to have a safe and efficient pedestrian flow, our work could provide a simpler guideline, or some rules of thumb.”
This work is supported, in part, by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of UK Research and Innovation.
The Class of 2025 learned on March 21 where they will be doing their internship and residency training – setting the stage for the next several years of their medical careers and lives.
Weill Cornell Medicine researchers found that restricting telehealth prescriptions for opioid use disorder could keep thousands from accessing buprenorphine, a medication that helps people recover from addiction.
Elsbeth Stern will give her farewell lecture on 27 March. Stern, who conducts research on the topics of learning and teaching, has helped shape the discussion around the transition to the baccalaureate school in Switzerland. We talked to her one more time about her insights.
A new national programme that aims to position Singapore at the forefront of advancements in RNA science and applications was officially launched today. This new initiative – named National Initiative for RNA Biology and Its Applications (NIRBA) – is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) with total funding of S$130 million over seven years. NIRBA will engage scientists and clinicians from leading institutions like the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Duke-NUS Medical School.
RNA biology and its applications has been identified as a rapidly expanding field of critical importance to Singapore’s future health and economic needs. Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Mr Heng Swee Keat, who is also Chairman of NRF, officiated at the inauguration of NIRBA at NUS.
NIRBA is led by Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, a Distinguished Professor of Medicine, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Director of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore at NUS, and Research Director at the Institute of Molecular & Cell Biology, A*STAR. He will work closely with a team of leading local experts in the field, to establish globally leading foundational research in RNA science, with strong translational potential for diverse applications. While the primary focus will be on human health, the research will also have relevance to areas such as agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
Unlocking the vast potential of RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules are present in all living organisms and in many viruses. RNA molecules, transcribed from DNA, serve as vital messengers that translate genetic information into proteins, driving the biological processes essential to life.
Recent research has uncovered that structurally diverse RNA molecules perform a remarkable range of biological functions, with many more yet to be discovered. As a result, RNA has emerged as a vital macromolecule, with its pivotal role in human health and disease only starting to unfold.
The potential of RNA research was both validated and significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which offered compelling proof of the power and adaptability of RNA platforms in vaccine development and their capacity for rapid manufacturing scale-up. The pandemic also greatly advanced various aspects of RNA science and technology worldwide. Of note, this potential impact extends beyond human health to multiple fields, including agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
To further strengthen Singapore’s capabilities in RNA research and translation, NIRBA aims to achieve the following goals:
Swiftly build world-leading foundational research peaks in differentiated challenge areas in RNA research where there are current global gaps, leveraging Singapore’s competitive advantages.
Develop an agile framework of ‘Innovation Clusters’ to create and sustain competitive research peaks, while drawing on relevant expertise from the local and global research community in a nimble and dynamic way.
Operationalise innovative pathways to build an upstream pipeline that fuels the capabilities of Singapore’s downstream units, to fully capitalise on their health and economic value for the nation and beyond.
Prof Venkitaraman said, “NIRBA will serve as a vital force-multiplierfor Singapore’s RNA research. It will integrate Singapore’s existing strengths to build internationally competitive innovation in carefully chosen challenge areas, and synergise between academic and industrial partners, to create short-term and longer-term health and economic benefits. Groundbreaking scientific discoveries are a necessary foundation for translation into economic, health, and societal impact.”
NIRBA’s innovation clusters will draw on a dynamic pool of multidisciplinary researchers from different institutions to promote island-wide inter-organisational collaborations between NUS, NTU Singapore, A*STAR, public health institutions, and industry.
Cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research to address knowledge gaps
NIRBA aims to build four peaks of excellence that are of strategic importance to Singapore. It will differentiate its work by focusing on areas where Singapore has a competitive advantage, such as in the RNA biology of diseases prevalent amongst the Asian population.
Cluster 1 focuses on how Asian genetic diversity impacts the RNA biology of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other conditions relevant to Singapore. Scientists will examine whether Asian genomic variants affect RNA expression, modification and function in different cell types linked to these diseases.
Cluster 2 explores how chemical modifications on RNA alter host immunity. RNA modifications, or small chemical changes made to RNA molecules,play a crucial role in helping our body balance immune responses, enabling the body to fight off infections while protecting our own healthy cells.
Cluster 3 explores how RNA molecules enter cells and are transported within them to lay scientific foundations for effective RNA-based therapeutics that selectively target diseased tissues.
Cluster 4 focuses on how RNA-based drugs exert their effects and are cleared from the body after administration, a critical enabler for the development of RNA-based therapies and vaccines in Singapore.
Central hub to foster collaborations
To promote impactful and meaningful interactions, NIRBA will deploy a ‘hub and spoke’ model where new collaborative research programmes, international academic and industrial collaborations, as well as unique core research resources will be co-located in a central ‘hub’ based physically at NUS. This 2,000-sqm space will be equipped with state-of-the-art technologies and infrastructure to meet the biological, structural, chemical and computational needs of NIRBA. NIRBA will harness diverse research talents from different institutions across Singapore working at the central ‘hub’, enabling synergistic interdisciplinary collaborations with a broad range of partners. Other activities using existing research infrastructure will be performed in distributed ‘spokes’.
Over the next seven years with NRF funding support, NIRBA aims to add considerable value to the RNA research landscape across Singapore, through the training of researchers, recruitment of overseas talent, access to shared infrastructure and unique core resources, and exposure of local research staff to collaborative projects. The peaks of excellence in science, people and platforms established by NIRBA will help to future-proof Singapore’s investments in RNA research, advance precision health for Asian populations and diseases, and generate economic value through spinouts and industrial partnerships.
A new national programme that aims to position Singapore at the forefront of advancements in RNA science and applications was officially launched on 24 March 2025. This new initiative – named National Initiative for RNA Biology and Its Applications (NIRBA) – is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) with total funding of S$130 million over seven years. NIRBA will engage scientists and clinicians from leading institutions like the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Duke-NUS Medical School.
RNA biology and its applications has been identified as a rapidly expanding field of critical importance to Singapore’s future health and economic needs. Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Mr Heng Swee Keat, who is also Chairman of NRF, officiated at the inauguration of NIRBA at NUS.
NIRBA is led by Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, a Distinguished Professor of Medicine, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Director of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore at NUS, and Research Director at the Institute of Molecular & Cell Biology, A*STAR. He will work closely with a team of leading local experts in the field, to establish globally leading foundational research in RNA science, with strong translational potential for diverse applications. While the primary focus will be on human health, the research will also have relevance to areas such as agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
Speaking at the launch ceremony, Mr Heng highlighted that RNA biology in and its applications is an important domain in foundational research, citing the example of the COVID-19 pandemic when the rapid development and deployment of mRNA vaccines saved countless lives. He said, “Today's launch of NIRBA is therefore very timely to strengthen our RNA Research and Innovation capabilities.”
Mr Heng further elaborated, “It is an exciting new chapter that we are writing in our biomedical journey, and I look forward to the breakthroughs and achievements from this new initiative in the years ahead.”
Unlocking the vast potential of RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules are present in all living organisms and in many viruses. RNA molecules, transcribed from DNA, serve as vital messengers that translate genetic information into proteins, driving the biological processes essential to life.
Recent research has uncovered that structurally diverse RNA molecules perform a remarkable range of biological functions, with many more yet to be discovered. As a result, RNA has emerged as a vital macromolecule, with its pivotal role in human health and disease only starting to unfold.
The potential of RNA research was both validated and significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which offered compelling proof of the power and adaptability of RNA platforms in vaccine development and their capacity for rapid manufacturing scale-up. The pandemic also greatly advanced various aspects of RNA science and technology worldwide. Of note, this potential impact extends beyond human health to multiple fields, including agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
To further strengthen Singapore’s capabilities in RNA research and translation, NIRBA aims to achieve the following goals:
Swiftly build world-leading foundational research peaks in differentiated challenge areas in RNA research where there are current global gaps, leveraging Singapore’s competitive advantages.
Develop an agile framework of ‘Innovation Clusters’ to create and sustain competitive research peaks, while drawing on relevant expertise from the local and global research community in a nimble and dynamic way.
Operationalise innovative pathways to build an upstream pipeline that fuels the capabilities of Singapore’s downstream units, to fully capitalise on their health and economic value for the nation and beyond.
Prof Venkitaraman said, “NIRBA will serve as a vital force-multiplierfor Singapore’s RNA research. It will integrate Singapore’s existing strengths to build internationally competitive innovation in carefully chosen challenge areas, and synergise between academic and industrial partners, to create short-term and longer-term health and economic benefits. Groundbreaking scientific discoveries are a necessary foundation for translation into economic, health, and societal impact.”
NIRBA’s innovation clusters will draw on a dynamic pool of multidisciplinary researchers from different institutions to promote island-wide inter-organisational collaborations between NUS, NTU Singapore, A*STAR, public health institutions, and industry.
Cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research to address knowledge gaps
NIRBA aims to build four peaks of excellence that are of strategic importance to Singapore. It will differentiate its work by focusing on areas where Singapore has a competitive advantage, such as in the RNA biology of diseases prevalent amongst the Asian population.
Cluster 1 focuses on how Asian genetic diversity impacts the RNA biology of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other conditions relevant to Singapore. Scientists will examine whether Asian genomic variants affect RNA expression, modification and function in different cell types linked to these diseases.
Cluster 2 explores how chemical modifications on RNA alter host immunity. RNA modifications, or small chemical changes made to RNA molecules,play a crucial role in helping our body balance immune responses, enabling the body to fight off infections while protecting our own healthy cells.
Cluster 3 explores how RNA molecules enter cells and are transported within them to lay scientific foundations for effective RNA-based therapeutics that selectively target diseased tissues.
Cluster 4 focuses on how RNA-based drugs exert their effects and are cleared from the body after administration, a critical enabler for the development of RNA-based therapies and vaccines in Singapore.
Central hub to foster collaborations
To promote impactful and meaningful interactions, NIRBA will deploy a ‘hub and spoke’ model where new collaborative research programmes, international academic and industrial collaborations, as well as unique core research resources will be co-located in a central ‘hub’ based physically at NUS. This 2,000-sqm space will be equipped with state-of-the-art technologies and infrastructure to meet the biological, structural, chemical and computational needs of NIRBA. NIRBA will harness diverse research talents from different institutions across Singapore working at the central ‘hub’, enabling synergistic interdisciplinary collaborations with a broad range of partners. Other activities using existing research infrastructure will be performed in distributed ‘spokes’.
Over the next seven years with NRF funding support, NIRBA aims to add considerable value to the RNA research landscape across Singapore, through the training of researchers, recruitment of overseas talent, access to shared infrastructure and unique core resources, and exposure of local research staff to collaborative projects. The peaks of excellence in science, people and platforms established by NIRBA will help to future-proof Singapore’s investments in RNA research, advance precision health for Asian populations and diseases, and generate economic value through spinouts and industrial partnerships.
RNA biology: Potential impact and its wide-ranging applications
A highlight of the launch event was a panel discussion titled “RNA Biology & Its Applications in Human Diseases – The Singapore Perspective”. Prominent leaders in the field - Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, Permanent Secretary of National Research and Development and Chairman of A*STAR; Dr Mohamed ElSayed, Chief Scientific Officer at Nucleic Acid Therapeutics Initiative (NATi); and Dr Tan Si Hui, an RNA biotech entrepreneur – shared insightful perspectives on the topic. The session was moderated by Prof Venkitaraman.
Life takes shape with the motion of a single cell. In response to signals from certain proteins and enzymes, a cell can start to move and shake, leading to contractions that cause it to squeeze, pinch, and eventually divide. As daughter cells follow suit down the generational line, they grow, differentiate, and ultimately arrange themselves into a fully formed organism.
Now MIT scientists have used light to control how a single cell jiggles and moves during its earliest stage of development. The team studied the motion of egg cells produced by starfish — an organism that scientists have long used as a classic model for understanding cell growth and development.
The researchers focused on a key enzyme that triggers a cascade of motion within a starfish egg cell. They genetically designed a light-sensitive version of the same enzyme, which they injected into egg cells, and then stimulated the cells with different patterns of light.
They found that the light successfully triggered the enzyme, which in turn prompted the cells to jiggle and move in predictable patterns. For instance, the scientists could stimulate cells to exhibit small pinches or sweeping contractions, depending on the pattern of light they induced. They could even shine light at specific points around a cell to stretch its shape from a circle to a square.
Their results, appearing today in the journal Nature Physics, provide scientists with a new optical tool for controlling cell shape in its earliest developmental stages. Such a tool, they envision, could guide the design of synthetic cells, such as therapeutic “patch” cells that contract in response to light signals to help close wounds, or drug-delivering “carrier” cells that release their contents only when illuminated at specific locations in the body. Overall, the researchers see their findings as a new way to probe how life takes shape from a single cell.
“By revealing how a light-activated switch can reshape cells in real time, we’re uncovering basic design principles for how living systems self-organize and evolve shape,” says the study’s senior author, Nikta Fakhri, associate professor of physics at MIT. “The power of these tools is that they are guiding us to decode all these processes of growth and development, to help us understand how nature does it.”
The study’s MIT authors include first author Jinghui Liu, Yu-Chen Chao, and Tzer Han Tan; along with Tom Burkart, Alexander Ziepke, and Erwin Frey of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; John Reinhard of Saarland University; and S. Zachary Swartz of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Cell circuitry
Fakhri’s group at MIT studies the physical dynamics that drive cell growth and development. She is particularly interested in symmetry, and the processes that govern how cells follow or break symmetry as they grow and divide. The five-limbed starfish, she says, is an ideal organism for exploring such questions of growth, symmetry, and early development.
“A starfish is a fascinating system because it starts with a symmetrical cell and becomes a bilaterally symmetric larvae at early stages, and then develops into pentameral adult symmetry,” Fakhri says. “So there’s all these signaling processes that happen along the way to tell the cell how it needs to organize.”
Scientists have long studied the starfish and its various stages of development. Among many revelations, researchers have discovered a key “circuitry” within a starfish egg cell that controls its motion and shape. This circuitry involves an enzyme, GEF, that naturally circulates in a cell’s cytoplasm. When this enzyme is activated, it induces a change in a protein, called Rho, that is known to be essential for regulating cell mechanics.
When the GEF enzyme stimulates Rho, it causes the protein to switch from an essentially free-floating state to a state that binds the protein to the cell’s membrane. In this membrane-bound state, the protein then triggers the growth of microscopic, muscle-like fibers that thread out across the membrane and subsequently twitch, enabling the cell to contract and move.
In previous work, Fakhri’s group showed that a cell’s movements can be manipulated by varying the cell’s concentrations of GEF enzyme: The more enzyme they introduced into a cell, the more contractions the cell would exhibit.
“This whole idea made us think whether it’s possible to hack this circuitry, to not just change a cell’s pattern of movements but get a desired mechanical response,” Fakhri says.
Lights and action
To precisely manipulate a cell’s movements, the team looked to optogenetics — an approach that involves genetically engineering cells and cellular components such as proteins and enzymes, such that they activate in response to light.
Using established optogenetic techniques, the researchers developed a light-sensitive version of the GEF enzyme. From this engineered enzyme, they isolated its mRNA — essentially, the genetic blueprint for building the enzyme. They then injected this blueprint into egg cells that the team harvested from a single starfish ovary, which can hold millions of unfertilized cells. The cells, infused with the new mRNA, then began to produce light-sensitive GEF enzymes on their own.
In experiments, the researchers then placed each enzyme-infused egg cell under a microscope and shone light onto the cell in different patterns and from different points along the cell’s periphery. They took videos of the cell’s movements in response.
They found that when they aimed the light in specific points, the GEF enzyme became activated and recruited Rho protein to the light-targeted sites. There, the protein then set off its characteristic cascade of muscle-like fibers that pulled or pinched the cell in the same, light-stimulated spots. Much like pulling the strings of a marionette, they were able to control the cell’s movements, for instance directing it to morph into various shapes, including a square.
Surprisingly, they also found they could stimulate the cell to undergo sweeping contractions by shining a light in a single spot, exceeding a certain threshold of enzyme concentration.
“We realized this Rho-GEF circuitry is an excitable system, where a small, well-timed stimulus can trigger a large, all-or-nothing response,” Fakhri says. “So we can either illuminate the whole cell, or just a tiny place on the cell, such that enough enzyme is recruited to that region so the system gets kickstarted to contract or pinch on its own.”
The researchers compiled their observations and derived a theoretical framework to predict how a cell’s shape will change, given how it is stimulated with light. The framework, Fakhri says, opens a window into “the ‘excitability’ at the heart of cellular remodeling, which is a fundamental process in embryo development and wound healing.”
She adds: “This work provides a blueprint for designing ‘programmable’ synthetic cells, letting researchers orchestrate shape changes at will for future biomedical applications.”
This work was supported, in part, by the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
“By revealing how a light-activated switch can reshape cells in real time, we’re uncovering basic design principles for how living systems self-organize and evolve shape,” says the study’s senior author, Nikta Fakhri, associate professor of physics at MIT
MIT engineers have devised a new way to deliver certain drugs in higher doses with less pain, by injecting them as a suspension of tiny crystals. Once under the skin, the crystals assemble into a drug “depot” that could last for months or years, eliminating the need for frequent drug injections.
This approach could prove useful for delivering long-lasting contraceptives or other drugs that need to be given for extended periods of time. Because the drugs are dispersed in a suspension before injection, they can be administered through a narrow needle that is easier for patients to tolerate.
“We showed that we can have very controlled, sustained delivery, likely for multiple months and even years through a small needle,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), an associate member of the Broad Institute, and the senior author of the study.
The lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemical Engineering, are former MIT and BWH postdoc Vivian Feig, who is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University; MIT graduate student Sanghyun Park; and Pier Rivano, a former visiting research scholar in Traverso’s lab.
Easier injections
This project began as part of an effort funded by the Gates Foundation to expand contraceptive options, particularly in developing nations.
“The overarching goal is to give women access to a lot of different formats for contraception that are easy to administer, compatible with being used in the developing world, and have a range of different timeframes of durations of action,” Feig says. “In our particular project, we were interested in trying to combine the benefits of long-acting implants with the ease of self-administrable injectables.”
There are marketed injectable suspensions available in the United States and other countries, but these drugs are dispersed throughout the tissue after injection, so they only work for about three months. Other injectable products have been developed that can form longer-lasting depots under the skin, but these typically require the addition of precipitating polymers that can make up 23 to 98 percent of the solution by weight, which can make the drug more difficult to inject.
The MIT and BWH team wanted to create a formulation that could be injected through a small-gauge needle and last for at least six months and up to two years. They began working with a contraceptive drug called levonorgestrel, a hydrophobic molecule that can form crystals. The team discovered that suspending these crystals in a particular organic solvent caused the crystals to assemble into a highly compact implant after injection. Because this depot could form without needing large amounts of polymer, the drug formulation could still be easily injected through a narrow-gauge needle.
The solvent, benzyl benzoate, is biocompatible and has been previously used as an additive to injectable drugs. The team found that the solvent’s poor ability to mix with biological fluids is what allows the solid drug crystals to self-assemble into a depot under the skin after injection.
“The solvent is critical because it allows you to inject the fluid through a small needle, but once in place, the crystals self-assemble into a drug depot,” Traverso says.
By altering the density of the depot, the researchers can tune the rate at which the drug molecules are released into the body. In this study, the researchers showed they could change the density by adding small amounts of a polymer such as polycaprolactone, a biodegradable polyester.
“By incorporating a very small amount of polymers — less than 1.6 percent by weight — we can modulate the drug release rate, extending its duration while maintaining injectability. This demonstrates the tunability of our system, which can be engineered to accommodate a broader range of contraceptive needs as well as tailored dosing regimens for other therapeutic applications,” Park says.
Stable drug depots
The researchers tested their approach by injecting the drug solution subcutaneously in rats and showed that the drug depots could remain stable and release drug gradually for three months. After the three-month study ended, about 85 percent of the drug remained in the depots, suggesting that they could continue releasing the drugs for a much longer period of time.
“We anticipate that the depots could last for more than a year, based on our post-analysis of preclinical data. Follow-up studies are underway to further validate their efficacy beyond this initial proof-of-concept,” Park says.
Once the drug depots form, they are compact enough to be retrievable, allowing for surgical removal if treatment needs to be halted before the drug is fully released.
This approach could also lend itself to delivering drugs to treat neuropsychiatric conditions as well as HIV and tuberculosis, the researchers say. They are now moving toward assessing its translation to humans by conducting advanced preclinical studies to evaluate self-assembly in a more clinically relevant skin environment. “This is a very simple system in that it’s basically a solvent, the drug, and then you can add a little bit of bioresorbable polymer. Now we’re considering which indications do we go after: Is it contraception? Is it others? These are some of the things that we’re starting to look into as part of the next steps toward translation to humans,” Traverso says.
The research was funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation, the Karl van Tassel Career Development Professorship, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, a Schmidt Science Fellows postdoctoral fellowship, the Rhodes Trust, a Takeda Fellowship, a Warren M. Rohsenow Fellowship, and a Kwangjeong Educational Foundation Fellowship.
MIT engineers have devised a new way to deliver certain drugs in higher doses with less pain, by injecting them as a suspension of tiny crystals. Once under the skin, the crystals assemble into a drug “depot” that could last for months or years, eliminating the need for frequent drug injections.
The Spotlight on Spinouts 2025 report, produced by the Royal Academy of Engineering in collaboration with Beauhurst, analyses annual trends in UK spinouts. The University of Cambridge ranks second to Oxford for the number of spinouts created since 2011, with Imperial in third. However, in the last year, Cambridge has spun out 26 new companies, showing the largest increase in the number of spinouts among the top three.
According to the report, East of England spinouts secured 35.0% of total investment, leading all regions. The area hosted two of the top five spinout fundraisings in 2024, including a £450 million raise by Cambridge spinout, Bicycle Therapeutics. The South Cambridgeshire-based company develops cancer treatments, with the investment aimed at supporting its R&D efforts.
Dr Jim Glasheen, Chief Executive of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s innovation arm, said: “This rapid increase in the number of spinouts coming out of Cambridge reflects our continued focus on accelerating Cambridge innovations as well as the impact of our newer initiatives, such as the Founders at the University of Cambridge programme and the Technology Investment Fund.”
Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Cambridge added: “It’s heartening to see the growth in spinouts from Cambridge and across the sector as a whole. University entrepreneurship has an increasingly vital role to play in driving UK economic growth and addressing some of our most pressing societal challenges. As one of the world’s top science and tech clusters, Cambridge has a responsibility to deliver innovation-led economic growth for the UK and we have ambitious plans to further strengthen our capabilities in this regard.”
Of the UK’s top three universities for spinouts – Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial - Cambridge saw the most growth in 2024, according to a new report on trends in UK academic spinouts.
The University of Melbourne has published its fourth Sexual Misconduct Annual Report, highlighting the Universitys commitment to transparency in how it responds to sexual misconduct within its community.
Traditional Owner groups and First Nations organisations will be supported to enable better economic outcomes for communities through land and sea rights in a newly formed First Nations-led partnership.
Transforming the cultural health of the nation and our region and responding to emerging threats to cultural legacies will be the core focuses of a new institute in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Maybe a teacher. Or maybe an education policy reformer.
Andrew Zonneveld, who grew up on a military base in North Carolina, is studying government and education.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Andrew Zonneveld believes public service is way to make a real difference in world
Andrew Zonneveld sees teaching as the most important job in the world.
“Doctors are great. But doctors are only doctors because they had great teachers,” said the first-generation college student from North Carolina.
Zonneveld ’26, a government concentrator with a secondary in education studies, is attending Harvard College on full financial aid. Graduating debt-free means he can prioritize public service.
“I would love to be a public school teacher for a few years,” said the Leverett House resident.
“He talks a great deal about going back to North Carolina and helping the schools there,” said his mom, Jennifer Eirich. “I think it has a lot to do with the strong connections he formed with the teachers he had as a kid. But I guess I think there’s something bigger out there for him. Maybe he’ll go and change the educational system for the whole country. Maybe he’ll go into politics.”
Zonneveld, who grew up on a military base and counts many servicemembers in his family, has been interested in the intersection of education and policy from an early age. He recalled pitching an elementary school teacher on forming the school’s first student government.
“I won president in third grade or fourth grade,” he said. “In my speech, I promised the principal would kiss a pig if we raised enough money through Box Tops — remember those?”
Entering Onslow Early College High School — where students work toward their diplomas while earning free credits from Coastal Carolina Community College — provided Zonneveld with his next opening. He spent the summer before ninth grade drafting a constitution for the student government association he later helped launch at the newly opened public high school.
“I could tell from the beginning how motivated he was,” remembered Hannah Padilla, a former guidance counselor there. “Within a week or two, he had come out of his shell and was just unapologetically Andrew: a dedicated student who knew exactly what he wanted from life.”
The Class of 2022 valedictorian assumed he would attend North Carolina’s flagship public university. The school offered him a generous scholarship. “But it was still going to cost me 15 or 20 grand per year,” Zonneveld said.
Opening an acceptance letter from Harvard College was a tearful occasion — and a total surprise after applying on a last-minute whim. “Not in a million years did someone from our county think something like this could happen,” Eirich said.
The family had been concerned about covering college costs, so the University’s offer came as a big relief. “Financial aid is really the only reason I’m here at Harvard,” he said. “It’s the only way I can afford it.”
The support also means Zonneveld’s attentions are no longer so splintered. He had trained as a lifeguard in his early teens, and sometimes worked full-time at area pools while attending high school.
At Harvard, Zonneveld has continued teaching aquatics at the Malkin Athletic Center. But only because he still enjoys passing on his knowledge. “I don’t have to work crazy hours,” he said.
Help from Harvard also made other opportunities possible. Zonneveld was able to complete an internship last summer at a research institute in Berlin with the support of the Government Department. He also traveled to Thailand and Vietnam with Harvard Model Congress to teach high schoolers about policy and public speaking. Over spring break, he helped the organization run a government simulation with teens in Brussels.
“Financial aid didn’t just bring me here,” Zonneveld said. “It allowed me to travel the world, to go home and see my family during breaks. It allowed me to have access to opportunities I would have never had anywhere else.”
Maryam Guerrab, who is from North Carolina, is studying government on the political economy track.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Maryam Guerrab, a child of Algerian immigrants, seeks to combine important lessons from classroom with powerful ones from life
Maryam Guerrab says her upbringing, as one of five children of Algerian immigrants, fueled her passion for advocacy.
“Public service work is incredibly important to me, I think in large part because of how I grew up. I come from a large immigrant family whose parents are both blue-collar workers,” Guerrab said. “I’ve seen a lot of the obstacles that different communities face through both my personal experiences and professional experiences I’ve pursued.”
At Harvard, Guerrab is concentrating in government on the political economy track.
“I thought that studying government, learning more about the local and economic institutions that shape the world we live in today, informing how many people lead their lives and the problems they face, would be the best way to advocate for people’s rights,” she said.
Guerrab, now just months away from graduation, was apprehensive about applying.
“I did not think Harvard was an option for me. It seemed this almost mystical place where the upper echelons of society would go, and that was not me,” said the 21-year-old from North Carolina. “I was privileged enough to know that I was going to go to college, but I thought it would be a state school or somewhere nearby.”
She learned about Harvard’s financial aid program in high school but joked with her family that she’d probably never get in anyway.
“There was this confidence from them when I told them I was applying,” she said of her parents. “I was like, ‘Mama, I don’t really know if you realize that very few people get in, and I don’t know if I can do it.’ And it was always, ‘It’s fine! It’ll be OK.’”
Mama turned out to be right.
Guerrab said getting assistance and not having to worry about paying for college has allowed her “to thrive as a student, pursue opportunities that potentially wouldn’t have been possible.”
She also received a launch grant, which is part of the support students on full financial aid receive to help pay for post-Harvard needs such as Medical College Admission Test-prep guides (she is planning to apply in May) and books.
She later added: “I recognize all the privilege that I have been given, and I want to use it to give back.”
Guerrab said she felt she has made the biggest impact during her College career as a case management director for Y2Y Network, which provides overnight housing for unhoused young adults in Greater Boston. The opportunity allowed her to engage with young people in the program and mentor other Harvard student volunteers.
“What drives my persistent pursuit of both my academics and community service work is my passion to give the best service I can and to take advantage of every opportunity,” Guerrab said. “Harvard is a once-in-a-lifetime experience — on the academic end, [being able to] learn from people with such diverse experiences. Harvard provides me an opportunity to learn as much as I can about the fields that I’m passionate about.”
She continued: “Taking what I learned in the classroom to inform how I’m interacting with the communities that I serve is super important.”
Between classes and volunteer work, Guerrab stepped out of her comfort zone and joined the mountaineering club on campus. She acknowledged that growing up, outdoor activities weren’t as accessible.
“I didn’t even think it was something I wanted to explore,” she said. “The Mountaineering Club was definitely something that I was like, ‘I’m just gonna try something crazy and see what happens.’”
Guerrab said her first mountaineering trip to the Boston Basin of the North Cascade National Park in Washington was a mental, physical, and personal “growth moment” that made her aware of her resilience.
“It was something that taught me that I can really do anything, even in really hard moments,” she said.
Her parents came from India. She wants to help other newcomers.
Merlin D’souza from Casa Grande, Arizona, studies human developmental and regenerative biology and hopes to go into medicine.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Merlin D’souza has her sights set on medical school
Merlin D’souza learned about artificial wombs in her high school Career Technical Education biotechnology class. That experience led her to look for unique biomedical programs when considering colleges. Harvard’s Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology Department immediately caught her attention.
“They were working with stem cells and doing projects that focused on the regenerative aspect of medicine,” said the senior from Casa Grande, Arizona. “As someone who wants to go into medicine and wants to be part of the technology and development [side], that was really exciting for me.”
D’souza, a concentrator in human developmental and regenerative biology and global health and health policy, has really enjoyed her time at Harvard, but the road to Cambridge was not entirely smooth. Her family was unsure how they would be able to afford paying for school. Immigrants from India, her father left school at a young age to begin working to support his family, while her mother was also unable to continue her education.
“My mom had a love and dream to go and study, but she had to help her mom in the rice fields and the farm. She always was like, ‘Wherever you want to shoot, however high you want to go, we’ll support you.’ Harvard was that [for me],” she said.
Getting full financial aid from Harvard allowed her to attend worry-free. “Tuition and the grants that I’ve been able to receive have been super helpful, because I’m not shifting the burden on my parents. That was a big concern for me,” she said. “Having that support as I study and go through this hard curriculum has been such a relief.”
D’souza took full advantage of the opportunities she found. During the last four years, she has traveled to India to teach at under-resourced schools, conducted research on mental health with the help of the Boston Public Health Commission, and presented research to the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health.
Financial aid assistance not only has made attendance possible, but also helped D’souza pursue medical school. In the fall of her junior year, she received a launch grant designed to help students transition from Harvard. With that money she was able to pay for the Medical College Admission Test and cover the costs of applications. She highlighted other support available to financial aid students like herself, including funds to buy a winter coat.
“The reason I want to go to medical school is mostly because I want to help populations from the communities I came up in. My parents were immigrants. They didn’t have access to the best medical resources,” she said.
Outside of academics, D’souza has found ways to give back. She serves as a peer advising fellow with the Advising Programs Office, where she supports first-years as they transition to college. She also volunteers at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter and at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“We get a chance to provide support to and play with a kid going through dialysis. It’s really the highlight of my week,” she said.
After graduation, D’souza will take a gap year to teach or do research before starting medical school, a break that she said wouldn’t have been possible if she was saddled with a lot of loan debt.
“One thing that people don’t think about with tuition assistance is that most people need it,” she said. “Tuition assistance has such a long-reaching impact. I’m able to have this education and pursue a degree in a profession that helps to give back. It’s kind of like a full circle.”
Providing medical care is important, but so is ensuring access
Morgan Byers grew up in a small Georgia community with big ideas of how to help
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Morgan Byers grew up in Commerce, Georgia, a community of about 8,200 residents, where she saw how limited access to medical care can be. She was particularly interested in the disproportionately high maternal mortality rate in the South.
“The South has the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, which is due to a complicated recipe of racial and gender discrimination, socioeconomic inequity, and limited access to reproductive health care,” said Byers ’26. “It absolutely breaks my heart that as medicine advances, these regions and women are entirely left behind, coping with the same maternal mortality rate in 2025 that was present in Massachusetts in the 1970s.”
That perspective inspired the Pforzheimer resident’s desire to become a doctor and led her to pursue an interdisciplinary approach to her studies.
“I eventually decided to study human developmental and regenerative biology out of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which is super research-heavy. I paired that with government, so that I can study medicine, research, and then access,” the double concentrator said.
“My ultimate goal is to focus on bringing access to individuals in rural medical deserts to curb preventable disease.”
Morgan Byers
Harvard proved to be “a transformative experience” that allowed her to “study absolutely everything,” she said. The summer after her first year, Byers headed to Portugal through the Office of International Education to study with its country’s doctors.
“I was fascinated by Portugal’s universal health care system after learning about it in a health care economics class,” Byers shared. “That summer, I woke up every day and studied a different specialty, being enthralled by the medical knowledge I was picking up. But I was even more fascinated by the health care system and how policy directly impacts medical practice.”
Beyond academics, Byers works as an EMT with Crimson EMS and conducts research at the Breault Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital. At the lab, Byers works on intestinal organoids and enteroendocrine cells under the supervision of Daniel Zeve, an endocrinologist and lecturer on pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
She also works as a campus tour guide and mentors Boston high school students through the Emerging Leaders Program at Radcliffe Institute.
Although she has taken full advantage of her time at the College, Byers said she wasn’t always sure she would be able to attend. “Nobody in my family had ever gone to college before,” she said. Her mother works as an administrative assistant at a high school, and her father works in equipment management.
She added: “I definitely did not think Harvard was an option for me. I honestly didn’t want to get myself excited about that possibility and it just to be ripped away.”
Even after she was accepted, Byers said her family remained concerned about covering costs. “It’s truly the biggest blessing in the world,” she said. “I was worried that I was going to have to say no because of money, but because of significant tuition assistance that was not the case.”
Her mom, Mandy Byers, added: “If it was not for Harvard’s financial aid program and all the wonderful people at the admissions office that we talked to in the beginning, I don’t know that it would have been an option for her.”
The 21-year-old wants to attend medical school in the South, where she hopes to make an impact on health care access. Several of her Harvard courses have highlighted for her the importance of implementation science, or the study of methods to promote evidence-based practices into public health care.
“I dreamed of being a bridge between the resource epicenters of the world, like Harvard, and the places so desperately in need of that research,” she said. “Those places were small towns all over the South, just like the tiny ones that I come from. My ultimate goal is to focus on bringing access to individuals in rural medical deserts to curb preventable disease.”
“Morgan has more ambition and drive than most adults,” her mother said. “She wants to help people, and I really can’t see her doing anything else. Even if medicine doesn’t work out, it’s going to be serving people in some capacity.”
Byers acknowledged that some students come to college with a clear idea of their path through higher education and beyond. “I’ve tried very consciously to not make it like that at all,” she said. “I’ve tried to be very grateful of the fact that I get to pave my own way at every turn.”
During his visit he saw the proposed city-centre site of Cambridge’s new flagship innovation hub, which was endorsed by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this year, and heard about plans for the space to support venture-backed, rapidly scaling companies. The hub will connect entrepreneurs, investors, and corporates, serving as the UK’s equivalent to Lab Central in Boston or Station F in Paris – a beacon for global talent and capital.
While he was in the city, the Minister unveiled Innovate Cambridge’s new Advisory Council. Featuring global tech and science pioneers, the Council will catalyse the Cambridge cluster’s potential to deliver substantial societal, environmental and economic benefits, and empower the city to become a global centre for responsible innovation.
He also spoke on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme about Cambridge’s role in the development of the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor. In a special edition, the programme focused on government plans to boost UK science and technology growth by linking up the two cities to create new homes, infrastructure, leisure facilities, office and laboratory space.
As part of his visit, the Minister toured the Cambridge West Innovation District, the transformative project that will allow industry to co-locate at scale with the University’s world-leading academic community. Once complete, the campus is expected to employ 14,000 people and will be the leading location in Europe for AI, quantum and climate research.
At the West Hub, a publicly accessible multi-purpose facility, Lord Vallance met with local authority leaders from across the region. He then toured the site and saw key research locations including the Whittle Laboratory, home to the UK’s Integrated Technology Accelerator for zero-carbon flight, and the Computer Lab, a long-standing driver of tech spinouts.
Visiting the Cavendish Laboratory (Department of Physics), he heard about the impact of industry collaboration with major companies like Hitachi and ARM, and the role that the Department’s new state-of-the-art facilities will play in setting the stage for a new era of scientific discovery in areas such as ‘green tech’ – including long-lasting batteries – next-generation ICT devices, and quantum healthcare technology.”
The visit concluded with a roundtable discussion, where senior representatives from across Cambridge’s innovation ecosystem discussed ways to accelerate company growth, attract global talent, and secure new foreign direct investment – delivering growth which will benefit the whole UK.
Lord Vallance said: "The Oxford and Cambridge Corridor is a world-leading, high-growth, innovation cluster and we need to harness the opportunities that innovators are coming up with here. By backing our strengths in the Corridor, we can boost economic growth across the country, unlocking up to £78 billion for our economy, and deliver on our Plan for Change."
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: "Cambridge is a mature innovation ecosystem spanning many high-growth sectors, including AI, technology, and life sciences. By working with the government and other partners, we can accelerate our impact even further, unlock the amazing potential of University research and innovation, and help drive UK growth."
Science Minister and Oxford-Cambridge Innovation Champion, Lord Patrick Vallance, visited Cambridge to see how the world’s most intensive science and technology cluster can drive economic growth.
The Oxford and Cambridge Corridor is a world-leading, high-growth, innovation cluster and we need to harness the opportunities that innovators are coming up with here.
Lord Patrick Vallance, Science Minister
From left, Dr Diarmuid O'Brien, Lord Patrick Vallance, and Professor Deborah Prentice at the proposed innovation hub site.
Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. ETH researchers made these findings in a new study.
Backslash at Cornell Tech, dedicated to advancing new works of art and technology that escape convention, has announced Nigerian-American artist Mimi Onuoha as its first Backslash Fellow.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems that would be impossible for the most powerful classical supercomputer to crack.
Just like a classical computer has separate, yet interconnected, components that must work together, such as a memory chip and a CPU on a motherboard, a quantum computer will need to communicate quantum information between multiple processors.
Current architectures used to interconnect superconducting quantum processors are “point-to-point” in connectivity, meaning they require a series of transfers between network nodes, with compounding error rates.
On the way to overcoming these challenges, MIT researchers developed a new interconnect device that can support scalable, “all-to-all” communication, such that all superconducting quantum processors in a network can communication directly with each other.
They created a network of two quantum processors and used their interconnect to send microwave photons back and forth on demand in a user-defined direction. Photons are particles of light that can carry quantum information.
The device includes a superconducting wire, or waveguide, that shuttles photons between processors and can be routed as far as needed. The researchers can couple any number of modules to it, efficiently transmitting information between a scalable network of processors.
They used this interconnect to demonstrate remote entanglement, a type of correlation between quantum processors that are not physically connected. Remote entanglement is a key step toward developing a powerful, distributed network of many quantum processors.
“In the future, a quantum computer will probably need both local and nonlocal interconnects. Local interconnects are natural in arrays of superconducting qubits. Ours allows for more nonlocal connections. We can send photons at different frequencies, times, and in two propagation directions, which gives our network more flexibility and throughput,” says Aziza Almanakly, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student in the Engineering Quantum Systems group of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and lead author of a paper on the interconnect.
Her co-authors include Beatriz Yankelevich, a graduate student in the EQuS Group; senior author William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and professor of Physics, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and associate director of RLE; and others at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory. The research appears today in Nature Physics.
In the new work, they took that architecture a step further by connecting two modules to a waveguide in order to emit photons in a desired direction and then absorb them at the other end.
Each module is composed of four qubits, which serve as an interface between the waveguide carrying the photons and the larger quantum processors.
The qubits coupled to the waveguide emit and absorb photons, which are then transferred to nearby data qubits.
The researchers use a series of microwave pulses to add energy to a qubit, which then emits a photon. Carefully controlling the phase of those pulses enables a quantum interference effect that allows them to emit the photon in either direction along the waveguide. Reversing the pulses in time enables a qubit in another module any arbitrary distance away to absorb the photon.
“Pitching and catching photons enables us to create a ‘quantum interconnect’ between nonlocal quantum processors, and with quantum interconnects comes remote entanglement,” explains Oliver.
“Generating remote entanglement is a crucial step toward building a large-scale quantum processor from smaller-scale modules. Even after that photon is gone, we have a correlation between two distant, or ‘nonlocal,’ qubits. Remote entanglement allows us to take advantage of these correlations and perform parallel operations between two qubits, even though they are no longer connected and may be far apart,” Yankelevich explains.
However, transferring a photon between two modules is not enough to generate remote entanglement. The researchers need to prepare the qubits and the photon so the modules “share” the photon at the end of the protocol.
Generating entanglement
The team did this by halting the photon emission pulses halfway through their duration. In quantum mechanical terms, the photon is both retained and emitted. Classically, one can think that half-a-photon is retained and half is emitted.
Once the receiver module absorbs that “half-photon,” the two modules become entangled.
But as the photon travels, joints, wire bonds, and connections in the waveguide distort the photon and limit the absorption efficiency of the receiving module.
To generate remote entanglement with high enough fidelity, or accuracy, the researchers needed to maximize how often the photon is absorbed at the other end.
“The challenge in this work was shaping the photon appropriately so we could maximize the absorption efficiency,” Almanakly says.
They used a reinforcement learning algorithm to “predistort” the photon. The algorithm optimized the protocol pulses in order to shape the photon for maximal absorption efficiency.
When they implemented this optimized absorption protocol, they were able to show photon absorption efficiency greater than 60 percent.
This absorption efficiency is high enough to prove that the resulting state at the end of the protocol is entangled, a major milestone in this demonstration.
“We can use this architecture to create a network with all-to-all connectivity. This means we can have multiple modules, all along the same bus, and we can create remote entanglement among any pair of our choosing,” Yankelevich says.
In the future, they could improve the absorption efficiency by optimizing the path over which the photons propagate, perhaps by integrating modules in 3D instead of having a superconducting wire connecting separate microwave packages. They could also make the protocol faster so there are fewer chances for errors to accumulate.
“In principle, our remote entanglement generation protocol can also be expanded to other kinds of quantum computers and bigger quantum internet systems,” Almanakly says.
This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office, the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Researchers developed a new interconnect that can support scalable, all-to-all communication between a series of superconducting quantum processors, enabling an information-carrying photon to travel between processors in a user-defined direction. The concept is illustrated here.
Switzerland’s glaciers are in increasingly poor shape. If greenhouse gas emissions are not cut drastically soon, they could cease to exist by 2100 – so says ETH Professor Daniel Farinotti in this ETH News interview to mark the first World Day for Glaciers.
The ability to generate high-quality images quickly is crucial for producing realistic simulated environments that can be used to train self-driving cars to avoid unpredictable hazards, making them safer on real streets.
But the generative artificial intelligence techniques increasingly being used to produce such images have drawbacks. One popular type of model, called a diffusion model, can create stunningly realistic images but is too slow and computationally intensive for many applications. On the other hand, the autoregressive models that power LLMs like ChatGPT are much faster, but they produce poorer-quality images that are often riddled with errors.
Researchers from MIT and NVIDIA developed a new approach that brings together the best of both methods. Their hybrid image-generation tool uses an autoregressive model to quickly capture the big picture and then a small diffusion model to refine the details of the image.
Their tool, known as HART (short for hybrid autoregressive transformer), can generate images that match or exceed the quality of state-of-the-art diffusion models, but do so about nine times faster.
The generation process consumes fewer computational resources than typical diffusion models, enabling HART to run locally on a commercial laptop or smartphone. A user only needs to enter one natural language prompt into the HART interface to generate an image.
HART could have a wide range of applications, such as helping researchers train robots to complete complex real-world tasks and aiding designers in producing striking scenes for video games.
“If you are painting a landscape, and you just paint the entire canvas once, it might not look very good. But if you paint the big picture and then refine the image with smaller brush strokes, your painting could look a lot better. That is the basic idea with HART,” says Haotian Tang SM ’22, PhD ’25, co-lead author of a new paper on HART.
He is joined by co-lead author Yecheng Wu, an undergraduate student at Tsinghua University; senior author Song Han, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and a distinguished scientist of NVIDIA; as well as others at MIT, Tsinghua University, and NVIDIA. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
The best of both worlds
Popular diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, are known to produce highly detailed images. These models generate images through an iterative process where they predict some amount of random noise on each pixel, subtract the noise, then repeat the process of predicting and “de-noising” multiple times until they generate a new image that is completely free of noise.
Because the diffusion model de-noises all pixels in an image at each step, and there may be 30 or more steps, the process is slow and computationally expensive. But because the model has multiple chances to correct details it got wrong, the images are high-quality.
Autoregressive models, commonly used for predicting text, can generate images by predicting patches of an image sequentially, a few pixels at a time. They can’t go back and correct their mistakes, but the sequential prediction process is much faster than diffusion.
These models use representations known as tokens to make predictions. An autoregressive model utilizes an autoencoder to compress raw image pixels into discrete tokens as well as reconstruct the image from predicted tokens. While this boosts the model’s speed, the information loss that occurs during compression causes errors when the model generates a new image.
With HART, the researchers developed a hybrid approach that uses an autoregressive model to predict compressed, discrete image tokens, then a small diffusion model to predict residual tokens. Residual tokens compensate for the model’s information loss by capturing details left out by discrete tokens.
“We can achieve a huge boost in terms of reconstruction quality. Our residual tokens learn high-frequency details, like edges of an object, or a person’s hair, eyes, or mouth. These are places where discrete tokens can make mistakes,” says Tang.
Because the diffusion model only predicts the remaining details after the autoregressive model has done its job, it can accomplish the task in eight steps, instead of the usual 30 or more a standard diffusion model requires to generate an entire image. This minimal overhead of the additional diffusion model allows HART to retain the speed advantage of the autoregressive model while significantly enhancing its ability to generate intricate image details.
“The diffusion model has an easier job to do, which leads to more efficiency,” he adds.
Outperforming larger models
During the development of HART, the researchers encountered challenges in effectively integrating the diffusion model to enhance the autoregressive model. They found that incorporating the diffusion model in the early stages of the autoregressive process resulted in an accumulation of errors. Instead, their final design of applying the diffusion model to predict only residual tokens as the final step significantly improved generation quality.
Their method, which uses a combination of an autoregressive transformer model with 700 million parameters and a lightweight diffusion model with 37 million parameters, can generate images of the same quality as those created by a diffusion model with 2 billion parameters, but it does so about nine times faster. It uses about 31 percent less computation than state-of-the-art models.
Moreover, because HART uses an autoregressive model to do the bulk of the work — the same type of model that powers LLMs — it is more compatible for integration with the new class of unified vision-language generative models. In the future, one could interact with a unified vision-language generative model, perhaps by asking it to show the intermediate steps required to assemble a piece of furniture.
“LLMs are a good interface for all sorts of models, like multimodal models and models that can reason. This is a way to push the intelligence to a new frontier. An efficient image-generation model would unlock a lot of possibilities,” he says.
In the future, the researchers want to go down this path and build vision-language models on top of the HART architecture. Since HART is scalable and generalizable to multiple modalities, they also want to apply it for video generation and audio prediction tasks.
This research was funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT and Amazon Science Hub, the MIT AI Hardware Program, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. The GPU infrastructure for training this model was donated by NVIDIA.
Researchers combined two types of generative AI models, an autoregressive model and a diffusion model, to create a tool that leverages the best of each model to rapidly generate high-quality images.
The growing number of people falling prey to scams in Singapore is a worrying trend, with victims often unaware of the legal avenues available when seeking recourse from financial institutions. This knowledge gap led NUS Law students Ernest Chua and Jadie Tan to galvanise efforts to raise awareness about the potential for low-cost mediation and adjudication for scam victims via the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre (FIDReC).
Recognising the language barrier between beneficiaries and volunteers in the Syariah Law Friends project which supports organisations that provide Syariah Law legal aid, NUS Law undergraduates Akhilaa Yogarajah and Fatema Maimoon developed a document of Syariah Law legal terms to help volunteers assist non-English speaking clients effectively.
These individuals and their impactful initiatives were among the many recognised at this year’s NUS Law Pro Bono Awards ceremony.
Empowering scam victims and initiating legal clinics in the Mountbatten neighbourhood
In the past, the NUS-FIDReC Collaboration pro-bono project (a collaboration between the NUS Law Pro Bono Group and the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre) focused on raising public awareness about FIDReC’s affordable alternative dispute resolution processes in cases involving financial misrepresentations (particularly in the insurance industry), and unauthorised credit card transactions.
However, when FIDReC and the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) highlighted the rising number of scam victims, co-Project Directors Ernest and Jadie decisively shifted the project’s focus and redirected efforts toward educating the public on FIDReC’s services that scam victims can turn to for assistance such as mediation and adjudication. “We wanted to let people know that if they get scammed, FIDReC may have services that they can turn to for help after reviewing their case,” said Jadie.
The pair revamped their outreach materials, and together with other student volunteers in NUS-FIDReC, collaborated with external partners like NCPC to deliver talks on scam awareness and the legal aid that FIDReC offers to NCPC-partner organisations across the island. These sessions reached diverse groups, such as nurses at Changi General Hospital and foreign workers at Land Transport Authority construction sites. The students also volunteered as translators during FIDReC adjudication processes when needed.
In addition, Ernest, in the course of his volunteer grassroots work in Mountbatten, frequently encountered vulnerable constituents with a variety of legal concerns. Recognising this need, he spearheaded the establishment of a legal clinic that connects constituents with pro bono lawyers, helping them obtain valuable legal advice. He also launched a Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) campaign to help Mountbatten constituents understand the legal significance of an LPA and help them get their LPAs certified. With the help of NUS Law’s Centre for Pro Bono and Clinical Legal Education (CPBCLE), he also managed to involve NUS Law students in these activities.
Both Jadie and Ernest were accorded the Pro Bono Special Recognition Award in recognition of their outstanding contributions to these initiatives.
Ernest shared how his experience in pro bono work has been incredibly fulfilling. “A lot of the things you learn in law school are theoretical so you don’t always see the direct impact of your work, but with pro bono work, you get to witness the tangible effect of the law on people’s lives.”
Supporting the Muslim community in navigating Syariah Law
When Akhilaa and Fatema led the Syariah Law Friends project in 2023, they noticed that their non-Malay-speaking volunteers had trouble note-taking in the pro bono legal clinics organised by their partner organisations, the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations and Jamiyah Singapore. These clinics linked Syariah law practitioners with beneficiaries seeking legal assistance on issues ranging from matrimonial to inheritance-related matters.
Volunteers had to take notes in these sessions to maintain consistent records of the issues raised and the legal advice given, but some did not understand the Malay/Arabic terms used. Akhilaa explained, “Volunteers who were unfamiliar with Syariah Law would sometimes misspell the words or would leave question marks when they hear unfamiliar words such as talak or cerai taklik.”
To help volunteers better understand these terms and assist non-English-speaking clients more effectively, the pair developed an internal document for notetakers which highlighted and explained such terms. They also proactively expanded the volunteer pool by recruiting more Malay-speaking students to meet the demands of ongoing legal clinic work, and like their seniors before them, organised lectures to educate volunteers on Syariah Law. For their efforts, Akhilaa and Fatema were recognised with the Pro Bono Innovation Award.
Akhilaa said the experience has deepened her sense of responsibility as a future lawyer as it was incredibly inspiring to see dedicated pro bono lawyers generously offer their time and expertise to those in need.
She elaborated, “Witnessing lawyers provide reassurance and peace of mind to clients facing uncertain futures in broken homes has made me more aware of the profound impact legal assistance can have on a person’s livelihood. Further, it has implored me to strengthen my commitment to wanting to use my legal education to aid marginalised and underprivileged clients even after I graduate.”
NUS Law Pro Bono Awards Ceremony
Over the past year, students have contributed to a wide range of pro bono initiatives, including assisting with Criminal Legal Aid Scheme cases, conducting legal awareness talks for migrant workers and sexual assault survivors and organising mentorship programmes for at-risk youth. Beyond Singapore, their efforts involved delivering educational talks to underprivileged children in Bangkok’s Klong Toey slums on their legal rights and the consequences of crimes such as human trafficking and domestic violence.
These student projects won accolades at the NUS Law Pro Bono Awards Ceremony this year. Organised annually by CPBCLE, the ceremony honours the achievements and exceptional leadership displayed by students in pro bono work. Additionally, financial grants were awarded to deserving pro bono initiatives.
Addressing the awardees, Guest of Honour Mr Murali Pillai, Minister of State for Ministry of Law and Ministry of Transport, praised the award recipients for their outstanding contributions to the community and commended CPBCLE for their efforts in cultivating a strong sense of community and a pro bono culture in the legal fraternity.
The former lawyer shared how serving the community through pro bono practice is one of the highest levels of contributions that a lawyer can make. Pro bono work, he noted, is essential. He said, “From my own experience, pro bono work centres us and helps us to remain true to why we joined the profession in the first place.”
A total of 18 students and one faculty member received awards across three categories. Seven pro bono projects were given financial grants. Please click here for the full list of award winners and projects.
Health law policy expert says biotech firm’s uncertain future shows need for protections of personal, genetic info
A recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine calls for regulations to protect customers’ personal and genetic data in light of biotech company 23andMe’s uncertain future.
The genetic testing firm became wildly popular after launching in 2007, with millions of customers sending in saliva samples for analysis to learn about their ancestry and genetic makeup.
The company was valued at $6 billion, or $17.65 a share, shortly after going public in 2021. It has since fallen to about $48 million, or $1.78 per share, after a 2023 data breach and resignation of some board members. The firm said in January that it’s exploring “strategic alternatives,” including a sale of the company or assets, restructuring, or business combination, among other options.
In this edited conversation, I. Glenn Cohen, one of the paper’s authors and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, explains the legal landscape surrounding genetic data, the reasons for more consumer protection laws, and the steps for consumers to protect their personal and genetic data.
I. Glenn Cohen.
File photo by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
If 23andMe were to file for bankruptcy protection, what might happen with the genetic data of 14 million people the company holds?
As 23andMe faces significant financial distress and might be purchased directly or go bankrupt and its assets sold, all of the genetic and health information provided by people is a valuable asset to the company. Many people have used services like 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and others which are direct-to-consumer genetic tests companies, to answer questions about their ancestry or their genetic code.
But in the course of answering these questions for themselves, they’ve also contributed to these huge genetic databases. Our concern is that they may end up in the hands of somebody other than 23andMe, in a way that many people who have given their information to 23andMe never contemplated and might object to.
What are the possible case scenarios, and what are your concerns?
One is about data security. We saw that 23andMe itself was subject to a massive data breach in 2023, and if the company that takes over the data lacks good data security, there’s a possibility of breach.
Interestingly, once upon a time, the Pentagon told military personnel not to use these at-home DNA kits because it was concerned about national security. A more quotidian concern is that your genetic information might become available to others, and it’s possible you could become reidentified.
To give you an example from a study several years ago, a number of researchers used genetic data to try to identify, through what’s called genome-wide association studies (GWAS) technology and approach, what parts of the genome were associated with being gay. Many people who had given their genetic information were understandably upset at the idea this could be a possible use of their information.
So, while customers have made the decision to share with 23andMe, from whom they get a lot of benefit, they really have very little say about what will happen should the company be taken over or should the company go bankrupt, and its assets sold.
“I would love to see a space where people can get the information they want without feeling as though that information might put them at risk.”
Do federal health privacy regulations offer privacy protections to consumers?
The Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the law that, among other things, when you speak to your doctor, creates rules about what can be shared under what context.
The problem is that HIPAA’s definition of covered entities and business associates means that when you have provided information, including your genetic data, not to a hospital system, not to a physician, but to a direct-to-consumer company like 23andMe, you are not covered by HIPAA. You are treated by the law essentially as a consumer, not as the patient.
Now, there are other federal laws that cover you a little bit. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act prevents health insurers, but also employers, from using genetic information in a way that is discriminatory. So that kind of law still will apply, but health privacy laws at the federal level won’t directly apply when you are dealing with a private company like 23andMe.
What about the privacy protections 23andMe offers to consumers?
We should say at the front end that it asks its consumers for consent to use their data for research purposes. There is the option not to consent although roughly 80 percent of the consumers have given consent.
The consumer agreements have a privacy statement that says all U.S. customers have certain rights, such as a right to opt out of the storage of saliva samples and the right to request the deletion of their account. It also says that it doesn’t share individual-level information, on diseases or genotypes, or de-identify information voluntarily with insurance companies, employers, public databases, or law enforcement agencies without a subpoena.
But the company shares personal information with service providers and contractors for sample analysis, marketing, and analytics. Also, the privacy statement reserves the company’s right to transfer customers’ personal information in the event of a sale or bankruptcy, and customers can’t protect their data from being accessed, sold, or transferred as part of that transaction.
Can bankruptcy laws offer some safeguards to 23andMe consumers?
One of the paper’s co-authors, Melissa Jacoby, is a bankruptcy law scholar. My specialty is health law, but I’ll do my best to explain. Many companies that have held sensitive information have filed for bankruptcy, and in the course of that bankruptcy they’ve sold consumer data to a third party.
Bankruptcy law offers some protections. Bankruptcy itself is a public process. There’s attention from the public, and sometimes regulators, like the [Federal Trade Commission] or state attorney generals, can get involved in cases and can seek to enter the bankruptcy proceedings. A federal court oversees a bankruptcy, and the U.S. Trustee Program, an agency within the Department of Justice, can sometimes get involved as well.
In some instances, bankruptcy law had required a consumer privacy ombudsperson to investigate a sale and determine whether it’s keeping with the bankrupt company’s privacy statements, as well as the law.
These are some protections, but they’re not perfect. One thing we want to highlight is that when most people have given their genetic information, they’ve never thought about this, and we just want people to pay attention to it.
What are your policy recommendations to protect consumers’ personal and genetic data?
The U.S. has a federal health privacy law that’s a bit out of date compared to our peer countries in Europe. One solution to this problem would be to have more general data privacy protection that would cover all personal data, including genetic data, and that would apply in bankruptcy cases as well.
There have been many attempts to get Congress to comprehensively update federal privacy law, including health privacy laws. They haven’t really succeeded. So, we’re not holding our breath.
A more targeted approach might be thinking about expanding the scope of the HIPAA law to cover companies like 23andMe, or potentially expanding what the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act covers, in terms of discrimination and genetic information. New regulations could also address instances when you have the overlap of a company that has genetic information and goes bankrupt. That’s what we’d like to see. Whether it will happen, I’m not sure.
What could consumers do in the meantime?
Going forward, I would think about these things as you decide whether the kind of information you are going to get from a direct-to-consumer company like 23andMe is worth the risks.
Also, when you are given the right to choose not to consent to sharing of data, I think that’s worth thinking about. And if this is something that worries you, this might be a time to go in and delete that information in your account, even though it’s not a perfect solve.
There are a lot of reasons why people are curious about their ancestry or genetic information. My hope is that this experience might also cause companies to be more privacy sensitive. I would love to see a space where people can have their cake and eat it too, to get the information they want without feeling as though that information might put them at risk if there’s a bankruptcy and the like.
Ivy League champs return for first time in 18 years
Nick Economides
Harvard Correspondent
3 min read
Coach Carrie Moore and her Ivy League champs depart for the airport.
Photos by Christina Richson/Harvard Athletics
The Harvard Women’s Basketball team headed to North Carolina on Thursday as the No. 10 seed in the upcoming NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament, marking the squad’s first trip to March Madness in 18 years. The flight to Raleigh came days after a thrilling 74-71 Crimson victory last Saturday against Columbia that gave the team its first-ever Ivy League Tournament Championship.
The Ivy League Tournament Championship trophy on display.
“I couldn’t be more proud of my team and the staff,” said the third-year coach. “It was a dramatic way to end the tournament, but if it didn’t end that way, it wouldn’t be us. You couldn’t write the story any better. It makes everything we’ve gone through over the last three years worth it.”
Moore said she is especially proud of how the team battled moments of adversity.
“I’ve always told our team, ‘You either win or you learn,’” she said. “That’s who we are. That’s our makeup. We are a resilient group. We’ve done a really good job this season of having a ‘next-play mentality’ and focusing on the process and not the outcome. We knew we were going to take these games one possession at a time, and one timeout at a time, and we never panicked.”
“From the top down, I’m so proud of the program,” said team captain and forward Katie Krupa ’26. “Coach Moore has done an excellent job handling each and every challenge.
“It was such an overwhelming feeling of joy and pride in the group. Everything we worked for and wanted was building to that moment. We’ve all really jelled this year and got the dynamics right off and on the court. This sisterhood is as strong as it’s ever been,” she added.
The Crimson, led by senior Harmoni Turner, who scored 44 points to help the Crimson reach the Ivy League championship, will play No. 7 seed Michigan State on Saturday afternoon. Moore said Harvard is ready for the national spotlight, and eager to make its presence known to the nation.
“We’re not just excited to be there,” Moore said. “We’re excited to go into this tournament, play really well, and win some games this weekend.”
“You go through so many peaks and valleys on and off the court during a season, it’s all about how you respond each time you hit that valley, and we’ve responded excellently every time this season,” added Krupa. “We have nothing to lose. We can go out there and show the world what we’re made of.”
A University of Melbourne program running teamwork-based video-game sessions to help neurodivergent children develop collaboration and social skills will soon be rolled out in schools across the globe, thanks to a $500,000 funding boost awarded through the Genesis Pre-seed Fund.
The SeaPerch underwater robot is a popular educational tool for students in grades 5 to 12. Building and piloting SeaPerch, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), involves a variety of hand fabrication processes, electronics techniques, and STEM concepts. Through the SeaPerch program, educators and students explore structures, electronics, and underwater dynamics.
“SeaPerch has had a tremendous impact on the fields of ocean science and engineering,” says Andrew Bennett ’85, PhD ’97, MIT SeaGrant education administrator and senior lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE).
The original SeaPerch project was launched by MIT Sea Grant in 2003. In the decades that followed, it quickly spread across the country and overseas, creating a vibrant community of builders. Now under the leadership of RoboNation, SeaPerch continues to thrive with competitions around the world. These competitions introduce challenging real-world problems to foster creative solutions. Some recent topics have included deep sea mining and collecting data on hydrothermal vents.
SeaPerch II, which has been in development at MIT Sea Grant since 2021, builds on the original program by adding robotics and elements of marine and climate science. It remains a “do-it-yourself” maker project with objectives that are achievable by middle and high school students. Bennett says he hopes SeaPerch II will enable an even greater impact by providing an approachable path to learning more about sensors, robotics, climate science, and more.
“What I think is most valuable about it is that it uses hardware store components that need to be cut, waterproofed, connected, soldered, or somehow processed before becoming part of the robot or controller,” says Diane Brancazio ME ’90, K-12 maker team leader for the MIT Edgerton Center, who co-leads the MIT SeaPerch initiative with Bennett. “[It’s] kind of like making a cake from scratch, instead of from a mix — you see what goes into the final product and how it all comes together.”
SeaPerch II is a family of modules that allow students and educators to create educational adventures tailored to their particular wants or requirements. Offerings include a pressure and temperature sensing module that can be used on its own; an autonomy module that the students can use to construct a closed-loop automatic depth control system for their SeaPerch; and a lesson module for soft robotic “fingers” that can be configured into grippers, distance sensors, and bump sensors.
The basic SeaPerch is a PVC pipe structure with three motors and a tether to a switch box. Through the building process, students learn about buoyancy, structural design, hand fabrication, and electric circuits. SeaPerch II leverages technologies that are more advanced, less expensive, and more accessible than they were when SeaPerch was first conceived. Bennett says SeaPerch II is meant to extend the original SeaPerch program without invalidating any of the existing system.
Teagan Sullivan, a third-year student in mechanical engineering, first became involved with the project in January 2023 through an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project with MIT Sea Grant. Initially, she continued development of the soft robotics portion of the project, before switching to a more general focus where she worked on frame design for SeaPerch II, making sure components could fit and that stability could be maintained. Later she helped run outreach programs, taking feedback from the students she worked with to help modify designs and make them “more robust and kid-friendly.”
“I have been able to see the impact of SeaPerch II on a small scale by working directly with students,” Sullivan says. “I have seen how it encourages creativity, and how it has taught kids that collaboration is the best road to success. SeaPerch II teaches the basics of electronics, coding, and manufacturing, but its best strength is the ability to challenge the way people think and encourage critical thinking.”
The team’s vision is to create opportunities for young people to engage in authentic science investigations and engineering challenges, developing a passion for engineering, science, and the aquatic environment. MIT Sea Grant is continuing to develop new SeaPerch II modules, including incorporating land-water communication, salinity and dissolved oxygen sensors, and fluorometers.
Sullivan says she hopes the program will reach more students and inspire them to take an interest in engineering while teaching the skills they need to be the next generation of problem-solvers. Brancazio says she hopes this project inspires and prepares young people to work on climate change issues.
“Robots are supposed to help people do things they couldn’t otherwise do,” Brancazio says. “SeaPerch is a robot with a mission.”
Nuclear physicist and MIT Professor Emeritus Lee Grodzins died on March 6 at his home in the Maplewood Senior Living Community at Weston, Massachusetts. He was 98.
Grodzins was a pioneer in nuclear physics research. He was perhaps best known for the highly influential experiment determining the helicity of the neutrino, which led to a key understanding of what's known as the weak interaction. He was also the founder of Niton Corp. and the nonprofit Cornerstones of Science, and was a co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
He retired in 1999 after serving as an MIT physics faculty member for 40 years. As a member of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), he initiated the relativistic heavy-ion physics program. He published over 170 scientific papers and held 64 U.S. patents.
“Lee was a very good experimental physicist, especially with his hands making gadgets,” says Heavy Ion Group and Francis L. Friedman Professor Emeritus Wit Busza PhD ’64. “His enthusiasm for physics spilled into his enthusiasm for how physics was taught in our department.”
Industrious son of immigrants
Grodzins was born July 10, 1926, in Lowell, Massachusetts, the middle child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants David and Taube Grodzins. He grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire. His two sisters were Ethel Grodzins Romm, journalist, author, and businesswoman who later ran his company, Niton Corp.; and Anne Lipow, who became a librarian and library science expert.
His father, who ran a gas station and a used-tire business, died when Lee was 15. To help support his family, Lee sold newspapers, a business he grew into the second-largest newspaper distributor in Manchester.
At 17, Grodzins attended the University of New Hampshire, graduating in less than three years with a degree in mechanical engineering. However, he decided to be a physicist after disagreeing with a textbook that used the word “never.”
“I was pretty good in math and was undecided about my future,” Grodzins said in a 1958 New YorkDaily News article. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I unexpectedly realized I wanted to be a physicist. I was reading a physics text one day when suddenly this sentence hit me: ‘We will never be able to see the atom.’ I said to myself that that was as stupid a statement as I’d ever read. What did he mean ‘never!’ I got so annoyed that I started devouring other writers to see what they had to say and all at once I found myself in the midst of modern physics.”
He wrote his senior thesis on “Atomic Theory.”
After graduating in 1946, he approached potential employers by saying, “I have a degree in mechanical engineering, but I don’t want to be one. I’d like to be a physicist, and I’ll take anything in that line at whatever you will pay me.”
He accepted an offer from General Electric’s Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he worked in fundamental nuclear research building cosmic ray detectors, while also pursuing his master’s degree at Union College. “I had a ball,” he recalled. “I stayed in the lab 12 hours a day. They had to kick me out at night.”
Brookhaven
After earning his PhD from Purdue University in 1954, he spent a year as a lecturer there, before becoming a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) with Maurice Goldhaber’s nuclear physics group, probing the properties of the nuclei of atoms.
In 1957, he, with Goldhaber and Andy Sunyar, used a simple table-top experiment to measure the helicity of the neutrino. Helicity characterizes the alignment of a particle’s intrinsic spin vector with that particle’s direction of motion.
The research provided new support for the idea that the principle of conservation of parity — which had been accepted for 30 years as a basic law of nature before being disproven the year before, leading to the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics — was not as inviolable as the scientists thought it was, and did not apply to the behavior of some subatomic particles.
The experiment took about 10 days to complete, followed by a month of checks and rechecks. They submitted a letter on “Helicity of Neutrinos” to Physical Review on Dec. 11, 1957, and a week later, Goldhaber told a Stanford University audience that the neutrino is left-handed, meaning that the weak interaction was probably one force. This work proved crucial to our understanding of the weak interaction, the force that governs nuclear beta decay.
“It was a real upheaval in our understanding of physics,” says Grodzins’ longtime colleague Stephen Steadman. The breakthrough was commemorated in 2008, with a conference at BNL on “Neutrino Helicity at 50.”
Steadman also recalls Grodzins’ story about one night at Brookhaven, where he was working on an experiment that involved a radioactive source inside a chamber. Lee noticed that a vacuum pump wasn’t working, so he tinkered with it a while before heading home. Later that night, he gets a call from the lab. “They said, ‘Don't go anywhere!’” recalls Steadman. It turns out the radiation source in the lab had exploded, and the pump filled the lab with radiation. “They were actually able to trace his radioactive footprints from the lab to his home,” says Steadman. “He kind of shrugged it off.”
The MIT years
Grodzins joined the faculty of MIT in 1959, where he taught physics for four decades. He inherited Robley Evans’ Radiation Laboratory, which used radioactive sources to study properties of nuclei, and led the Relativistic Heavy Ion Group, which was affiliated with the LNS.
In 1972, he launched a program at BNL using the then-new Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator to study interactions of heavy ions with nuclei. “As the BNL tandem was getting commissioned, we started a program, together with Doug Cline at the University of Rochester, tandem to investigate Coulomb-nuclear interference,” says Steadman, a senior research scientist at LNS. “The experimental results were decisive but somewhat controversial at the time. We clearly detected the interference effect.” The experimental work was published in Physical Review Letters.
Grodzins’ team looked for super-heavy elements using the Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratorySuper-Hilac, investigated heavy-ion fission and other heavy-ion reactions, and explored heavy-ion transfer reactions. The latter research showed with precise detail the underlying statistical behavior of the transfer of nucleons between the heavy-ion projectile and target, using a theoretical statistical model of Surprisal Analysis developed by Rafi Levine and his graduate student. Recalls Steadman, “these results were both outstanding in their precision and initially controversial in interpretation.”
In 1985, he carried out the first computer axial tomographic experiment using synchrotron radiation, and in 1987, his group was involved in the first run of Experiment 802, a collaborative experiment with about 50 scientists from around the world that studied relativistic heavy ion collisions at Brookhaven. The MIT responsibility was to build the drift chambers and design the bending magnet for the experiment.
“He made significant contributions to the initial design and construction phases, where his broad expertise and knowledge of small area companies with unique capabilities was invaluable,” says George Stephans, physics senior lecturer and senior research scientist at MIT.
Professor emeritus of physics Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62 recalls working on a Mossbauer experiment to establish if photons changed frequency as they traveled through bright regions. “It was an idea held by some to explain the ‘apparent’ red shift with distance in our universe,” says Weiss. “We became great friends in the process, and of course, amateur cosmologists.”
“Lee was great for developing good ideas,” Steadman says. “He would get started on one idea, but then get distracted with another great idea. So, it was essential that the team would carry these experiments to their conclusion: they would get the papers published.”
MIT mentor
Before retiring in 1999, Lee supervised 21 doctoral dissertations and was an early proponent of women graduate students in physics. He also oversaw the undergraduate thesis of Sidney Altman, who decades later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For many years, he helped teach the Junior Lab required of all undergraduate physics majors. He got his favorite student evaluation, however, for a different course, billed as offering a “superficial overview” of nuclear physics. The comment read: “This physics course was not superficial enough for me.”
“He really liked to work with students,” says Steadman. “They could always go into his office anytime. He was a very supportive mentor.”
“He was a wonderful mentor, avuncular and supportive of all of us,” agrees Karl van Bibber ’72, PhD ’76, now at the University of California at Berkeley. He recalls handing his first paper to Grodzins for comments. “I was sitting at my desk expecting a pat on the head. Quite to the contrary, he scowled, threw the manuscript on my desk and scolded, ‘Don't even pick up a pencil again until you've read a Hemingway novel!’ … The next version of the paper had an average sentence length of about six words; we submitted it, and it was immediately accepted by Physical Review Letters.”
Van Bibber has since taught the “Grodzins Method” in his graduate seminars on professional orientation for scientists and engineers, including passing around a few anthologies of Hemingway short stories. “I gave a copy of one of the dog-eared anthologies to Lee at his 90th birthday lecture, which elicited tears of laughter.”
Early in George Stephans’ MIT career as a research scientist, he worked with Grodzins’ newly formed Relativistic Heavy Ion Group. “Despite his wide range of interests, he paid close attention to what was going on and was always very supportive of us, especially the students. He was a very encouraging and helpful mentor to me, as well as being always pleasant and engaging to work with. He actively pushed to get me promoted to principal research scientist relatively early, in recognition of my contributions.”
“He always seemed to know a lot about everything, but never acted condescending,” says Stephans. “He seemed happiest when he was deeply engaged digging into the nitty-gritty details of whatever unique and unusual work one of these companies was doing for us.”
Al Lazzarini ’74, PhD ’78 recalls Grodzins’ investigations using proton-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) as a sensitive tool to measure trace elemental amounts. “Lee was a superb physicist,” says Lazzarini. “He gave an enthralling seminar on an investigation he had carried out on a lock of Napoleon’s hair, looking for evidence of arsenic poisoning.”
Robert Ledoux ’78, PhD ’81, a former professor of physics at MIT who is now program director of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency with the Department of Energy, worked with Grodzins as both a student and colleague. “He was a ‘nuclear physicist’s physicist’ — a superb experimentalist who truly loved building and performing experiments in many areas of nuclear physics. His passion for discovery was matched only by his generosity in sharing knowledge.”
The research funding crisis starting in 1969 led Grodzins to become concerned that his graduate students would not find careers in the field. He helped form the Economic Concerns Committee of the American Physical Society, for which he produced a major report on the “Manpower Crisis in Physics” (1971), and presented his results before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and at the Karlsruhe National Lab in Germany.
Grodzins played a significant role in bringing the first Chinese graduate students to MIT in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of the students he welcomed was Huan Huang PhD ’90. “I am forever grateful to him for changing my trajectory,” says Huang, now at the University of California at Los Angeles. “His unwavering support and ‘go do it’ attitude inspired us to explore physics at the beginning of a new research field of high energy heavy ion collisions in the 1980s. I have been trying to be a ‘nice professor’ like Lee all my academic career.”
Even after he left MIT, Grodzins remained available for his former students. “Many tell me how much my lifestyle has influenced them, which is gratifying,” Huang says. “They’ve been a central part of my life. My biography would be grossly incomplete without them.”
Niton Corp. and post-MIT work
Grodzins liked what he called “tabletop experiments,” like the one used in his 1957 neutrino experiment, which involved a few people building a device that could fit on a tabletop. “He didn’t enjoy working in large collaborations, which nuclear physics embraced.” says Steadman. “I think that’s why he ultimately left MIT.”
In the 1980s, he launched what amounted to a new career in detection technology. In 1987, after developing a scanning proton-induced X-ray microspectrometer for use measuring elemental concentrations in air, he founded the Niton Corp., which developed, manufactured, and marketed test kits and instruments to measure radon gas in buildings, lead-based paint detection, and other nondestructive testing applications. (“Niton” is an obsolete term for radon.)
“At the time, there was a big scare about radon in New England, and he thought he could develop a radon detector that was inexpensive and easy to use,” says Steadman. “His radon detector became a big business.”
He later developed devices to detect explosives, drugs, and other contraband in luggage and cargo containers. Handheld devices used X-ray fluorescence to determine the composition of metal alloys and to detect other materials. The handheld XL Spectrum Analyzer could detect buried and surface lead on painted surfaces, to protect children living in older homes. Three Niton X-ray fluorescence analyzers earned R&D 100 awards.
“Lee was very technically gifted,” says Steadman.
In 1999, Grodzins retired from MIT and devoted his energies to industry, including directing the R&D group at Niton.
His sister Ethel Grodzins Romm was the president and CEO of Niton, followed by his son Hal. Many of Niton’s employees were MIT graduates. In 2005, he and his family sold Niton to Thermo Fisher Scientific, where Lee remained as a principal scientist until 2010.
In the 1990s, he was vice president of American Science and Engineering, and between the ages of 70 and 90, he was awarded three patents a year.
“Curiosity and creativity don’t stop after a certain age,” Grodzins said toUNH Today. “You decide you know certain things, and you don’t want to change that thinking. But thinking outside the box really means thinking outside your box.”
“I miss his enthusiasm,” says Steadman. “I saw him about a couple of years ago and he was still on the move, always ready to launch a new effort, and he was always trying to pull you into those efforts.”
A better world
In the 1950s, Grodzins and other Brookhaven scientists joined the American delegation at the Second United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva.
Early on, he joined several Manhattan Project alums at MIT in their concern about the consequences of nuclear bombs. In Vietnam-era 1969, Grodzins co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems. He served as its chair in 1970 and 1972. He also chaired committees for the American Physical Society and the National Research Council.
As vice president for advanced products at American Science and Engineering, which made homeland security equipment, he became a consultant on airport security, especially following the 9/11 attacks. As an expert witness, he testified at the celebrated trial to determine whether Pan Am was negligent for the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and he took part in a weapons inspection trip on the Black Sea. He also was frequently called as an expert witness on patent cases.
In 1999, Grodzins founded the nonprofit Cornerstones in Science, a public library initiative to improve public engagement with science. Based originally at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, Cornerstones now partners with libraries in Maine, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California. Among their initiatives was one that has helped supply telescopes to libraries and astronomy clubs around the country.
“He had a strong sense of wanting to do good for mankind,” says Steadman.
Awards
Grodzins authored more than 170 technical papers and holds more than 60 U.S. patents. His numerous accolades included being named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1964 and 1971, and a senior von Humboldt fellow in 1980. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received an honorary doctor of science degree from Purdue University in 1998.
In 2021, the Denver X-Ray Conference gave Grodzins the Birks Award in X-Florescence Spectrometry, for having introduced “a handheld XRF unit which expanded analysis to in-field applications such as environmental studies, archeological exploration, mining, and more.”
Personal life
One evening in 1955, shortly after starting his work at Brookhaven, Grodzins decided to take a walk and explore the BNL campus. He found just one building that had lights on and was open, so he went in. Inside, a group was rehearsing a play. He was immediately smitten with one of the actors, Lulu Anderson, a young biologist. “I joined the acting company, and a year-and-a-half later, Lulu and I were married,” Grodzins had recalled. They were happily married for 62 years, until Lulu’s death in 2019.
They raised two sons, Dean, now of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hal Grodzins, who lives in Maitland, Florida. Lee and Lulu owned a succession of beloved huskies, most of them named after physicists.
After living in Arlington, Massachusetts, the Grodzins family moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1972 and bought a second home a few years later in Brunswick, Maine. Starting around 1990, Lee and Lulu spent every weekend, year-round, in Brunswick. In both places, they were avid supporters of their local libraries, museums, theaters, symphonies, botanical gardens, public radio, and TV stations.
Grodzins took his family along to conferences, fellowships, and other invitations. They all lived in Denmark for two sabbaticals, in 1964-65 and 1971-72, while Lee worked at the Neils Bohr Institute. They also traveled together to China for a month in 1975, and for two months in 1980. As part of the latter trip, they were among the first American visitors to Tibet since the 1940s. Lee and Lulu also traveled the world, from Antarctica to the Galapagos Islands to Greece.
His homes had basement workshops well-stocked with tools. His sons enjoyed a playroom he built for them in their Arlington home. He also once constructed his own high-fidelity record player, patched his old Volvo with fiberglass, changed his own oil, and put on the winter tires and chains himself. He was an early adopter of the home computer.
“His work in science and technology was part of a general love of gadgets and of fixing and making things,” his son, Dean, wrote in a Facebook post.
Lee is survived by Dean, his wife, Nora Nykiel Grodzins, and their daughter, Lily; and by Hal and his wife Cathy Salmons.
A remembrance and celebration for Lee Grodzins is planned for this summer. Donations in his name may be made to Cornerstones of Science.
Artificial intelligence is up to the challenge of reducing human suffering, experts say. Are we?
When Adam Rodman was a second-year medical student in the 2000s, he visited the library for a patient whose illness had left doctors stumped. Rodman searched the catalog, copied research papers, and shared them with the team.
“It made a big difference in that patient’s care,” Rodman said. “Everyone said, ‘This is so great. This is evidence-based medicine.’ But it took two hours. I can do that today in 15 seconds.”
Rodman, now an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a doctor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, these days carries a medical library in his pocket — a smartphone app created after the release of the large language model ChatGPT in 2022. OpenEvidence — developed in part by Medical School faculty — allows him to query specific diseases and symptoms. It searches the medical literature, drafts a summary of findings, and lists the most important sources for further reading, providing answers while Rodman is still face-to-face with his patient.
“We say, ‘Wow, the technology is really powerful.’ But what do we do with it to actually change things?”
Adam Rodman
Artificial intelligence in various forms has been used in medicine for decades — but not like this. Experts predict that the adoption of large language models will reshape medicine. Some compare the potential impact with the decoding of the human genome, even the rise of the internet. The impact is expected to show up in doctor-patient interactions, physicians’ paperwork load, hospital and physician practice administration, medical research, and medical education.
Most of these effects are likely to be positive, increasing efficiency, reducing mistakes, easing the nationwide crunch in primary care, bringing data to bear more fully on decision-making, reducing administrative burdens, and creating space for longer, deeper person-to-person interactions.
Adam Rodman, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
“The optimist in me hopes that AI can make us doctors better versions of ourselves to better care for our patients.”
ADAM RODMAN: I am obsessed with metacognition, with thinking about thinking. So what excites me most about AI and medicine? Well, the optimist in me hopes that AI and medicine can make us doctors better versions of ourselves to better care for our patients. I think the best case scenario for me is a world in which an artificial intelligence is communicating with me and my patients, looking for signs of implicit bias, looking for signs that I might be making the wrong decision, and more importantly, feeding back that information to me so that I can improve over time, so that I can become a better human. My worry is actually directly related to this. These are very powerful reasoning technologies, and really what is medical education other than a way to frame and shape the medical mind? So part of my worry is that because these technologies are so powerful, they’ll shortcut many of the ways that we know that doctors learn and get better, and we may end up with generations of physicians who don’t know how to think the best. I don’t think that this is the foregone conclusion, but it really is my worry about the way that things are going.
But there are serious concerns, too.
Current data sets too often reflect societal biases that reinforce gaps in access and quality of care for disadvantaged groups. Without correction, these data have the potential to cement existing biases into ever-more-powerful AI that will increasingly influence how healthcare operates.
Another important issue, experts say, is that AIs remain prone to “hallucination,” making up “facts” and presenting them as if they are real.
Then there’s the danger that medicine won’t be bold enough. The latest AI has the potential to remake healthcare top to bottom, but only if given a chance. The wrong priorities — too much deference to entrenched interests, a focus on money instead of health — could easily reduce the AI “revolution” to an underwhelming exercise in tinkering around the edges.
“I think we’re in this weird space,” Rodman said. “We say, ‘Wow, the technology is really powerful.’ But what do we do with it to actually change things? My worry, as both a clinician and a researcher, is that if we don’t think big, if we don’t try to rethink how we’ve organized medicine, things might not change that much.”
Shoring up the ‘tottering edifice’
Five years ago, when asked about AI in healthcare, Isaac Kohane responded with frustration. Teenagers tapping away on social media apps were better equipped than many doctors. The situation today couldn’t be more different, he says.
Kohane, chair of the Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine’s new AI initiative, describes the abilities of the latest models as “mind boggling.” To illustrate the point, he recalled getting an early look at OpenAI’s GPT-4. He tested it with a complex case — a child born with ambiguous genitalia — that might have stymied even an experienced endocrinologist. Kohane asked GPT-4 about genetic causes, biochemical pathways, next steps in the workup, even what to tell the child’s parents. It aced the test.
“This large language model was not trained to be a doctor; it’s just trained to predict the next word,” Kohane said. “It could speak as coherently about wine pairings with a vegetarian menu as diagnose a complex patient. It was truly a quantum leap from anything that anybody in computer science who was honest with themselves would have predicted in the next 10 years.”
Isaac Kohane, chairman of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine’s new AI journal
“Having an instant second opinion after any interaction with a clinician will change, for the better, the nature of the doctor-patient relationship.”
ISAAC KOHANE: I am most excited that AI is going to transform the patient experience. Just merely having an instant second opinion after any interaction with a clinician will change to the better the nature of the doctor-patient relationship. Also, with regard to what things I fear could go wrong, it’s that parties that do not have the patient’s best interest will be the ones steering the tendencies/biases or prejudices of our new AI companions.
And none too soon. The U.S. healthcare system, long criticized as costly, inefficient, and inordinately focused on treatment over prevention, has been showing cracks. Kohane, recalling a faculty member new to the department who couldn’t find a primary care physician, is tired of seeing them up close.
“The medical system, which I have long said is broken, is broken in extremely obvious ways in Boston,” he said. “People worry about equity problems with AI. I’m here to say we have a huge equity problem today. Unless you’re well connected and are willing to pay literally thousands of extra dollars for concierge care, you’re going to have trouble finding a timely primary care visit.”
Early worries that AI would replace physicians have yielded to the realization that the system needs both AI and its human workforce, Kohane said. Teaming nurse practitioners and physician assistants with AI is one among several promising scenarios.
“It is no longer a conversation about, ‘Will AI replace doctors,’ so much as, ‘Will AI, with a set of clinicians who may not look like the clinicians that we’re used to, firm up the tottering edifice that is organized medicine?’”
Building the optimal assistant
How LLMs were rolled out — to everyone at once — accelerated their adoption, Kohane says. Doctors immediately experimented with eye-glazing yet essential tasks, like writing prior authorization requests to insurers explaining the necessity of specific, usually expensive, treatments.
“People just did it,” Kohane said. “Doctors were tweeting back and forth about all the time they were saving.”
Patients did it too, seeking virtual second opinions, like the child whose recurring pain was misdiagnosed by 17 doctors over three years. In the widely publicized case, the boy’s mother entered his medical notes into ChatGPT, which suggested a condition no doctor had mentioned: tethered cord syndrome, in which the spinal cord binds inside of the backbone. When the patient moves, rather than sliding smoothly, the spinal cord stretches, causing pain. The diagnosis was confirmed by a neurosurgeon, who then corrected the anatomic anomaly.
One of the perceived benefits of employing AI in the clinic, of course, is to make doctors better the first time around. Greater, faster access to case histories, suggested diagnoses, and other data is expected to improve physician performance. But plenty of work remains, a recent study shows.
Research published in JAMA Network Open in October compared diagnoses delivered by an individual doctor, a doctor using an LLM diagnostic tool, and an LLM alone. The results were surprising, showing an insignificant improvement in accuracy for the physicians using the LLM — 76 percent versus 74 percent for the solitary physician. More surprisingly, the LLM by itself did best, scoring 16 percentage points higher than physicians alone.
Rodman, one of the paper’s senior authors, said it’s tempting to conclude that LLMs aren’t that helpful for doctors, but he insisted that it’s important to look deeper at the findings. Only 10 percent of the physicians, he said, were experienced LLM users before the study — which took place in 2023— and the rest received only basic training. Consequently, when Rodman later looked at the transcripts, most used the LLMs for basic fact retrieval.
“The best way a doctor could use it now is for a second opinion, to second-guess themselves when they have a tricky case,” he said. “How could I be wrong? What am I missing? What other questions should I ask? Those are the ways, we know from psychological literature, that complement how humans think.”
Among the other potential benefits of AI is the chance to make medicine safer, according to David Bates, co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Learning Systems at Mass General Brigham. A recent study by Bates and colleagues showed that as many as one in four visits to Massachusetts hospitals results in some kind of patient harm. Many of those incidents trace back to adverse drug events.
“AI should be able to look for medication-related issues and identify them much more accurately than we’re able to do right now,” said Bates, who is also a professor of medicine at the Medical School and of health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
David Bates,co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics Learning Systems at Mass General Brigham
“AI has a tendency to hallucinate, and that is a worry, because we don’t want things in people’s records that are not really there.”
DAVID BATES: AI has a great deal of promise. Burnout is rampant in many parts of medicine, especially, for example, primary care, and artificial intelligence will make many routine tasks like documentation much faster. Ambient scribes in particular are already doing that. There are also concerns about things going wrong. There are many ways that any time gains could be used, for example, just to increase physician workloads. It’s also very important that medical records be correct, and AI has a tendency to hallucinate, and that is a worry, because we don’t want things in people’s records that are not really there.
Another opportunity stems from AI’s growing competence in a mundane area: notetaking and summarization, according to Bernard Chang, dean for medical education at the Medical School.
Systems for “ambient documentation” will soon be able to listen in on patient visits, record everything that is said and done, and generate an organized clinical note in real time. When symptoms are discussed, the AI can suggest diagnoses and courses of treatment. Later, the physician can review the summary for accuracy.
Automation of notes and summaries would benefit healthcare workers in more than one way, Chang said. It would ease doctors’ paperwork load, often cited as a cause of burnout, and it would reset the doctor-patient relationship. One of patients’ biggest complaints about office visits is the physician sitting at the computer, asking questions and recording the answers. Freed from the note-taking process, doctors could sit face-to-face with patients, opening a path to stronger connections.
“It’s not the most magical use of AI,” Chang said. “We’ve all seen AI do something and said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ This is not one of those things. But this program is being piloted at different ambulatory practices across the country and the early results are very promising. Physicians who feel overburdened and burnt out are starting to say, ‘You know what, this tool is going to help me.’”
Bernard Chang, Harvard Medical School Dean for Medical Education
“I see AI as a transformative tool on par with the availability of the internet in terms of its effect on medicine and medical education.”
BERNARD CHANG: What most excites me about AI’s promise in medicine is that these technological tools will allow physicians to spend more time on the human aspects of the profession, which is sorely needed, while facilitating the ability to access information quickly, analyze large amounts of important data, and make the difficult connections necessary to consider the rare diagnoses, the less obvious treatment paradigms, and ultimately the optimal care for patients. In medical education, students can use AI tools to accelerate their learning and move more quickly beyond rote practice to higher levels of cognitive analysis on their way to becoming the most outstanding doctors of the future. Whether things might go long lies in our hands. We need to be cautious about hallucinations and misinformation, bias, an erosion of fundamentals in learning, and an over-reliance on machines. As a society, we need to be mindful of the environmental impacts of the high energy costs involved. On the whole, I see AI as a transformative tool on par with the availability of the internet in terms of its effect on medicine and medical education.
The bias threat
For all their power, LLMs are not ready to be left alone.
“The technology is not good enough to have that safety level where you don’t need a knowledgeable human,” Rodman said. “I can understand where it might have gone aground. I can take a step further with the diagnosis. I can do that because I learned the hard way. In residency you make a ton of mistakes, but you learn from those mistakes. Our current system is incredibly suboptimal but it does train your brain. When people in medical school interact with things that can automate those processes — even if they’re, on average, better than humans — how are they going to learn?”
Doctors and scientists also worry about bad information. Pervasive data bias stems from biomedicine’s roots in wealthy Western nations whose science was shaped by white men studying white men, says Leo Celi, an associate professor of medicine and a physician in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Leo Celi, associate professor of medicine and a physician in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine
“We need to design human AI systems, rather than build algorithms. We have to be able to predict how humans will mess up.”
LEO CELI: AI could be the Trojan horse we’ve been waiting for to redesign systems from a clean slate. I am talking about systems for knowledge creation, health care delivery, and eduction, which are all quite broken. The legacy of AI is to make us better critical thinkers, by putting data at the front and center, and making the breadth and the depth of the problems crystal clear. But we need to design human AI systems, rather than build algorithms. We have to be able to predict how humans will mess up. The designs should be similar those of systems for aviation, road safety, space, nuclear power generation. We need psychologists, cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, anthropologists to design human AI systems.”
“You need to understand the data before you can build artificial intelligence,” Celi said. “That gives us a new perspective of the design flaws of legacy systems for healthcare delivery, legacy systems for medical education. It becomes clear that the status quo is so bad — we knew it was bad and we’ve come to accept that it is a broken system — that all the promises of AI are going bust unless we recode the world itself.”
Celi cited research on disparities in care between English-speaking and non-English speaking patients hospitalized with diabetes. Non-English speakers are woken up less frequently for blood sugar checks, raising the likelihood that changes will be missed. That impact is hidden, however, because the data isn’t obviously biased, only incomplete, even though it still contributes to a disparity in care.
“They have one or two blood-sugar checks compared to 10 if you speak English well,” he said. “If you average it, the computers don’t see that this is a data imbalance. There’s so much missing context that experts may not be aware of what we call ‘data artifacts.’ This arises from a social patterning of the data generation process.”
Bates offered additional examples, including a skin cancer device that does a poor job detecting cancer on highly pigmented skin and a scheduling algorithm that wrongly predicted Black patients would have higher no-show rates, leading to overbooking and longer wait times.
“Most clinicians are not aware that every medical device that we have is, to a certain degree, biased,” Celi said. “They don’t work well across all groups because we prototype them and we optimize them on, typically, college-age, white, male students. They were not optimized for an ICU patient who is 80 years old and has all these comorbidities, so why is there an expectation that the numbers they represent are objective ground truths?”
The exposure of deep biases in legacy systems presents an opportunity to get things right, Celi said. Accordingly, more researchers are pushing to ensure that clinical trials enroll diverse populations from geographically diverse locations.
One example is Beth Israel’s MIMIC database, which reflects the hospital’s diverse patient population. The tool, overseen by Celi, offers investigators de-identified electronic medical records — notes, images, test results — in an open-source format. It has been used in 10,000 studies by researchers all around the world and is set to expand to 14 additional hospitals, he said.
Age of agility
As in the clinic, AI models used in the lab aren’t perfect, but they are opening pathways that hold promise to greatly accelerate scientific progress.
“They provide instant insights at the atomic scale for some molecules that are still not accessible experimentally or that would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to generate,” said Marinka Zitnik, an associate professor of biomedical informatics at the Medical School. “These models provide in-silico predictions that are accurate, that scientists can then build upon and leverage in their scientific work. That, to me, just hints at this incredible moment that we are in.”
”What is becoming increasingly important is to develop reliable, faithful benchmarks or techniques that allow us to evaluate how well the outputs of AI models behave in the real world.”
Marinka Zitnik
Zitnik’s lab recently introduced Procyon, an AI model aimed at closing knowledge gaps around protein structures and their biological roles.
Until recently, it has been difficult for scientists to understand a protein’s shape — how the long molecules fold and twist onto themselves in three dimensions. This is important because the twists and turns expose portions of the molecule and hide others, making those sites easier or harder for other molecules to interact with, which affects the molecule’s chemical properties.
Marinka Zitnik, assistant professor of biomedical informatics
“Insights from research labs don’t always translate into effective treatments, and AI could amplify this gap if it’s not designed to bridge it.”
MARINKA ZITNIK: I am most excited about AI’s ability to learn and innovate on its own, instead of just analyzing existing knowledge. AI can generate new ideas, uncover hidden patterns, and propose solutions that humans might not consider. In biomedical research and drug development, this means AI could design new molecules, predict how these molecules interact with biological systems, and match treatments to patients with greater accuracy. By integrating information across genetics, proteins, all the way to clinical outcomes, AI can speed up discoveries in ways that was previously not possible. A major challenge, however, is that AI models tend to focus on problems that have already been extensively studied, while other important areas receive less attention. If we are not careful, medical advances may become concentrated in familiar areas, while other conditions remain under-explored, not because they are less important, but because there is less existing knowledge to guide AI systems. Another issue is that AI-driven drug design and treatment recommendations often rely on experimental findings generated in research labs that might not fully capture the complexity of real patients. Insights from research labs don’t always translate into effective treatments, and AI could amplify this gap if it’s not designed to bridge it. The opportunity is to build AI that makes discoveries and ensure that those discoveries lead to meaningful advances, bringing innovation to areas where it’s needed most.
Today, predicting a protein’s shape — down to nearly every atom — from its known sequence of amino acids is feasible, Zitnik said. The major challenge is linking those structures to their functions and phenotypes across various biological settings and diseases. About 20 percent of human proteins have poorly defined functions, and an overwhelming share of research — 95 percent — is devoted to just 5,000 well-studied proteins.
“We are addressing this gap by connecting molecular sequences and structures with functional annotations to predict protein phenotypes, helping move the field closer to being able to in-silico predict functions for each protein,” Zitnik said.
A long-term goal for AI in the lab is the development of “AI scientists” that function as research assistants, with access to the entire body of scientific literature, the ability to integrate that knowledge with experimental results, and the capacity to suggest next steps. These systems could evolve into true collaborators, Zitnik said, noting that some models have already generated simple hypotheses. Her lab used Procyon, for example, to identify domains in the maltase glucoamylase protein that bind miglitol, a drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes. In another project, the team showed that Procyon could functionally annotate poorly characterized proteins implicated in Parkinson’s disease. The tool’s broad range of capabilities is possible because it was trained on massive experimental data sets and the entire scientific literature, resources far exceeding what humans can read and analyze, Zitnik said.
The classroom comes before the lab, and the AI dynamic of flexibility, innovation, and constant learning is also being applied to education. The Medical School has introduced a course dealing with AI in healthcare; added a Ph.D. track on AI in medicine; is planning a “tutor bot” to provide supplemental material beyond lectures; and is developing a virtual patient on which students can practice before their first nerve-wracking encounter with the real thing. Meanwhile, Rodman is leading a steering group on the use of generative AI in medical education.
These initiatives are a good start, he said. Still, the rapid evolution of AI technology makes it difficult to prepare students for careers that will span 30 years.
“The Harvard view, which is my view as well, is that we can give people the basics, but we just have to encourage agility and prepare people for a future that changes rapidly,” Rodman said. “Probably the best thing we can do is prepare people to expect the unexpected.”
Study traces surge in activism among Black men who faced discrimination while defending country
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division take part in a victory parade on 5th Avenue in New York City following World War I.
European/FPG/Getty Images
Black men drafted into the U.S. Army during World War I were significantly more likely to join the NAACP and to play key leadership roles in the early Civil Rights Movement as a result of the discrimination they experienced while serving the country, according to a new study by Harvard Kennedy School economist Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, a doctoral student in economics.
Looking to measure what drove the postwar boost in political activism among Black veterans, the researchers combed through millions of military records, U.S. Census data, as well as membership rolls for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the decade following the war. They found that by 1930, World War I veterans comprised 15 percent of male members of the NAACP, the leading civil rights organization of the period.
The significant discrimination Black troops faced while serving in the Great War — working in segregated units with little formal training — “seeded deep feelings of institutional betrayal and discontent” that compelled many veterans to challenge the status quo after 1918, Ang and Chinoy concluded.
Desmond Ang (left) and Sahil Chinoy.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Black men who were induced to enlist were three times more likely to join the NAACP, the study found. Since the early 1800s, Black Americans had been barred from serving in the military and attending institutions such as West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy. When World War I broke out, the U.S. needed to beef up its defensive ranks quickly, so in 1917 it instituted the first nationwide draft of Black men, conscripting nearly 400,000. The move was unpopular, particularly within the all-white armed forces, and Black and white servicemen were segregated. Nearly 90 percent of Black troops were assigned labor-intensive or menial jobs, say the researchers, and most were denied combat and officer training, firearms, and promotions.
Soldiers who were most caught off guard by the hostile treatment they received were the likeliest to become politically active, the study found. For example, researchers traced the highest NAACP enrollment to veterans of the 92nd Division, who risked their lives in combat while facing constant racial abuse. The study saw lower enrollment among noncombatants and veterans of the 93rd Division, who experienced less discriminatory treatment while brigading overseas with the French military.
Identifying the private motivations of veterans from a century ago was difficult, so to help understand how Black soldiers felt about the war, Ang and Chinoy reviewed questionnaires administered by state commissions asking veterans to describe their service and how it affected them. Those who served in camps that denied training or promotion opportunities were more than twice as likely to cite injustice in their survey responses.
Another rich source of information, said Ang, were contemporaneous reports assembled by U.S. military intelligence, which had a department monitoring what it called “Negro subversion.” White officers would go from camp to camp taking the temperature of Black troops. The two greatest causes of discontent cited by Black service members in the reports were the dearth of promotion opportunities while laboring under often cruel and unqualified white supervisors, and the lack of military training in return for their service.
“The government had a really good handle on what things were really upsetting Black people,” which “speaks to this idea that a lot of this was very deliberate, institutional decisions that were happening,” said Ang. “It really seems to corroborate this narrative [historian] Chad Williams and others have talked about, which is the sense of hypocrisy and injustice that was going on.”
Ang and Chinoy say the research may “underestimate” how influential World War I veterans were in terms of the potential spillover effects on their families, friends, and others in the Black community, a subject they intend to explore next. Also, the researchers are starting to look at how the backlash to the NAACP’s rise and the Civil Rights Movement sparked a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow in the 1920s.
Citing the white power movement following the Vietnam War and the paramilitary styling of some far-right groups today in the U.S., Ang wonders whether the dynamics at play during World War I is a piece of a much larger puzzle. “Is this something that we can see historically, and what are the aspects of military service” that may drive people to become politically active?
Take our quiz to learn more about how indoor air quality can impact your health
Do you ever find yourself feeling tired or struggling to concentrate while at the office? In “Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick — or Keep You Well,” Harvard public health and business experts Joseph Allen and John Macomber explore how the places we spend most of our time — our homes, workplaces, and schools — affect our well-being, focus, and problem-solving ability. Allen helped us develop the following quiz based on his research on indoor air quality.
Eight staff artists are featured in their homes, studios, and work spaces.
Photos and video by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Niles Singer
Harvard Staff Photographer
8 min read
Harvard staff cultivate talents that flourish beyond the gates
Nearly 300 talented artists from across the University are displaying their work in the annual Harvard Staff Art Show. Created as a venue where staff can share their creativity with the broader community, the show is now in its fifth year. Below are profiles of eight of these creatives who were happy to chat about their projects.
Scott Murry
Designer, Illustrator, and Photographer
Senior Designer, Harvard Library
Scott Murry in his apartment.
Scott Murry said his “Find Yourself,” part of a series of monoline-style digital drawings about mental health created during the pandemic, is about “trying to think about who you are with intentionality.”
Murry’s interest in the visual arts was nurtured in ninth and 10th grades by teachers who motivated and challenged him to achieve. He went to the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Art Institute of Boston and “was wild about editorial illustration and children’s book illustration” before taking on various roles at design agencies, in environmental design, and at the Weekly Dig.
These days Murry is being intentional with his time, drawing, designing, doing concert photography, publishing a children’s book, and working on a photo book of his son, Elliott. He is particularly excited by the design possibilities of the double Ls and double Ts in his son’s name.
Murry works on a drawing from his series that reads, “Have hope it will be better.” The drawing is “related to something from the pandemic or politics, where it just felt very busted, like, you know, you find your car on cinder blocks with a broken windshield, which I have with my own car.”
Pairs of custom Vans shoes printed with Murry’s designs.
Eve Radovsky
Cabinet and Furniture Maker
Faculty Assistant, Harvard Law School
Eve Radovsky holds the cabinet she’s displaying in this year’s Staff Art Show.
In 2018, Eve Radovsky enrolled in a full-time program in cabinet- and furniture-making. “I also have always really appreciated furniture design, and I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands,” she said. Her white-oak-and-maple piece in the show was inspired by an image of a blanket chest created by Thomas Dennis in the 17th century.
Radovsky used carving gouges to remove sections of wood for the front and small metal stamps to create the background. She also used several different types of stains to “age” the piece in a way that mimicked the more dangerous process of fuming.
She has also been a passionate knitter for the past 10-plus years and is currently working on creating a sweater for herself.
The front of her cabinet is hand-carved.
Radovsky knitting while sitting in a chair she made herself.
Yuwei Li
Drawer
Neurotechnology Engineer, The Center for Brain Science
Yuwei Li holds her drawing of Lou the budgie.
Yuwei Li likes drawing cute animals, including her budgie, Lou, who died right before Thanksgiving. For her, “drawing is a way to relax and be happy,” and the picture she chose to display is meant both to remind her of her pet and thank him for being a part of her life.
“This is actually based on a photo that I took from my cell phone … One day, he was just, like, winking at me. And then I happened to capture him winking with my camera.”
Li, shown in the Center for Brain Science’s machine shop in Harvard’s Northwest Building, uses her talents at work to design and fabricate equipment for approximately 40 different labs. Her latest after-hours project — inspired by “Star Wars” fans she met at Comic-Con in San Diego — is a 3-D print of a one-to-one scale model of R2-D2, which she hopes to mount on wheels and use to carry her tools.
Li solders a project for her work in the machine shop.
Li is assembling her 3-D R2-D2 piece by piece.
Veronica Bagnole
Embroiderer
Digital Project Manager, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Veronica Bagnole holds her current embroidery project.
For Veronica Bagnole, embroidery is a calming and historically rich artform. When she isn’t overseeing the GSD’s website and supporting a team of 100 content editors, she works on embroidery pieces that can take hundreds of hours to complete.
Bagnole’s piece shows a woman from the late 18th to early 19th century, whose likeness she created from AI images that she modified to create an outline before adding texture during the roughly 250 to 300 hours it took to embroider.
“When people come to this piece, I want them to look at it and think, ‘Who is that woman? Why did she have her portrait done?’”
Bagnole said embroidery deserves more recognition as not just a craft but a historical art form that allows her to honor and “connect with generations from the past.”
The gold chain is one of several small details Bagnole improvised.
Four pairs of 19th and early 20th century embroidery scissors from Bagnole’s collection. She calls them “beautiful little pieces of history.”
Stanislav Karachev
Dancer and Poet
Energy Performance Engineer, Harvard Medical School
Stanislav Karachev poses in the mirror he used for his poetry and dance piece “My Mirror.” A video recording of his performance is in this year’s Staff Art Show.
When Stanislav Karachev was invited to dance at a venue in New Hampshire, he knew he had to go big. He ended up creating the performance featured in this year’s art show, a mix of poetry, music, and dance he used to express his feelings during a breakup.
Karachev decided that he would incorporate a mirror and engage with the audience during the performance. “Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, you’re like, I’m doing a solo. It’s all about me.’ And it’s not. It’s about the audience and the connection between the performer or performers with the audience.”
Karachev recorded his poem and mixed his backing track with the help of a neighbor who also works at Harvard. He chose krump as the dance style because of its high energy. Karachev said he ended up impressed with where the intensity drove him: “I didn’t know I could move like that.”
The sole of an artist.
A page from Karachev’s poetry notebook.
John Buonomo
Astrophotographer
Senior Cloud Architect, Harvard University Health Services
John Buonomo in front of The Great Refractor at the Harvard College Observatory.
John Buonomo’s earliest attempts at astrophotography were in 1978. The self-taught artist said he became fascinated with his subject at 9 years old when a neighbor showed him a view of Jupiter and Saturn through his refractor. Buonomo’s first photographs using film and a manual tracking scope weren’t very successful, but the advent of digital technology “changed everything.”
These days Buonomo uses dedicated cooled astro CCD cameras, high-end optics, auto guiding, and computer-controlled scripting to create his work. Once he’s captured an image, he uses specialized software to stack multiple exposures and adjust other parameters to reveal faint structures. He calls the balance of technical skill and artistic vision “what makes astrophotography both demanding and deeply rewarding.”
Arched Rock at Goat Rock Beach in Jenner, California.
Photo Courtesy of John Buonomo
Buonomo looks through the Clark Telescope at the Harvard College Observatory.
Toru Nakanishi
Photographer and Sculptor
Exhibition Production Specialist at the Harvard Art Museums
Toru Nakanishi with several of his 3-D printed sculptures.
Toru Nakanishi’s love of photography started in college, when he began creating black-and-white photos in a darkroom. But when he no longer had access to a darkroom and couldn’t justify the cost of a digital camera, he began making images on a flatbed scanner.
This year’s show includes one of Nakanishi’s flatbed scans of ramen noodles. To create his images, Nakanishi laid the noodles on the scanner and turned off all the lights to get a black background. For other images, “I made a flatbed scanner with a glass wall on top of it. You can fill it with the water and then float the item in it and then scan it.”
This photograph shown is a piece of a much larger noodle series, one image of which is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Nakanishi also sculpts in wood.
Nakanishi holds the photograph he is displaying in the Staff Art Show.
Fionnuala Gerrity
Ceramicist
Conservation Technician at Harvard Library Preservation Services
Fionnuala Gerrity.
Fionnuala Gerrity first tried ceramics as a kid, but returned to it before the pandemic by taking courses at Indigo Fire in Belmont. They were surprised by the result: “I had no idea it would grow into an entire body of work, like a side gig to my professional career.”
Today, “everything that I do is based on local forest ecosystems,” Gerrity said. Using slabs as the primary construction method, building the vessel first, and finally adding sculpted elements, Gerrity tries to depict nature as accurately as possible. During the photoshoot, they shared a finished tea set decorated with “three different moths that preferentially associate with bitter nut hickory.”
“I love the idea that they might inspire people to look a little bit more closely at what’s around them,” Gerrity said.
The system, Aardvark Weather, has been supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. It provides a blueprint for a new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to transform current practices. The results are reported in the journal Nature.
“Aardvark reimagines current weather prediction methods offering the potential to make weather forecasts faster, cheaper, more flexible and more accurate than ever before, helping to transform weather prediction in both developed and developing countries,” said Professor Richard Turner from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “Aardvark is thousands of times faster than all previous weather forecasting methods.”
Current weather forecasts are generated through a complex set of stages, each taking several hours to run on powerful supercomputers. Aside from daily usage, the development, maintenance and use of these systems require significant time and large teams of experts.
More recently, research by Huawei, Google, and Microsoft has shown that one component of the weather forecasting pipeline, the numerical solver (which calculates how weather evolves over time), can be replaced with AI, resulting in faster and more accurate predictions. This combination of AI and traditional approaches is now being used by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
But with Aardvark, researchers have replaced the entire weather prediction pipeline with a single, simple machine learning model. The new model takes in observations from satellites, weather stations and other sensors and outputs both global and local forecasts.
This fully AI driven approach means predictions that were once produced using many models – each requiring a supercomputer and a large support team to run – can now be produced in minutes on a desktop computer.
When using just 10% of the input data of existing systems, Aardvark already outperforms the United States national GFS forecasting system on many variables. It is also competitive with United States Weather Service forecasts that use input from dozens of weather models and analysis by expert human forecasters.
“These results are just the beginning of what Aardvark can achieve,” said first author Anna Allen, from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. “This end-to-end learning approach can be easily applied to other weather forecasting problems, for example hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes. Beyond weather, its applications extend to broader Earth system forecasting, including air quality, ocean dynamics, and sea ice prediction.”
The researchers say that one of the most exciting aspects of Aardvark is its flexibility and simple design. Because it learns directly from data it can be quickly adapted to produce bespoke forecasts for specific industries or locations, whether that's predicting temperatures for African agriculture or wind speeds for a renewable energy company in Europe.
This contrasts to traditional weather prediction systems where creating a customised system takes years of work by large teams of researchers.
“The weather forecasting systems we all rely on have been developed over decades, but in just 18 months, we’ve been able to build something that’s competitive with the best of these systems, using just a tenth of the data on a desktop computer,” said Turner, who is also Lead Researcher for Weather Prediction at the Alan Turing Institute.
This capability has the potential to transform weather prediction in developing countries where access to the expertise and computational resources required to develop conventional systems is not typically available.
“Unleashing AI’s potential will transform decision-making for everyone from policymakers and emergency planners to industries that rely on accurate weather forecasts,” said Dr Scott Hosking from The Alan Turing Institute. “Aardvark’s breakthrough is not just about speed, it’s about access. By shifting weather prediction from supercomputers to desktop computers, we can democratise forecasting, making these powerful technologies available to developing nations and data-sparse regions around the world.”
“Aardvark would not have been possible without decades of physical-model development by the community, and we are particularly indebted to ECMWF for their ERA5 dataset which is essential for training Aardvark,” said Turner.
“It is essential that academia and industry work together to address technological challenges and leverage new opportunities that AI offers,” said Matthew Chantry from ECMWF. “Aardvark’s approach combines both modularity with end-to-end forecasting optimisation, ensuring effective use of the available datasets."
“Aardvark represents not only an important achievement in AI weather prediction but it also reflects the power of collaboration and bringing the research community together to improve and apply AI technology in meaningful ways,” said Dr Chris Bishop, from Microsoft Research.
The next steps for Aardvark include developing a new team within the Alan Turing Institute led by Turner, who will explore the potential to deploy Aardvark in the global south and integrate the technology into the Institute’s wider work to develop high-precision environmental forecasting for weather, oceans and sea ice.
Adapted from a media release by The Alan Turing Institute
A new AI weather prediction system, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, can deliver accurate forecasts tens of times faster and using thousands of times less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems.
This year’s report analyses the UK’s innovation landscape, by benchmarking industrial sectors against global competitors and delivering key insights into the country’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities.
The report arrives at a particularly significant moment, with the UK Government placing industrial strategy at the core of its plans to deliver growth, emphasising investment, technology adoption, and high-growth sectors.
Recent national consultations on scale-up financing, technology adoption, and industrial strategy have highlighted the demand for stronger data and analysis to guide decision making.
The UK Innovation Report 2025 addresses this call by providing fresh data, deep insights, and expert perspectives to support informed policy making and strategic investment, which have significant implications for the UK's industrial strategy.
Key findings from this year’s report include:
There has been a significant decline in the UK’s share of global manufacturing value-added, from 3.1% in 2000 to 1.9% in 2022
The UK remains a global leader in government financial support for business research and development but lags in direct funding
Skills mismatches persist, with 37% of UK workers feeling overqualified for their jobs
The UK is a leading innovator in renewable energy technologies, ranking fourth in public R&D spending on low-carbon energy
Compiled by policy experts from the University of Cambridge, the report provides an easy-to-navigate overview of key trends across UK industry.
As the UK Government continues to develop its national industrial strategy, the Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy group at Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing has unveiled the UK Innovation Report 2025.
An Australian-first study has found that certain natural fats which exist in the skin of babies, called lipids, are linked to the development of eczema in children.
The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) and the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics (HCMA) exchanged a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on leadership training and development during a visit to NUS by His Excellency Mr Tô Lâm, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam on 12 March 2025.
The MOU will deliver programmes to Vietnamese senior party cadres, government officials and senior civil servants, covering topics like good governance, digital transformation, green transition and public administration reforms.
The agreement was one of three initiatives announced by NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye during Mr Lâm’s visit to LKYSPP, where the Vietnamese leader delivered a policy speech and participated in a dialogue session chaired by Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security Mr Teo Chee Hean.
In his speech at the event, Prof Tan emphasised NUS’ commitment to forging strong partnerships with institutions around the world to advance education, research and innovation across different ecosystems.
“Your visit today marks a major milestone in our university’s engagement with Vietnam. It will inspire our NUS community to take bold strides in deepening our engagement with Vietnam,” said Prof Tan to Mr Lâm, noting that NUS has many partnerships with Vietnamese institutions like the Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi University of Science and Technology.
The event was one of Mr Lâm’s various engagements during his official three-day visit to Singapore, during which both countries agreed to elevate bilateral ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership – the highest diplomatic tier.
In an opening speech at the event, Mr Teo said Singapore and Vietnam aim to strengthen their strong bilateral ties, with enhanced partnerships in new and emerging areas as Vietnam continues its remarkable rise.
Having made visits to Vietnam over the past three decades, Mr Teo has personally witnessed its exponential growth. “In 1993, I had the honour of accompanying Mr Lee Kuan Yew – then Senior Minister – on his first official visit to Vietnam.” The 1993 visit “laid the foundation that continues to guide the strong relations between our two countries”, Mr Teo recounted, citing enduring collaborations such as the 20 Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Parks across 14 provinces that have created over 320,000 jobs and attracted more than US$23 billion in foreign investment.
In his policy address titled “Vietnam’s Policy for Scientific and Technological Development, Innovation, and National Digital Transformation in a New Era: Opportunities for Vietnam–Singapore Cooperation”, Mr Lâm cited Singapore’s remarkable progress with its Smart Nation initiative, noting that Vietnam is also pursuing advancements in its government institutions, legislation and infrastructure development.
“We must adopt a new mindset in legislation to meet governance requirements and encourage innovation,” he said, calling NUS “a premier beacon of academic excellence and innovation in the region and the world”.
Collaborations in research, innovation and human capital development
Addressing an audience of more than 300, Mr Lâm shared how Vietnam intends to learn from Singapore’s expertise in science and technology to achieve its two goals: to become a modern industrial country by 2030 and a developed, high-income country by 2045.
Scientific innovation and digital transformation, he added, provide the “golden key” for Vietnam to avoid the middle-income trap and keep pace in an era of globalisation and economic integration.
Given the complementary strengths of both countries – Singapore’s managerial expertise and abundant capital, and Vietnam’s large workforce and market – scientific and technological cooperation will remain a key foundation of the Vietnam-Singapore partnership, said Mr Lâm.
To this end, he proposed strengthening collaboration in several areas, ranging from research to human capital development.
By stepping up joint research initiatives, both countries will open up opportunities for knowledge sharing and technology exchange. “This requires extensive collaboration among research institutes and universities of international standing in both countries, facilitating the exchange of experience and specialised resources,” he explained.
Human resource development and the acceleration of technology transfer are other areas where both sides can work together, with Singapore’s world-class education and research institutions sharing its educational model, specialised training programmes, and hands-on managerial expertise with Vietnam.
The session concluded with a question-and-answer dialogue moderated by Mr Teo, with Mr Lâm addressing various topics, including how ASEAN youth can adapt to a volatile world.
Mr Lam’s visit to LKYSPP was followed by an event later that evening at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (YST), where the Vietnamese delegation – joined by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat – was treated to a joint musical performance by the Vietnam National Academy of Music, Hanoi Philharmonic Orchestra, and students from YST, who performed works by Vietnamese composers alongside well-known pieces from Western classical music repertoire.
In his welcome address, Professor Peter Tornquist, Dean of YST, said the performance was a celebration of the enduring friendship between Vietnam and Singapore and a reaffirmation of the shared commitment to deepening ties between both nations.
YST and the Vietnam National Academy of Music also signed an MOU on 13 March 2025. Apart from promoting joint research and development activities between both institutions, it will encourage exchanges among faculty, students and visiting artists, building on the growing collaboration between Singapore and Vietnam in music. The signing was witnessed by the Honourable Spouse Mdm Ngo Phuong Ly, who was present at the ceremony as Guest-of-Honour, along with other members of the delegation.
NUS is also set to expand the growing collaboration between Vietnam and Singapore with another initiative. A new start-up acceleration programme by NUS Enterprise called Univentures@BLOCK71 will help Vietnamese start-ups seize emerging opportunities and scale beyond local markets. The programme is supported by the Vietnam National Innovation Centre and Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, in partnership with Temasek Foundation.
Can Europe defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia?
Production ramps up at a German munitions factory last year in response to the war in Ukraine.
Fabian Bimmer/Getty Images
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
National security expert details what’s being done, what can be done as U.S. appears to rethink decadeslong support
Many European leaders believe they can no longer rely on the U.S. for the high level of defensive support they have counted on for decades now that President Donald Trump, a longtime critic of NATO and the European Union, has returned to office.
A distinguished veteran, Hooker served in national security roles during the Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush administrations and had been on the faculty of National Defense University, National War College, and U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
You recently wrote that Europe has to shore up its own defense because it is no longer a priority for the U.S. How do things look at this moment?
I think for sure the threat to European security is much greater. The reason is the perception that the U.S. is disengaging and, in some ways, working with Russian President Vladimir Putin. That encourages Putin and dismays the Europeans, which has a downside and an upside.
The U.S. has worked for decades to suppress any notions of European strategic autonomy. We always thought we’d be the primary security provider in Europe, and we like being the leaders of NATO. So to that extent there’s been very halting progress at developing a separate or independent capability in Europe.
There’s an article in The Wall Street Journal that argues that Europe’s got way more in the way of forces and in wealth than Russia. But when you really peel the onion back, there are a lot of problems with that thesis.
The first is that readiness across Europe is quite low, even among the major powers — the French, the British, the Germans, the Italians. They would struggle to put a single army combat division in the field in less than 60 or 90 days. They probably could not put a second in the field for much longer after that.
The U.K. had 66 divisions in World War I, it would struggle to put one out in 90 days to defend the Baltic states. So that’s a pretty low level of readiness.
Why isn’t it more robust?
The militaries across Europe have gotten much, much smaller. In the last 30 years, they’ve gone to volunteer militaries, which are much more expensive, and you can’t generate reserves with volunteer militaries. And we’ve seen from Ukraine that modern warfare, no surprise, causes a lot of casualties and consumes a lot of resources. So that’s a problem.
But the real problem is what we call the enablers. It is all the below-the-line capabilities that enable you to actually fight. This is logistics, air defense, medical support, artillery at the corps level — those kinds of things. You just don’t find those in Europe.
And so, it’s really hard to put a force together that could deter or stand up to the Russian Federation in a major war because those capabilities are either absent or very much attenuated.
Now, the overarching issue for everything is, if the U.S. disengages and withdraws its nuclear umbrella, there’s really no answer in Europe for that. There just isn’t.
That would put the European nations, and particularly those in the east, under great, great pressure, because Putin would threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons, and there’s nothing to deter that. There’s no response other than the U.S. umbrella. And there are those who argue, even now, in practice, de facto, that umbrella’s been withdrawn.
“If the U.S. disengages and withdraws its nuclear umbrella, there’s really no answer in Europe for that.”
Is Europe correct to worry the U.S. nuclear umbrella has been withdrawn?
Has it been withdrawn already? I don’t know. Is it reliable? I wouldn’t think so.
If Putin were to threaten or actually use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine or, let’s say in Estonia, would the administration respond with nuclear threats of its own? Personally, I have my doubts. I worked in the first 18 months of the Trump administration. I was the senior NATO guy, which is not a comfortable job to have, and I have my doubts. I’ll just leave it at that.
What are Europe’s biggest defensive shortcomings, ones that hurt its strategic autonomy?
No. 1, of course, is the nuclear question.
No. 2 is they don’t really have higher level formations. They have a lot of corps headquarters, but they’re not real corps headquarters. They don’t have the artillery, the air defense, the engineers, all that stuff that you need to fight at the corps level.
No. 3 is the readiness of the formations they do have is quite low, so they can’t push out meaningful forces in 14 days the way the U.S. can.
It’s very easy to think of Europe as one entity, but it’s really not. It’s 44 different polities, and they all see the world a little bit differently.
The eastern flank countries, they all see the world the same. The Poles, the Baltic states, the Nordics, they all border Russia. They’re spending a lot of money; they’re going back to conscription; they’re getting better every day. They see the world the way it really is. All the other nations, not so much.
Do you think European leaders are genuinely motivated to take action?
I think it’s underway. I really do. But it’s not the kind of thing that you can solve overnight.
One clear sign is that defense spending continues to rise in many places. Not in every place in Europe — there are still some key states that don’t even make 2 percent. But the big ones have all said, “We’re going to work toward 3 percent,” and their budgets do seem to be rising.
Collectively, the Europeans hit the 2 percent target in 2024, and they have been increasing spending quite a bit over the last four or five years, but it hasn’t translated yet into actual capability.
So many people, even experts, just repeat this mantra that “the Europeans aren’t spending enough.” Actually, they spend more than four times more on defense than Russia does. Russia spent about $125 billion — as far as we can tell — in 2024, and the European allies spent about $500 billion, which is a lot.
So, I don’t see spending as the issue. How that money is spent is the real issue.
Which countries have nuclear weapons and might others decide to acquire some in light of the changing landscape?
The British have about 400 deployable warheads. These are essentially strategic warheads. They have three ballistic missile submarines.
The French have about the same number deployed in about the same way. Those can threaten the 10 largest Russian cities. Those are strategic weapons; they’re not intended to try to take out Russian missile silos.
The Russians have more than 10 times that many warheads. Are those deterrents effective for those countries? I think probably yes. Could they, or would they, extend their nuclear umbrella to neighbor states or to allies? I’m doubtful about that.
There’s been discussion in Germany about generating a nuclear capability, but it seems clear the Germans are not going to do that.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Poles might be looking at that. The Ukrainians, who do have a lot of advanced technology and used to have nuclear weapons, it’s possible the Ukrainians might think about developing some kind of nuclear capability. Outside of those cases, I just don’t see it.
Are there any steps Europe can take immediately to defend itself?
No. 1: They can return to conscription because that enables you to grow your forces quickly and generate reserves.
No. 2: It’s really hard to move forces across Europe. This problem is called military mobility. Every time you cross a national boundary, or even a provincial boundary, you get stopped. There’s a paperwork check. The rail gauges are not uniform across Europe, so you might get as far as Poland and then you have to unload everything and put it on a different train. So military mobility is a real issue.
No. 3: Interoperability, which means can we all work together on the battlefield, is a real challenge.
All the Allies can’t talk on the battlefield securely to each other, and they can’t pass data securely on the battlefield because they have different systems.
And No. 4 is just be ready. You’ve got to be serious about the problem and attack it. I do think they’re getting more serious. The question is how fast can they do it, and is there going to be more Russian aggression on European territory before they get there?
He was walking in Washington and just like that he was gone
Tony Horwitz and Geraldine Brooks in their Martha’s Vineyard home in 2016.
Photo by Elizabeth Cecil
8 min read
Geraldine Brooks traces painful, disorienting pendulum-swing of grief after losing Tony Horwitz, her husband of 35 years
Excerpted from “Memorial Days” by Geraldine Brooks, Radcliffe Fellow ’06, visiting lecturer ’21, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
May 27, 2019 West Tisbury
“Is this the home of Tony Horwitz?”
Yes
“Who am I speaking to?”
This is his wife
That is exact. The rest is a blur.
“Collapsed in the street … tried to resuscitate at the scene … brought to the hospital … couldn’t revive him.”
And, so, now he’s in the OR. And, so, now we’ve admitted him for a procedure. And, so, now we’re keeping him for observation.
So many things that logically should have followed.
But she says none of these things. Instead, the illogical thing: He’s dead.
No.
Not Tony. Not him. Not my husband out on the road energetically promoting his new book. My husband with the toned body of a six-day-a-week gym rat. The 60-year-old who still wears clothes the same size as the day I met him in his twenties. My husband, younger than I am — hilarious, bursting with vitality. He’s way too busy living. He cannot possibly be dead.
The resident’s voice is flat, exhausted. She is impatient with me as I ask her to repeat what she has just said. It is, she tells me, the end of her shift. She gives me a number for the doctor who is coming on duty in this ER, 500 miles away in Washington, D.C. She can’t get me off the phone fast enough.
But Tony — I need to see him. Where will he be when I get there?
“We can’t keep a body in the ER. It will be moved to the hospital morgue to be picked up by the DC medical examiner.”
It. A body. She means Tony.
So how will I see him? I’m in Massachusetts, on an island. It’s going to take me hours to get there —
She cuts me off.
“The DC police will need to talk to you. Make sure they can reach you.”
And then she is gone.
At some moment in this call, I stood up from my desk. When the phone rang, at 18 minutes past one, I’d only just sat down to work after a morning of distractions. I’d had a happy conversation on the phone with my older son, a recent college graduate, adventuring around the world and about to board a plane in Manila for the eight-hour flight to Sydney, where he would stay with my sister. A friend, Susanna, had come to borrow or return a book — I can’t recall which. We’d gone down to the paddock to throw hay to the horses and hung around there, draped on the split rails, chatting.
I’d read a long email from Tony about the visit he’d made the day before to the Virginia village where we lived for 10 years. It was mostly unpunctuated, gossipy, catching me up on the doings of our former neighbors — their tribulations with dry wells and divorces (“she refers to him as her was-band”). The email concluded:
“didn’t wish self back there (if for no other reason, 90 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and still May) but heartened that it seems to have gently evolved while keeping history and quirk. tomorrow back to the grind and am now 2-3 episodes behind on “Billions” so you’ll have rewatch upon return. love and hugs”
I’d hit send on my reply and finally opened the file titled Horse, the novel I was supposed to be writing.
Then, the phone.
Another distraction. I considered letting it go to voicemail.
But maybe there was a question my older son had forgotten to ask. My younger son was away at boarding school, sitting for his end-of-year exams. Perhaps he needed something. I had to pick up.
The caller ID was hard to read in the bright sunlight. Only as I brought the handset close could I make out gw hsp on the display. Don’t tell me I picked up a darn fundraising call. …
Now the dial tone burred. I stared at the handset. My legs started to shake. But I couldn’t sit down. I paced across the room, feeling the howl forming in my chest. I needed to scream, weep, throw myself on the floor, rend my garments, tear my hair.
But I couldn’t allow myself to do any of those things. Because I had to do so many other things.
I stood there and suppressed that howl. Because I was alone, and no one could help me. And if I let go, if I fell, I might not be able to get back up.
In books and movies no one gets this news alone. Someone comes to the door. Someone makes sure you’re sitting down, offers you water, asks whom you’d like them to call.
But no one had done me this kindness. A tired young doctor had picked up my husband’s cell phone, on which he had never set up a passcode, and hit the speed dial for home.
The first brutality in what I would learn is a brutal, broken system.
February 23 Essendon
The small prop plane takes off from Melbourne’s Essendon Airport. Suburban rooftops, container terminals, the industrialized mouth of the Yarra River. And then we pierce a flat layer of cloud and the view I’d hoped for, the glittering, island-studded Bass Strait, is obscured. All I can do is watch the mesmerizing blur of the propeller. A smear of concentric circles. The unlikely physics of flight.
I am headed to a shack on the farthest end of Flinders Island to do the unfinished work of grieving. I have come to realize that what I did that day in late May 2019 and what I was obliged to do in the days and months that followed has exacted an invisible price. I am going to this remote island to pay it.
In the confines of the small plane I overhear snatches of conversation from my fellow travelers:
“I’ve got a hundred acres, it’s quite a big bit of dirt.”
“No one’s prolly fished that spot since we were there last year.”
“You can have the views, or you can have the bars, but you gotta consider the cell tower if you’re building a place.”
“All the pines are gone.”
“What d’ya mean, gone?”
“I mean gone, mate. Not there.”
Tony died on Memorial Day, the American holiday that falls on the last Monday in May and honors the war dead.
When I get to Flinders Island, I will begin my own memorial days. I am taking something that our culture has stopped freely giving: the right to grieve. To shut out the world and its demands. To remember my love and to feel the immensity of his loss. “Grief is praise,” writes Martín Prechtel in his book “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
I haven’t honored Tony enough, because I have not permitted myself the time and space for a grief deep enough to reflect our love.
This will be, finally, the time when I will not have to prepare a face for the faces that I meet. The place where I will not have to pretend that things are normal and that I am okay. Because it has been more than three years and, contrary to appearances, I am not at all okay. I have come to realize that my life since Tony’s death has been one endless, exhausting performance. I have cast myself in a role: woman being normal. I’ve moved around in public acting out a series of convincing scenes: PTO mum, conservation commissioner, author on tour. But nothing has been normal. Here, finally, the long-running show goes on hiatus.
I have been trapped in the maytzar, the narrow place of the Hebrew scriptures. In the Psalms, the singer cries out to God from the narrow place and is answered from the “wideness” of God. Our English word “anguish” means the same thing as the Hebrew maytzar. It is from the Latin for narrowness, strait, restriction. I have not allowed myself the wild wideness of an elaborate, florid, demonstrative grief. Instead, it has been this long feeling of constriction, of holding it in and tamping it down and not letting it show.
I am not a deist. No god will answer my cries. The wideness I seek is in nature, in quiet, in time.
And I have chosen this place, this island, deliberately. Before I met Tony, my life had begun directing me here. Falling in love with him derailed that life, set me on an entirely different course. Now I might glimpse what I have been missing, walk that untraveled road, consider the person I might have become.
Alone on this island at the ends of the earth, maybe, I will finally be able to break out of the maytzar. But first I will need to get back to that moment in my sunlit study when I refused to allow myself to howl.
That howl has become the beast in the basement of my heart. I need to find a way to set it free.
As director of the MIT BioMicro Center (BMC), Stuart Levine ’97 wholeheartedly embraces the variety of challenges he tackles each day. One of over 50 core facilities providing shared resources across the Institute, the BMC supplies integrated high-throughput genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis, bioinformatics support, and data management to researchers across MIT. The BioMicro Center is part of the Integrated Genomics and Bioinformatics core facility at the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Biotechnology Center.
“Every day is a different day,” Levine says, “there are always new problems, new challenges, and the technology is continuing to move at an incredible pace.” After more than 15 years in the role, Levine is grateful that the breadth of his work allows him to seek solutions for so many scientific problems.
By combining bioinformatics expertise with biotech relationships and a focus on maximizing the impact of the center’s work, Levine brings the broad range of skills required to match the diversity of questions asked by investigators in MIT’s Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, as well as researchers across MIT’s campus.
Expansive expertise
Biology first appealed to Levine as an MIT undergraduate taking class 7.012 (Introduction to Biology), thanks to the charisma of instructors Professor Eric Lander and Amgen Professor Emerita Nancy Hopkins. After earning his PhD in biochemistry from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, Levine returned to MIT for postdoctoral work with Professor Richard Young, core member at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
In the Young Lab, Levine found his calling as an informaticist and ultimately decided to stay at MIT. Here, his work has a wide-ranging impact: the BMC serves over 100 labs annually, from the the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Chemical Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; and, of course, Biology.
“It’s a fun way to think about science,” Levine says, noting that he applies his knowledge and streamlines workflows across these many disciplines by “truly and deeply understanding the instrumentation complexities.”
This depth of understanding and experience allows Levine to lead what longtime colleague Professor Laurie Boyer describes as “a state-of-the-art core that has served so many faculty and provides key training opportunities for all.” He and his team work with cutting-edge, finely tuned scientific instruments that generate vast amounts of bioinformatics data, then use powerful computational tools to store, organize, and visualize the data collected, contributing to research on topics ranging from host-parasite interactions to proposed tools for NASA’s planetary protection policy.
Staying ahead of the curve
With a scientist directing the core, the BMC aims to enable researchers to “take the best advantage of systems biology methods,” says Levine. These methods use advanced research technologies to do things like prepare large sets of DNA and RNA for sequencing, read DNA and RNA sequences from single cells, and localize gene expression to specific tissues.
Levine presents a lightweight, clear rectangle about the width of a cell phone and the length of a VHS cassette.
“This is a flow cell that can do 20 human genomes to clinical significance in two days — 8 billion reads,” he says. “There are newer instruments with several times that capacity available as well.”
The vast majority of research labs do not need that kind of power, but the Institute, and its researchers as a whole, certainly do. Levine emphasizes that “the ROI [return on investment] for supporting shared resources is extremely high because whatever support we receive impacts not just one lab, but all of the labs we support. Keeping MIT’s shared resources at the bleeding edge of science is critical to our ability to make a difference in the world.”
To stay at the edge of research technology, Levine maintains company relationships, while his scientific understanding allows him to educate researchers on what is possible in the space of modern systems biology. Altogether, these attributes enable Levine to help his researcher clients “push the limits of what is achievable.”
The man behind the machines
Each core facility operates like a small business, offering specialized services to a diverse client base across academic and industry research, according to Amy Keating, Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology and head of the Department of Biology. She explains that “the PhD-level education and scientific and technological expertise of MIT’s core directors are critical to the success of life science research at MIT and beyond.”
While Levine clearly has the education and expertise, the success of the BMC “business” is also in part due to his tenacity and focus on results for the core’s users.
He was recognized by the Institute with the MIT Infinite Mile Award in 2015 and the MIT Excellence Award in 2017, for which one nominator wrote, “What makes Stuart’s leadership of the BMC truly invaluable to the MIT community is his unwavering dedication to producing high-quality data and his steadfast persistence in tackling any type of troubleshooting needed for a project. These attributes, fostered by Stuart, permeate the entire culture of the BMC.”
“He puts researchers and their research first, whether providing education, technical services, general tech support, or networking to collaborators outside of MIT,” says Noelani Kamelamela, lab manager of the BMC. “It’s all in service to users and their projects.”
Tucked into the far back corner of the BMC lab space, Levine’s office is a fitting symbol of his humility. While his guidance and knowledge sit at the center of what elevates the BMC beyond technical support, he himself sits away from the spotlight, resolutely supporting others to advance science.
“Stuart has always been the person, often behind the scenes, that pushes great science, ideas, and people forward,” Boyer says. “His knowledge and advice have truly allowed us to be at the leading edge in our work.”
“Stuart has always been the person, often behind the scenes, that pushes great science, ideas, and people forward,” Professor Laurie Boyer says of Stuart Levine, director of MIT's BioMicro Center (pictured). “His knowledge and advice have truly allowed us to be at the leading edge in our work.”
Wildfires set acres ablaze. Earthquakes decimate towns into rubble. People go missing in mountains and bodies of water. Coronavirus cases surge globally.
When disaster strikes, timely, cohesive emergency response is crucial to saving lives, reducing property and resource loss, and protecting the environment. Large-scale incidents can call into action thousands of first responders from multiple jurisdictions and agencies, national and international. To effectively manage response, relief, and recovery efforts, they must work together to collect, process, and distribute accurate information from disparate systems. This lack of interoperability can hinder coordination and ultimately result in significant failures in disaster response.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory developed the Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS) to enable first responders across different jurisdictions, agencies, and countries to effectively coordinate during emergencies of any scale. Originally intended to help U.S. firefighters respond to wildfires, NICS has since evolved from an R&D prototype into an open-source operational platform adopted by emergency-response agencies worldwide, not only for natural disaster response but also search-and-rescue operations, health crises management, public event security, and aviation safety. The global community of users cultivated by NICS, and spinouts inspired by NICS, have maximized its impact.
At the core of the web-based NICS software tool is an incident map overlaying aggregated data from various external and internal sources such as first responders on the ground, airborne imaging sensors, weather and traffic reports, census data, and satellite-based maps; virtually any data source can be added. Emergency personnel upload the content directly on a computer or mobile app and communicate in real time through voice and chat functions. Role-based collaboration rooms are available for user-defined subsets of first responders to focus on a particular activity — such as air drop support, search and rescue, and wildlife rescue — while maintaining access to the comprehensive operational picture.
With its open-standards architecture, NICS interoperates with organizations' existing systems and allows internal data to be shared externally for enhanced visibility and awareness among users as a disaster unfolds. The modular design of NICS facilitates system customization for diverse user needs and changing mission requirements. The system archives all aspects of a created incident and can generate reports for post-incident analysis to inform future response planning.
Partnering with first responders
As a federally funded research and development (R&D) center, Lincoln Laboratory has a long history of conducting R&D of architectures for information sharing, situational awareness, and decision-making in support of the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal entities. Recognizing that aspects of these architectures are relevant to disaster response, Lincoln Laboratory's Technology Office initiated in 2007 a study focused on wildfire response in California. A laboratory-led research team partnered with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), which annually responds to thousands of wildfires in collaboration with police, medical, and other services.
"CAL FIRE provided firsthand insight into what information is critical during emergency response and how may be best to view and share this information," says NICS co-developer Gregory Hogan, now associate leader of the laboratory's Advanced Sensors and Techniques Group.
With this insight, the laboratory developed and demonstrated a prototype of NICS. Noting the utility of such a system, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) began funding the R&D of NICS in 2010. Over the next several years, the laboratory team refined NICS, soliciting input from an organically formed users' group comprising more than 450 organizations across fire, law, medical, emergency services and management, border patrol, industry, utilities, nongovernmental organizations, and tribal partners. Thousands of training exercises and real emergencies employed NICS to coordinate diverse emergency-response activities spanning disaster management, law enforcement, and special security.
In 2014, CAL FIRE — which had been using NICS to respond to wildfires, mudslides and floods — officially adopted NICS statewide. That same year, the Emergency Management Directorate of Victoria, Australia's largest state, implemented NICS (as the Victorian Information Network for Emergencies, or VINE) after a worldwide search for a system to manage large-scale crises like bush fires.
In 2015, NICS was transferred to the California Office of Emergency Services. The California Governor's Office of Emergency Services deployed NICS as the Situation Awareness and Collaboration Tool (SCOUT) for emergency responders and law enforcement officials statewide in 2016.
Creating an open-source community
NICS also spawned an initial spinout company formed by personnel from CAL FIRE, the Worldwide Incident Command Services (WICS), which received a license for the system's software code in early 2015. WICS is a California-incorporated nonprofit public benefit corporation and the official DHS S&T Technology Transition Partner created to transition the NICS R&D project to a robust operational platform, which was named Raven. Later that year, DHS S&T made NICS available worldwide at no cost to first responder and emergency management agencies through an open-source release of the software code base on Github.
In 2016, Lincoln Laboratory and DHS S&T launched a four-year partnership with the NATO SPS Program to extend NICS to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Croatia, North Macedonia, and Montenegro for enhanced emergency collaboration among and within these Western Balkan nations. Under this Advanced Regional Civil Emergency Coordination Pilot, NICS was demonstrated in dozens of field exercises and applied to real-life incidents, including wildfires in BiH and a 6.2-magnitude earthquake in Croatia. In 2019, North Macedonia adopted NICS as its official crisis management system. And, when Covid-19 struck, NICS entered a new application space: public health. In North Macedonia, emergency institutions used NICS to not only coordinate emergency response, but also inform residents about infection cases and health resource locations. The laboratory team worked with North Macedonia's Crisis Management Center to enable national public access to NICS.
Increasing global impact
NICS' reach continues to grow. In 2021, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Aeronautics Division and the U.S. Department of Transportation Volpe National Transportation Systems Center collaborated with Lincoln Laboratory using the baseline NICS system to field a new web-based tool: the Commonwealth aiRspace and Information Sharing Platform (CRISP). Integrating sensor feeds, airspace information, and resource data, CRISP enables a robust counter–small uncrewed aircraft systems mission for the safety and security of aviation and aviation-related activities throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
"The NICS project has demonstrated the power of collaborative development, in which each partner lends their expertise, resulting in a meaningful contribution to the global disaster response community," says Stephanie Foster, who was the lead developer and program manager of NICS.
In 2023, Foster co-founded the spinout company Generation NYX to increase access to NICS, renamed NYX DEFENDER, and create a community of users who work together to advance its capabilities. Generation NYX offers services to existing users established during the laboratory's R&D work, and provides a software-as-a-service solution for all new users. NYX DEFENDER improves the ability of local emergency management organizations to manage events such as parades and festivals; supports decision-making during floods and other natural disasters; and expands awareness among community stakeholders such as police, fire, and state officials.
"NYX DEFENDER offers an innovative tool for local emergency management and public safety agencies and departments to create a common operating picture and foster interoperability, improve communications, and develop and maintain situational awareness during preplanned and no-notice events," says Clara Decerbo, director at the Providence Emergency Management Agency. "Our use of NYX DEFENDER during major City of Providence events has allowed us to integrate situational awareness between multiple public safety entities, private security, and event organizers and assisted us in ensuring our teams have the information they need to provide well-organized and coordinated public safety services to members of our community and visitors."
Generation NYX was recently subcontracted to provide support for a new three-year project that NATO SPS and DHS S&T kicked off earlier this year with the laboratory to establish NICS as the national disaster management platform in BiH. Foster has experience in this area, as she not only led the laboratory technical team who successfully adapted and deployed NICS in the Western Balkans under the 2016 SPS pilot, but also coordinated teams across the four nations. Though BiH participated in the 2016 SPS pilot, this latest effort seeks to expand NICS' adoption more broadly across the country, working within its complex multilevel government structure. NATO SPS is funding a second project, which began in October 2024, that will bring NICS to Albania and Georgia for use in search and rescue, particularly in response to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear events. For both projects, the laboratory team will enhance the open-source NICS code to operate on the edge (i.e., in disconnected communication scenarios) and integrate wearables for monitoring the health of first responders.
Since NICS was released open source on Github, NICS' worldwide usage has continued to grow for a wide range of applications. NICS has been used to locate missing persons in the Miljacka and Bosna Rivers in BiH; to direct ambulances to hypothermic runners at the Los Angeles Marathon; and to provide situational awareness among the National Guard for the Fourth of July celebration in Boston, Massachusetts. NICS has also proven its utility in mine and unexploded ordnance detection and clearance activities; in BiH, an estimated 80,000 explosive remnants of war pose a direct threat to the country's residents. Envisioned applications of NICS include monitoring of critical infrastructure such as utilities.
In recognition of its broader humanitarian impact, NICS was awarded a 2018 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award, Northeast Region, from the Federal Laboratory Consortium and a 2019 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award.
"NICS is a mature product, so what we are thinking about now is outside-the-box use cases for the technology," says the laboratory's Bioanalytics Systems and Technologies Group Leader Kajal Claypool, who is supervising the ongoing NATO SPS and DHS S&T projects. "That is where I see Lincoln Laboratory can bring innovation to bear."
Referencing the Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS), Mirnesa Softić of the Ministry of Security of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) briefs a U.S. ambassador during 2021 wildfires in BiH.
At India Climate Conference, Harvard’s South Asia ties take center stage
Tarun Khanna.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Jacob Sweet
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Global summit on adaptation and resilience highlights the Mittal Center’s collaborative focus
When asked in 2010 to lead what would become the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, proposed two guiding rules. One: He wanted the organization to be open to all fields of inquiry. And two: He wanted “feet on the street” across South Asia.
This week’s climate adaptation conference, “India 2047: Building a Climate-Resilient Future,” co-hosted by the Mittal Institute and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability alongside the Indian government, is a sign of Khanna’s push for a strong, multidisciplinary connection between the University and the region, as more than 160 scholars and experts from Harvard and across the world gather to address adaptation to climate change in India.
The conference is part of the institute’s ongoing climate change initiative focused on South Asia. Since 2023, when the Mittal Institute led its first climate-related workshop in New Delhi, it has been investing in more climate-change adaptation research. Among other projects, its Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies project, funded initially by the Salata Institute, has studied the health effects of extreme heat on workers using sensors that the subjects wear throughout the day. The study will create one of the largest data sets relating to heat and health anywhere in the world.
The leaders of that research — epidemiologist Caroline Buckee and associate professor in emergency medicine Satchit Balsari — will attend the India conference and participate in workshops over several days in New Delhi, as well as a multiday “climate immersion experience” for senior faculty and analysts in Ahmedabad, the site of some of the Mittal Institute’s initial measurement work on heat stress. Among other topics, the group will address links between extreme heat and poverty, food security, rural incomes, and environmental degradation.
This multipronged approach — with collaborators from Harvard and with the Indian government’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change and its public policy think tank NITI Aayog — is typical of the Mittal Institute’s appetite for diverse collaborators and areas of research.
Among many projects in recent years, the institute has facilitated joint bioscience and biotechnology research between Boston and Bangalore through its Building Bharat-Boston Biosciences program; supported studies analyzing pigments in historical Indian art; and brought together researchers from the U.S., England, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan to study the consequences of the 1947 partition of British India. From the beginning, Khanna said, the institute has tried to equally support intellectual endeavors across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
It has also stayed true to Khanna’s desire for “feet on the street.” The institute has built up a physical presence across South Asia, with offices in New Delhi and Lahore and representation in other countries — each of which raises project money from the countries in which they’re located. “For us to be operating with any degree of credibility, any degree of welcome in a foreign country, people better start thinking of you as embracing their societies as opposed to being an outsider,” said Khanna.
The relationships will be on display at the conference, where Harvard faculty such as Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology Daniel Schrag, Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability James Stock, and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers will work with colleagues across Harvard’s Schools of business, medicine, and public health and with several agencies of the Indian government. “We have enormous goodwill,” Khanna said. “Especially at a time when higher ed is treated with skepticism, it’s a pristine asset.”
As the event unfolds, one of the largest organized by Harvard outside of the U.S., Khanna believes it’s just the beginning for the Mittal Institute — with many years of collaboration and innovation to come.
Michael Omari Owuo Junior, better known as Stormzy, will receive a Doctorate in Law in recognition of his philanthropic work and impact in a number of fields, including education, music, sport and literature. He launched his Scholarship programme at the University of Cambridge in 2018 funding two Black British students each year covering both their tuition fees and maintenance costs. Three years later, the programme was expanded after HSBC UK agreed to fund a further ten students per year. So far, 55 students have been supported by a Stormzy Scholarship and 2025 will see the largest group graduate so far. The ‘Stormzy effect’ has been credited with being a contributor to an increase in applications to Cambridge from Black students across the UK.
An honorary Doctorate in Letters will be conferred upon the actor Sir Simon Russell Beale. Renowned for his stage, film and television roles, Sir Simon is an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, where he studied for his undergraduate degree. He is the recipient of two BAFTA awards, three Laurence Olivier Awards and a Tony. He was knighted in 2019.
Professor Angela Davis, the political activist, philosopher and author, will also receive a Doctorate in Letters. A Distinguished Professor Emerita from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Professor Davis is a radical feminist thinker and prominent civil rights campaigner who was an active member of the Communist Party and champion of the prison abolition movement. She is a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.
Lady Arden of Heswall, former Justice of the UK’s Supreme Court, and an Honorary Fellow of Girton College, will receive a Doctorate in Law. She was previously a Judge in the Court of Appeal and before that, at the High Court of Justice, where she was the first female judge assigned to the Chancery Division. She is a former Chair of the Law Commission and a member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. She was made a Privy Counsellor in 2000.
A Doctorate in Law will also be conferred on former Olympic rower and current chair of UK Sport, Dame Katherine Grainger. She is one of the most decorated British female Olympians and the only British woman to have won medals at five successive Olympic Games. In November, she was elected as the next chair of the British Olympic Association, the first woman to hold the post. She is currently Chancellor of the University of Glasgow.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Sir Oliver Hart, is to receive a Doctorate in Science. He is currently the Lewis P and Linda L Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Hart’s work focuses on the theory of contracts, how parties can write better contracts, and on the social responsibility of business. He was knighted in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours.
Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council, is to be conferred with a Doctorate in Medical Science. Formerly a Staff Scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, she is a developmental biologist and immunologist. She is best known for her work on the mechanisms that allow a developing body to take on its correct shape. She was formerly Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg.
Sir John Rutter is no stranger to Cambridge, being an Honorary Fellow at Clare College and Director of Music at the College from 1975 to 1979. A composer, arranger and conductor of choral music, his work has been performed all over the world. Founder and Director of the Cambridge Singers, Sir John, who was knighted in 2024, will receive a Doctorate in Music.
All eight distinguished individuals have accepted the University Council’s nomination to receive an honorary doctorate. Subject to final approval by the Regent House, the University’s governing body, they are now due to be admitted to their degrees at a special Congregation in the Senate-House on Wednesday 25 June, at which the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, will preside and which will be attended by staff, students and alumni as well as specially invited guests.
Talented individuals from the world of science, music, drama, law, economics, sport and political activism are recognised in the list of distinguished people nominated for honorary degrees from the University of Cambridge this year.
The tour included visits to CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center), Greentown Labs, LabCentral, The Engine, MassRobotics, and Harvard Innovation Labs – each playing a vital role in supporting technology startups and scientific enterprise.
The delegates met with entrepreneurs, investors, and research leaders to understand how these organisations facilitate the transition from cutting-edge research to commercial success. They observed how dedicated innovation hubs provide early-stage companies with access to lab space, venture funding, and corporate partnerships, creating an environment where ideas can rapidly develop into high-growth businesses.
The visit highlighted the impact of physical infrastructure in driving innovation. The Engine, for example, supports startups developing breakthrough technologies by offering 200,000 square feet (more than 18,500 m2) of lab space, funding, and specialised resources. Greentown Labs, the largest climate tech incubator in North America, and LabCentral, a shared lab facility for biotech startups, provide entrepreneurs with critical resources and networks to scale their businesses.
These hubs foster dense, high-energy ecosystems where startups, researchers, and investors work in close proximity. Co-location with major research institutions and established tech companies further accelerates innovation by facilitating knowledge exchange and collaboration.
Cambridge, UK, is already a leading centre for research and innovation. However, the visit reinforced the need for investment in dedicated innovation infrastructure alongside the existing world-class science to scale up commercial success. Boston’s innovation growth has been underpinned by over $1.5bn (£1.16bn) in state funding over the past 15 years, ensuring startups have access to space, funding, and industry connections.
The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, said: "Kendall Square demonstrates what is possible when world-class research, investment, and entrepreneurial ambition come together in a concentrated ecosystem.
"Cambridge, UK, has all the ingredients to be a global leader in science-driven enterprise, but we must ensure our innovation infrastructure matches our research excellence. This visit reinforced the urgency of scaling up our support for deep-tech and life sciences startups to drive economic growth and tackle global challenges."
A delegation of university representatives and innovation leaders from Cambridge, UK, recently visited Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to examine one of the world’s most successful innovation hubs.
The British Cambridge delegation in the American Cambridge
By Prof (Practice) Mak Yuen Teen, Director of the Centre for Investor Protection, and Assoc Prof Susan See Tho, both from the Dept of Accounting and the Centre at the NUS Business School
Dementia affects 50 million people worldwide and 1 million people in the UK. Current treatments are limited, but research has led to some significant recent advances. For example, the first drugs which slow down the disease are now licensed in the UK and potential dementia blood tests are being trialled.
Scientists are also turning to existing drugs to see if they may be repurposed to treat dementia. As the safety profile of these drugs is already known, the move to clinical trials can be accelerated significantly. Researchers want to ask members of the public which drugs they would like to see prioritised for these clinical trials.
Dr Ben Underwood, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, said: “One thing that always improves research into medical conditions is the involvement of people with experience of them – in many respects, you are the experts, rather than us.
“As dementia is common, almost everyone has some experience of it, either through family, friends, work or meeting people with dementia in general life. It’s a problem across society and we want a wide range of opinions for the best way to tackle it.”
Dr Underwood has teamed up with Linda Pointon, a Programme Manager at the Department of Psychiatry, to create a website where everyone can give their feedback on dementia research projects. Linda herself has experience of caring for her mother-in-law, who had frontotemporal dementia and passed away in 2020.
Linda said: “We’re launching our website because we want as many people as possible to share their views and help us guide the direction of our research. It’s a great opportunity for all of us who have been affected by dementia, either directly or caring for a friend or relative, to help researchers understand what aspects of these potential treatments are important and meaningful, both in terms of benefits and side-effects.”
The information collected by the POPPED team will be used to help inform AD-SMART, a trial to be led by Imperial College London, which will test several existing drugs alongside a placebo to quickly determine if any can slow early Alzheimer’s progression.
Dr Underwood added: “Instead of asking a few people what might be helpful, our website gives us the opportunity to ask thousands of people. The more people who use it, the more powerful it will be, so I’d encourage everyone to visit the site and tell us what they think. We can use it to work together to beat dementia, a condition whose effects I see in my clinic every day.”
Cambridge researchers are seeking the views of people with lived experience of dementia – patients and their friends and families – on which existing drugs should be repurposed for clinical trials to see whether they can slow or halt the progress of dementia.
One thing that always improves research into medical conditions is the involvement of people with experience of them – in many ways, they are the experts, not us
A long-term Switzerland-wide study has found that neighbourhoods with numerous, well-arranged trees exhibit lower mortality risks than other areas. The reasons behind this, and the factors that play a role, will require further research.
David Schmittlein, an MIT professor of marketing and the MIT Sloan School of Management’s longest-serving dean and a visionary and transformational leader, died March 13, following a long illness. He was 69.
Schmittlein, the John C Head III Dean from 2007 to 2024, guided MIT Sloan through a financial crisis, a global pandemic, and numerous school-wide milestones. During those 17 years, Schmittlein led initiatives introducing several new degree programs, redesigning the academic program portfolio while maintaining the MBA as the flagship degree, and diversifying executive offerings. Under his guidance, the school enhanced alumni engagement, increased philanthropic support, expanded the faculty, oversaw numerous campus capital projects, and opened several international programs. He also championed a centennial celebration of Course 15 — MIT’s designation for management — and led a branding and marketing effort that cemented MIT Sloan’s reputation as a place for smart, open, grounded, and inventive leaders.
In all, he brought MIT Sloan’s value to managers, organizations, and the world into clear focus, positioning and preparing the school to lead in a new era of management education.
“Dave transformed the MIT Sloan School of Management from a niche player to a top five business school and, in the process, drew us closer to the Institute in ways that all of the faculty, staff, and students welcome and support,” says MIT professor of finance Andrew W. Lo. “He greatly expanded our visibility internationally [and] also expanded our footprint from a research and educational and outreach perspective. Really, it gave us the opportunity to define ourselves in ways that we weren’t doing prior to his joining.”
In a letter to the MIT community, President Sally Kornbluth wrote, “Dave helped build MIT Sloan’s reputation and impact around the globe, worked with faculty to create first-rate new management education programs, and substantially improved current students’ educational opportunities.”
Kornbluth, who was appointed MIT president in 2023, noted that she didn’t overlap with Schmittlein for very long before he stepped down in February 2024 due to his illness. But during that year, his “wise, funny, judicious counsel left a lasting impression,” Kornbluth wrote. “I knew I could always call on him as a sounding board and thought partner, and I did.”
Professor Georgia Perakis, who was appointed the John C Head III Dean (Interim) when Schmittlein left last year, says, “Dave was not only an incredible leader for MIT Sloan, but also a mentor, teacher, and friend. Under his leadership, he took MIT Sloan to new heights. I will always be grateful for his guidance and support during my time as interim dean. I know the legacy of his contributions to MIT and MIT Sloan will always stay with us.”
Before coming to MIT Sloan, Schmittlein was a professor of marketing and deputy dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he spent 27 years. Schmittlein, who grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, viewed his appointment as the eighth dean of MIT Sloan as a homecoming in 2007.
From modest roots, and the oldest of six siblings, Schmittlein graduated from Brown University, where he earned a BA in mathematics, and Columbia University, where he was awarded both an MPhil in business and a PhD in marketing.
“Growing up in Massachusetts, MIT was always an icon for me,” Schmittlein later wrote.
“MIT picks an outsider to lead Sloan School”
As The Boston Globe headline announcing his arrival made clear, Schmittlein’s appointment as dean was unusual. He was the first to come from outside MIT since the school’s founding dean, E. Pennell Brooks, was appointed. But, in 2007, Institute leadership determined that there was a need for a fresh perspective at MIT Sloan.
“While most of Dean Schmittlein’s MIT predecessors had risen through the MIT faculty ranks, I directed the search committee to search broadly to identify a leader who could amplify the MIT Sloan School’s impact and extend its reach,” says President Emerita Susan Hockfield, who led MIT from 2004 to 2012. “David Schmittlein emerged with his unusual combination of cerebral and collaborative talents, along with his academic experience at the highest level.”
By the time Schmittlein arrived, the MIT Sloan School, which had its origins in 1914 as an undergraduate major called Engineering Administration, was at an exciting crossroads. Schmittlein’s predecessor, Richard Schmalensee, who had served as dean for nearly a decade, had secured donor funding for the construction of a new central building and established a concise mission statement that would guide the school in the coming decades. MIT’s management school was at a point of reflection and growth.
“I acknowledged head-on that I was coming from a very different school — not to change MIT, but to help it be the best version of its distinctive self,” Schmittlein wrote recently.
Schmittlein quickly identified several critical tasks. In 2007, the school had a group of 96 tenure-line faculty members, but they often left for peer schools, and the small faculty size meant that one person’s exit affected an entire department. There was no real mechanism for highlighting MIT Sloan expert faculty insights. The flagship MBA program was successful, but had challenges with selectivity and scale. And the comparatively small class size meant that the alumni community was challenged in networking, particularly in finance.
Financial crisis and MFin degree
Schmittlein collaborated with the school’s finance faculty to launch the Master of Finance degree program in 2008. Nobel laureate Robert C. Merton, who had begun his career at MIT Sloan but had decamped to Harvard University, returned to the school in 2010 to be involved in the one-year program. Today, the MFin program — known for its selectivity and rigor — offers a range of quantitative courses and features an 18-month option in addition to the original one-year curriculum.
Schmittlein’s arrival at MIT coincided with the global financial crisis of 2007–09. “The entire Institute was reeling from the meltdown,” Lo remembers. “We had to respond … and one of the most impressive things Dave did was to acknowledge the problems with the financial crisis and the financial system. But instead of de-emphasizing finance, he encouraged the finance group to do research on the crisis and to come up with a better version of finance that acknowledged these potential dangers.”
In turn, program enrollment increased, and “a number of our students ultimately went off to regulatory positions, as well as to industry, with a new knowledge of how to deal with financial crises more systematically,” Lo says.
Expansion of executive and other degree programs
In 2010, the long-standing full-time MIT Sloan Fellows MBA program attracted mid-career leaders and managers from around the world to MIT Sloan. That year, Schmittlein shepherded the launch of the 20-month part-time MIT Executive MBA program. This program opened up more opportunities for U.S.-based executives to earn a degree without having to leave their jobs for a full-time program.
Next, MIT Sloan launched the Master of Science in Management Studies program, which allowed graduates and current students from several international partner schools, including Fudan University and Tsinghua University in China, to earn a master’s degree from MIT in nine months.
Rounding out the portfolio of academic programs introduced during Schmittlein’s tenure is the MIT Sloan Master of Business Analytics program, launched in 2016. The program, which bridged MIT Sloan’s classes with MIT’s offerings in computer science, became one of the most competitive master’s degree programs at the Institute.
One distinction for MIT Sloan was “its integration with the university within which it lives,” Schmittlein said in a 2008 interview. “We are different from other schools in that regard. Most other leading schools of management wall off their teaching programs and their research programs from the rest of the university. We simply don’t do that.”
“MIT Sloan in 2025 is very much ‘the house that Dave built,’” says Professor Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan.
“This is nothing short of astonishing, given that Dave came to Sloan from another business school with a distinct mission and culture … What’s more, Sloan was hardly broken — it had several strong deans leading up Dave’s arrival, a sterling reputation, and very proud traditions,” Zuckerman Sivan says.
Zuckerman Sivan, who served as MIT Sloan’s deputy dean and then as an associate dean for teaching and learning from 2015 to 2021, says it was a tremendous privilege to work for Schmittlein, and he notes that Schmittlein often saw potential in others before they saw it in themselves, including him.
“Personally, I hadn’t given a thought to becoming a dean … when Dave popped the question to me. I’m so glad he did, though, because I learned so much from the experience, not least from being able to consult with Dave and see how he thought about different managerial challenges,” Zuckerman Sivan says.
Faculty, capital projects, and international ties
Schmittlein invested in faculty compensation, and by 2012 the MIT Sloan faculty count had grown to 112.
“Dave recognized early on that growth was essential for Sloan to retain and recruit the very best faculty,” Zuckerman Sivan says. “And every move he made, especially with regard to the degree programs, was done in close and deliberate collaboration with faculty leaders. This was absolutely key. He got senior faculty at Sloan on board with the moves that he had recognized were essential for the school, such that now the moves seem obvious and organic.”
Schmittlein also oversaw several capital projects, some of which were already underway when he joined MIT Sloan. When Building E62 opened in 2010, for the first time in history all of MIT Sloan’s faculty members were housed under one roof. The Gold-certified LEED building also included six new classrooms and an executive education suite. Following that, the landmark historic buildings E60 and E52 were renovated and refreshed.
President Emerita Hockfield says that Schmittlein advanced the school in many dimensions. One area that resonates with her was his agility in building and maintaining relationships with international partners and donors. During Schmittlein’s tenure, the MIT Sloan Latin America Office opened in Santiago, Chile, in 2013, and the Asia School of Business was launched in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2015. Schmittlein also helped to lay the groundwork for the launch of the MIT Sloan Office for Southeast Asian Nations, which opened in October 2024 in Bangkok.
The international collaborations increased the school’s visibility throughout the world. Hockfield notes that those international relationships benefited MIT Sloan students.
“For any leader today — being able to foster international relationships has to be a critical part of anyone’s toolkit,” she says. “And [for MIT Sloan students] to see that up close and personal, they can understand how they can make that happen as business leaders.”
Indeed, some MIT Sloan students were introduced firsthand to global business leaders under the guidance of both Hockfield and Schmittlein, who, for the past several years, co-taught an elective course, Corporations at the Crossroads, that featured guest speakers discussing management, strategy, and leadership.
“It was inspiring and just a lot of fun to teach that course with him … Dave possessed the wonderful combination of a brilliant intellect and a profound kindness. While he generously shared both, he more eagerly shared his kindness than his brilliance,” Hockfield says.
Ideas Made to Matter
During Schmittlein’s tenure, MIT Sloan launched a brand identity project with new messaging and the tagline “Ideas Made to Matter,” accompanied by a new website and logo. In the early 2000s, at Wharton, he had championed the online business journal Knowledge at Wharton, which went on to be a standout thought leadership publication. Under Schmittlein’s helm, MIT Sloan launched Ideas Made to Matter, a publication bringing practical insights from MIT Sloan’s faculty to global business leaders.
Hockfield recalls how Schmittlein deftly brought marketing insights to MIT Sloan. “He really understood organizational communications … and he was brilliant [at getting the MIT Sloan story out] with just the right tone,” she says.
Legacy: Principled, innovative leaders who improve the world
Lo says that Schmittlein embodied the example of a principled leader. “He was not only an amazing leader, but he was an amazing human being. He inspired all of us, and will continue to inspire all of us for years to come,” he says.
“Dave gave the Sloan School and MIT a great gift,” Lo continues. “We are now perfectly positioned to reach the next inflection point of changing the role of management education, not only at MIT but around the world.”
Hockfield says, “One of the things I deeply admired about Dave is that his personal ambitions were always secondary or tertiary to his ambitions for the school, the faculty, and the students. And that’s just a wonderful thing to behold. It brings out the best in people … I’m just so grateful that MIT had the benefit of his brilliance and curiosity for the time that we did. It’s a huge loss.”
“We are heartbroken,” MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart says. “For nearly 17 years, the MIT community relied on and benefited from Dave Schmittlein’s inspiring vision, skillful leadership, and kind and collaborative nature. He worked tirelessly to advance MIT Sloan’s mission of developing principled, innovative leaders, all while strengthening the school’s ties to the rest of campus and building partnerships across the country and globe. He will be deeply missed by his friends and colleagues at MIT.”
Schmittlein continually searched for ways to invent and innovate. He often quoted Alfred P. Sloan, the original benefactor of MIT Sloan, who said in 1964, “I hope we all recognize that the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management is not finished. It never will be finished. It is only on its way. Nothing is finished in a world that is moving so rapidly forward …”
Schmittlein is survived by his wife of nearly 33 years, Barbara Bickart, and their children, Brigitte Schmittlein and Gabriel Schmittlein, as well as his siblings, in-laws, several nieces and nephews, and a host of lifelong friends and colleagues.
MIT Sloan is developing plans for a future celebration of Schmittlein’s life, with details for the community to come. To read more about his life and contributions, read his obituary online.
It’s difficult to build devices that replicate the fluid, precise motion of humans, but that might change if we could pull a few (literal) strings.
At least, that’s the idea behind “cable-driven” mechanisms in which running a string through an object generates streamlined movement across an object’s different parts. Take a robotic finger, for example: You could embed a cable through the palm to the fingertip of this object and then pull it to create a curling motion.
While cable-driven mechanisms can create real-time motion to make an object bend, twist, or fold, they can be complicated and time-consuming to assemble by hand. To automate the process, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed an all-in-one 3D printing approach called “Xstrings.” Part design tool, part fabrication method, Xstrings can embed all the pieces together and produce a cable-driven device, saving time when assembling bionic robots, creating art installations, or working on dynamic fashion designs.
In a paper to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2025), the researchers used Xstrings to print a range of colorful and unique objects that included a red walking lizard robot, a purple wall sculpture that can open and close like a peacock’s tail, a white tentacle that curls around items, and a white claw that can ball up into a fist to grab objects.
To fabricate these eye-catching mechanisms, Xstrings allows users to fully customize their designs in a software program, sending them to a multi-material 3D printer to bring that creation to life. You can automatically print all the device’s parts in their desired locations in one step, including the cables running through it and the joints that enable its intended motion.
MIT CSAIL postdoc and lead author Jiaji Li says that Xstrings can save engineers time and energy, reducing 40 percent of total production time compared to doing things manually. “Our innovative method can help anyone design and fabricate cable-driven products with a desktop bi-material 3D printer,” says Li.
A new twist on cable-driven fabrication
To use the Xstrings program, users first input a design with specific dimensions, like a rectangular cube divided into smaller pieces with a hole in the middle of each one. You can then choose which way its parts move by selecting different “primitives:” bending, coiling (like a spring), twisting (like a screw), or compressing — and the angle of these motions.
For even more elaborate creations, users can incorporate multiple primitives to create intriguing combinations of motions. If you wanted to make a toy snake, you could include several twists to create a “series” combo, in which a single cord drives a sequence of motions. To create the robot claw, the team embedded multiple cables into a “parallel” combination, where several strings are embedded, to enable each finger to close up into a fist.
Beyond fine-tuning the way cable-driven mechanisms move, Xstrings also facilitates how cables are integrated into the object. Users can choose exactly how the strings are secured, in terms of where the “anchor” (endpoint), “threaded areas” (or holes within the structure that the cord passes through), and “exposed point” (where you’d pull to operate the device) are located. With a robot finger, for instance, you could choose the anchor to be located at the fingertip, with a cable running through the finger and a pull tag exposed at the other end.
Xstrings also supports diverse joint designs by automatically placing components that are elastic, compliant, or mechanical. This allows the cable to turn as needed as it completes the device’s intended motion.
Driving unique designs across robotics, art, and beyond
Once users have simulated their digital blueprint for a cable-driven item, they can bring it to life via fabrication. Xstrings can send your design to a fused deposition modeling 3D printer, where plastic is melted down into a nozzle before the filaments are poured out to build structures up layer by layer.
Xstrings uses this technique to lay out cables horizontally and build around them. To ensure their method would successfully print cable-driven mechanisms, the researchers carefully tested their materials and printing conditions.
For example, the researchers found that their strings only broke after being pulled up and down by a mechanical device more than 60,000 times. In another test, the team discovered that printing at 260 degrees Celsius with a speed of 10-20 millimeters per second was ideal for producing their many creative items.
“The Xstrings software can bring a variety of ideas to life,” says Li. “It enables you to produce a bionic robot device like a human hand, mimicking our own gripping capabilities. You can also create interactive art pieces, like a cable-driven sculpture with unique geometries, and clothes with adjustable flaps. One day, this technology could enable the rapid, one-step creation of cable-driven robots in outer space, even within highly confined environments such as space stations or extraterrestrial bases.”
The team’s approach offers plenty of flexibility and a noticeable speed boost to fabricating cable-driven objects. It creates objects that are rigid on the outside, but soft and flexible on the inside; in the future, they may look to develop objects that are soft externally but rigid internally, much like humans’ skin and bones. They’re also considering using more resilient cables, and, instead of just printing strings horizontally, embedding ones that are angled or even vertical.
Li wrote the paper with Zhejiang University master’s student Shuyue Feng; Tsinghua University master’s student Yujia Liu; Zhejiang University assistant professor and former MIT Media Lab visiting researcher Guanyun Wang; and three CSAIL members: Maxine Perroni-Scharf, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science; Emily Guan, a visiting researcher; and senior author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and leader of the HCI Engineering Group.
This research was supported, in part, by a postdoctoral research fellowship from Zhejiang University, and the MIT-GIST Program.
The “Xstrings” method can produce a range of colorful and unique objects, like a white tentacle that curls around items and a purple wall sculpture that can open and close.
PPH researchers apply cutting-edge AI and computational models to massive datasets to develop a deep understanding of the factors that shape health and illness.
Kennedy School analyst’s recession warning includes worries about trade war, stock market, risk perception
U.S. markets this month suffered heavy losses after China, Mexico, and Canada responded to President Donald Trump’s tariff push by imposing levies on American goods. Many investors fear a prolonged trade war could push the nation into a recession. (The president says that Americans should expect a “period of transition.”) Meanwhile, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index has fallen to its lowest level since November 2022.
These developments serve as a backdrop for meetings this week where the Federal Reserve will weigh whether to resume interest rate cuts.
In this edited conversation, economist Jeffrey Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard Kennedy School, discusses the impact of the new administration’s tariff policy and the broader condition of the U.S. economy.
Jeffrey Frankel.
Harvard file photo
Is there a good argument for increasing or expanding tariffs?
They’re pretty universally bad — almost all economists are opposed to them. Can there ever be a good justification for a tariff? Three cases I can think of. First, a poor country may have no effective way of collecting revenue other than a tariff. Second, there’s a so-called “infant industry” argument — that if government is able to identify an industry that has potential for economies of scale and spillover effects, they need to protect it against international competition for a few years and then the industry will grow, and the government will be able to remove the tariffs and have it compete on world markets. Third, the Europeans have something called CBAM, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, in the cause of fighting climate change. One might interpret that as a tariff, but my interpretation is that because it helps carry out the Paris Accord, it may be beneficial and indeed is the sort of measure that is fine under the World Trade Organization. There are probably other examples, but none that apply to the U.S. today.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the market selloff a “normal” and “healthy correction” to years of overreliance on government spending, predicting that we’ll end up with a stronger economy. Is that a plausible explanation?
It’s not based on anything. Their way of coping is to stall for time, saying, “Well, of course, we’re going to have some negative effects at first, but this prosperity will come after.” But that’s not based on any kind of economic argument that I have heard, let alone a valid one.
I suppose someone could argue that with tariff protection, our manufacturing sector will achieve higher investment and higher productivity growth, and we’ll be more competitive in the long run, and that higher growth will show up in higher incomes. But the Trump approach to tariffs is hurting investment, not helping it. Usually what they say is that boosts confidence, but the current policy chaos is having the opposite effect. It’s reducing confidence.
For countries undergoing debt crises, mainly developing countries, a common pattern is that they’ve been running budget deficits that are too large, and their debt level is getting too high. Then, as part of an adjustment program, usually under the guidance of the IMF [International Monetary Fund], they have to undergo a combination of reducing the budget deficit, monetary discipline, and devaluation. That causes a year or two of severe economic pain but allows a recovery subsequently and a restoration of growth in the long-term. You could characterize Korea in ’98 that way, for example. The excessive debt part of the pattern does describe the U.S. now, but I don’t think the rest applies to the U.S. A debt crisis is not to be recommended and is not what the tariff proponents have in mind.
The latest University of Michigan consumer sentiment index shows economic confidence is at its lowest since November 2022. Also, hiring has cooled. Do these developments point to a recession or something like 1970s-style stagflation?
I think it is appropriate to worry about a recession coming within the next year. It’s much more likely than one would have thought a year ago.
I see five things going on that could logically lead to or worsen a recession. One is the trade war. The second is a stock market crash. The third is major cuts in government spending, assuming Musk and Trump manage to find genuine cuts. The fourth is a U.S. fiscal crisis because of a government shutdown, failure to raise the debt ceiling, or a downgrading by Moody’s, the credit rating agency. The fifth is a general increase in perceptions of risk. Risk is increasing because what Trump has done on tariffs and on government spending has been so erratic. It’s almost as if they’re doing everything they can to increase perceptions of variability and volatility and unpredictability. The uncertainty itself has a negative effect.
The instability has alarmed not just investors, but also sectors like real estate and health care, with many businesses shifting into “wait and see” mode. What are the implications for the wider economy?
If the uncertainty only lasted a minute, it wouldn’t have much effect, but it’s clearly going to last longer than that. Even if it takes a few months to resolve these issues, that could be enough to hurt employment and income and even to cause a recession. In the extreme, if all hiring stops for a month or two, that itself would cause a recession.
The Federal Reserve faces two seemingly contradictory options on interest rates: support the economy and jobs with rate cuts or leave them alone to keep inflation and inflation expectations under control. What’s the Fed likely do?
That’s the tradeoff. In a sense, it’s always the tradeoff, but it becomes much more acute at a time like this, because tariffs and general chaos are adverse supply shocks. They’re like a world oil shock or a COVID shock or something like that. Supply shocks make a tradeoff between output and inflation worse, and they’re not something the central bank can make up for. So, the Fed is worried both about increasing inflation and about a slowdown in the economy. One objective says keep interest rates higher, and the other says cut them. I think they will leave them unchanged.
Damion Searls ’92 talks process, sentence structure, and what makes a chair a chair
When someone asks Damion Searls how he “chooses” words for a translation, he likens it to asking a reader how they “choose” what Mr. Darcy looks like when reading “Pride and Prejudice.” Neither is so much a choice, he says, but a response shaped by the text.
“We’re not translating the words that are there. We’re having a reading experience, and then we’re giving a version of that that someone who reads English can then have,” Searls ’92 told the audience that recently packed the Barker Center’s Plimpton Room to hear the acclaimed translator. “This is why there are no perfect translations or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ translations, just like there’s no wrong way that Mr. Darcy looks.”
Searls, who works from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, has translated Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse, Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Max Weber. He discussed his philosophy, which he outlines in his 2024 book, at a lecture co-hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Philosophy, and the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Rethinking Translation Seminar.
The day before, Searls led a translation workshop with three Ph.D. students from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Comparative Literature’s Secondary Field in Translation Studies.
“Whatever you think translating is, it’s some kind of reading and some kind of writing joined together,” the former Adams and Dunster House resident said. “Reading explains a lot about translation, and if you unpack what reading is you’re going to get most of the way to the philosophy of translation.”
“Reading explains a lot about translation, and if you unpack what reading is you’re going to get most of the way to the philosophy of translation.”
Damion Searls
Searls said translation isn’t that different from other forms of writing in English, which require the same skills. However what distinguishes translation is the way translators read, a close reading that engages deeply with a language’s structure.
When “reading like a translator,” Searls said he must identify which linguistic elements can be omitted in English and which are intentional stylistic choices by the author. When translating Uwe Johnson’s “Anniversaries,” for example, he noticed frequent “not this but that” constructions (“the train leaves at not 7:00 but 6:00”), which are more common in German than in English.
While it would be easy to rephrase for smoother English, he realized Johnson used this pattern deliberately to express a personal vision and “slowly hone in on the truth.”
“We can’t just erase it because it’s not just the German language: It’s him, the author,” Searls said. “Every writer is using the resources of their language to do what they want to do, and as translators we have to do the same thing with an entirely different body of resources.”
In “The Philosophy of Translation,” Searls draws from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about perception to describe how translating happens, arguing the “living bond” that exists between people and objects also exists between translators and the language they are reading.
Just as a person immediately recognizes a chair, understands its purpose, and is prompted to sit by the object’s existence, Searls told the audience, translators also immediately recognize written language when they read it, understand one of its purposes is to be translated, and are prompted by the language to produce the translation.
Searls also described his process when approaching a new translation, which is usually to do a slow and precise first draft, which allows him to revise later versions without referring too much to the source material. He’ll sometimes read the book beforehand, but more frequently translates as he goes.
“It feels intuitive. I just keep revising it and trying to make it sound good,” Searls explained. “As much as you can avoid looking back at the original will help you direct your attention to: Does this sound like it should sound in English?”
“It feels intuitive. I just keep revising it and trying to make it sound good.”
Damion Searls
One key to a smooth translation is keeping associations similar for readers in both languages, Searls said. While translating Fosse’s “Septology I-VII,” he encountered a reference to Gula Tidend (literally “Gula Times,”) a now-defunct newspaper published in a small town outside the city where the main character lives.
When Searls asked Fosse about the name, he learned that “gula” is an old verb meaning strong wind, and also referred to a medieval Norwegian region, the birthplace of the oldest body of laws in the Nordic countries. Fosse left the choice up to him, so Searls settled on “The Northern Herald,” which evokes medieval heraldry and the northern wind.
Most importantly, he said, his translation avoids disrupting the sentence’s flow by making English readers pause to wonder about the words in the title.
“It seems like this example of the translator being really subjective, but from my point of view, I was just reading,” Searls said. “At first, when I read Gula Tidend I didn’t know how to read it. I didn’t understand what it was doing in the book, why it was there, how it fit together. Then I looked up the words, talked to the author, and got to the point where I could read it. Once I got there, I was totally faithful.”
An audience member asked Searls how to reach the point of feeling like a skilled enough reader to translate. He responded that while some believe mastering the source language is necessary for translation, he sees more nuance. Though he knows Norwegian well enough to translate Fosse, he said, he wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable translating just any Norwegian book.
“It’s also true that there are different kinds of expertise in the world. You don’t want to err so far in that direction that you become a sort of gatekeeper, saying that until you have a Ph.D. you’re not allowed to translate a book, because maybe you bring other things to the table,” Searls said. “It seems like a very good example of do your best and try to get better.”
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Frank Hu is the Chair of the Department of Nutrition and the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
This is a heavily debated topic. Alcohol, nicotine, and opiates are all classified as addictive substances based on strict clinical criteria, and although sugar has been shown to increase cravings and compulsive eating behaviors, technically it’s not classified as an addictive substance based on current clinical criteria.
But the physical and psychological effects are real. Our food system is loaded with ultra-processed foods that contain not just added sugar but unhealthy fats and sodium. Those kinds of foods increase your cravings, because they’re very palatable, and they’re accessible. That leads to habitual consumption, and when you suddenly stop consuming those foods, you do experience some withdrawal-like symptoms: headaches, dizziness, anxiety, and so on. But it’s a matter of the degree: For alcohol, nicotine, and drugs, those symptoms are very severe, and it’s very difficult for people to completely stop consuming those substances.
We need some sweetness in our diets and in our lives.
So we can say that sugar has some addictive qualities, but it’s not officially classified as an addictive substance like alcohol, nicotine, or drugs.
It’s also important to make a distinction between a food or nutrient that we need to survive versus a drug or substance which can be completely removed from our diet. You can eliminate alcohol or drugs, but sugar is in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, milk, and other dairy products. If you consume low to moderate amounts of sugar, it’s not going to have major health consequences or psychological effects. The most important issue is the dose.
In the U.S. currently, the average person consumes almost 20 teaspoons a day of added sugar in things like sugary beverages, snacks, and sweets, which is enormous — it’s almost 300 calories. The recommendation from the American Heart Association is no more than 9 teaspoons of added sugar for men, 6 teaspoons for women, and much less for children.
People should be aware of the amount of sugar they’re consuming. Read the food labels for your cookies and snacks. Going cold turkey can backfire, so reduce your amount of added sugar gradually.
It’s difficult to classify sugar the same way as truly addictive substances. An appropriate amount of sugar in our diet can enhance flavor and texture; it can increase pleasure. We need some sweetness in our diets and in our lives. So if you classify sugar the same way as nicotine, it may be counterproductive.
Within the human brain, a network of regions has evolved to process language. These regions are consistently activated whenever people listen to their native language or any language in which they are proficient.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Game of Thrones.”
To study how the brain responds to these artificial languages, MIT neuroscientists convened nearly 50 speakers of these languages over a single weekend. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that when participants listened to a constructed language in which they were proficient, the same brain regions lit up as those activated when they processed their native language.
“We find that constructed languages very much recruit the same system as natural languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the study.
The findings help to define some of the key properties of language, the researchers say, and suggest that it’s not necessary for languages to have naturally evolved over a long period of time or to have a large number of speakers.
“It helps us narrow down this question of what a language is, and do it empirically, by testing how our brain responds to stimuli that might or might not be language-like,” says Saima Malik-Moraleda, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Convening the conlang community
Unlike natural languages, which evolve within communities and are shaped over time, constructed languages, or “conlangs,” are typically created by one person who decides what sounds will be used, how to label different concepts, and what the grammatical rules are.
Esperanto, the most widely spoken conlang, was created in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, who intended it to be used as a universal language for international communication. Currently, it is estimated that around 60,000 people worldwide are proficient in Esperanto.
In previous work, Fedorenko and her students have found that computer programming languages, such as Python — another type of invented language — do not activate the brain network that is used to process natural language. Instead, people who read computer code rely on the so-called multiple demand network, a brain system that is often recruited for difficult cognitive tasks.
Fedorenko and others have also investigated how the brain responds to other stimuli that share features with language, including music and nonverbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions.
“We spent a lot of time looking at all these various kinds of stimuli, finding again and again that none of them engage the language-processing mechanisms,” Fedorenko says. “So then the question becomes, what is it that natural languages have that none of those other systems do?”
That led the researchers to wonder if artificial languages like Esperanto would be processed more like programming languages or more like natural languages. Similar to programming languages, constructed languages are created by an individual for a specific purpose, without natural evolution within a community. However, unlike programming languages, both conlangs and natural languages can be used to convey meanings about the state of the external world or the speaker’s internal state.
To explore how the brain processes conlangs, the researchers invited speakers of Esperanto and several other constructed languages to MIT for a weekend conference in November 2022. The other languages included Klingon (from “Star Trek”), Na’vi (from “Avatar”), and two languages from “Game of Thrones” (High Valyrian and Dothraki). For all of these languages, there are texts available for people who want to learn the language, and for Esperanto, Klingon, and High Valyrian, there is even a Duolingo app available.
“It was a really fun event where all the communities came to participate, and over a weekend, we collected all the data,” says Malik-Moraleda, who co-led the data collection effort with former MIT postbac Maya Taliaferro, now a PhD student at New York University.
During that event, which also featured talks from several of the conlang creators, the researchers used fMRI to scan 44 conlang speakers as they listened to sentences from the constructed language in which they were proficient. The creators of these languages — who are co-authors on the paper — helped construct the sentences that were presented to the participants.
While in the scanner, the participants also either listened to or read sentences in their native language, and performed some nonlinguistic tasks for comparison. The researchers found that when people listened to a conlang, the same language regions in the brain were activated as when they listened to their native language.
Common features
The findings help to identify some of the key features that are necessary to recruit the brain’s language processing areas, the researchers say. One of the main characteristics driving language responses seems to be the ability to convey meanings about the interior and exterior world — a trait that is shared by natural and constructed languages, but not programming languages.
“All of the languages, both natural and constructed, express meanings related to inner and outer worlds. They refer to objects in the world, to properties of objects, to events,” Fedorenko says. “Whereas programming languages are much more similar to math. A programming language is a symbolic generative system that allows you to express complex meanings, but it’s a self-contained system: The meanings are highly abstract and mostly relational, and not connected to the real world that we experience.”
Some other characteristics of natural languages, which are not shared by constructed languages, don’t seem to be necessary to generate a response in the language network.
“It doesn’t matter whether the language is created and shaped over time by a community of speakers, because these constructed languages are not,” Malik-Moraleda says. “It doesn’t matter how old they are, because conlangs that are just a decade old engage the same brain regions as natural languages that have been around for many hundreds of years.”
To further refine the features of language that activate the brain’s language network, Fedorenko’s lab is now planning to study how the brain responds to a conlang called Lojban, which was created by the Logical Language Group in the 1990s and was designed to prevent ambiguity of meanings and promote more efficient communication.
The research was funded by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Professorship, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
In this image, greetings are written in different languages, including artificial ones like Esperanto (saluton!), Klingon from Star Trek (nuqneH), and Dothraki from Game of Thrones (M’athchomaroon!).
A person’s “bioenergetic age” – or how youthfully their cells generate energy – might be a key indicator of whether they’re at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, new research from Weill Cornell Medicine shows.
Using advanced analysis based on full genome sequences, researchers from the University of Cambridge have found evidence that modern humans are the result of a genetic mixing event between two ancient populations that diverged around 1.5 million years ago. About 300,000 years ago, these groups came back together, with one group contributing 80% of the genetic makeup of modern humans and the other contributing 20%.
For the last two decades, the prevailing view in human evolutionary genetics has been that Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, and descended from a single lineage. However, these latest results, reported in the journal Nature Genetics, suggest a more complex story.
“The question of where we come from is one that has fascinated humans for centuries,” said first author Dr Trevor Cousins from Cambridge’s Department of Genetics. “For a long time, it’s been assumed that we evolved from a single continuous ancestral lineage, but the exact details of our origins are uncertain.”
“Our research shows clear signs that our evolutionary origins are more complex, involving different groups that developed separately for more than a million years, then came back to form the modern human species,” said co-author Professor Richard Durbin, also from the Department of Genetics.
While earlier research has already shown that Neanderthals and Denisovans – two now-extinct human relatives – interbred with Homo sapiens around 50,000 years ago, this new research suggests that long before those interactions – around 300,000 years ago – a much more substantial genetic mixing took place. Unlike Neanderthal DNA, which makes up roughly 2% of the genome of non-African modern humans, this ancient mixing event contributed as much as 10 times that amount and is found in all modern humans.
The team’s method relied on analysing modern human DNA, rather than extracting genetic material from ancient bones, and enabled them to infer the presence of ancestral populations that may have otherwise left no physical trace. The data used in the study is from the 1000 Genomes Project, a global initiative that sequenced DNA from populations across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
The team developed a computational algorithm called cobraa that models how ancient human populations split apart and later merged back together. They tested the algorithm using simulated data and applied it to real human genetic data from the 1000 Genomes Project.
While the researchers were able to identify these two ancestral populations, they also identified some striking changes that happened after the two populations initially broke apart.
“Immediately after the two ancestral populations split, we see a severe bottleneck in one of them—suggesting it shrank to a very small size before slowly growing over a period of one million years,” said co-author Professor Aylwyn Scally, also from the Department of Genetics. “This population would later contribute about 80% of the genetic material of modern humans, and also seems to have been the ancestral population from which Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged.”
The study also found that genes inherited from the second population were often located away from regions of the genome linked to gene functions, suggesting that they may have been less compatible with the majority genetic background. This hints at a process known as purifying selection, where natural selection removes harmful mutations over time.
“However, some of the genes from the population which contributed a minority of our genetic material, particularly those related to brain function and neural processing, may have played a crucial role in human evolution,” said Cousins.
Beyond human ancestry, the researchers say their method could help to transform how scientists study the evolution of other species. In addition to their analysis of human evolutionary history, they applied the cobraa model to genetic data from bats, dolphins, chimpanzees, and gorillas, finding evidence of ancestral population structure in some but not all of these.
“What’s becoming clear is that the idea of species evolving in clean, distinct lineages is too simplistic,” said Cousins. “Interbreeding and genetic exchange have likely played a major role in the emergence of new species repeatedly across the animal kingdom.”
So who were our mysterious human ancestors? Fossil evidence suggests that species such as Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis lived both in Africa and other regions during this period, making them potential candidates for these ancestral populations, although more research (and perhaps more evidence) will be needed to identify which genetic ancestors corresponded to which fossil group.
Looking ahead, the team hopes to refine their model to account for more gradual genetic exchanges between populations, rather than sharp splits and reunions. They also plan to explore how their findings relate to other discoveries in anthropology, such as fossil evidence from Africa that suggests early humans may have been far more diverse than previously thought.
“The fact that we can reconstruct events from hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago just by looking at DNA today is astonishing,” said Scally. “And it tells us that our history is far richer and more complex than we imagined.”
The research was supported by Wellcome. Aylwyn Scally is a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Trevor Cousins is a member of Darwin College, Cambridge.
Modern humans descended from not one, but at least 2 ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe.
Our history is far richer and more complex than we imagined
From bridges and tunnels to railways, Switzerland has always invested heavily in the upkeep of its infrastructure. But how does it keep everything operating safely and smoothly while also instilling confidence that nothing will go wrong?
Trust takes years to build and seconds to break – not least when it comes to international relations. ETH researchers investigate what it takes to build confidence on the global stage.
How does disinformation impact public trust in science? And can healthy scepticism be a good thing? A debate between climate researcher Sonia Seneviratne, communication scientist Mike S. Schäfer and former Swiss Federal Chancellor Walter Thurnherr.
Philippe Kahn studied maths at ETH Zurich before upping sticks to Silicon Valley. His inventions changed the world – and continue to shape our lives to this day.
When it comes to getting along together, trust plays an indispensable role. While we all have an intuitive grasp of what this interpersonal investment involves, even science struggles to express exactly how it works.
Technology is improving football – from helping referees make more accurate decisions to developing better on-field tactics. ETH Zurich and FIFA are exploring how AI can make these advancements more accessible to competitions worldwide.
Prototyping large structures with integrated electronics, like a chair that can monitor someone’s sitting posture, is typically a laborious and wasteful process.
One might need to fabricate multiple versions of the chair structure via 3D printing and laser cutting, generating a great deal of waste, before assembling the frame, grafting sensors and other fragile electronics onto it, and then wiring it up to create a working device.
If the prototype fails, the maker will likely have no choice but to discard it and go back to the drawing board.
MIT researchers have come up with a better way to iteratively design large and sturdy interactive structures. They developed a rapid development platform that utilizes reconfigurable building blocks with integrated electronics that can be assembled into complex, functional devices. Rather than building electronics into a structure, the electronics become the structure.
These lightweight three-dimensional lattice building blocks, known as voxels, have high strength and stiffness, along with integrated sensing, response, and processing abilities that enable users without mechanical or electrical engineering expertise to rapidly produce interactive electronic devices.
The voxels, which can be assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured almost infinitely into various forms, cost about 50 cents each.
The prototyping platform, called VIK (Voxel Invention Kit), includes a user-friendly design tool that enables end-to-end prototyping, allowing a user to simulate the structure’s response to mechanical loads and iterate on the design as needed.
“This is about democratizing access to functional interactive devices. With VIK, there is no 3D printing or laser cutting required. If you just have the voxel faces, you are able to produce these interactive structures anywhere you want,” says Jack Forman, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences and affiliate of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and the MIT Media Lab, and co-lead author of a paper on VIK.
Forman is joined on the paper by co-lead author and fellow graduate student Miana Smith; graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman; and senior author Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor and director of the CBA. The research will be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Functional building blocks
VIK builds upon years of work in the CBA to develop discrete, cellular building blocks called voxels. One voxel, an aluminum cuboctahedra lattice (which has eight triangular faces and six square faces), is strong enough to support 228 kilograms, or about the weight of an upright piano.
Instead of being 3D printed, milled, or laser cut, voxels are assembled into largescale, strong, durable structures like airplane components or wind turbines that can respond to their environments.
The CBA team merged voxels other work in their lab centered on interconnected electrical components, yielding voxels with structural electronics. Assembling these functional voxels generates structures that can transmit data and power, as well as mechanical forces, without the need for wires.
They used these electromechanical building blocks to develop VIK.
“It was an interesting challenge to think about adapting a lot of our previous work, which has been about hitting hard engineering metrics, into a user-friendly system that makes sense and is fun and easy for people to work with,” Smith says.
For instance, they made the voxel design larger so the lattice structures are easier for human hands to assemble and disassemble. They also added aluminum cross-bracing to the units to improve their strength and stability.
In addition, VIK voxels have a reversible, snap-fit connection so a user can seamlessly assemble them without the need for additional tools, in contrast to some prior voxel designs that used rivets as fasteners.
“We designed the voxel faces to permit only the correct connections. That means that, if you are building with voxels, you are guaranteed to be building the correct wiring harness. Once you finish your device, you can just plug it in and it will work,” says Smith.
Wiring harnesses can add significant cost to functional systems and can often be a source of failure.
An accessible prototyping platform
To help users who have minimal engineering expertise create a wide array of interactive devices, the team developed a user-friendly interface to simulate 3D voxel structures.
The interface includes a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulation model that enables users to draw out a structure and simulate the forces and mechanical loads that will be applied to it. It adds colors to an animation of the user’s device to identify potential points of failure.
“We created what is essentially a ‘Minecraft’ for voxel applications. You don’t need a good sense of civil engineering or truss analysis to verify that the structure you are making is safe. Anyone can build something with VIK and have confidence in it,” Forman says.
Users can also easily integrate off-the-shelf modules, like speakers, sensors, or actuators, into their device. VIK emphasizes flexibility, enabling makers to use the types of microcontrollers they are comfortable with.
“The next evolution of electronics will be in three-dimensional space and the Voxel Invention Kit (VIK) is the stepping stone that will enable users, designers, and innovators a way to visualize and integrate electronics directly into structures,” says Victor Zaderej, manager of advanced electronics packaging technology at Molex, a manufacturer of electronic, electrical, and fiber optic connectivity systems. “Think of the VIK as the merging of a LEGO building kit and an electronics breadboard. When creative engineers and designers begin thinking about potential applications, the opportunities and unique products that will be enabled will be limitless.”
Using the design tool for feedback, a maker can rapidly change the configuration of voxels to adjust a prototype or disassemble the structure to build something new. If the user eventually wishes to discard the device, the aluminum voxels are fully recyclable.
This reconfigurability and recyclability, along with the high strength, high stiffness, light weight, and integrated electronics of the voxels, could make VIK especially well-suited for applications such as theatrical stage design, where stage managers want to support actors safely with customizable set pieces that might only exist for a few days.
And by enabling the rapid-prototyping of large, complex structures, VIK could also have future applications in areas like space fabrication or in the development of smart buildings and intelligent infrastructure for sustainable cities.
But for the researchers, perhaps the most important next step will be to get VIK out into the world to see what users come up with.
“These voxels are now so readily available that someone can use them in their day-to-day life. It will be exciting to see what they can do and create with VIK,” adds Forman.
A new rapid prototyping platform, VIK, utilizes reconfigurable building blocks with integrated electronics that can be assembled into complex, functional devices.
Sci-fi books recommended by faculty, staff probe AI, humanity, censorship
Sy Boles
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
When the future feels overwhelming, some of us stock up on canned goods while others turn to books. Science fiction has long challenged how we think about technology and society, often serving as a warning about where we are going or as an inspiration to build new worlds. The Gazette asked Harvard faculty and staff from across the disciplines to give us their recommendations.
Karen Brennan
Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Practice in Learning Technologies; Faculty Affiliate, Computer Science, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Faculty Co-Chair, Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology
‘Blindsight’
Peter Watts
“Like many people, I’m thinking a lot about artificial intelligence,” said Brennan, who directs Harvard’s Creative Computing Lab. Brennan recommended “Blindsight,” which follows a crew of augmented humans encountering alien intelligence that seems to lack self-awareness but surpasses humans in capability.
“Through the account of the crew’s increasingly disturbing interactions with the aliens, Watts invites us to confront the uncomfortable possibility that consciousness — an aspect of human intelligence that feels so essential — might actually be an evolutionary aberration, a glitch that more powerful forms of intelligence would lack, beneficially. In this time when we’re trying to make machines more like our own minds, the book’s message feels especially urgent: Perhaps we should be less concerned about artificial intelligence becoming more like us, and more concerned about what it means if it doesn’t need to be.”
Theo Anthony
Radcliffe Institute Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow and Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow
‘Solaris’
Stanislaw Lem
Artist and filmmaker Theo Anthony recommended the 1961 Polish novel “Solaris.”
“A team of scientists travels to the oceanic planet of Solaris, whose waters display potential signs of intelligence. Scientific interventions fail; attempts to communicate come back as staticky echoes. Meanwhile, ghosts of dead lovers haunt the crew. ‘Solaris’ is a novel about encounters at the limits of understanding — a welcome dose of humility in the face of the unknown.”
Amy Deschenes
Head of UX & Digital Accessibility at Harvard Library
‘A Rover’s Story’
Jasmine Warga
Deschenes read “A Rover’s Story,” a middle-grade novel about the journey of a fictional Mars rover, to her 7-year-old. In the story, a rover named Res, short for Resilience, communicates with humans only in code, but is fascinated by humans’ emotions and experiences.
“My son and I chatted about why some people might feel like a machine is their friend or even their child. One of the hazmats (aka humans), Rania, is fully committed to her work, but we know from letters that her daughter writes to Res that Rania is missing out on time with her family in order to make Res’ mission a success. Rania, one of the more pragmatic hazmats, unexpectedly shares a song with Res before he leaves for his mission. She tells him that she hopes he will remember her and that the song will bring him luck. This shift in her behavior, revealing that she does have an emotional connection to Res, was another point my son and I discussed. We speculated that maybe she is missing her daughter and trying to connect with Res in a more meaningful way because of this.
“As AI continues to evolve in ways I can’t even imagine, this gave my son and I the opportunity to reflect on what makes us human. It led us to discuss how machines might act as surrogates for friendship, and why they will never replace true human connections. ‘A Rover’s Story’ invites us to embrace our unique human traits, even as AI and machines become a significant part of our lives.”
Ursula Friedman
College Fellow in Contemporary Chinese/Taiwanese/Sinophone and Latin American Literature, Translation Studies, Comparative/World Literature, Media and Sound Studies
‘Exorcism’
Han Song
Much of novelist Han Song’s science fiction has been censored by the Chinese government for being “too dark,” but for Friedman, that’s part of what makes his work so great.
“The universe has been diagnosed with an incurable disease and has begun to mutate, alternately waxing poetic and killing off patients, in a last-ditch attempt to cure itself,” Friedman says. “Yang Wei awakens to find himself relegated to a geriatric ward aboard the Peace Ark, a military-ward-turned-hospital-ship governed by robots and AI beings. The ship’s operations are overseen by a glitching AI being known as Siming, whose vacillating policies clash with those of the hospital authorities.”
“‘Exorcism’ certainly feels like an instruction manual for averting disaster in today’s world, in the sense that Siming manufactures and dramatizes disaster. In the novel, the key to averting catastrophe lies in recognizing that although the universe may explode at any moment, human beings can create their own narrative culture by questioning the authorities’ version of reality and choosing pain over cultural amnesia. The ‘narrative-implant therapy’ in the novel strikes me as hauntingly similar to much of the political rhetoric spun by the U.S. media. In the novel, the hospital system alters the warp and weft of time and space, just as the current political regime attempts to skew our perception of ‘reality.’ The colorful characters aboard the Peace Ark grow inured to their own insurmountable pain as war and death rage around them. Their anesthetized bodies become war zones upon which industrial progresses clash with the impulse to forget and destroy.”
Jeff Saviano
Business AI Ethics Leader at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics
‘Fahrenheit 451’
Ray Bradbury
Saviano, an AI ethicist, recommended Bradbury’s classic cautionary tale about censorship, saying it serves as an enduring reminder about power and control of information.
“In the novel, books are outlawed, and access to knowledge is systematically erased — not just through brute force, but through a culture of distraction and passive consumption,” he said. “People in Bradbury’s novel are pacified by immersive entertainment, which diminishes their curiosity and critical thinking. It’s not just about what’s banned; it’s about what replaces it.
“This theme is particularly urgent in the new age of AI, where algorithm-driven content curation shapes what we read, watch, and even believe. Just as Bradbury’s world suppresses books in favor of shallow entertainment, today’s AI systems can amplify mindless digital engagement at the expense of deep thought and critical thinking. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ reminds us that protecting intellectual freedom requires more than just keeping books on shelves — it demands vigilance against technology that prioritizes instant gratification over meaningful understanding. A must-read for anyone thinking about AI’s role in shaping the future of knowledge.”
The MIT women's track and field team won its first NCAA Division III National Championship in program history on Saturday, March 15, at the 2025 NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships, hosted by Nazareth College in Rochester, New York.
The Engineers, who entered the meet as the top-ranked team in the nation, scored the most points ever scored by an MIT women's team at a national indoor meet. They finished with 49 points, which earned them a first place finish in a field of 62. They were ahead of Washington University, with 45.5 points; the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, with 37 points; Loras College, with 32 points; and the State University of New York at Geneseo, with 29 points.
“This was such a fun and exciting outcome, and what our team has been working toward all year,” says Julie Heyde, MIT director of track and field and head coach of cross country and track and field. “Since last year, even, the team knew they had a possibility of being national champs. We didn't gear only toward this goal; we have been very process-driven, and that's why this team win is so special. Each and every person competed for each other, representing a total team culture.”
Field events
On Friday, senior Alexis Boykin (Clayton, Ohio) delivered the second-best mark in NCAA Division III history in the weight throw, claiming her second consecutive NCAA National Championship in the event. Boykin's opening attempt traveled 19.71 m and would have won the event, but the defending national champion followed with three throws of over 20 m on her next four attempts, including a mark of 20.48 (67' 2 1/4") on her second attempt. With her second consecutive national championship in hand, Boykin took aim at the national record on her final attempt, encouraging the crowd to make some noise before delivering with a mark of 2.91 m.
On Saturday, Boykin's third attempt in the shot put was the mark to beat, as the defending national champion registered a mark of 15.31 meters. Senior Emily Ball (Des Moines, Iowa) set a new personal record with a mark of 14.19m (46 feet, 6-3/4 inches) to finish in sixth and earn All-American honors. Ball's second throw was the best attempt for the MIT senior, earning the Engineers three valuable points in the team standings. The win gave Boykin two titles on the weekend and her seventh individual NCAA national championship.
In the pole vault, junior Hailey Surace (Danville, Calif.) set a new collegiate personal record of 3.97 m (13' 0 1/4") to finish as the national runner-up, earning All-America honors in the pole vault and seven points in the team standings. Surace cleared each of the first six progressions on her first attempt at each height. However, national champion Yasmin Ruff of WashU was the only competitor to clear 4.02m (13' 2 1/4").
Junior Nony Otu Ugwu (Katy, Texas) finished ninth in the first flight of the triple jump and did not advance to the final. Otu Ugwu's best mark came on her second jump with a mark of 11.78m (38 feet, 7-3/4 inches).
Running events
On Friday in the 5000-meter race: Junior Rujuta Sane (Chandler, Ariz.) moved from sixth place up to fifth place in the final stretch to earn MIT four points in the event. Sane finished in 16:56.67 to earn All-America accolades.
In the distance medley relay, senior Christina Crow (Mercer Island, Wash.), senior Marina Miller (Bel Air, Md.), and junior Kate Sanderson (West Hartford, Conn.) finished with a time 11:41.39 to pick up eight points for the Engineers.
On Saturday, Graduate student Gillian Roeder (Delmar, New York) finished fifth in the mile event in a hard-fought race, earning All-America honors with a time of 4:51.97.
With MIT on the verge of clinching the national title, Roeder, Crow, Sane and Sanderson took to the track in the 3,000-meter event. Sane finished 20th in 10:02.86, with Roeder taking 16th in 9:56.02. Crow and Sanderson held in the middle of the pack for most of the race before Sanderson made a late move, taking over sixth place with just a few laps remaining. Sanderson would hold the position to earn three points and clinch the national championship. Crow took 11th in 9:44.99.
Other numbers of note
Along with the second best mark in Division III history, Boykin set a new personal record, MIT program record, and a facility record at the Golisano Training Center in the weight throw. Otu Ugwu was making her second appearance at indoor nationals and her third overall NCAA appearance. She was 14th in the triple jump at both the indoor and outdoor national championship last year. Roeder was running in the final in the mile for the first time since 2023 indoor nationals, where she also finished fifth. Sanderson qualified for indoor nationals in the 5,000 meters in both 2023 and 2024, but Saturday was her first All-American after finishing 16th in 2024 and 20th in 2023.
MIT will head outside in two weeks, opening the outdoor track and field season Thursday-Saturday, March 27-29, at the Raleigh Relays, hosted by North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
A version of this article first appeared on the MIT Athletics website.
New effort ensures that more undergraduates, especially from middle-income families, will receive support
3 min read
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Harvard University President Alan M. Garber and Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra on Monday announced that Harvard College will be free for students from families with annual incomes of $100,000 or less and tuition-free for students from families with annual incomes of $200,000 or less. This significant expansion of financial aid, which begins in the 2025-26 academic year, will make Harvard affordable to more students than ever, especially from middle-income families.
“Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth,” Garber said. “By bringing people of outstanding promise together to learn with and from one another, we truly realize the tremendous potential of the University.”
The expansion will enable approximately 86 percent of U.S. families to qualify for Harvard College’s financial aid, extending the University’s commitment to providing all undergrads the resources they need to enroll and graduate.
“Harvard has long sought to open our doors to the most talented students, no matter their financial circumstances,” said Hoekstra. “This investment in financial aid aims to make a Harvard College education possible for every admitted student, so they can pursue their academic passions and positively impact our future.”
Starting in the 2025-26 academic year, Harvard College will be free for students whose family income is $100,000 and below. This covers all billed expenses including tuition, food, housing, health insurance, and travel costs. Additionally, each of these students will receive a $2,000 start-up grant in their first year and a $2,000 launch grant during their junior year to help support the transition beyond Harvard.
Students with family incomes of $200,000 or less will receive free tuition and additional financial aid to cover billed expenses, depending on their financial circumstances. And many students with family incomes above $200,000 will also receive aid, depending on their circumstances. Harvard’s financial aid staff work personally and individually with students and families to match each family’s specific situation.
“We know the most talented students come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and experiences, from every state and around the globe,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid. “Our financial aid is critical to ensuring that these students know Harvard College is a place where they can be part of a vibrant learning community strengthened by their presence and participation.”
The expansion builds on more than two decades of investment in undergraduate financial aid at Harvard, beginning in 2004 with the launch of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative, which completely covered tuition, food, and housing costs for students from families with annual incomes of $40,000 or less. This threshold has increased four times since then — from $60,000 in 2006 to $85,000 in 2023.
In 2007, Harvard eliminated loans, providing all assistance in the form of grants. It also eliminated home equity in determining a family’s ability to pay for College.
Harvard has awarded more than $3.6 billion in undergraduate financial aid since launching the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. Harvard College’s annual financial aid award budget is $275 million for academic year 2025-26. Fifty-five percent of undergraduates currently receive financial aid. Their families paid an average of $15,700 for the 2023-24 year.
“Our team works closely with each student to ensure full inclusion in the Harvard experience,” said Griffin Director of Financial Aid Jake Kaufmann. “The financial aid program is designed so that Harvard students can study, train, research, create, and fully engage in the Harvard experience with minimal constraints.”
The South West of England has one of the country’s lowest levels of student progression into higher education. One of the key objectives of the visit was to engage with pupils and teachers in an area that is conspicuously under-represented in applications and admissions to Cambridge.
First stop was Colyton Grammar School, in east Devon, where Professor Prentice talked to school leaders about the barriers encountered by students from the region wishing to attend university. Joining her were representatives from Downing College, which has a particular connection to the area. They were also joined by Mike Nicholson, the University’s Director of Recruitment, Admissions and Participation, and Tom Levinson, Head of Widening Participation and Collaborative Outreach.
The University of Cambridge and Downing College have partnered with the University of Bristol and the Sutton Trust to support the Colyton Foundation Your Future Story – a programme that aims to support high attaining students from under-resourced backgrounds in the South West to pursue higher education opportunities.
In the evening, the Vice-Chancellor attended a reception in Bristol which was attended by nearly 50 Cambridge alumni, including one who matriculated in 1949.
The following day the Vice-Chancellor travelled to North Somerset for a visit to Priory Community School, part of an Academy Trust in Worle, near Weston-super-Mare. Mike Nicholson led a school assembly for year 11 students. Later that morning, Xanthe Robertson, Access and Recruitment Officer of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, led assemblies for 1,500 students in Years 7 through to 10.
The Vice-Chancellor and colleagues were interviewed by members of a student news team named after the journalist Jill Dando, who grew up in Worle. The visitors noted that among the school’s notable alumni was Stephen Jenkins, Professor of Physical and Computational Surface Chemistry at Cambridge.
The next stop was Weston College, a further and higher education College in Weston-super-Mare that provides education and vocational training to students from the age of 14 through to adulthood. There the group met Sixth Form students to hear about their aspirations.
The final leg of the journey took the Cambridge delegation to St Bede’s Catholic and Sixth Form College in Bristol. The school is part of the HE+ network, through which the University of Cambridge and Colleges work together with schools FE establishments across the country to encourage applications from talented students.
Reflecting on her visit, the Vice-Chancellor said: “Travelling to the South West allowed me to learn more about the region and to understand some of the barriers to aspiration and attainment that prevent bright students from pursuing higher education. The students we met were impressive. Their teachers’ commitment to supporting their educational journey is outstanding. I hope that the outreach partnerships between the University, the Colleges and local schools will help us attract talented students to Cambridge, and will more generally encourage them to consider going to university.”
This visit to the South West followed the Vice-Chancellor’s trip to Rochdale, Manchester and Liverpool a year ago and her visit to Peterborough in the autumn of 2024.
The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, has led a delegation to Devon, North Somerset and Bristol. It was the first time a serving Cambridge Vice-Chancellor had travelled to the region in an official capacity to engage with local schools and alumni.
Olivier Blanchard PhD ’77, the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics Emeritus, has been named a winner of the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management for “profoundly influencing modern macroeconomic analysis by establishing rigorous foundations for the study of business cycle fluctuations,” as described in the BBVA Foundation’s award citation.
Blanchard, who is also senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, shares the award with MIT alumni Jordi Galí PhD ’89 of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 of Columbia University. The three economists were instrumental in developing the New Keynesian model, now widely taught and applied in central banking policy around the world.
The framework builds on classical Keynesian models in part by introducing the role of consumer expectations to macroeconomic policy analysis — in short, using the public’s perception of the future to help inform current policy. The model’s unconventional tools, including greater transparency around monetary policy, were tested by policymakers following the burst of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s and applied by the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank in response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Blanchard played a foundational role in the development of New Keynesian economics, beginning with a 1987 paper coauthored with Princeton University’s Nobuhiro Kiyotaki (also a Frontiers of Knowledge laureate) on the effects of monetary policy under monopolistic competition. A decade later, Woodford described optimal monetary policy within the New Keynesian framework, laying key theoretical groundwork for the model, and Galí extended and synthesized the framework, ultimately resulting in a blueprint for designing optimal monetary policy.
Blanchard, who joined the MIT faculty in 1983 and served as head of the Department of Economics from 1998 to 2003, advised and taught decades of macroeconomics students at MIT, including Galí. As chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015, Blanchard used his framework to help design policy during the Global Financial Crisis and the Euro debt crisis. Blanchard’s leadership as a scholar, student advisor, teacher, and policy advisor is at the heart of the trio’s prize-winning research.
MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, current head of the economics department, praises Blanchard’s multifaceted contributions.
“Olivier is not only an amazing macroeconomist whose work continues to have profound influence in this time of global macroeconomic uncertainty,” says Gruber, “but also a pillar of the department. His leadership in research and enormous dedication to our program were central in carrying forward the legacy of the department’s early greats and making MIT Economics what it is today.”
Blanchard, Galí, and Woodford share the award’s 400,000-euro prize and will be formally honored at a ceremony in Bilbao, Spain, in June.
The BBVA Foundation works to support scientific research and cultural creation, disseminate knowledge and culture, and recognize talent and innovation, focusing on five strategic areas: environment, biomedicine and health, economy and society, basic sciences and technology, and culture. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize categories, recognize world-class research and cultural creation and aim to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a global public good.
Since 2009, the BBVA has given awards to more than a dozen MIT faculty members, including MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, as well as to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), led by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Ben Olken.
The visit provided the Minister with an opportunity to meet with senior academics to discuss the success of EU funding streams, such as Horizon, and collaboration with EU institutions, and how this has enabled decisive breakthroughs at Cambridge.
Professor Erwin Reisner, Professor of Energy and Sustainability, greeted the Minister at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and demonstrated a history of the Chemistry Department’s scientific breakthroughs, before welcoming him to the Reisner Laboratory. During their tour of the Laboratory, Mr Thomas-Symonds also met with Professor Reisner’s team of researchers, some of whom are in receipt of funding from the EU’s prestigious Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship programme.
Professor Reisner, who has a successful history of securing ERC and Horizon funding awards, then introduced his own work, which focuses on the development of concepts to make fuels, chemicals and plastics from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Mr Thomas-Symonds also received an insight into their research through a series of demonstrations. PhD student Beverly Low supervised him in the Lab’s glovebox, preparing a sample for the solar reforming of biomass waste. Her colleague Andrea Rogolino showed how the team use sunlight to produce hydrogen from biomass waste.
Professor Erwin Reisner said: “The Minister showed great talent in the lab – he handled a glovebox very well and prepared a sample to produce hydrogen from biomass using solar energy. The visit provided us an opportunity to emphasise the importance of a close alliance with our friends and colleagues in Europe.”
After his tour of the Reisner Lab, the Minister attended a roundtable discussion with Cambridge ERC grant-holders and University leaders. He was joined by academics from across disciplines and heard from those in receipt of funding from a variety of EU funding streams.
The Minister spoke to Professor Chiara Ciccarelli (Professor of Physics), Professor Erwin Reisner (Professor of Energy and Sustainability), Professor Marcos Martinón-Torres (Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science) and Professor David Fairen-Jimenez (Professor of Molecular Engineering and co-founder of successful Cambridge spinouts).
The roundtable was chaired by leading Professor of EU Law, Professor Catherine Barnard, and also included the University’s Director of Research Services, Dr Andrew Jackson.
Following his visit to the Department of Chemistry, the Minister delivered the Mackenzie-Stuart Lecture, at the University’s Centre for European Legal Studies.
The Rt Hon Nick Thomas-Symonds MP, the Paymaster General and Minister with responsibility for EU relations, visited Cambridge on Thursday 13 March.
“Many thousands of children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are missing out on school in India,” said Dr Abhimanyu Sharma, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics, the study’s author. “This has a huge impact on their wellbeing and life chances.”
“One of the main reasons for this very high dropout rate is that their schools do not offer education in sign language.”
Dr Sharma’s study, published today in Language Policy, explains that sign language continues to be ‘shunned’ in most Indian schools because it is still stigmatised as a visible marker of deafness. But, he argues, the alternative preferred by many schools, ‘oralism’ harms the school attainment of deaf students.
“Outside of India, ‘oralism’ is widely criticised but the majority of schools in India continue to use it,” Dr Sharma says. “Gesturing is not sign language, sign language is a language in its own right and these children need it.”
“When I was in primary school in Patna, one of my fellow students was deaf. Sign language was not taught in our school and it was very difficult for him. I would like to support the charities, teachers and policymakers in India who are working hard to improve education for such students today.”
Dr Sharma acknowledges that the Indian Government has taken important steps to make education more inclusive and welcomes measures such as the establishment of the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre in 2015. But, he argues, far more work is needed to ensure that DHH students receive the education which they need and to which they are legally entitled.
Sharma calls for constitutional recognition for Indian Sign Language (ISL) as well as recognition of ISL users as a linguistic minority. Being added to India’s de facto list of official languages would direct more Government financial support to Indian Sign Language.
“Central and state governments need to open more schools and higher education institutes for deaf and hard-of-hearing students,” Sharma also argues.
“In the whole of India, there are only 387 schools for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. The Government urgently needs to open many more specialist schools to support the actual number of deaf and hard-of-hearing children, which has been underestimated.”
He points out that deaf and hard-of-hearing people were undercounted in India’s last census because of the use of problematic terminology. The 2011 census reported around 5 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the country but in 2016, the National Association of the Deaf estimated that the true figure was closer to 18 million people.
Sharma also highlights the need for more higher education institutions for these students as there are very few special colleges for them, such as the St. Louis Institute for Deaf and Blind (Chennai, Tamil Nadu). He also calls for an increase in the number of interpreter training programs available across Indian universities.
Dr Sharma advises central and state governments to conduct regular impact assessments of new policy measures to ensure that they are improving inclusion for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
He also calls on the government to invest in research to support more targeted approaches to teaching and learning for DHH students, and to support public awareness campaigns to tackle biases and negative social attitudes towards deafness.
Dr Sharma’s study examines developments in Indian legislation and policy relating to DHH people since the 1950s. He highlights the fact that parliamentary debates in the Upper House about DHH people declined from 17 in the 1950s, to just 7 in the 1990s, before rising to 96 in the 2010s.
India’s language policy requires pupils to learn three languages at the secondary stage of schooling. Given the problematic nature of the three-language formula for deaf students, the 1995 Persons with Disabilities Act rescinds this requirement for these learners and decrees that they should learn only one language.
The drawback of the 1995 Act, however, is that it does not mention the use of sign language and does not specify how language learning for such learners will be realised. Dr Sharma recognises that the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 brought significant improvements but highlights the gap between decrees and implementation. The 2016 Act decrees that the Government and local authorities shall take measures to train and employ teachers who are qualified in sign language and to promote the use of sign language.
“In practice, India does not have enough teachers trained to support deaf and hard-of-hearing students, but I am positive that the country can achieve this,” Dr Sharma said.
Around one in five (over 19%) of India’s deaf and hard-of-hearing children were out-of-school in 2014, according to a survey conducted for the Indian Government. A new study calls on the Government to address this ongoing educational crisis by recognising Indian Sign Language as an official language; rejecting ‘oralism’, the belief that deaf people can and should communicate exclusively by lipreading and speech; and opening more schools and higher education institutes for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students.
India does not have enough teachers trained to support deaf and hard-of-hearing students
The technique – known as deep brain stimulation – is to be trialled at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, and King’s College Hospital, London. The team behind the Brain-PACER: Brain Pacemaker Addiction Control to End Relapse study will soon be recruiting individuals with severe alcohol or opioid addiction who are interested in taking part.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a neurosurgical procedure that delivers ongoing stimulation to the brain. DBS acts as a brain pacemaker to normalise abnormal brain activity. It is well-tolerated, effective and widely used for neurological disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder.
Although there have been several proof-of-concept studies that suggest DBS is effective in addictions, Brain-PACER – a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, Kings College London and the University of Oxford – is the first major, multicentre study to use DBS to treat craving and relapse in severe addiction.
Chief Investigator Professor Valerie Voon, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, said: “While many people who experience alcohol or drug addiction can, with the right support, control their impulses, for some people, their addiction is so severe that no treatments are effective. Their addiction is hugely harmful to their health and wellbeing, to their relationships and their everyday lives.
“Initial evidence suggests that deep brain stimulation may be able to help these individuals manage their conditions. We’ve seen how effective it can be for other neurological disorders from Parkinson’s to OCD to depression. We want to see if it can also transform the lives of people with intractable alcohol and opioid addiction.”
The primary aim of the Brain-PACER study is to assess the effects of DBS to treat alcohol and opioid addiction in a randomised controlled trial study. Its mission is twofold: to develop effective treatments for addiction and to understand the brain mechanisms that drive addiction disorders.
DBS is a neurosurgical treatment that involves implanting a slender electrode in the brain and a pacemaker under general anaesthesia. These electrodes deliver electrical impulses to modulate neural activity, which can help alleviate symptoms of various neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Keyoumars Ashkan, Professor of Neurosurgery at King’s College Hospital and the lead surgeon for the study, said: “Deep brain stimulation is a powerful surgical technique that can transform lives. It will be a major leap forward if we can show efficacy in this very difficult disease with huge burden to the patients and society.”
During surgery, thin electrodes are carefully placed in precise locations of the brain. These locations are chosen based on the condition being treated. For addiction, the electrodes are placed in areas involved in reward, motivation, and decision-making.
Harry Bulstrode, Honorary Consultant Neurosurgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Clinical Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, said: "We see first-hand how deep brain stimulation surgery can be life-changing for patients with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. Thanks to this trial, I am now hopeful that we can help patients and their families – who have often struggled for years – by targeting the parts of the brain linked to addiction."
Dr David Okai, Visiting Senior Lecturer from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, added: “DBS is safe, reversible and adjustable, so it offers a flexible option for managing chronic conditions. We hope it will offer a lifeline to help improve the quality of life for patients whose treatment until now has been unsuccessful.”
Details on the trial, including criteria for participation, can be found on the Brain-PACER website.
The research is supported by the Medical Research Council, UK Research & Innovation.
People suffering from severe alcohol and opioid addiction are to be offered a revolutionary new technique involving planting electrodes in the brain to modulate brain activity and cravings and improve self-control.
We’ve seen how effective deep brain stimulation can be for neurological disorders from Parkinson’s to OCD to depression. We want to see if it can also transform the lives of people with intractable alcohol and opioid addiction
Creating integrated healthcare programmes, enabling older persons to be more active socially and physically, and strengthening trust and cohesion within the community are key efforts undertaken by Health District @ Queenstown (HD@QT) to promote purposeful and healthy longevity. Findings from a new study conducted by researchers from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences reinforces HD@QT’s commitment towards a holistic and integrated approach to health and well-being.
A major part of the Baseline Study consists of a multi-wave survey. Phase 1 of the survey was conducted from September 2023 to May 2024, engaging over 5,000 Queenstown residents from all walks of life; for example, participants are aged between 21 to 102 years old, and staying in various types of housing. Residents responded to questions pertaining to diverse domains such as productivity, physical and psychological well-being, and social cohesion.
Assoc Prof Jia said, “The Baseline Study is a pulse-taking project that adopts a bottom-up approach to engage residents, allowing us to hear their voices and gain a deeper understanding of their current needs and future aspirations. The insights gathered will serve as the foundation for future programmes. To ensure ongoing engagement, we are forming a resident panel to continuously gather insights into their evolving needs. Through this platform, we aim to co-develop programmes that best address and serve these needs.”
The results of the Baseline Study were shared by Senior Minister of State for National Development & Digital Development and Information Mr Tan Kiat How at the opening of Happy Village @ Mei Ling on 15 March 2025. This is a new community space that brings together health and social care partners, as well as volunteers, to holistically take care of health and well-being needs within the community.
At Happy Village @ Mei Ling, the National University Health System (NUHS) is piloting an innovative care model known as the Blended Care Team (BCT), which will work closely with residents to co-develop personalised care plans, seamlessly integrating health and social expertise with strong community engagement to improve the physical, mental and social well-being of residents living in the Mei Ling and Stirling neighbourhoods.
The Baseline Study and Happy Village @ Mei Ling are the latest initiatives under HD@QT, a multi-stakeholder collaboration led by NUS, NUHS and the Housing & Development Board (HDB), working closely with multiple partners from the public, private and people sectors.
Multiple well-being factors play a crucial role in shaping overall health
Based on the findings of the Baseline Study, NUS researchers deduced that overall health is influenced by various physical, mental and psychological well-being factors such as social connections, environment, productivity and engagement.
Integrated solutions in national health programmes that consider these various factors can enhance the health and well-being of individuals across their life stages, enabling them to lead more active and fulfilling lives. Notably, the multi-sectorial and multi-disciplinary approach of HD@QT enables the development of sustainable solutions to increase healthy longevity, enable purposeful longevity, promote intergenerational bonding, and empower residents to age in place.
Older adults are mentally healthy but could benefit from increased social and physical activity
In the Baseline Study, most respondents above 65 years old reported that they have good mental health, while about two-thirds revealed that they do not actively participate in activities such as exercising, volunteering and learning.
To enable older persons to stay meaningfully engaged through community-led interactions, HD@QT has introduced initiatives such as the FaithActs x Ibasho Centre at Magaret Drive, a proactive effort to create a mindset change in society where older persons are valued for their potential to contribute to the community. Regular digital clinics and upcycling craft workshops have been organised for Queenstown residents of all ages to mingle and acquire new skills. In addition, students from NUS’ Residential College 4 and Queenstown Secondary have designed creative approaches such as food hunts, cooking, and mahjong sessions to encourage older persons in Queenstown and young people to bond.
Additionally, construction for the pilot Active Health Fitness Trail at Mei Ling has begun, and Build-To-Order developments in Queenstown are designed with wellness offerings to complement the existing amenities in Queenstown. A wellness hub comprising fitness equipment for circuit workouts will be built atop the multi-storey car park at Queen’s Arc, while Queensway Canopy will have roof gardens integrated with a jogging track, fitness stations and mini obstacle courses to encourage residents to incorporate exercise into their daily routines.
Holistic care for future well-being
The researchers found that among the respondents, 25 per cent of younger adults (between 21 and 34 years old) reported less than optimal health. Limited mobility and sensory impairment may also begin earlier than 50 years old.
NUHS launched Health Together in May 2023, a community initiative alongside with its partners to support the health and wellness needs of residents in the western region of Singapore by empowering them to take ownership of their well-being and stay healthy. In addition, initiatives such as Happy Village @ Mei Ling will provide social care and healthcare services to address older persons’ social and physical health holistically.
Improve employment support for mature workers
The Baseline Study found that amongst those aged 36 years old and above, more than half have sufficient savings for short-term needs, i.e. they have sufficient savings to sustain six or more months of expenses. However, the study also showed that full-time employment starts to decline from 50 years old, which indicate risks for future financial security. Community initiatives to improve financial literacy and provide better employment support could be explored.
Strengthen trust and cohesion within the community
75 per cent of respondents in the Baseline Study enjoy strong social support from family and friends. In addition, 60 per cent said they trusted most people in the neighbourhood. This highlights a strong foundation for social cohesion, which can be further reinforced through community-driven initiatives.
To further strengthen trust and cohesion within the community, residents could come together with stakeholders and researchers at community spaces such as the recently launched Come4TeaLah! community engagement hub to co-create solutions tailored to Queenstown’s unique needs, learn about healthier lifestyles and interact with people of all ages. In addition, residents could gather with the Queenstown Kakis, a community of neighbours who hope to build kampung spirit with activities and food in a safe space for residents to interact.
Findings from the Baseline Study will help the team identify the needs of residents and enable the assessment of the overall impact of HD@QT initiatives to improve physical, mental and social well-being for Queenstown residents in the future.
Phase 2 of the Baseline Study survey is currently underway and is targeted for completion by mid-2025. The researchers will be surveying the same group of respondents to monitor if there are changes to the earlier factors over time and they will also examine new factors such as financial literacy and caregiving.
We move thanks to coordination among many skeletal muscle fibers, all twitching and pulling in sync. While some muscles align in one direction, others form intricate patterns, helping parts of the body move in multiple ways.
In recent years, scientists and engineers have looked to muscles as potential actuators for “biohybrid” robots — machines powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers. Such bio-bots could squirm and wiggle through spaces where traditional machines cannot. For the most part, however, researchers have only been able to fabricate artificial muscle that pulls in one direction, limiting any robot’s range of motion.
Now MIT engineers have developed a method to grow artificial muscle tissue that twitches and flexes in multiple coordinated directions. As a demonstration, they grew an artificial, muscle-powered structure that pulls both concentrically and radially, much like how the iris in the human eye acts to dilate and constrict the pupil.
The researchers fabricated the artificial iris using a new “stamping” approach they developed. First, they 3D-printed a small, handheld stamp patterned with microscopic grooves, each as small as a single cell. Then they pressed the stamp into a soft hydrogel and seeded the resulting grooves with real muscle cells. The cells grew along these grooves within the hydrogel, forming fibers. When the researchers stimulated the fibers, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, following the fibers’ orientation.
“With the iris design, we believe we have demonstrated the first skeletal muscle-powered robot that generates force in more than one direction. That was uniquely enabled by this stamp approach,” says Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The team says the stamp can be printed using tabletop 3D printers and fitted with different patterns of microscopic grooves. The stamp can be used to grow complex patterns of muscle — and potentially other types of biological tissues, such as neurons and heart cells — that look and act like their natural counterparts.
“We want to make tissues that replicate the architectural complexity of real tissues,” Raman says. “To do that, you really need this kind of precision in your fabrication.”
She and her colleagues published their open-access results Friday in the journal Biomaterials Science. Her MIT co-authors include first author Tamara Rossy, Laura Schwendeman, Sonika Kohli, Maheera Bawa, and Pavankumar Umashankar, along with Roi Habba, Oren Tchaicheeyan, and Ayelet Lesman of Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Training space
Raman’s lab at MIT aims to engineer biological materials that mimic the sensing, activity, and responsiveness of real tissues in the body. Broadly, her group seeks to apply these bioengineered materials in areas from medicine to machines. For instance, she is looking to fabricate artificial tissue that can restore function to people with neuromuscular injury. She is also exploring artificial muscles for use in soft robotics, such as muscle-powered swimmers that move through the water with fish-like flexibility.
Raman has previously developed what could be seen as gym platforms and workout routines for lab-grown muscle cells. She and her colleagues designed a hydrogel “mat” that encourages muscle cells to grow and fuse into fibers without peeling away. She also derived a way to “exercise” the cells by genetically engineering them to twitch in response to pulses of light. And, her group has come up with ways to direct muscle cells to grow in long, parallel lines, similar to natural, striated muscles. However, it’s been a challenge, for her group and others, to design artificial muscle tissue that moves in multiple, predictable directions.
“One of the cool things about natural muscle tissues is, they don’t just point in one direction. Take for instance, the circular musculature in our iris and around our trachea. And even within our arms and legs, muscle cells don’t point straight, but at an angle,” Raman notes. “Natural muscle has multiple orientations in the tissue, but we haven’t been able to replicate that in our engineered muscles.”
Muscle blueprint
In thinking of ways to grow multidirectional muscle tissue, the team hit on a surprisingly simple idea: stamps. Inspired in part by the classic Jell-O mold, the team looked to design a stamp, with microscopic patterns that could be imprinted into a hydrogel, similar to the muscle-training mats that the group has previously developed. The patterns of the imprinted mat could then serve as a roadmap along which muscle cells might follow and grow.
“The idea is simple. But how do you make a stamp with features as small as a single cell? And how do you stamp something that’s super soft? This gel is much softer than Jell-O, and it’s something that’s really hard to cast, because it could tear really easily,” Raman says.
The team tried variations on the stamp design and eventually landed on an approach that worked surprisingly well. The researchers fabricated a small, handheld stamp using high-precision printing facilities in MIT.nano, which enabled them to print intricate patterns of grooves, each about as wide as a single muscle cell, onto the bottom of the stamp. Before pressing the stamp into a hydrogel mat, they coated the bottom with a protein that helped the stamp imprint evenly into the gel and peel away without sticking or tearing.
As a demonstration, the researchers printed a stamp with a pattern similar to the microscopic musculature in the human iris. The iris comprises a ring of muscle surrounding the pupil. This ring of muscle is made up of an inner circle of muscle fibers arranged concentrically, following a circular pattern, and an outer circle of fibers that stretch out radially, like the rays of the sun. Together, this complex architecture acts to constrict or dilate the pupil.
Once Raman and her colleagues pressed the iris pattern into a hydrogel mat, they coated the mat with cells that they genetically engineered to respond to light. Within a day, the cells fell into the microscopic grooves and began to fuse into fibers, following the iris-like patterns and eventually growing into a whole muscle, with an architecture and size similar to a real iris.
When the team stimulated the artificial iris with pulses of light, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, similar to the iris in the human eye. Raman notes that the team’s artificial iris is fabricated with skeletal muscle cells, which are involved in voluntary motion, whereas the muscle tissue in the real human iris is made up of smooth muscle cells, which are a type of involuntary muscle tissue. They chose to pattern skeletal muscle cells in an iris-like pattern to demonstrate the ability to fabricate complex, multidirectional muscle tissue.
“In this work, we wanted to show we can use this stamp approach to make a ‘robot’ that can do things that previous muscle-powered robots can’t do,” Raman says. “We chose to work with skeletal muscle cells. But there’s nothing stopping you from doing this with any other cell type.”
She notes that while the team used precision-printing techniques, the stamp design can also be made using conventional tabletop 3D printers. Going forward, she and her colleagues plan to apply the stamping method to other cell types, as well as explore different muscle architectures and ways to activate artificial, multidirectional muscle to do useful work.
“Instead of using rigid actuators that are typical in underwater robots, if we can use soft biological robots, we can navigate and be much more energy-efficient, while also being completely biodegradable and sustainable,” Raman says. “That’s what we hope to build toward.”
This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
MIT engineers grew an artificial, muscle-powered structure that pulls both concentrically and radially, much like how the iris in the human eye acts to dilate and constrict the pupil.
Want a less divisive America? Just a matter of trust.
Robert Putnam traces nation’s plummeting social connection and rocketing discord, offers way to start thinking of solution
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
America is coming apart, warns Robert Putnam. It’s all due to a growing lack of social connection, and it’s visible in our relationships, communities, and deeply riven politics.
The bottom line is that we just don’t trust each other anymore, he said. But there are places to start.
The Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus and author of the influential 1995 book “Bowling Alone” spoke at a John F. Kennedy Forum in a March 12 conversation with former Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus.
Putnam began with a discussion of national politics. He noted that President Trump’s critics blame him for our problems.
“America is in deep trouble,” said the 84-year-old political scientist. But Trump, he explained, didn’t create the turmoil. “He’s a symptom.”
“The real threat of what’s happening right now in America is not what’s on the surface, but the fact that the underlying causes of that are still there,” said Putnam. “And they will still be there when Trump is long gone unless we do something about it.”
That, said Putnam, is because our isolation — our lack of social capital — is growing worse, particularly among people with less education. “What the election showed is that the people, and above all the working class in America, were isolated. That’s why Trump won,” he said.
Putnam spoke a bit about his latest book, “The Upswing,” co-authored with his former student Shaylyn Romney Garrett. He drilled down on the data about what he called “political polarization, economic inequality, social isolation, and cultural self-centeredness.”
Putnam showed a series of graphs, all of which described a rough bell curve, starting low, peaking, and then coming back down. All of them, he explained, covered the period from roughly 1890 to 2020 in the U.S.
The first measured “political comity or bipartisanship,” which hit its high during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, “the most bipartisan — or nonpartisan — president in our history.” While that chart continued its high through John F. Kennedy’s presidency, its decline has been steady since.
“Now is probably the most politically polarized period in American history, with the exception of a period between 1860 and 1865.” He paused to make sure the room understood why he chose those dates. “That’s how close we are to a civil war,” he said.
The next chart, with a very similar curve, graphed economic equality, which has once again reached such a low level that it rivals the 1890s Gilded Age. A graph of social cohesion followed that same curve.
“Americans were very socially isolated at the beginning of the 20th century.” During that period of industrialization and urbanization, he said, “Large numbers of people were moving from villages in Sicily or villages in Iowa to the big city,” leaving their families and community connections behind. “And they had not yet made new ones.”
But they would.
“You see coming out of the ’30s and up until the ’60s, Americas were becoming much more trusting of one another,” he said.
“It’s not just about economics. Two-thirds of American society are not just unhappy about the fact that they don’t have good income or great chances of upward mobility. ”
Robert Putnam
Describing his own college experience in the ’60s, he recalled, “Most Americans trusted one another. Seventy-five, maybe 80 percent of Americans said they trusted other people,” Putnam said. “I think the latest number I saw was 10 percent of Americans say they trusted other people. And it’s still going down. We’ve still not stopped declining in our sense of connection with one another.”
The roots of these declines have many causes. The first is our definition of community — who is the “we” that makes up America. “The ‘we’ that we built over the course of the first two-thirds of the 20th century was a shriveled ‘we,’” said Putnam. “It was not just a white male ‘we,’ but it was more white than nonwhite” as well as more male than female.
“If we have a new progressive era, it has to have a more capacious sense of ‘we,’” he said.
We are also now isolated by social class, with the biggest gap being between those with college educations and those without. “The people who are left behind are the non-college-educated part of America.
“Only one-third of America has a college degree,” he said. “Do the math. We are never going to win unless we can begin to connect with the less-educated parts of America.”
Framing the issue as not an economic issue but a moral one, Putnam brought up Hillary Clinton’s ill-phrased dismissal of the “deplorables” who supported Trump.
“It’s not just about economics. Two-thirds of American society are not just unhappy about the fact that they don’t have good income or great chances of upward mobility. They don’t think we respect them — and we don’t,” Putnam said, referring to the college-educated, mostly middle-class or higher professional, corporate, and managerial class.
What we have to do is connect, he advised. Rebuild those social networks that allowed Americans to interact across class and education lines. And while many tout in-person connections, Putnam said, “It’s a mistake to think we have to have either face-to-face or virtual connections. Most of our connections are alloys, partially face-to-face and partly virtual.”
Such connections can help us bond in ways not connected with politics. He then gave a very local example: “I happen to be a Red Sox fan,” he said. “If you want to build connections among people from different parts of Boston or different age groups or different genders, bond in Fenway Park.
“Bridging in one direction, often depends on bonding in some other dimension,” he noted.
Ultimately, he said, “It is absolutely crucial that this new movement be based on youth. There are cultural things that young people of any class can bond on, like memes, and bridge other directions.
“I’m not giving you an answer,” he said. “I’m giving you a strategy for approaching an answer.”
The enduring appeal of the “The Odyssey” can be seen in the A.R.T.’s production; a new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn; and a forthcoming movie from director Christopher Nolan (pictured).
Photos by Nile Scott Studio and Maggie Hall; Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Classicist Greg Nagy on story’s epic appeal, his favorite translation, and ‘journey of the soul’ that awaits new readers
Homer’s “Odyssey” has captured people’s imaginations for nearly 3,000 years. Testaments to its enduring appeal abound: A recent stage adaptation of the epic poem at the American Repertory Theater; a movie by Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan is in the works; and a new translation by Bard scholar Daniel Mendelsohn will be published next month.
In this edited interview, Greg Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, reveals his favorite of the more than 100 translations of the poem, explains the appeal of the “trickster” Odysseus, and more.
What can you tell us about Homer?
There is nothing historical about the person called Homer. However, there’s everything historical about how people who listened to Homeric poetry imagined the poet. Homeric poetry evolved especially in two phases. The earlier phase was in coastal Asia Minor, in territory that now belongs to the modern state of Turkey and in outlying islands that now belong to the modern state of Greece. In these areas, around the late eighth and early seventh centuries B.C.E., there was a confederation of 12 Greek Ionian cities, which is where “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” evolved into the general shape that we have. A second phase took place in preclassical and classical Athens, around the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. Before such a later phase, almost anything that was epic could be attributed to this mythologized figure called Homer.
Gregory Nagy.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
There have been more than 100 translations of the poem. Do you have a favorite?
I like the translation by George Chapman, a poet in his own right, who published the first complete translation of “The Odyssey” into English in 1616. There is that famous poem by John Keats (1816), in which he speaks about reading Chapman’s Homer. I also like the translation by Emily Wilson, who was the first female translator of “The Odyssey” (2017) into English.
I also like the translations by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald, both of whom were dear friends. Lattimore was probably one of the most accurate translators of Homeric poetry; he cared about the original Greek text as it was eventually transmitted. He is easy on the eye, but hard on the ear. Fitzgerald is easier on the ear. And then there is Robert Fagles (1996), who has done the most actor-friendly translation.
I like Wilson’s translation very much. She is a great poet; she has a real ear for what’s going on in the minds and hearts of the characters. One of my favorite parts is how Wilson handles the gruesome death of the handmaidens who are not loyal to the household of Odysseus, and their agonizing death is so beautifully treated without any false sympathy.
Novelist Samuel Butler, who was a real romantic of the Victorian sort, wrote the book “The Authoress of ‘The Odyssey,’” where he imagines that the poem is composed not by Homer, but by Homer’s daughter. For her masterful translation, I would say that Wilson could be considered as the daughter of Homer.
Why do we find Odysseus fascinating? He’s cunning, vengeful, and so flawed …
I learned when I was a graduate student at Harvard from my professor, John H. Finley, that Odysseus, whom we all see as an epic hero, gets “a bad press” almost everywhere except in “The Odyssey.” Odysseus is what anthropologists call a trickster — a hero who is not originally an epic hero, but someone who, by way of knowing all the norms of society, can violate every rule, whether it’s a deeply ingrained moral law or whether it’s a matter of etiquette, as in the case of table manners. The value of the trickster is that it teaches us what the rules are because the trickster will show you how every one of them can be violated.
“The value of the trickster is that it teaches us what the rules are because the trickster will show you how every one of them can be violated.”
What we read in the very first line of “The Odyssey” summarizes it: “The man, sing him to me, O Muse, that man of twists and turns …” What can be more fascinating than somebody who has unlimited capacity to shift identities?
Who is your favorite character? Odysseus? Penelope? Telemachus?
Penelope is my favorite character in “The Odyssey” because she’s so smart. I have written a commentary interpreting the dream of Penelope that she narrates to her husband, who is still in disguise. If my interpretation is right, then the deftness of her narration shows that she is even smarter than Odysseus!
Finally, what should readers learn from the poem?
In the Homeric “Odyssey,” the hero experiences a journey of the soul. Reading the epic can lead to the reader’s own journey.
Timi Esan ’27 (left) and Ted Nash are pictured during rehearsal. “One of the takeaways from the couple of days for me was kind of more about the personal interaction with the students than it was even about the music.”
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students plan concert with saxophonist and composer Ted Nash that ends with enlightening dinner conversation
At Arrow Street Arts, the Harvard Jazz Orchestra found itself swinging with Grammy-winning saxophonist and composer Ted Nash. The Feb. 21 sold-out concert, which I planned alongside Emil Massad ’25, marked an exciting collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The center was eager to collaborate with Harvard because, as Todd Stoll, its vice president of education, noted, “Harvard is such a revered institution worldwide. It is important that people also realize that the arts play a very vital role in the lives of students.”
For this performance, Nash arranged the pieces he played with the orchestra, immersing us in his creativity.
“Ted approached the music with wisdom and attention to detail through the energy and emotion he brought, and the insightful comments, suggestions, and anecdotes he shared,” said saxophonist Zeb Jewell-Alibhai ’27.
After rehearsal, we had dinner with Nash, giving us a chance to connect beyond playing. He talked of growing up in a musical family and always knowing he wanted to be a musician.
“He encouraged us to reflect on our own histories as a way of developing creativity, walking us through how his family and past experiences shaped his music,” making the opportunity to play his arrangements even more meaningful, said Massad.
For Nash, dinner was the highlight. “It was unusual because the students were so bright and open and willing to talk about things that are important to them — that moved me,” he said.
Nash talked to us about our interests and fears, offering insight and encouragement. He was surprised that most students were not music concentrators, noting, “They had so many other things they wanted to talk about … that actually overlapped with music.”
“Collaborating with Ted Nash was effortless. Ted created an ideal environment with amazing energy, resulting in a successful concert,” said Yosvany Terry, Harvard director of jazz bands and a senior lecturer on music.
Director Yosvany Terry (left) conducts.
Zeb Jewell-Alibhai ’27 solos on tenor saxophone.
Ted Nash (left) and drummer Dylan Goodman ’25 speak during rehearsal.
Raghav Mehrotra ’26 plays drums during rehearsal. Trumpet player Christopher Shin ’27 performs during the concert.
Harvard Medical School Ph.D. candidate Ed Hutton plays his trombone.
Alto saxophonist Matthew Chen ’26 (right) solos during the concert.
Nash shares, “I felt that a number of the kids in that band played at a professional level, and yet they understand the difficulties of choosing a life of music, and that’s part of their intelligence as well.”Ted Nash (right) solos on soprano saxophone.
The audience gives a standing ovation following the performance.
A musician carries his music case, freshly signed by Ted Nash.
U.S. innovation ecosystem is envy of world. Here’s how it got started.
During World War II, government-supported research led scientists to successfully mass produce penicillin. Here workers at a United States Department of Agriculture research lab, ca. 1943, look for mold strains that produce the highest amounts of the antibiotic.
USDA file photo
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
Economist who studies technological change looks at public-private research partnership amid rising questions on federal funding
The participation of the federal government in the nation’s innovation ecosystem has been under scrutiny lately. For decades, federal funds have supported academic research, which in turn, has boosted private development, fueling new discoveries in medicine, technology, and other fields. The Trump administration is seeking to cap reimbursement for indirect research costs for biomedical science, which could mean billions of dollars in funding cuts from the National Institutes of Health.
The issue has turned a spotlight on the nation’s public-private research partnership, which has been credited with advances in a wide array of fields and emulated around the world. The Gazette spoke with Daniel P. Gross, an associate professor of business administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and former professor at Harvard Business School. Gross, together with Bhaven Sampat from Arizona State University, authored a recent National Bureau of Economic Researchworking paper on the postwar expansion of biomedicine.
In this edited conversation, Gross said the partnership was a response to the urgent demands of World War II, helped the U.S. and its allies win the war, and seeded the current thriving system.
What is your view of this partnership between the federal government and academia and how did it get started?
That partnership has been in place essentially since World War II. Its roots trace back to June 1940, when a handful of leaders at U.S. universities and industrial R&D labs approached President Franklin D. Roosevelt to propose harnessing civilian scientists to develop new technology for the U.S. military, which at the time significantly lagged on the technological frontier of warfare.
This was over a year before the U.S. entered the war, but it marked the beginning of an undertaking that engaged tens of thousands of scientists at firms and universities in the war effort, yielding numerous breakthroughs then, and was subsequently extended and deepened throughout the Cold War and has continued growing since. This partnership has been a pillar of U.S. technological leadership over the past 80 years, in biomedicine and beyond.
At the time, the National Institutes of Health existed, but it was a shadow of its current self?
The U.S. innovation system, and particularly the biomedical innovation system, looked very different in 1940.
The three pillars of U.S. biomedicine today are universities, the life sciences industry, and the NIH. Today they work together and build on each other. But in the 1930s, they were far more primitive. Universities were less research-intensive and had very little funding. The pharmaceutical industry wasn’t well organized, and to a large degree consisted of chemical companies with a minor subsidiary drug business rather than the large, dedicated drug developers we know today.
Drug discovery then was driven more by trial and error empiricism than science — drugs weren’t even subject to FDA review for safety until 1938 and efficacy until 1962. And the NIH was small and only intramural — it was not yet providing extramural research funding like we have now.
“In nearly every war before World War II, infectious disease killed more soldiers than battlefield injuries. Suddenly, there was an urgent need for innovation with immediate practical payoff — but no real infrastructure for getting it done.”
And that was seen as inadequate once the war began?
The war posed a wide range of technological problems, from detecting enemy aircraft to keeping soldiers healthy. In nearly every war before World War II, infectious disease killed more soldiers than battlefield injuries. Suddenly, there was an urgent need for innovation with immediate practical payoff — but no real infrastructure for getting it done.
The war provided an impetus for organizational innovation to support technological innovation. This included a new agency to coordinate and fund wartime research, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, or OSRD. It also triggered the invention of the federal R&D contract, new patent policies, peer review procedures, and even indirect cost funding.
Most importantly, however, was the embrace of the idea that R&D investment was an activity for the federal government, and a new pattern of collaboration between the government, firms, and universities.
Was it largely successful? Penicillin is a story that’s mentioned quite a bit.
Most would say yes. After all, the Allies won the war — and technology, medical and otherwise, was an important contributor to that outcome. New drugs are not necessarily the first thing you think of when you imagine military technology. Yet disease and other ailments could debilitate the military’s field forces, increasing required manpower. Tuberculosis, measles, and venereal diseases are all examples of common maladies among soldiers at the time. Malaria was prevalent in the Pacific theater and North Africa.
The broad range of fronts where this global war was fought, and new weapons with which it was fought, certainly expanded the set of problems needing attention — included protecting soldiers from extreme environmental conditions like hot and cold temperatures or oxygen deprivation at high altitudes, disease vector-control strategies, wound and burn treatments, blood substitutes, and much more.
OSRD’s Committee on Medical Research (CMR) directed and funded hundreds of projects on these problems and made significant progress in many of them. You’re right that one of the more important and remembered breakthroughs was penicillin. Though penicillin was discovered in the 1920s, at the dawn of World War II there was no method of producing penicillin in enough quantities even for clinical testing, let alone treatment.
CMR initially set out with two approaches to developing penicillin as a drug, not knowing which would succeed. One was to try synthesize it. The other was to try to grow it in large quantities from the mold that produces it. Scientists initially thought that the synthetic approach held more promise, but in the end it was scaled-up fermentation of natural penicillin that succeeded.
This breakthrough was transformative — not only for military health but civilian health too. The proof is in the data: Between World War I and World War II, military hospital admissions and death rates from most common infectious diseases declined by 90 to 100 percent. World War II research essentially solved the military’s problem of bacterial disease.
Perhaps even more important is that it spawned a golden age in drug development. The antibiotic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s can be directly traced to achievements in the war.
Some things became successful in the postwar period. Why did this effort have such long legs?
Across the CMR portfolio, the work undertaken to meet the urgent demands of war created a foundation upon which postwar biomedical science and technology subsequently began to grow. That foundation consisted of things like new research tools and techniques, new therapies and therapeutic candidates, new drug development platforms, newly developed capabilities at existing and emerging pharmaceutical firms — including experience in specific drug categories and more generally in science-based approaches to drug discovery, like rational drug design — and most importantly, new scientific understanding.
What abouttraining a new generation of scientists?
It’s a great question. Many readers might think that public R&D funding primarily supports research. But scientific training is also important. The war effort engaged not only seasoned scientists but also thousands of graduate students, predoctoral researchers, and recently minted Ph.D.s. This was the case for both medical and nonmedical research: The labs doing the work were teeming with young people. Although we don’t trace the contributions of these students in biomedicine, I think it’s safe to presume that for many, it was formative.
In related work with Maria Roche, an assistant professor and former colleague at HBS, we have shown this was the case for researchers engaged in World War II radar research. More broadly, when you look at university and policy leadership across U.S. science in the first 25 years after World War II, you see OSRD alumni all over the place. The war proved to be a breeding ground for technical and administrative capacity that the U.S. harnessed afterwards.
When you talk about CMR funding, it included reimbursement for indirect costs — a subject of debate today. What was the rationale behind that then?
It’s useful to think about the context: OSRD needed to incentivize firms and universities to take on military R&D projects. Doing so required reorienting existing research efforts and displacing future ones — this was disruptive. Firms were being asked to use their own facilities, equipment, and sometimes best talent on national problems rather than commercial ones. Some were reluctant to do so without complete compensation. Medical researchers were also initially wary of public funding and bureaucratic control.
Reimbursing these R&D performers for overhead expenses, in addition to the immediate incremental costs of OSRD-contracted work, was one way it incentivized participation. Ultimately, the policy goal was for OSRD research to be “no gain, no loss” for its contractors. The structure of and motivations for indirect cost recovery have evolved somewhat since then, but the basic principles trace back to it.
Today it’s a bit different, in that we’re not building something, but we are trying to continue something that has proven to be successful?
It appears it’s been pretty productive. I wouldn’t dispute that there are opportunities to make the system more efficient, but overall, if you look at the output of this 80-year partnership between U.S. universities, federal research funders, and industry, it’s a story of success. I think we ought to be careful that, in pursuing reforms in science policy, we protect the golden goose.
The U.S. innovation system, and especially the biomedical innovation system, is the envy of the world. It has catalyzed decades of innovation that have supported national defense, health, and economic growth. To undo that would be a great loss for the U.S. and the world.
A decade after scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT first began testing whether sensory stimulation of the brain’s 40Hz “gamma” frequency rhythms could treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice, a growing evidence base supporting the idea that it can improve brain health — in humans as well as animals — has emerged from the work of labs all over the world. A new open-access review article in PLOS Biology describes the state of research so far and presents some of the fundamental and clinical questions at the forefront of the noninvasive gamma stimulation now.
“As we’ve made all our observations, many other people in the field have published results that are very consistent,” says Li-Huei Tsai, Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, director of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, and senior author of the new review, with postdoc Jung Park. “People have used many different ways to induce gamma including sensory stimulation, transcranial alternating current stimulation, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, but the key is delivering stimulation at 40 hertz. They all see beneficial effects.”
A decade of discovery at MIT
Starting with a paper in Nature in 2016, a collaboration led by Tsai has produced a series of studies showing that 40Hz stimulation via light, sound, the two combined, or tactile vibration reduces hallmarks of Alzheimer’s pathology such as amyloid and tau proteins, prevents neuron death, decreases synapse loss, and sustains memory and cognition in various Alzheimer’s mouse models. The collaboration’s investigations of the underlying mechanisms that produce these benefits have so far identified specific cellular and molecular responses in many brain cell types including neurons, microglia, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and the brain’s blood vessels. Last year, for instance, the lab reported in Nature that 40Hz audio and visual stimulation induced interneurons in mice to increase release of the peptide VIP, prompting increased clearance of amyloid from brain tissue via the brain’s glymphatic “plumbing” system.
Meanwhile, at MIT and at the MIT spinoff company Cognito Therapeutics, phase II clinical studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s exposed to 40Hz light and sound experienced a significant slowing of brain atrophy and improvements on some cognitive measures, compared to untreated controls. Cognito, which has also measured significant preservation of the brain’s “white matter” in volunteers, has been conducting a pivotal, nationwide phase III clinical trial of sensory gamma stimulation for more than a year.
“Neuroscientists often lament that it is a great time to have AD [Alzheimer’s disease] if you are a mouse,” Park and Tsai wrote in the review. “Our ultimate goal, therefore, is to translate GENUS discoveries into a safe, accessible, and noninvasive therapy for AD patients.” The MIT team often refers to 40Hz stimulation as “GENUS” for Gamma Entrainment Using Sensory Stimulation.
A growing field
As Tsai’s collaboration, which includes MIT colleagues Edward Boyden and Emery N. Brown, has published its results, many other labs have produced studies adding to the evidence that various methods of noninvasive gamma sensory stimulation can combat Alzheimer’s pathology. Among many examples cited in the new review, in 2024 a research team in China independently corroborated that 40Hz sensory stimulation increases glymphatic fluid flows in mice. In another example, a Harvard Medical School-based team in 2022 showed that 40Hz gamma stimulation using Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation significantly reduced the burden of tau in three out of four human volunteers. And in another study involving more than 100 people, researchers in Scotland in 2023 used audio and visual gamma stimulation (at 37.5Hz) to improve memory recall.
Open questions
Amid the growing number of publications describing preclinical studies with mice and clinical trials with people, open questions remain, Tsai and Park acknowledge. The MIT team and others are still exploring the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie GENUS’s effects. Tsai says her lab is looking at other neuropeptide and neuromodulatory systems to better understand the cascade of events linking sensory stimulation to the observed cellular responses. Meanwhile, the nature of how some cells, such as microglia, respond to gamma stimulation and how that affects pathology remains unclear, Tsai adds.
Even with a national phase III clinical trial underway, it is still important to investigate these fundamental mechanisms, Tsai says, because new insights into how noninvasive gamma stimulation affects the brain could improve and expand its therapeutic potential.
“The more we understand the mechanisms, the more we will have good ideas about how to further optimize the treatment,” Tsai says. “And the more we understand its action and the circuits it affects, the more we will know beyond Alzheimer’s disease what other neurological disorders will benefit from this.”
Indeed, the review points to studies at MIT and other institutions providing at least some evidence that GENUS might be able to help with Parkinson’s disease, stroke, anxiety, epilepsy, and the cognitive side effects of chemotherapy and conditions that reduce myelin, such as multiple sclerosis. Tsai’s lab has been studying whether it can help with Down syndrome as well.
The open questions may help define the next decade of GENUS research.
A decade after she launched a collaboration to study whether stimulating the brain's gamma rhythms could help people with Alzheimer's disease, Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai delivered a lecture on the latest 40Hz sensory stimulation research to an audience of colleagues at MIT Feb. 27.
A decade after scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT first began testing whether sensory stimulation of the brain’s 40Hz “gamma” frequency rhythms could treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice, a growing evidence base supporting the idea that it can improve brain health — in humans as well as animals — has emerged from the work of labs all over the world. A new open-access review article in PLOS Biology describes the state of research so far and presents some of the fundamental and clinical questions at the forefront of the noninvasive gamma stimulation now.
“As we’ve made all our observations, many other people in the field have published results that are very consistent,” says Li-Huei Tsai, Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, director of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, and senior author of the new review, with postdoc Jung Park. “People have used many different ways to induce gamma including sensory stimulation, transcranial alternating current stimulation, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, but the key is delivering stimulation at 40 hertz. They all see beneficial effects.”
A decade of discovery at MIT
Starting with a paper in Nature in 2016, a collaboration led by Tsai has produced a series of studies showing that 40Hz stimulation via light, sound, the two combined, or tactile vibration reduces hallmarks of Alzheimer’s pathology such as amyloid and tau proteins, prevents neuron death, decreases synapse loss, and sustains memory and cognition in various Alzheimer’s mouse models. The collaboration’s investigations of the underlying mechanisms that produce these benefits have so far identified specific cellular and molecular responses in many brain cell types including neurons, microglia, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and the brain’s blood vessels. Last year, for instance, the lab reported in Nature that 40Hz audio and visual stimulation induced interneurons in mice to increase release of the peptide VIP, prompting increased clearance of amyloid from brain tissue via the brain’s glymphatic “plumbing” system.
Meanwhile, at MIT and at the MIT spinoff company Cognito Therapeutics, phase II clinical studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s exposed to 40Hz light and sound experienced a significant slowing of brain atrophy and improvements on some cognitive measures, compared to untreated controls. Cognito, which has also measured significant preservation of the brain’s “white matter” in volunteers, has been conducting a pivotal, nationwide phase III clinical trial of sensory gamma stimulation for more than a year.
“Neuroscientists often lament that it is a great time to have AD [Alzheimer’s disease] if you are a mouse,” Park and Tsai wrote in the review. “Our ultimate goal, therefore, is to translate GENUS discoveries into a safe, accessible, and noninvasive therapy for AD patients.” The MIT team often refers to 40Hz stimulation as “GENUS” for Gamma Entrainment Using Sensory Stimulation.
A growing field
As Tsai’s collaboration, which includes MIT colleagues Edward Boyden and Emery N. Brown, has published its results, many other labs have produced studies adding to the evidence that various methods of noninvasive gamma sensory stimulation can combat Alzheimer’s pathology. Among many examples cited in the new review, in 2024 a research team in China independently corroborated that 40Hz sensory stimulation increases glymphatic fluid flows in mice. In another example, a Harvard Medical School-based team in 2022 showed that 40Hz gamma stimulation using Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation significantly reduced the burden of tau in three out of four human volunteers. And in another study involving more than 100 people, researchers in Scotland in 2023 used audio and visual gamma stimulation (at 37.5Hz) to improve memory recall.
Open questions
Amid the growing number of publications describing preclinical studies with mice and clinical trials with people, open questions remain, Tsai and Park acknowledge. The MIT team and others are still exploring the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie GENUS’s effects. Tsai says her lab is looking at other neuropeptide and neuromodulatory systems to better understand the cascade of events linking sensory stimulation to the observed cellular responses. Meanwhile, the nature of how some cells, such as microglia, respond to gamma stimulation and how that affects pathology remains unclear, Tsai adds.
Even with a national phase III clinical trial underway, it is still important to investigate these fundamental mechanisms, Tsai says, because new insights into how noninvasive gamma stimulation affects the brain could improve and expand its therapeutic potential.
“The more we understand the mechanisms, the more we will have good ideas about how to further optimize the treatment,” Tsai says. “And the more we understand its action and the circuits it affects, the more we will know beyond Alzheimer’s disease what other neurological disorders will benefit from this.”
Indeed, the review points to studies at MIT and other institutions providing at least some evidence that GENUS might be able to help with Parkinson’s disease, stroke, anxiety, epilepsy, and the cognitive side effects of chemotherapy and conditions that reduce myelin, such as multiple sclerosis. Tsai’s lab has been studying whether it can help with Down syndrome as well.
The open questions may help define the next decade of GENUS research.
A decade after she launched a collaboration to study whether stimulating the brain's gamma rhythms could help people with Alzheimer's disease, Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai delivered a lecture on the latest 40Hz sensory stimulation research to an audience of colleagues at MIT Feb. 27.
With the help of a dedicated group of departmental volunteers from across campus and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princetonians stepped up to support community programs.
A study out of Weill Cornell Medicine and Oregon Health & Science University provides critical insight for the development of a vaccine that can more effectively block the spread of cytomegalovirus across the placenta to babies before they're born.
In a new book, music professor considers race in all its facets
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Jessie Cox.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Growing up in Switzerland, Jessie Cox found it difficult to speak about being Black. Black lives remained largely unthought of in the tiny, land-locked nation, he believed.
Since then, he’s thought about them. In his new book, “Sounds of Black Switzerland,” Cox, an assistant professor of music who’s currently teaching an advanced course on studio collaboration, addresses the dynamics of race in a place where it is rarely discussed.
“One task for me was to open a discourse about Black Switzerland. Another task was to contribute to the thinking of Blackness and Black studies,” said Cox, a composer, drummer, and scholar from the western city of Biel.
“Sounds of Black Switzerland,” released in February as Cox dove into his second semester at Harvard, fuses cultural appraisal and sophisticated music criticism. Some chapters are devoted to Blackness and Afrofuturism. Another analyzes how anti-Blackness can rest on color-blindness and erasure. Cox examines the associated challenges with Switzerland’s judiciary system, immigration law, and notions of national belonging.
Yet Cox didn’t want his critique of anti-Blackness to anchor the book.
“Rather, I wanted to uncover the imaginative possibilities that we can come to think and hear under the term ‘Blackness,’” he said. “My goal was to show that there are inherent possibilities uncovered in all these discourses around Black life and Blackness in the U.S. and globally.”
Cox said he was inspired by Nigerian Swiss composer Charles Uzor, who wrote a series that includes “Bodycam Exhibit 3: George Floyd in Memoriam,” to which Cox devotes a full chapter. The 2020 murder in Minneapolis was later compared to the case of Mike Ben Peter, a Black man who died in 2018 after being pinned down by six police officers in the Swiss city of Lausanne.
Determined not to reduce the Black experience to the violence Black communities face, Cox also draws on songs by popular Swiss artists, including the Bern-based rapper Nativ.
“Nativ has this piece in which the chorus says, ‘Today is a good day for change’ in Swiss German, but the word ‘change’ is in English, so it’s a reference to Barack Obama,” Cox explained.
“To be able to think about what we are going through in our lives and our world in as many facets as we can is crucial to coming together and learning about each other’s experiences,” said Cox, who taught a fall 2024 course titled “Music to Re-imagine the World: From Afrofuturism to Experimental Music Across Planet Earth.”
“There is very radical possibility that we can get — if we invest in artistic practice as a space for imagining new worlds — new ways of being, new commonalities, and new relations,” he said.
Lorenz Hurni considers what constitutes maps and why they are also instruments of power – and reveals how the Swiss World Atlas deals with disputed names and unilateral name changes.
What is it like to study at ETH Zurich? Sally Liu shares an insight into her daily life as a student – and explains why she finds it so important to speak openly about challenges.
It is a deep question, from deep in our history: When did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.
Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old. Estimates of when language originated vary widely, based on different forms of evidence, from fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new analysis took a different approach. They reasoned that since all human languages likely have a common origin — as the researchers strongly think — the key question is how far back in time regional groups began spreading around the world.
“The logic is very simple,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing the results. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate about the geographic divergence of early human populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before.”
The paper, “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago,” appears in Frontiers in Psychology. The co-authors are Miyagawa, who is a professor emeritus of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT; Rob DeSalle, a principal investigator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Institute for Comparative Genomics; Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, a faculty member in linguistics at the University of São Paolo; Remo Nitschke, of the University of Zurich, who worked on the project while at the University of Arizona linguistics department; Mercedes Okumura of the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of São Paulo; and Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History.
The new paper examines 15 genetic studies of different varieties, published over the past 18 years: Three used data about the inherited Y chromosome, three examined mitochondrial DNA, and nine were whole-genome studies.
All told, the data from these studies suggest an initial regional branching of humans about 135,000 years ago. That is, after the emergence of Homo sapiens, groups of people subsequently moved apart geographically, and some resulting genetic variations have developed, over time, among the different regional subpopulations. The amount of genetic variation shown in the studies allows researchers to estimate the point in time at which Homo sapiens was still one regionally undivided group.
Miyagawa says the studies collectively provide increasingly converging evidence about when these geographic splits started taking place. The first survey of this type was performed by other scholars in 2017, but they had fewer existing genetic studies to draw upon. Now, there are much more published data available, which when considered together point to 135,000 years ago as the likely time of the first split.
The new meta-analysis was possible because “quantity-wise we have more studies, and quality-wise, it’s a narrower window [of time],” says Miyagawa, who also holds an appointment at the University of São Paolo.
Like many linguists, Miyagawa believes all human languages are demonstrably related to each other, something he has examined in his own work. For instance, in his 2010 book, “Why Agree? Why Move?” he analyzed previously unexplored similarities between English, Japanese, and some of the Bantu languages. There are more than 7,000 identified human languages around the globe.
Some scholars have proposed that language capacity dates back a couple of million years, based on the physiological characteristics of other primates. But to Miyagawa, the question is not when primates could utter certain sounds; it is when humans had the cognitive ability to develop language as we know it, combining vocabulary and grammar into a system generating an infinite amount of rules-based expression.
“Human language is qualitatively different because there are two things, words and syntax, working together to create this very complex system,” Miyagawa says. “No other animal has a parallel structure in their communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and to communicate them to others.”
This conception of human language origins also holds that humans had the cognitive capacity for language for some period of time before we constructed our first languages.
“Language is both a cognitive system and a communication system,” Miyagawa says. “My guess is prior to 135,000 years ago, it did start out as a private cognitive system, but relatively quickly that turned into a communications system.”
So, how can we know when distinctively human language was first used? The archaeological record is invaluable in this regard. Roughly 100,000 years ago, the evidence shows, there was a widespread appearance of symbolic activity, from meaningful markings on objects to the use of fire to produce ochre, a decorative red color.
Like our complex, highly generative language, these symbolic activities are engaged in by people, and no other creatures. As the paper notes, “behaviors compatible with language and the consistent exercise of symbolic thinking are detectable only in the archaeological record of H. sapiens.”
Among the co-authors, Tattersall has most prominently propounded the view that language served as a kind of ignition for symbolic thinking and other organized activities.
“Language was the trigger for modern human behavior,” Miyagawa says. “Somehow it stimulated human thinking and helped create these kinds of behaviors. If we are right, people were learning from each other [due to language] and encouraging innovations of the types we saw 100,000 years ago.”
To be sure, as the authors acknowledge in the paper, other scholars believe there was a more incremental and broad-based development of new activities around 100,000 years ago, involving materials, tools, and social coordination, with language playing a role in this, but not necessarily being the central force.
For his part, Miyagawa recognizes that there is considerable room for further progress in this area of research, but thinks efforts like the current paper are at least steps toward filling out a more detailed picture of language’s emergence.
“Our approach is very empirically based, grounded in the latest genetic understanding of early homo sapiens,” Miyagawa says. “I think we are on a good research arc, and I hope this will encourage people to look more at human language and evolution.”
This research was, in part, supported by the São Paolo Excellence Chair awarded to Miyagawa by the São Paolo Research Foundation.
A new survey of genomic evidence suggests humans’ unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.
Number of those burdened by rental affordability hits record high
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Public policy expert discusses possible ways to cut costs amid national housing crunch
Amid a nationwide housing shortage, a new report shows the number of those burdened by rental affordability has hit a record high.
As of 2023, 22.6 million renter households spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities, up by 2.2 million since 2019. More than half, or 12.1 million, of those spent more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, according to recent research by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.
Worsening affordability affects renters across income groups. Middle-income renters, who earn $30,000-$75,000, comprised 41 percent of all cost burdened households in 2023. Those earning $75,000 and more were 9 percent. A full-time job is no guarantee that housing will be affordable. Indeed, 36 percent of fully employed renters were cost-burdened in 2023.
In this edited conversation, Chris Herbert, the center’s director, explains why renting continues to grow less affordable and what cities can try to do about it.
The number of households struggling with housing costs is at an historic high. What’s driving this?
There’s two things. Since 2021, we saw rents going up at double-digit rates in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. In 2023, they started to slow down. In 2024, they were growing at more like an inflationary clip, so “better.” That was a function of very strong demand from the pandemic. Supply couldn’t keep up and led to high rents.
It came on the backs of what had been deteriorating affordability for the last two decades. There was a quiet affordability crisis growing, which is, how many renters were cost-burdened.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we reached a peak around 2011 in terms of both numbers and share of renters who were cost-burdened. From there, things gradually got a bit better.
But underneath the surface, while the overall share of renters who were cost-burdened was edging down, the share of renters working year-round, full-time, at not great but not terrible jobs, we were seeing a sharp increase in the share of renters who were cost-burdened.
What was happening was the cost-burdened/housing affordability issue was really being democratized. It was spreading from just among the poorest households to more working folks, particularly young people.
There was a real worsening of the crisis since the pandemic, but it had already been getting worse, and particularly worse for working people.
The number of cost-burdened renters has hit another record high
Many more middle- and higher-income renters are struggling with housing costs. What accounts for that shift?
That’s kind of the $64,000 question. The most common answer people give is that we haven’t been building enough housing. To some extent, that’s true. Multifamily vacancy rates had gotten quite tight, particularly in the face of the pandemic surge. So, there was a sense that we didn’t have enough apartments.
That is a piece of the story, but we almost overemphasize it. The other part of the story is that the cost of producing housing units is very high. There’s this notion, “Build more houses, and the price will come down.” You have to bear in mind that builders only build housing if it makes economic sense to do so.
The expense comes in four big buckets: There’s land, and that’s where a lot of the conversation has been around zoning and the fact that we don’t have enough land zoned for high-density housing. And then there’s construction costs — that’s 60 percent of the cost of an apartment building. The land, typically, is only 20 percent. And then there’s the soft costs: architectural, engineering, and then, financing. Those costs go up with a difficult approval process. They’re about 10-15 percent of the cost, so not a big driver. But the financing costs, when interest rates go up to 7 percent, is a big driver.
Housing is expensive for a host of reasons, zoning being one of them, construction costs, and the fact we haven’t had improvements in efficiency in the construction sector, and then the complexity of the approvals process and the high cost of capital.
Boston mayoral candidates Josh Kraft and Mayor Michelle Wu said housing affordability will be a top issue in the upcoming election. Do mayors and cities have any real tools to bring down housing costs?
There’s been a lot of discussion and emphasis on the regulatory processes. How restrictive is your zoning? How onerous is your approval process? How hard is it for a developer to propose a reasonable scale development and get it approved and start work on it? A big thing cities are doing is relooking at their zoning. Cambridge has done various iterations of looking at their zoning.
Related to that can be the approval process: The affordable housing overlay in Cambridge says if you put forth a development that meets criteria in terms of setbacks and density and other factors, we’re going to approve it, and you don’t have to go through a whole process of design review. So, cities can do that.
How does that affect affordability? It reduces the soft costs. To the extent you’re giving me greater density, I may be able to get a better value of land. The challenge is that the land’s value is based on how many units you can put on it. And so, if you tell me I can put two units on it, and the land was worth, say, a million bucks, and then you say, “Now you can put 10 units on it.” That’s $100,000 a unit. I just saved a ton of money.
But as soon as you tell a developer you can put 10 units on it, the developer says, “I’ll pay 5 million bucks for that piece of land.” So, you don’t get as much savings from the density. All cities can do in that regard is try to make it so there’s not more friction and more pressure on prices to go up faster than they otherwise would.
You’re going to have a hard time solving the affordability problem through zoning. And if you’re talking about lower-income households or even moderate-income households, you’re going to have to talk about ways in which you’re going to subsidize the cost of that housing. That means cities have to find ways to get money.
Boston has been very good about linkage payments for commercial development generating a fair amount of money, as has Cambridge, and an affordable housing trust that gets money from that. They can use some general appropriations from their budget.
You can also look for special taxes. Boston put forward a transfer tax proposal that former Mayor Marty Walsh estimated would generate about $100 million a year in income for the Affordable Housing Trust. Mayor Wu pursued it, but the state legislature has stymied them.
A big issue for cities is how do we get more financial resources to help subsidize housing. One of the things cities can do is go catalog all the land they own. That land can be an important subsidy. Boston’s been doing that.
“A big issue for cities is how do we get more financial resources to help subsidize housing. One of the things cities can do is go catalog all the land they own. That land can be an important subsidy. Boston’s been doing that.”
Chris Herbert
And maybe spur innovation in the design of housing. Boston’s Housing Innovation Lab has been looking at how do we get more modular housing, more efficiencies of factory production and how can the City of Boston play a role in trying to help that get to scale.
Any promising policy ideas or positive trends on the horizon?
We’re definitely in a situation where we have to try a lot of things. There’s a lot of experimentation. There’s a piece in the Mass. state bond bill for a revolving loan fund. People have come to the realization that housing affordability has been a long-term problem that’s been a long time in the making, and so we have to have a long-term vision of how we address this.
One of the big ways in which housing inflates in value is through the inflation of land values. Houses depreciate, and so, the value of a house built in 2000 should be less today. But in fact, housing values around here are double what they were in 2000, and that’s all in the land value. It’s land values that capture a lot of the inflation in house prices. And so, one thing to do is to lock in land ownership long term to keep that inflation from affecting the occupants of the home.
The other piece is that if [property owners] manage housing at cost then you can start charging rents that are a lot more affordable. Combine that with public ownership or nonprofit ownership that could be exempt or limited property taxes, low-cost land, at-cost rents, and reduced costs from reduced property taxes, you can start to get housing that is affordable.
Many companies invest heavily in hiring talent to create the high-performance library code that underpins modern artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA, for instance, developed some of the most advanced high-performance computing (HPC) libraries, creating a competitive moat that has proven difficult for others to breach.
But what if a couple of students, within a few months, could compete with state-of-the-art HPC libraries with a few hundred lines of code, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands?
That’s what researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown with a new programming language called Exo 2.
Exo 2 belongs to a new category of programming languages that MIT Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley calls “user-schedulable languages” (USLs). Instead of hoping that an opaque compiler will auto-generate the fastest possible code, USLs put programmers in the driver's seat, allowing them to write “schedules” that explicitly control how the compiler generates code. This enables performance engineers to transform simple programs that specify what they want to compute into complex programs that do the same thing as the original specification, but much, much faster.
One of the limitations of existing USLs (like the original Exo) is their relatively fixed set of scheduling operations, which makes it difficult to reuse scheduling code across different “kernels” (the individual components in a high-performance library).
In contrast, Exo 2 enables users to define new scheduling operations externally to the compiler, facilitating the creation of reusable scheduling libraries. Lead author Yuka Ikarashi, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL affiliate, says that Exo 2 can reduce total schedule code by a factor of 100 and deliver performance competitive with state-of-the-art implementations on multiple different platforms, including Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) that power many machine learning applications. This makes it an attractive option for engineers in HPC focused on optimizing kernels across different operations, data types, and target architectures.
“It’s a bottom-up approach to automation, rather than doing an ML/AI search over high-performance code,” says Ikarashi. “What that means is that performance engineers and hardware implementers can write their own scheduling library, which is a set of optimization techniques to apply on their hardware to reach the peak performance.”
One major advantage of Exo 2 is that it reduces the amount of coding effort needed at any one time by reusing the scheduling code across applications and hardware targets. The researchers implemented a scheduling library with roughly 2,000 lines of code in Exo 2, encapsulating reusable optimizations that are linear-algebra specific and target-specific (AVX512, AVX2, Neon, and Gemmini hardware accelerators). This library consolidates scheduling efforts across more than 80 high-performance kernels with up to a dozen lines of code each, delivering performance comparable to, or better than, MKL, OpenBLAS, BLIS, and Halide.
Exo 2 includes a novel mechanism called “Cursors” that provides what they call a “stable reference” for pointing at the object code throughout the scheduling process. Ikarashi says that a stable reference is essential for users to encapsulate schedules within a library function, as it renders the scheduling code independent of object-code transformations.
“We believe that USLs should be designed to be user-extensible, rather than having a fixed set of operations,” says Ikarashi. “In this way, a language can grow to support large projects through the implementation of libraries that accommodate diverse optimization requirements and application domains.”
Exo 2’s design allows performance engineers to focus on high-level optimization strategies while ensuring that the underlying object code remains functionally equivalent through the use of safe primitives. In the future, the team hopes to expand Exo 2’s support for different types of hardware accelerators, like GPUs. Several ongoing projects aim to improve the compiler analysis itself, in terms of correctness, compilation time, and expressivity.
Ikarashi and Ragan-Kelley co-authored the paper with graduate students Kevin Qian and Samir Droubi, Alex Reinking of Adobe, and former CSAIL postdoc Gilbert Bernstein, now a professor at the University of Washington. This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. National Science Foundation, while the first author was also supported by Masason, Funai, and Quad Fellowships.
A new programming language called “Exo 2” could enable high-performance coding that can compete with state-of-the-art libraries with a few hundred lines of code, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands.
Housing Day — one of Harvard’s most beloved traditions — marks a milestone for first-years
When first-year student Wilson Cheung and his four suitemates woke up at 7 a.m. on Thursday, they could already hear upperclassmen gathering in the Yard outside their dorm. They waited excitedly in their room as the sounds drew closer until finally, around 8:30 a.m., a loud group made their way up the stairs.
When Cheung heard chants of “C-A-B-O-T,” he briefly wondered if he was about to be sorted into Cabot House, but when the door opened it was a group of Adams House residents there to greet him enthusiastically and give him his assignment letter.
As he hugged a friend in front of the John Harvard Statue 15 minutes later, Cheung couldn’t stop smiling.
“My suitemate and I got Adams and we’re super happy,” he said. “Adams just finished its renovation, so we’re going live in a brand-new dorm. It’s also close to everything, right in the center of campus. It’s a very cool dorm.”
Dunster House residents play music and dance in the Yard before storming first-year dorms.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Housing Day, when first-year students learn where they will live for the next three years, is one of Harvard’s most beloved — and rowdy — annual traditions. Upperclassmen representing the 12 residential Houses flock to Harvard Yard early in the morning to showcase their House spirit and friendly rivalry. At 8:30 a.m., upperclassmen storm the first-year dorms to deliver housing assignment letters and welcome their newest Housemates home.
Students danced and celebrated in front of the bronze John Harvard, many in coordinated outfits, such as blue T-shirts for Lowell House and burgundy beanies for Winthrop. Some Dunster House residents walked by playing trumpets and saxophones, while Leverett House residents, wearing green bunny ears, honked green plastic stadium horns. House mascots, like the Dunster House moose, Currier House tree, and Cabot fish, danced around and posed for photos.
Winthrop House residents Ikenna Ogbogu and Ebun Oguntola, both sophomores, rallied with the rest of their Housemates, dressed in burgundy shirts. Ogbogu, who was holding a sign that read “’Throp, what a W,” said he loves Housing Day because getting his housing assignment last year was a milestone in the Harvard experience.
A Winthrop House resident cheers.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Jeffrey Yang ’26 (center) laughs with his fellow Adams House residents.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Wearing polar bear mascot costumes Pforzheimer House residents cross Garden Street on their way to Harvard Yard.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
“You’re part of a larger community with such so much more history than your freshman hall,” Ogbogu said. “Being on the other side now and being able to dorm-storm freshmen, dressing up, shouting in the morning at 7 a.m. is just really fun because you’re part of creating an experience for everyone here.”
Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College, paused to take selfies with a costumed group as he greeted students in the Yard. Khurana said the annual tradition is one of the most “incredible” experiences at the College.
“The Houses are what make Harvard College so distinctive,” Khurana said. “One of the things I love about this day is that this is when every House becomes a home for our students.”
“At a time when many of us feel like we need an injection of joy, Housing Day delivered just that,” said Hoekstra. “It’s magical to watch friendships — maybe lifelong ones — form right before your eyes.”
Outside Hollis Hall, Lowell House seniors Anoushka Chander and Una Roven, both in blue jackets, posed for a photo together while their Housemates flooded into the dorm. The seniors, who were holding a sign that read “take the L,” were feeling nostalgic to be experiencing the tradition for the last time.
“It’s just a great tradition to celebrate our House and the wonderful community that we have and each other,” Chander said. “It’s our last Housing Day to let people know they got the best House, and that it will be their home for the next few years.”
Their advice to first-years experiencing Housing Day for the first time?
“Just enjoy it,” Chander said.
“Yeah, enjoy it, any House you get will be awesome,” Roven agreed, then paused. “But Lowell is the best.”
First-year students await their House assignments as they watch the festivities below their residence hall.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Dressed as the Cabot House mascot, Max Wagner ’27 prepares to enter a first-year dorm room.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
A Currier House resident waves the House flag.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
After delivering a Housing Day letter to a first-year dorm, bunny-eared Leverett House students boo Dunster House residents as they exit.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Amelie Lima ’27 holds up a Currier House sign.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Adams House residents wave to first-years in their dorm rooms.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Niels Korsgaard ’25 (left) of Mather House rallies atop the John Harvard Statue.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
In Annenberg Hall Michael Young ’25 (from left), Naomi Whidden ’27, Emily Schwartz ’27, and Mila Ivanovska ’25 pose for a photo at the Dunster House table.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Harrison Warfel ’26 of Quincy House makes himself heard over the boisterous crowd.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Lowell and Eliot House residents show their spirit.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
An Eliot House resident in a mastodon costume rallies the group.
How closely have you been following the Gazette? Take our quiz to find out.
Ditching butter has a big impact. Climate change is changing the forest. The cost of homeowners insurance is screwy. Drug manufacturing costs could be lower. Harvard runs (or ran) on typewriters.
Fourth-year Aravind Krishnan, the inaugural Sarah Katz Award recipient, is working to help shelter residents in Philadelphia better monitor their health.
Geophysicist Douglas Jerolmack has used the mathematical framework developed for understanding fracture patterns on Earth to survey two-dimensional fracture networks across the solar system, which could offer insights into detecting potentially habitable environments on other planets.
Annabelle Jin, a fourth-year student in the College of Arts and Sciences, is one of 16 recipients selected by the Henry Luce Foundation to be a 2025-26 Luce Scholar.
At a gathering at Eisenlohr Hall, a portrait of renowned architect Julian Abele and a series of his paintings were unveiled, formally recognizing his design contributions to one of campus’ iconic structures.
For the last two years, the Perelman School of Medicine has partnered with the African Family Health Organization to offer weekly family-medicine/primary care clinics for recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.
Through a community-led partnership project, graduate student Eileen Feng and an interdisciplinary, cross-school team are working with local youth to tailor an AI-supported platform for healing through creative arts.
The Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials, a joint endeavor between Penn Arts Sciences and the Penn Museum, celebrates 10 years of teaching students how to interpret the past in an interdisciplinary context.
At Penn’s Graduate School of Education, the Penn Center for Learning Analytics is piloting an AI teaching assistant that fields students’ syllabus questions, generates assignment feedback, and eases the stress of instructors’ and TAs’ emailing schedules.
More than 60,000 tons of plastic makes the journey down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean every year. And that doesn’t include what finds its way to the river’s banks, or the microplastics ingested by the region’s abundant and diverse wildlife.
It’s easy to demonize plastic, but it has been crucial in developing the society we live in today. Creating materials that have the benefits of plastics while reducing the harms of traditional production methods is a goal of chemical engineering and materials science labs the world over, including that of Bradley Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.
Olsen, a Fulbright Amazonia scholar and the faculty lead of MIT-Brazil, works with communities to develop alternative plastics solutions that can be derived from resources within their own environments.
“The word that we use for this is co-design,” says Olsen. “The idea is, instead of engineers just designing something independently, they engage and jointly design the solution with the stakeholders.”
In this case, the stakeholders were small businesses around Manaus in the Brazilian state of Amazonas curious about the feasibility of bioplastics and other alternative packaging.
“Plastics are inherent to modern life and actually perform key functions and have a really beautiful chemistry that we want to be able to continue to leverage, but we want to do it in a way that is more earth-compatible,” says Desirée Plata, MIT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.
That’s why Plata joined Olsen in creating the course 1.096/10.496 (Design of Sustainable Polymer Systems) in 2021. Now, as a Global Classroom offering under the umbrella of MISTI since 2023, the class brings MIT students to Manaus during the three weeks of Independent Activities Period (IAP).
“In my work running the Global Teaching Labs in Brazil since 2016, MIT students collaborate closely with Brazilian undergraduates,” says Rosabelli Coelho-Keyssar, managing director of MIT-Brazil and MIT-Amazonia, who also runs MIT’s Global Teaching Labs program in Brazil. “This peer-learning model was incorporated into the Global Classroom in Manaus, ensuring that MIT and Brazilian students worked together throughout the course.”
The class leadership worked with climate scientist and MIT alumnus Carlos Nobre PhD ’83, who facilitated introductions to faculty at the Universidade Estadual de Amazonas (UAE), the state university of Amazonas. The group then scouted businesses in the Amazonas region who would be interested in partnering with the students.
“In the first year, it was Comunidade Julião, a community of people living on the edge of the Tarumã Mirim River west of Manaus,” says Olsen. “This year, we worked with Comunidade Para Maravilha, a community living in the dry land forest east of Manaus.”
A tailored solution
Plastic, by definition, is made up of many small carbon-based molecules, called monomers, linked by strong bonds into larger molecules called polymers. Linking different monomers and polymers in different ways creates different plastics — from trash bags to a swimming pool float to the dashboard of a car. Plastics are traditionally made from petroleum byproducts that are easy to link together, stable, and plentiful.
But there are ways to reduce the use of petroleum-based plastics. Packaging can be made from materials found within the local ecosystem, as was the focus of the 2024 class. Or carbon-based monomers can be extracted from high-starch plant matter through a number of techniques, the goal of the 2025 cohort. But plants that grow well in one location might not in another. And bioplastic production facilities can be tricky to install if the necessary resources aren’t immediately available.
“We can design a whole bunch of new sustainable chemical processes, use brand new top-of-the-line catalysts, but if you can’t actually implement them sustainably inside an environment, it falls short on a lot of the overall goals,” says Brian Carrick, a PhD candidate in the Olsen lab and a teaching assistant for the 2025 course offering.
So, identifying local candidates and tailoring the process is key. The 2025 MIT cohort collaborated with students from throughout the Amazonas state to explore the local flora, study its starch content in the lab, and develop a new plastic-making process — all within the three weeks of IAP.
“It’s easy when you have projects like this to get really locked into the MIT vacuum of just doing what sounds really cool, which isn’t always effective or constructive for people actually living in that environment,” says Claire Underwood, a junior chemical-biological engineering major who took the class. “That’s what really drew me into the project, being able to work with people in Brazil.”
The 31 students visited a protected area of the Amazon rainforest on Day One. They also had chances throughout IAP to visit the Amazon River, where the potential impact of their work became clear as they saw plastic waste collecting on its banks.
“That was a really cool aspect to the class, for sure, being able to actually see what we were working towards protecting and what the goal was,” says Underwood.
They interviewed stakeholders, such as farmers who could provide the feedstock and plastics manufacturers who could incorporate new techniques. Then, they got into the classroom, where massive intellectual ground was covered in a crash course on the sustainable design process, the nitty gritty of plastic production, and the Brazilian cultural context on how building such an industry would affect the community. For the final project, they separated into teams to craft preliminary designs of process and plant using a simplified model of these systems.
Connecting across boundaries
Working in another country brought to the fore how interlinked policy, culture, and technical solutions are.
“I know nothing about economics, and especially not Brazilian economics and politics,” says Underwood. But one of the Brazilian students in her group was a management and finance major. “He was super helpful when we were trying to source things and account for inflation and things like that — knowing what was feasible, and not just academically feasible.”
Before they parted at the end of IAP, each team presented their proposals to a panel of company representatives and Brazilian MIT alumni who chose first-, second-, and third-place winners. While more research is needed before comfortably implementing the ideas, the experience seemed to generate legitimate interest in creating a local bioplastics production facility.
Understanding sustainable design concepts and how to do interdisciplinary work is an important skill to learn. Even if these students don’t wind up working on bioplastics in the heart of the Amazon, being able to work with people of different perspectives — be it a different discipline or a different culture — is valuable in virtually every field.
“The exchange of knowledge across different fields and cultures is essential for developing innovative and sustainable solutions to global challenges such as climate change, waste management, and the development of eco-friendly materials,” says Taisa Sampaio, a PhD candidate in materials chemistry at UEA and a co-instructor for the course. “Programs like this are crucial in preparing professionals who are more aware and better equipped to tackle future challenges.”
Right now, Olsen and Plata are focused on harnessing the deep well of connections and resources they have around Manaus, but they hope to develop that kind of network elsewhere to expand this sustainable design exploration to other regions of the world.
“A lot of sustainability solutions are hyperlocal,” says Plata. “Understanding that not all locales are exactly the same is really powerful and important when we’re thinking about sustainability challenges. And it’s probably where we've gone wrong with the one-size-fits-all or silver-bullet solution — seeking that we’ve been doing for the past many decades.”
Collaborations for the 2026 trip are still in development but, as Olsen says, “we hope this is an experience we can continue to offer long into the future, based on how positive it has been for our students and our Brazilian partners.”
The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge and the Eindhoven University of Technology, have created an organic semiconductor that forces electrons to move in a spiral pattern, which could improve the efficiency of OLED displays in television and smartphone screens, or power next-generation computing technologies such as spintronics and quantum computing.
The semiconductor they developed emits circularly polarised light—meaning the light carries information about the ‘handedness’ of electrons. The internal structure of most inorganic semiconductors, like silicon, is symmetrical, meaning electrons move through them without any preferred direction.
However, in nature, molecules often have a chiral (left- or right-handed) structure: like human hands, chiral molecules are mirror images of one another. Chirality plays an important role in biological processes like DNA formation, but it is a difficult phenomenon to harness and control in electronics.
But by using molecular design tricks inspired by nature, the researchers created a chiral semiconductor by nudging stacks of semiconducting molecules to form ordered right-handed or left-handed spiral columns. Their results are reported in the journal Science.
One promising application for chiral semiconductors is in display technology. Current displays often waste a significant amount of energy due to the way screens filter light. The chiral semiconductor developed by the researchers naturally emits light in a way that could reduce these losses, making screens brighter and more energy-efficient.
“When I started working with organic semiconductors, many people doubted their potential, but now they dominate display technology,” said Professor Sir Richard Friend from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who co-led the research. “Unlike rigid inorganic semiconductors, molecular materials offer incredible flexibility—allowing us to design entirely new structures, like chiral LEDs. It’s like working with a Lego set with every kind of shape you can imagine, rather than just rectangular bricks.”
The semiconductor is based on a material called triazatruxene (TAT) that self-assembles into a helical stack, allowing electrons to spiral along its structure, like the thread of a screw.
“When excited by blue or ultraviolet light, self-assembled TAT emits bright green light with strong circular polarisation—an effect that has been difficult to achieve in semiconductors until now,” said co-first author Marco Preuss, from the Eindhoven University of Technology. “The structure of TAT allows electrons to move efficiently while affecting how light is emitted.”
By modifying OLED fabrication techniques, the researchers successfully incorporated TAT into working circularly polarised OLEDs (CP-OLEDs). These devices showed record-breaking efficiency, brightness, and polarisation levels, making them the best of their kind.
“We’ve essentially reworked the standard recipe for making OLEDs like we have in our smartphones, allowing us to trap a chiral structure within a stable, non-crystallising matrix,” said co-first author Rituparno Chowdhury, from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. “This provides a practical way to create circularly polarised LEDs, something that has long eluded the field.”
The work is part of a decades-long collaboration between Friend’s research group and the group of Professor Bert Meijer from the Eindhoven University of Technology. “This is a real breakthrough in making a chiral semiconductor,” said Meijer. “By carefully designing the molecular structure, we’ve coupled the chirality of the structure to the motion of the electrons and that’s never been done at this level before.”
The chiral semiconductors represent a step forward in the world of organic semiconductors, which now support an industry worth over $60 billion (about £45 billion). Beyond displays, this development also has implications for quantum computing and spintronics—a field of research that uses the spin, or inherent angular momentum, of electrons to store and process information, potentially leading to faster and more secure computing systems.
The research was supported in part by the European Union’s Marie Curie Training Network and the European Research Council. Richard Friend is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Rituparno Chowdhury is a member of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Converting one type of cell to another — for example, a skin cell to a neuron — can be done through a process that requires the skin cell to be induced into a “pluripotent” stem cell, then differentiated into a neuron. Researchers at MIT have now devised a simplified process that bypasses the stem cell stage, converting a skin cell directly into a neuron.
Working with mouse cells, the researchers developed a conversion method that is highly efficient and can produce more than 10 neurons from a single skin cell. If replicated in human cells, this approach could enable the generation of large quantities of motor neurons, which could potentially be used to treat patients with spinal cord injuries or diseases that impair mobility.
“We were able to get to yields where we could ask questions about whether these cells can be viable candidates for the cell replacement therapies, which we hope they could be. That’s where these types of reprogramming technologies can take us,” says Katie Galloway, the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering.
As a first step toward developing these cells as a therapy, the researchers showed that they could generate motor neurons and engraft them into the brains of mice, where they integrated with host tissue.
Galloway is the senior author of two papers describing the new method, which appear today in Cell Systems. MIT graduate student Nathan Wang is the lead author of both papers.
From skin to neurons
Nearly 20 years ago, scientists in Japan showed that by delivering four transcription factors to skin cells, they could coax them to become induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Similar to embryonic stem cells, iPSCs can be differentiated into many other cell types. This technique works well, but it takes several weeks, and many of the cells don’t end up fully transitioning to mature cell types.
“Oftentimes, one of the challenges in reprogramming is that cells can get stuck in intermediate states,” Galloway says. “So, we’re using direct conversion, where instead of going through an iPSC intermediate, we’re going directly from a somatic cell to a motor neuron.”
Galloway’s research group and others have demonstrated this type of direct conversion before, but with very low yields — fewer than 1 percent. In Galloway’s previous work, she used a combination of six transcription factors plus two other proteins that stimulate cell proliferation. Each of those eight genes was delivered using a separate viral vector, making it difficult to ensure that each was expressed at the correct level in each cell.
In the first of the new Cell Systems papers, Galloway and her students reported a way to streamline the process so that skin cells can be converted to motor neurons using just three transcription factors, plus the two genes that drive cells into a highly proliferative state.
Using mouse cells, the researchers started with the original six transcription factors and experimented with dropping them out, one at a time, until they reached a combination of three — NGN2, ISL1, and LHX3 — that could successfully complete the conversion to neurons.
Once the number of genes was down to three, the researchers could use a single modified virus to deliver all three of them, allowing them to ensure that each cell expresses each gene at the correct levels.
Using a separate virus, the researchers also delivered genes encoding p53DD and a mutated version of HRAS. These genes drive the skin cells to divide many times before they start converting to neurons, allowing for a much higher yield of neurons, about 1,100 percent.
“If you were to express the transcription factors at really high levels in nonproliferative cells, the reprogramming rates would be really low, but hyperproliferative cells are more receptive. It’s like they’ve been potentiated for conversion, and then they become much more receptive to the levels of the transcription factors,” Galloway says.
The researchers also developed a slightly different combination of transcription factors that allowed them to perform the same direct conversion using human cells, but with a lower efficiency rate — between 10 and 30 percent, the researchers estimate. This process takes about five weeks, which is slightly faster than converting the cells to iPSCs first and then turning them into neurons.
Implanting cells
Once the researchers identified the optimal combination of genes to deliver, they began working on the best ways to deliver them, which was the focus of the second Cell Systems paper.
They tried out three different delivery viruses and found that a retrovirus achieved the most efficient rate of conversion. Reducing the density of cells grown in the dish also helped to improve the overall yield of motor neurons. This optimized process, which takes about two weeks in mouse cells, achieved a yield of more than 1,000 percent.
Working with colleagues at Boston University, the researchers then tested whether these motor neurons could be successfully engrafted into mice. They delivered the cells to a part of the brain known as the striatum, which is involved in motor control and other functions.
After two weeks, the researchers found that many of the neurons had survived and seemed to be forming connections with other brain cells. When grown in a dish, these cells showed measurable electrical activity and calcium signaling, suggesting the ability to communicate with other neurons. The researchers now hope to explore the possibility of implanting these neurons into the spinal cord.
The MIT team also hopes to increase the efficiency of this process for human cell conversion, which could allow for the generation of large quantities of neurons that could be used to treat spinal cord injuries or diseases that affect motor control, such as ALS. Clinical trials using neurons derived from iPSCs to treat ALS are now underway, but expanding the number of cells available for such treatments could make it easier to test and develop them for more widespread use in humans, Galloway says.
The research was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Researchers at MIT have devised a simplified process to convert a skin cell directly into a neuron. This image shows converted neurons (green) that have integrated with neurons in the brain’s striatum after implantation.
One of the University’s largest events of the year, the NUS120 Open House 2025 held on 8 March 2025 saw over 21,000 visitors pack the Kent Ridge and Bukit Timah campuses for a vibrant, informative and diverse showcase of what NUS has to offer.
Coinciding with NUS’ 120th anniversary this year, the event, which included a six-day virtual segment, provided a glimpse into the distinctive educational approach of Singapore’s first higher education institution and flagship university.
Kicking off the online segment from 1 to 6 March were virtual talks by the Office of Admissions that acquainted prospective students with the University’s educational offerings. These include over 60 bachelor’s degree programmes, interdisciplinary and flexible pathways, as well as opportunities for career development and global experiences. Talks, webinars and social media sessions by NUS Business School, NUS Law and the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health were among the other presentations that took place during the online Open House.
The on-campus event saw throngs of prospective students and parents turn up to explore the various facets of NUS’ academic and student life. From programme booths, talks and masterclasses, to student life performances, campus tours and residential showcases, visitors got a taste of the well-rounded experience at NUS.
Nicole Yeo, a graduate from River Valley High School, said, “The Open House has provided me a glimpse into the school culture and I managed to clear my doubts, enabling me to make a more informed decision about my applications.
“I found the booths the most informative as not only were the programme booklets useful, the faculty members and students there were very eager to share with me about their programmes and answer my queries,” said Nicole, who is considering majors in Environmental Studies, Geography and Environmental and Sustainability Engineering.
From a robotics fair to an International Women’s Day symposium and a display of NUS’ cutting-edge innovations, these were just some highlights from the Open House.
Robots revolutionising life, work and play
The College of Design and Engineering’s (CDE) showcase included an exciting Robotics Fair, featuring robots that transform the way we live, work and play spread over 29 booths and complemented by novel robot demonstrations and displays. Among the projects were an AI-powered system that enhances eye surgery precision based on deep learning methods; the HEXR Glove, a revolutionary haptic device that mimics the sensation of touch by recreating realistic tactile sensations; and industrial exoskeletons that employ advanced sensors and algorithms to reduce the risk of workplace injury.
Role of universities in shaping gender equity
With the Open House coinciding with International Women’s Day, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences hosted a symposium discussing gender equity entitled “Accelerating Action: Transforming Knowledge into Impact”. Bringing together Dr Adelyn Lim, Associate Professor Michelle Lazar, Associate Professor Kamalini Ramdas and Dr Suriani Suratman, it highlighted the role universities can play in driving meaningful change and challenging entrenched gender norms through research, education and community engagement.
Impactful and interactive innovations
Visitors had the chance to interact with innovative projects by students and researchers at CDE, NUS College and the College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS) that are making a real-world impact at The NUS120 Experience – Innovation and Impact Hub.
On display was an impressive R24E-model racecar project by NUS Formula SAE, a group of passionate CDE undergraduates who design, build and race a Formula-style race car every year. Prospective students tried their hand at building bamboo structures guided by Team Aruga from NUS College’s Impact Experience Philippines (IExPhilippines) programme, which champions bamboo as a sustainable solution for green economic development. CHS showcased marine biodiversity enhancement units developed by its Experimental Marine Ecology Lab, a form of ecological engineering of artificial coastal structures that support marine life.
Prospective students learnt how the new robotics engineering specialisation will equip students with versatile skillsets that integrate mechanical, electrical and computer engineering with data science and artificial intelligence. Associate Professor Peter Chan also shared how the programme will prepare students for the future of intelligent robotics, through careers in industries such as defence, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and consumer electronics.
Pavithra Kannan from Raffles Institution, who plans to apply to Mechanical Engineering, found the talk informative. “I managed to learn about the course and possible career prospects. It was interesting to see how diverse the curriculum could be considering you can take different minors and specialisations to truly customise your own curriculum,” she said.
Over at CDE’s talk for Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Industrial Design, lecturers elaborated on the depth and breadth of the comprehensive curricula, faculty expertise, and career prospects for graduates, giving prospective students a well-rounded idea of the diverse skillsets and capabilities they will acquire.
Getting an edge in AI
Making its debut at the Computing showcase was the new Bachelor of Computing in Artificial Intelligence(AI) degree programme, also launching in August. Providing a strong foundation in mathematics, computer science and AI fundamentals, it will enable students to pursue specialisations in areas like robotics, computer vision and bioinformatics, opening doors to careers as AI engineers, machine learning engineers and data scientists.
Students also heard about the Bachelor in Business AI Systems programme. A revamp of the Information Systems degree, it involves solving business problems with AI systems and digital innovation. The programme offers three specialisations – AI governance and management, digital product and platform management, and financial technology – as well as internships with start-ups and multinational companies.
Life Sciences – one of the biggest majors within CHS – presented its comprehensive programme that offers students the option of two specialisations: Biomedical Sciences; and Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity. Along with a range of minors like Aquatic Ecology and Forensic Science, it aims to nurture versatile scientists for careers in fields such as biotechnology, food security and environmental sustainability.
The joint programme talks organised by FASS included a Geography and Global Studies session that compared the two programmes. Highlighting their shared multidisciplinary approach, it contrasted Geography’s focus on the environment and society with Global Studies’ close examination of globalisation’s effects, emphasising the differing skill sets and career paths.
Interdisciplinary insights
Along with talks and college tours, NUS College, Singapore’s first honours college, hosted special classes to showcase its stimulating interdisciplinary curriculum.
In Dr Roweena Yip’s class, “Tragedy, Culture, and Society”, students examined how societies are transformed by tragic events, using art, literature and pop culture to analyse the concept through historical, political and emotional dimensions. During Dr Chan Kiat Hwa’s class on nuclear waste and their implications on safety and acceptance, students explored the scientific basis of nuclear energy, the different approaches for storage and disposal, and the profound challenge of warning future generations of the long-term risks present in nuclear waste sites.
Prospective students also explored various avenues for artistic expression. In line with the new Arts For All framework, which aims to integrate the arts more deeply into student life and the academic journey at NUS, the myriad of opportunities for participation in the arts were discussed at a talk by the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music.
Various second major programmes and academic pathways were shared, such as the Second Major in Audio Arts and Sciences, which develops students into skilled audio engineers and sound designers with both technical expertise and an understanding of music. Prospective students also heard about the NUS Centre for the Arts’ Second Major in Performing Arts, which prepares students for careers not only in the performing arts but in the arts industry and beyond, through real-world performance experience and vocational learning.
Those interested in starting a healthcare career had the chance to discover NUS’ academic programmes in Nursing, Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy and gain insights from alumni in the industry about their professional journeys. Pharmacy, which offers the only degree programme in Singapore training undergraduates as registered pharmacists, held a talk discussing the multi-faceted roles of pharmacists across different sectors, from healthcare and research to manufacturing and regulation. Nursing’s immersive special class employed virtual reality simulations and hands-on training using a mannequin, giving students the chance to try their hand at various clinical procedures.
At Bukit Timah Campus, students joined Law's ever-popular mock moot and attended masterclasses on legal topics such as criminal justice and international arbitration.
NUS’ strong entrepreneurial culture was also underscored through NUS Enterprise’s showcase of key initiatives like NUS Overseas Colleges, NUS Enterprise Summer and Winter Programmes in Entrepreneurship, and BLOCK71, highlighting the University’s vibrant innovation ecosystem and the many opportunities for budding entrepreneurs to tap on its networks.
For the first time, the programme included a fireside chat featuring Olympic champion Joseph Schooling, which saw him share about his life journey and emphasise the importance of self-belief, family support, and taking calculated risks. He also credited his Olympic achievement to dedication and pushing boundaries— attributes that are core to entrepreneurship.
Spotlight on student and campus life
Visitors at the Student Village were treated to a vibrant kaleidoscope of performances and showcases from diverse student clubs and interest groups, featuring some of NUS’ brightest talents in the performing arts. Serenading visitors across a range of genres including pop, rock, indie and R&B were the Sheares Band and Raffles Hall’s acapella group RHythm, along with other acts.
The performances and activities gave visitors a taste of NUS life beyond academics, driving home the mission of NUS’ latest NUSOne initiative, which aims to encourage greater self-directed personal growth and development among students, as well as synergise the University’s formal classroom learning with out-of-classroom experiences.
Masters, Resident Fellows, and student leaders from the Residential Colleges (RC), Halls, and Houses were also present to offer prospective students the inside scoop through talks, sample classes and guided tours.
NUS’ two newest residential units also made their debut at this year’s Open House. Valour House showcased its active and inclusive culture with an informative booth and exciting games and prizes. Acacia College, an upcoming RC focusing on artificial and human intelligences, shared how students will explore the relationship between AI and all facets of life and work while acquiring AI-related skills.
Besides engaging prospective students with anecdotes of on-campus living and information on their signature initiatives and pastoral care, the hostels also showcased the diverse student life and interest groups available, such as the uplifting band performances by the College of Alice and Peter Tan and Tembusu College.
Amber Lee, a graduate of Victoria Junior College who is considering Ridge View Residential College (RVRC) and Tembusu College, found the RC booths helpful. “There were many professors and students in the programme enthusiastically answering my questions of anything and everything about the RC, such as the professor at the RVRC booth who gave me a very thorough breakdown of modules and type of content taught at RVRC.”
The gift from philanthropist Tom Secunda, co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., will help fund artificial intelligence-related research at Cornell Tech in New York City and at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science in Ithaca.
Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, who is Director of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore), Distinguished Professor of Medicine at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and Research Director at the Agency for Science, Technology & Research’s (A*STAR) Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, has been elected to the 2025 class of Fellows of the prestigious American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Academy. Standings among an exceptional group of 33 newly inducted Fellows this year, he is honoured for his pioneering contributions to cancer research.
Prof Venkitaraman’s research has elucidated the tumour suppressive functions of the hereditary breast cancer gene, BRCA2, in genome maintenance. His work has been instrumental in uncovering the mechanisms responsible for carcinogenesis in BRCA2 mutation carriers, and advancing technologies to accelerate drug discovery, thereby establishing a foundation for the development of novel cancer therapies.
“I am deeply honoured to be elected to the AACR Academy, the world’s oldest and largest cancer research organisation. It is a great privilege to join such a distinguished group of global colleagues who have made transformative contributions for the lasting benefit of patients,” said Prof Venkitaraman.
He added, “This recognition is not mine alone—it also felicitates the achievements of a far-flung family of staff, students, fellows, and collaborators in my team whose contributions and camaraderie have made my work possible. It also underscores the excellence of research conducted at CSI Singapore, made possible through the generous support of our funders and donors. I am proud to be part of the remarkable scientific community at NUS and A*STAR in Singapore, and remain committed to advancing discoveries that improve patient outcomes worldwide.”
The AACR Academy honours outstanding scientists who have made significant contributions in driving innovation and progress in the fight against cancer. Fellows of the AACR Academy serve as a global brain trust of leading experts in cancer science and medicine, working to advance the AACR’s mission to prevent and cure all cancers through research, education, collaboration, communication, advocacy, and funding for cancer research.
Fellows of the AACR Academy are nominated and elected through a meticulous peer-reviewed process that rigorously evaluates each candidate’s scientific achievements and contributions to the global cancer research community. Scientists whose work have made a deep and lasting impact on cancer research and related fields are considered for election and induction into the AACR Academy.
“The 2025 class of Fellows of the AACR Academy perfectly exemplifies the pinnacle of scientific innovation and excellence, with their collective scientific contributions fundamentally advancing our understanding of cancer biology and treatment. We are thrilled to welcome them to our distinguished group of Fellows of the AACR Academy, now numbering 375, and look forward to celebrating their groundbreaking achievements at our upcoming Annual Meeting in April 2025,” said AACR Chief Executive Officer Dr Margaret Foti.
A modulator developed by researchers from ETH Zurich has broken the terahertz mark. The ultrafast component efficiently transmits large volumes of data into the fibre-optic network in a short space of time.
Three outstanding educators have been named MacVicar Faculty Fellows: associate professor in comparative media studies/writing Paloma Duong, associate professor of economics Frank Schilbach, and associate professor of urban studies and planning Justin Steil.
For more than 30 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program has recognized exemplary and sustained contributions to undergraduate education at MIT. The program is named in honor of Margaret MacVicar, MIT’s first dean for undergraduate education and founder of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Fellows are chosen through a highly competitive, annual nomination process. The MIT Registrar’s Office coordinates and administers the award on behalf of the Office of the Vice Chancellor; nominations are reviewed by an advisory committee, and final selections are made by the provost.
Paloma Duong: Equipping students with a holistic, global worldview
Paloma Duong is the Ford International Career Development Associate Professor of Latin American and Media Studies. Her work has helped to reinvigorate Latin American subject offerings, increase the number of Spanish minors, and build community at the Institute.
Duong brings an interdisciplinary perspective to teaching Latin American culture in dialogue with media theory and political philosophy in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) program. Her approach is built on a foundation of respect for each student’s unique academic journey and underscores the importance of caring for the whole student, honoring where they can go as intellectuals, and connecting them to a world bigger than themselves.
Senior Alex Wardle says that Professor Duong “broadened my worldview and made me more receptive to new concepts and ideas … her class has deepened my critical thinking skills in a way that very few other classes at MIT have even attempted to.”
Duong’s Spanish language classes and seminars incorporate a wide range of practices — including cultural analyses, artifacts, guest speakers, and hands-on multimedia projects — to help students engage with the material, think critically, and challenge preconceived notions while learning about Latin American history. CMS/W head and professor of science writing Seth Mnookin notes, “students become conversant with region-specific vocabularies, worldviews, and challenges.” This approach makes students feel “deeply respected” and treats them as “learning partners — interlocutors in their own right,” observes Bruno Perreau, the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies and Language.
Outside the classroom, Duong takes the time to mentor and get to know students by supporting and attending programs connected to MIT Cubanos, Cena a las Seis, and Global Health Alliance. She also serves as an advisor for comparative media studies and Spanish majors, is the undergraduate officer for CMS/W, and is a member of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Education Advisory Committee and the Committee on Curricula.
“Subject areas like Spanish and Latin American Studies play an important role at MIT,” writes T.L. Taylor, professor in comparative media studies/writing and MacVicar Faculty Fellow. “Students find a sense of community and support in these spaces, something that should be at the heart of our attention more than ever these days. We are lucky to have such a dynamic and engaged educator like Professor Duong.”
On receiving this award, Duong says, “I’m positively elated! I’m very grateful to my students and colleagues for the nomination and am honored to become part of such a remarkable group of fellow teachers and mentors. Teaching undergraduates at MIT is always a beautiful challenge and an endless source of learning; I feel super lucky to be in this position.”
Frank Schilbach: Bringing energy and excitement to the curriculum
Frank Schilbach is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. His connection and dedication to undergraduates, combined with his efforts in communicating the importance of economics as a field of study, were key components in the revitalization of Course 14.
When Schilbach arrived at MIT in 2015, there were only three sophomore economics majors. “A less committed teacher would have probably just taken it as a given and got on with their research,” writes professor of economics Abhijit Banerjee. “Frank, instead, took it as a challenge … his patient efforts in convincing students that they need to make economics a part of their general education was a key reason why innovations [to broaden the major] succeeded. The department now has more than 40 sophomores.”
In addition to bolstering enrollment, Schilbach had a hand in curricular improvements. Among them, he created a “next step” for students completing class 14.01 (Principles of Microeconomics) with a revised class 14.13 (Psychology and Economics) that goes beyond classic topics in behavioral economics to explore links with poverty, mental health, happiness, and identity.
Even more significant is the thoughtful and inclusive approach to teaching that Schilbach brings. “He is considerate and careful, listening to everyone, explaining concepts while making students understand that we care about them … it is just a joy to see how the students revel in the activities and the learning,” writes Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. Erin Grela ’20 notes, “Professor Schilbach goes above and beyond to solicit student feedback so that he can make real-time changes to ensure that his classes are serving his students as best they can.”
His impacts extend beyond MIT as well. Professor of economics David Atkin writes: “Many of these students are inspired by their work with Frank to continue their studies at the graduate level, with an incredible 29 of his students going on to PhD studies at many of the best programs in the country. For someone who has only recently been promoted to a tenured professor, this is a remarkable record of advising.”
“I am delighted to be selected as a MacVicar Fellow,” says Schilbach. “I am thrilled that students find my courses valuable, and it brings me great joy to think that my teaching may help some students improve their well-being and inspire them to use their incredible talents to better the lives of others.”
Justin Steil: Experiential learning meets public service
“I am honored to join the MacVicar Faculty Fellows,” writes associate professor of law and urban planning Justin Steil. “I am deeply grateful to have the chance to teach and learn with such hard-working and creative students who are enthusiastic about collaborating to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems, in the classroom and beyond.”
Professor Steil uses his background as a lawyer, a sociologist, and an urban planner to combine experiential learning with opportunities for public service. In class 11.469 (Urban Sociology in Theory and Practice), he connects students with incarcerated individuals to examine inequality at one of the state’s largest prisons, MCI Norfolk. In another undergraduate seminar, students meet with leaders of local groups like GreenRoots in Chelsea, Massachusetts; Alternatives for Community and Environment in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury to work on urban environmental hazards. Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning and MacVicar Faculty Fellow Lawrence Vale calls Steil’s classes “life-altering.”
In addition to teaching, Steil is also a paramedic and has volunteered as an EMT for MIT Emergency Medical Service (EMS), where he continues to transform routine activities into teachable moments. “There are numerous opportunities at MIT to receive mentorship and perform research. Justin went beyond that. My conversations with Justin have inspired me to go to graduate school to research medical devices in the EMS context,” says Abigail Schipper ’24.
“Justin is truly devoted to the complete education of our undergraduate students in ways that meaningfully serve the broader MIT community as well as the residents of Cambridge and Boston,” says Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Biological Engineering Katharina Ribbeck. Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism and director of the Urban Risk Lab,concurs: “through his teaching, advising, mentoring, and connections with community-based organizations and public agencies, Justin has knit together diverse threads into a coherent undergraduate experience.”
Student testimonials also highlight Steil’s ability to make each student feel special by delivering undivided attention and individualized mentorship.A former student writes: “I was so grateful to have met an instructor who believed in his students so earnestly … despite being one of the busiest people I’ve ever known, [he] … unerringly made the students he works with feel certain that he always has time for them.”
Since joining MIT in 2015, Steil has received a Committed to Caring award in 2018; the Harold E. Edgerton Award for exceptional contributions in research, teaching, and service in 2021; and a First Year Advising Award from the Office of the First Year in 2022.
It’s going to get even harder to write (or at least type) like Sylvia Plath
Thomas Furrier.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Cambridge Typewriter, one of few shops left to buy, repair vintage machines, prepares to close doors after more than half a century
Ever since Tom Furrier announced he was closing Cambridge Typewriter the phone has been ringing off the hook.
“I’m going out on top,” hollered the 70-year-old on a recent morning at his storefront on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington, where he moved the business, which has been around for more than 50 years, after buying it from his old boss in 1990. “I’m busier than ever.”
Furrier’s tiny shop is a mid-century relic, with the smell of ink wafting through the door, framed period ads on the walls, and dozens of vintage manual typewriters emblazoned with names such as Underwood, Remington, Smith-Corona, and Royal perched on shelves and sitting on the floor in sturdy cases.
Like so many businesses, Furrier’s was disrupted by the digital revolution of the 1990s. But recent years have brought a modest renaissance for the 19th-century communication technology as a wave of young customers with a penchant for manual typewriters boosted the store’s finances.
This new cohort joined the shop’s shrinking group of regulars, which over the years has included celebrated writers like Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, novelist Celeste Ng (“Little Fires Everywhere”), memoirist Susanna Kaysen (“Girl, Interrupted”), and poet Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature — and generations of Harvard, MIT, and Boston-area students and faculty members.
Although his business is still robust, Furrier says he’s ready for retirement. Decades of lifting and fixing typewriters (about 30,000 by his count) have left him with worn cartilage in his hands and chronic back pain. After plans to sell the shop failed twice, he will shut down at the end of March.
It’s bittersweet.
“I’m really going to miss this place,” said Furrier, his work jacket showing stubborn grease stains and, in his pockets, his favorite tools: a spring hook and a small screwdriver to reach inside the machines’ nooks and crannies. “I’m going to miss my customers. My regular customers are very upset because now they’ll have to travel to southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island or southern Connecticut … But I’m just done.”
A forestry major and lifelong tinkerer, Furrier began as a typewriter technician in the 1980s, when he was 25. In those days he did mostly service calls at MIT and Harvard Law School, where he would fix machines used by scholars such as Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, and others, he said.
In recent years, others with links to Harvard have visited his shop, among them Tayari Jones, a 2011-2012 Radcliffe Fellow who became a typewriter devotee.
Jones’ encounter with Furrier was as serendipitous as it was consequential. Struggling with writer’s block, she visited the shop seeking inspiration.
“Tom made me into a convert,” said Jones, who teaches creative writing at Emory University, in a phone interview. “It wasn’t until I went to Tom’s that I discovered manual typewriters … Tom is the greatest typewriter doctor because he doesn’t run his shop like a museum. He’s not fussy and prissy about it. He’s very practical and down to earth. He wants us all just to have fun with the typewriter; just get it; put some paper in there; make some noise and make some art.”
“Tom is the greatest typewriter doctor because he doesn’t run his shop like a museum.”
Tayari Jones
Jones now writes on vintage manual typewriters. In fact, her 2018 award-winning best-seller “American Marriage” was produced entirely on a typewriter — one of the 11 in her collection, five of which she bought from Furrier.
“There’s so much pressure in the industry to be fast,” Jones said. “Using a typewriter made me feel like, I can slow down and work at my own pace … And there is something so satisfying about raising a racket when using a typewriter.”
Professors Jill Lepore and Leah Price visited Furrier’s shop as they were preparing for “How to Read a Book,” a seminar they co-taught a few years ago. The class asked students to think about the tools they use to take notes by recapitulating the history of note-taking technologies, Lepore wrote in an email. Students used clay and a stylus, paper and quills, typewriters and smartphones.
Lepore said she used the typewriters she bought from Furrier in a history class she taught in the fall.
“We visited Cambridge Typewriter some years back to stock up,” wrote Lepore. “I still use the three typewriters that I bought from him then … It’s harder and harder to find typewriters to use. When the ones I’ve got break down, or when I can no longer replace the ribbon, this crucial piece of the history of technology will be lost.”
Reached by email, Price, an associate in Harvard’s English Department and Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, said she had sort of an epiphany at Furrier’s store.
“Visiting Tom’s shop helped me understand that coming up with ideas is the easy part,” said Price. “Repairing the tools that record and transmitting those ideas turned out to be surprisingly tricky, and banging out their thoughts on a typewriter keyboard helped slow down our students to a pace where they had to think before they wrote. Come the apocalypse, every Crimson journalist may want to know how to change a typewriter ribbon.”
“Visiting Tom’s shop helped me understand that coming up with ideas is the easy part.”
Leah Price
Visitors often come to Furrier’s shop as if it were a museum or a curiosity shop.
“If people come in by themselves, they come back with family or friends because they say, ‘You’ve got to come to see this shop,”’ Furrier said. “Or people come with their grandkids to show them that this is what they used to write with.”
Furrier said it took him by surprise when a younger crowd started appearing in the early 2000s. Some were aspiring writers who wanted to emulate legendary ones, like the customer looking to purchase a Hermes 3000, the model famously used by American poet Sylvia Plath. Others were looking for something computers can’t offer.
“To write on a typewriter is a totally different experience than writing on a computer,” said Furrier. “It’s a sensorial experience; the sounds of the click-clack, the feel of the keys and the paper, the smell of the ink. And there are no distractions. Typewriters only do one thing; you can’t multitask on it, and that’s a new thing to younger people.”
“It’s a sensorial experience; the sounds of the click-clack, the feel of the keys and the paper, the smell of the ink. And there are no distractions. Typewriters only do one thing; you can’t multitask on it, and that’s a new thing to younger people.”
Thomas Furrier
Reflecting on his career, Furrier said he most cherishes the friendships he made with writers and some customers, and a couple of stints as a typewriter consultant for period films, among them one by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.
Other highlights include the time when actor Tom Hanks, a typewriter collector, gifted him an autographed Olympia SM4 machine with a typewritten letter asking him to “take good care of it and help it keep doing its job for another hundred years.”
And then there was being mentioned in the acknowledgment section by Jones in “American Marriage.”
To bid farewell, Furrier will hold a retirement party with typewriters for people to use on March 22 at the Fox Library in East Arlington. Longtime customers, friends, and the general public are all invited.
“It has been beyond my wildest dreams,” Furrier said of his career. “For a tinkerer like me, fixing typewriters has been fun and rewarding. I got to befriend some amazing writers and geek out about typewriters. And how many people can say they got movie credits and a book acknowledgement?”
On fiction, grief, and, most of all, ‘radical honesty’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares with readers the story behind ‘Dream Count,’ a novel she was scared she’d never finish
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
For Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, fiction is a calling. Last week, the former Radcliffe fellow and 2018 Class Day speaker visited Harvard Square to mark another milestone in her vocation with the release of “Dream Count” — a book more than 10 years in the making.
The author of four novels, Adichie published her third, the critically acclaimed “Americanah,” in 2013. For a while, she worried there wouldn’t be another.
“Dream Count” is “actually quite an emotional moment for me because in some ways, I can’t believe that I’ve actually written a novel,” Adichie told a packed crowd gathered in the First Parish Church for an event sponsored by Harvard Book Store. “At some point, I wasn’t sure that I would ever write a novel again, and I was terrified. It was an unbearable thought. And so I feel this immense gratitude to be here, to have people actually come out, and hear me talk about this novel.”
“Dream Count” follows four interconnected women as they pursue love and self-discovery through hardships. The first, whose story opens the book, is Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer from a privileged background living in the U.S. The narrative also follows her hyper-independent cousin, Omelogor, living in Nigeria; Zikora, a Nigerian lawyer in Washington whose life isn’t quite going to plan; and Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, whose tragedy unites the characters.
“When it comes to fiction, the whole point of it is that you have to let go. You have to be willing to go wherever it takes you,” Adichie told the audience members who filled the church’s 600-seat meetinghouse space.
The backdrop is the pandemic, when, as Adichie puts it, “The world sort of stopped briefly, and it was so surreal and so unique, that people reacted in all kinds of ways.” Even so, the novelist had a lot more on her mind than just COVID.
The new book is “about many things,” Adichie said. “It’s about thinking about the other lives that we might have led. Sometimes, even when we’re content in our own lives, we still imagine other paths that our destiny could have taken us on. And I think it’s also about knowing about how much one knows oneself, about how much one knows other people.”
“Dream Count” was shaped in part by personal shocks that revealed hidden interior truths, Adichie said. In 2020, when her father died from complications of kidney disease, the intensity of her grief surprised her. Instead of the numbness she expected, she began weeping and pounding the floor.
“I started thinking about self-knowledge after my father died,” she said. “I found myself thinking about what love is, and one of my conclusions is that to love a person is to attempt to know them. But at the same time, I think we’re limited by how much we can, in fact, know even ourselves. The fact that we that we can surprise ourselves is just endlessly fascinating to me.”
During the Q&A portion of the event, longtime fans and new readers alike praised Adichie for her rich characters and narrative skills. Some sought advice for dealing with political uncertainty. One aspiring novelist wanted to know how to write fiction without giving too much away.
“I think you do have to give too much of yourself away,” Adichie answered. “Fiction is my vocation. I think it’s the reason I’m here … And so when I’m writing fiction, I don’t think about my audience. I really do feel as though I’m suspended in this just wonderful, magical place.”
She added: “When it comes to fiction, the whole point of it is that you have to let go. You have to be willing to go wherever it takes you. That I think, is the fundamental requirement of writing good fiction — a certain kind of truth, a certain kind of, what I like to call radical honesty.”
Adichie gave birth to her first child, a daughter, in 2016, followed by twin boys in 2024. Asked about balancing work with family life, she said, “Motherhood is the greatest lesson that I’ve had in my life, but it does come at a cost. It requires a kind of balance and things that you need to step back from for a while, and it just is the way it is. When I started to feel that I was in that horrible writer’s block space, I would make time to read poetry … I did that in service to my writing even though the writing was not happening. There are small ways in which you can still hold onto whatever it is that you want to achieve, even if you are not able to fully engage with it at the time.”
Johnny can read. Jane can read. But they may not fully comprehend.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Ed School panel looks at how to reverse declining scores on recent ‘Nation’s Report Card’
Educators have made significant progress in the science of reading in recent decades. Teachers know how to get students to the point where they can take on simple declarative sentences. So Johnny and Jane can read — but they have trouble comprehending more complex ideas. There is still much work to do, said experts at an Ed School panel in a webinar on Thursday.
Moderated by Pamela Mason, senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the panel highlighted the need to improve literacy outcomes in light of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — which showed declines in reading scores for U.S. fourth and eighth graders.
“If you can’t read words off the page, you’re not going to understand what you read.”
Phil Capin
Assistant professor of education Phil Capin.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Experts discussed the science of reading, an interdisciplinary body of research, based on the Reading Rope concept, which teachers have been using since the 2000s to help children become skilled readers, capable not only of reading words but fully comprehending what they read. According to the reading rope model, many strands are woven into skilled reading, the biggest of which are word recognition and language comprehension.
Educators have succeeded in teaching word-recognition skills, such as phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition, but they are missing the mark in helping children learn language-comprehension skills, such as background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge, said professor of education James Kim. Educators need to use the reading rope model more effectively, he said.
“We know how to help kids climb easy structures,” said Kim. “We know how to help kids read familiar narrative texts like ‘The ants ate the chips at the picnic,’ but where we are struggling is in helping kids use that rope to climb very tall and very difficult structures. And you know what those structures are? They are NAEP scores.”
Phil Capin, assistant professor of education, agreed with Kim that educators could do more to help students develop comprehension skills, which are crucial to critical thinking and problem-solving. There is an array of skills and knowledge that contribute to successful reading comprehension, and they are all intertwined, he said. Early reading instruction and being able to read words are necessary, but they are insufficient for students to understand what they read. Both steps are critical.
“If you can’t read words off the page, you’re not going to understand what you read,” said Capin. “It should also be just as obvious that if you don’t understand what the individual words mean, you’re very unlikely to be able to understand the text.”
Vocabulary and background knowledge are the strongest predictors of reading comprehension, said Capin. Educators can find practice guides on how to help students build language comprehension skills at What Works Clearinghouse, an initiative of the Department of Education, he said.
“We’ve made progress in the science of reading simple text, yes. Now we need to make progress in the science of reading difficult science, math and English language arts text.”
James Kim
Professor of education James Kim.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Research has found that students engaged in active and purposeful reading and collaborative learning tend to achieve the best results. “If we want students to get better at reading and understanding texts, it’s critical that teachers take a step back and allow students the opportunity to engage successfully in reading difficult texts and to make meaning together,” said Capin.
Parents can do their part to help children learn to read and understand what they read, said Kim, by reading aloud more difficult books and teaching them new words. “We have to remember that reading to learn and preparing kids to read to learn can happen from birth, basically from the time the kids are born,” he said.
If anything, the declines in fourth and eighth graders’ reading scores underscore how hard it is for children to gain effective reading comprehension skills, said Kim. As part of the NAEP test, students have to read complex nonfiction texts that require high background knowledge.
“Do you know what we ask kids to read on the NAEP test?” said Kim. “We ask them to read about the U.S. Constitution. We ask them to read about the human body system. We ask them to understand what metamorphosis is, and that is what we have to do next as we think about making progress in the science of reading …
“We’ve made progress in the science of reading simple text, yes. Now we need to make progress in the science of reading difficult science, math and English language arts text.”
Rising econ star sheds light on power of exchange rates
Oleg Itskhoki, now a Clark Medalist, returns to Harvard
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Oleg Itskhoki.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Exchange rates aren’t a hot topic in the U.S., due to the dollar dominating global trade and acting as the benchmark for all other currency valuations.
“But in most countries of the world, the exchange rate looms very large,” said Professor of Economics Oleg Itskhoki, Ph.D. ’09. “In smaller open economies like Canada, Australia, Switzerland, or even Great Britain and Japan, the exchange rate matters quite a lot. Talk with central bankers in these countries, and they’re often more interested in the exchange rate than in inflation.”
Itskhoki, a rising star in international economics, joined the Harvard faculty last summer. The Russian-born macroeconomist is best known for partnering with Dmitry Mukhin on a series of papers showing why exchange rates against the U.S. dollar don’t always move with macroeconomic fundamentals like consumption, productivity, and monetary policy. Instead, factors in a country’s financial markets are the dominant driver.
At the center of the analysis is a more accurate framework for understanding exchange rates between currencies worldwide. Itskhoki was recognized for his work with the American Economic Association’s 2022 John Bates Clark Medal, a prestigious award recognizing significant contributions by economists younger than 40.
“There are really two branches of international economics: international trade and international macroeconomics. It’s very unusual but Oleg has established himself as a leader in both. He’s just a tremendous intellectual force.”
Kenneth Rogoff
“But even if Oleg hadn’t won the Clark Medal, he would be someone we want in this department,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics and Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics. “There are really two branches of international economics: international trade and international macroeconomics. It’s very unusual but Oleg has established himself as a leader in both. He’s just a tremendous intellectual force.”
Itskhoki, whose resume includes professorships at UCLA and Princeton, initially landed at Harvard as a Ph.D. student in the mid-’00s. His advisers included Elhanan Helpman, Ph.D. ’74; Pol Antràs; and Gita Gopinath (on leave since 2019 for leadership roles at the International Monetary Fund).
All three faculty veterans partnered with Itskhoki on research related to trade, globalization, and inequality. A series of papers with Gopinath and the late economics professor Emmanuel Farhi turned a macroeconomic lens on the real-world impacts of border taxes.
“When you announce an import tariff, your exchange rate appreciates immediately and this actually hurts your exporters even before the tariff is in place,” Itskhoki explained. “Few people outside the economics profession appreciate the fact that an import tariff is, in fact, equivalent to an export tax — a very import and rather general insight from a 1936 paper by Abba Lerner that has been quite central for a lot of my research.”
But Itskhoki situates his work squarely in the tradition of Rogoff, a leading expert on international finance who served as the IMF’s chief economist from 2001 to 2003.
In 2001, Rogoff co-authored an influential paper advancing a unified theory to explain many of the big puzzles in international macroeconomics. The purchasing-power-parity puzzle, for example, concerns how prices for the same product can vary from one country to the next even when adjusted for exchange rates.
Starting in 2016, Itskhoki partnered with Mukhin, now with the London School of Economics, to rethink many of the puzzles related to exchange rates in Rogoff’s analysis. Itskhoki and Mukhin’s first paper, published in 2021, introduced a simple model that solved these puzzles while more accurately predicting exchange rates between currencies worldwide.
As for the purchasing-power-parity puzzle, Rogoff chalked it up to citizens’ preference for domestically produced goods. Itskhoki’s work offered additional insights.
“He fleshes out the role of financial markets as well as the importance of monopoly in modern economies,” Rogoff explained.
This puzzle-solving research agenda is far from concluded. Itskhoki and Mukhin just published the second major paper in their series, expanding their framework to challenge previous exchange-rate modeling that hinges on factors such as inflation, productivity, or consumer demand.
“We show that forces like demand for a country’s assets must be more important in shaping the exchange rate than forces related to supply of goods and monetary policy.”
Oleg Itskhoki
“We show that forces like demand for a country’s assets must be more important in shaping the exchange rate than forces related to supply of goods and monetary policy,” Itskhoki said.
Two more publications are also in the works, both available now as working papers. The first lays out how economic sanctions impact exchange rates, with the test case being valuations of the ruble following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The other draws on the whole series to offer guidelines for policymakers worldwide.
“Should countries form a currency union like the Eurozone?” Itskhoki offered. “What are the costs and benefits of abandoning independent currencies — of adopting a common monetary policy — but losing the exchange rate flexibility? Is it good for the central bank to set a floating exchange rate? Should they partially fix it? Fully fix it? It was odd to discuss these questions without a reliable framework that could reproduce the actual properties of exchange rates.”
How to escape your silo (spoiler: friendship helps)
Co-authors of ‘What We Can’t Burn’ formed lasting bond even as they argued about best way to fight climate change
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Eve Driver and Tom Osborn agreed that the world urgently needed to ditch fossil fuels. But the Harvard College classmates, both engaged with campus conversations on climate change, saw very different ways of getting there.
Driver viewed the push for carbon-free energy sources as a historical analog to the Civil Rights Movement.
“But Tom was like, ‘No, this is much more akin to when we switched from horses and buggies to cars,’” Driver recalled.
Each slowly came to see the wisdom in the other’s perspective, with direct, and often difficult, conversations, proving the building blocks of a lasting bond. Driver and Osborn went on to publish “What We Can’t Burn: Friendship and Friction in the Fight for Our Energy Future” (2024). In a recent appearance at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, they read from the book and traded insights on fostering connections like the one they forged as Class of ’20 undergrads.
“When I discovered this book, I found it so moving that it entered my own research on friendship and politics,” offered Ethics Center Director Eric Beerbohm, the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Government and senior adviser of the FAS Civil Discourse initiative. “I told them, ‘You’ve almost created a genre here.’”
Osborn, who studied psychology, had been the teenage founder of a clean cooking fuel company in his home in Kenya. He was in high school when his mother was diagnosed with a respiratory tract infection, caused by inhaling smoke while cooking with charcoal, the local standard.
“I grew up in a setting where government doesn’t really work,” Osborn said. “I thought, if someone’s going to solve this clean cooking problem for my mom, it’s not going to be the government. It was going to take an entrepreneur to do it.”
Driver, who grew up in suburban Boston loving Ralph Waldo Emerson, remembered being skeptical of Osborn based, in part, on the name he chose for his company: GreenChar.
“The climate crisis demands radical and uncomfortable forms of cooperation between people with all kinds of reasons not to trust or talk to each other.”
Tom Osborn and Eve Driver
“I was very skeptical about greenwashing,” said Driver, now a Brooklyn-based writer and strategist focused on the clean energy transition. “There’s a lot of companies I was learning about that advertised themselves as green but were really not very green.”
“What We Can’t Burn” alternates between the voices of Driver and Osborn during their junior year at Harvard, a memoir-like format that captures how sparring partners can evolve into trusted pals who expand each other’s thinking. “The climate crisis demands radical and uncomfortable forms of cooperation between people with all kinds of reasons not to trust or talk to each other,” they write in the introduction.
The Feb. 27 conversation touched on an event, explored at length in the book, that nearly broke their relationship: Driver’s involvement in a fossil fuel divestment protest that halted a 2019 Kennedy School event featuring then-Harvard President Larry Bacow.
“I felt like that tactic was to some extent alienating,” said Osborn, now the co-founder and CEO of the Shamiri Institute, a public benefit organization delivering mental healthcare to young people across Africa. “I was just like, ‘If you’re going to be going around campus shutting down people, I don’t want to be friends with you.’”
Event moderator Ari Kohn ’26, a social studies concentrator and undergraduate fellow at the Ethics Center, asked about the particularities of maintaining their connection on campus. “My experience at Harvard has been that people have really self-segregated among people who have very similar beliefs as them,” said Kohn, who also co-chairs the Intellectual Vitality student advisory board.
Osborn attributed these divisions to the siloed nature of academia, with experts from different fields working separately: “The consequence of that is we don’t have a lot of modeling for what it takes to engage in these conversations outside of combative debates.”
“The consequence of that is we don’t have a lot of modeling for what it takes to engage in these conversations outside of combative debates.”
Tom Osborn
Debating Driver on the best way to decarbonize helped open his entrepreneurial mind to the role policymaking can play in bringing renewables to market, he said.
“I was guilty of the siloing that I was accusing people in academia of,” he confessed, citing the “heavily subsidized” SolarCity, acquired by Tesla in 2016, as just one example of a clean energy venture to get a boost from government partnerships.
“We both had a lot of authentic questions that we couldn’t really answer within our circles,” Driver said. “I was so inspired by so many of the academics and activists and writers I was reading. But at the same time, I knew there was a limit, just from a disciplinary perspective. None of them have ever built an energy company.”
Joseph Koerner with Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo” (1927) at Harvard Art Museums.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Eileen O'Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
In new book, Joseph Koerner dissects reaction to 3 works created during political unrest
When Joseph Koerner first began teaching Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch at Harvard in the 1990s, he saw him as the “typical medieval artist” preoccupied with sin, chaos, and danger. But as Koerner uncovered more information about how Bosch’s works have been interpreted over the centuries by panicked people in times of political upheaval, the story began to shift.
“Now, one almost feels like one is looking to Bosch for what we are supposed to do under our own emergency situation,” he said. “Instead of being way back in the past, he seems to have become a cipher for the present and an omen for the future.”
Koerner’s latest book, “Art in a State of Siege,” seeks to capture “that feeling of looking at works of art as ‘omens’” by examining three images: Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (circa 1490-1500), Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo” (1927), and an animated drawing by William Kentridge of a dead victim of state violence disappearing into the South African landscape (1993). Koerner writes about the political situations that inspired these works, and how they captivated historical figures from the Spanish King Philip II to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The book was partly inspired by a personal connection: Koerner’s father, the artist Henry Koerner, created works that addressed the trauma of the Holocaust. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Koerner discusses shifting ideas of “the enemy” and other themes raised by the works.
Where does the phrase “art in a state of siege” come from?
It was coined by Kentridge in 1986 at a moment in South African history when the white apartheid government decided the unrest that they perceived themselves to be facing was of such magnitude that they had to suspend the rule of law indefinitely. In its first meaning, “siege” is a condition in which a city or fort is surrounded by enemy forces. But in modern-state formations, leaders in times of civil war can declare a state of siege where you treat your own people as if they’re enemies. Every modern constitution has some loophole in it, by which laws, rights, and privileges can be temporarily suspended. The sieges that figure in my book are of the latter type. What I’m exploring is less about the artists, and what they made and how they responded to siege, than about what art looks like in states of siege. The book tries to grasp a relationship between viewers and works of art in which the artwork vacillates between something that’s very dangerous, and something that might give some signal of what to do in terrible circumstances.
What makes Bosch’s tryptic “The Garden of Earthly Delights” so intriguing?
Famously, no one knows how the central panel relates to the outside panels. Is hell (in the right panel) a punishment for the central scene, or is the central scene a continuation of the Adam and Eve scene (left panel), one in which the Fall never happened and everything’s happy? No one has been able to definitively decide that, and on that hinges the whole painting. The question is: Is the image positive or negative? Are we looking at a friend or are we looking at an enemy?
“Amity finds no toehold in Bosch’s hostile carousel of love,” Koerner writes.
Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” (c. 1490-1500)
What kinds of enemies does Bosch depict?
He almost programmatically makes you not quite sure who the enemy is. Bosch wanted to magnify different siege conditions: the feeling that the self is besieged by sin; the feeling that Christian Europe is besieged by Islam; the feeling there’s a conspiracy of people called witches and heretics who are secretly occupying your town. Ultimately the enemy in Bosch seems to be the old enemy, Satan, who lies behind all devilry. But Bosch gives enough specifics that a person could take more concrete enemies and direct violence against them. In many of his paintings there’s a small, often slightly hidden, flag of the Ottoman Empire in the distance, as if to say, “This is what Europe will look like once the siege is over and the enemy has breached the gates.” There are also racial slurs and anti-Jewish slurs, and there’s even a sense that the poor in the city might be enemies.
You write about how viewers project their own experiences onto “Garden.” Could you talk about that?
In times when things are at their worst, Bosch suddenly comes into favor. One of the things I was fascinated by is how a group of right-leaning and Nazi intellectuals became obsessed with Bosch — there’s evidence from their letters. They realize they’re losing the war. They believe the crimes that they perpetrated are going to come back to haunt them. They already feel themselves to be victims. Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and Mircea Eliade are having these conversations, and they look to Bosch to give them a sign of what’s going to happen to them. I found a memoir that Schmitt wrote while he was in prison in Nuremberg for possible war crimes, in which he’s imagining in his cell Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” He sees the painting as the enemy because for him it’s liberalism, it’s free love, it’s a lawless world, a world in which every hell has broken loose. I found out that Schmitt was the first person to hear Wilhelm Fraenger’s crazy theory that “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is actually in favor of the pleasures that it represents, that it was painted for a secret group of free-love advocates called Adamites, ruled by a Jewish convert. So this idea existed that it was a Jewish work, and hedonistic. This scholarly error seemed very, very interesting to me.
What interested you about Max Beckmann and his self-portrait that’s at the Harvard Art Museums?
There’s almost no self-portrait in the history of art that is as boldly frontal as this huge self-portrait in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Because it’s rather simple, the little details really start to get conversation going — like the cigarette in his hand, and the fact that he’s looking straight ahead. And the more you look at it, the more stuff comes out.
The painting was created at a moment when there was a break from the repeated failures as a parliamentary democracy in post-WWI Germany — a respite from the collapse into political chaos due to the fight between left-wing and right-wing paramilitarized groups. In 1927 Beckmann decides, in a moment of wild artistic optimism, to say, with the painting and an accompanying manifesto, that the artist is the one who creates balance and stops chaos by being the decider of the polity, and the decision that the artist makes is the work of art itself.
It’s not an unusual idea at the time that art is a power or force that can be weaponized. The Nazis, of course, famously weaponized art. It wasn’t by accident that Adolf Hitler was an aspiring artist, that Nazi leadership theorized Hitler and the Nazi movement as a “sculptor” using humans as their work of art. In 1937 the Nazi leadership mounted this very peculiar art exhibition to vilify, repudiate, and degrade works of art on display by calling that art “degenerate.” The idea was to put the enemy on display. In the aftermath of this “degenerate art” exhibition, Beckmann’s painting was put on auction and went via a Swiss dealer to Harvard Art Museums.
What is the value of studying art from times of political unrest?
Art has that characteristic of becoming relevant whether you like it or not. For the most part, people understand art in terms of victories: The artist is victorious over the problems that face them and becomes “the great artist.” And even the art historian, the person who shows how the artist won: In so doing, they win their own case in their book or article. My kind of art history is different than that. My art history is about art that comes up in times of trouble, in which there’s not victory but the potential for severe defeat. “Art in a State of Siege” is a way of showing, on a broader canvas, what art looks like, not under victory circumstances, but in troubled times.
Photographer Susan Meiselas (left) speaks with attendees following the talk.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Photographer Susan Meiselas shares how ‘44 Irving Street Cambridge, MA’ shaped her career
Susan Meiselas didn’t set out to be a photographer. The documentary photographer, filmmaker, and president of the Magnum Foundation was working toward her master’s degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1971 when she shot her groundbreaking “44 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA series,” which is now on view at the Harvard Art Museums.
Best known for her documentary photography of the late 1970s insurrection in Nicaragua and her photos of carnival strippers later that decade, Meiselas looked back on the Irving Street black-and-white prints during a recent gallery talk and shared how they helped shape the career that followed.
Initially, she said, she was focused on her degree when a course in photography “with a sociological bent” caught her eye. (She no longer remembers the name of the course.) For a class project, she chose to shoot the other inhabitants of her Cambridge boarding house.
“The camera was this way to connect,” she said. “I knew no one, and I began to knock on doors.”
Going around to the different apartments, she realized that each space in the old building “had a different character.” Seeing how the residents personalized their rooms, “I became fascinated by what they did with their space.”
Visitors gather to examine the photographs Meiselas discussed.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographersity
Even more captivating than the personal use of space, Meiselas found, were the interactions with her neighbors, whom she identified only by their first names. To start with, she would explain that she was a student, learning photography. “I’d ask them if there was a place in their room that they would sit for a portrait.” The results vary, with subjects settled into easy chairs or lounging on the floor, some in clean, well-lit areas and others surrounded by books and papers. Once she developed the photos, she’d return with a contact sheet to show her subjects. “That was the moment where something else for me happened,” she said. After her subjects had viewed the photos, she would ask them, “How do you feel about yourself?”
Those written responses, which can be read by accessing a QR code on the exhibit wall, make the installation complete, said Meiselas, who submitted the letters along with the photographs for class. “They wrote me either about how they felt about themselves, how the picture did or didn’t portray them.”
At the gallery talk, she read excerpts of those responses aloud. Her former neighbor Gordon, for example, is shown slumped in a chair, with books and a television behind him. “I wouldn’t have chosen to live alone. I was forced to,” he wrote, perhaps to explain his dejected posture. “That’s the way I am, somewhat distant. I get turned in on myself. I look at this place as a way station.”
In other samples of the QR-accessible text, another neighbor, Carol, responded to her photo, which shows her surrounded by her books. “I like to think my face conveys the way I feel during my most creative jam sessions: slightly dissatisfied at my slowness, slightly chagrined by the progress and quality so far lacking.” Another, Barbara, focused on herself: “My picture shows me … in my small world,” she wrote of the photo, which shows her typing at a desk, “looking out at everyone and everything.”
Those letters became Meiselas’s focus. “I didn’t leave class thinking ‘I’m going to be a photographer,’” she said. Instead, “I became fascinated by the camera as a point of connection.”
What interested her, she continued, was how the subjects responded. The experience also raised two themes that have become constants in her work: “the pleasure of the connection, and the problematic nature of the power of representation.”
Meiselas explored these themes recently in the book “Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography,” which she calls “an attempt to really look at photography as including others.” (The book was co-authored with UC Berkeley Professor of African American Studies Leigh Raiford; Yale University Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Laura Wexler; photographer Wendy Ewald; and Brown University Professor of Modern Culture and Media Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.) Such an examination is necessary, she said, because the relationship between the subject and the photographer can be fraught, balanced between “what’s positive and collaborative and inclusive and participatory, and what is more problematic.”
After the “Irving Street” project, Meiselas went on to get her education degree and teach. Working with elementary school students at an experimental school in the South Bronx, she again incorporated photography into her work. Using simple pinhole cameras, her students took photos of their surroundings and their neighbors “and made little books,” she recalled.
“They used images to tell stories. It wasn’t about the formalism of photography,” she said. “It was about the narrative and the connectivity. It was: Take your pinhole camera, go out on the street, meet the butcher…” Through these photos, Meiselas said she hoped to give her students “a notion of photography as an exchange in the world.”
Through all these projects, she sees the thread of relationship-building. Looking back once more on the “Irving Street” series, she noted: “This project has always resonated as the beginning of my practice.”
Photographs from Susan Meiselas’ “44 Irving Street, Cambridge, MA” portfolio are on display at the Harvard Art Museums through April 6.
For those looking to climb the corporate ladder in the U.S., here’s an idea you might not have considered: debate training.
According to a new research paper, people who learn the basics of debate are more likely to advance to leadership roles in U.S. organizations, compared to those who do not receive this training. One key reason is that being equipped with debate skills makes people more assertive in the workplace.
“Debate training can promote leadership emergence and advancement by fostering individuals’ assertiveness, which is a key, valued leadership characteristic in U.S. organizations,” says MIT Associate Professor Jackson Lu, one of the scholars who conducted the study.
The research is based on two experiments and provides empirical insights into leadership development, a subject more often discussed anecdotally than studied systematically.
“Leadership development is a multi-billion-dollar industry, where people spend a lot of money trying to help individuals emerge as leaders,” Lu says. “But the public doesn’t actually know what would be effective, because there hasn’t been a lot of causal evidence. That’s exactly what we provide.”
The paper, “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness,” was published Monday in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The authors are Lu, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Michelle X. Zhao, an undergraduate student at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis; Hui Liao, a professor and assistant dean at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business; and Lu Doris Zhang, a doctoral student at MIT Sloan.
Assertiveness in the attention economy
The researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 471 employees in a Fortune 100 firm were randomly assigned to receive either nine weeks of debate training or no training. Examined 18 months later, those receiving debate training were more likely to have advanced to leadership roles, by about 12 percentage points. This effect was statistically explained by increased assertiveness among those with debate training.
The second experiment, conducted with 975 university participants, further tested the causal effects of debate training in a controlled setting. Participants were randomly assigned to receive debate training, an alternative non-debate training, or no training. Consistent with the first experiment, participants receiving the debate training were more likely to emerge as leaders in subsequent group activities, an effect statistically explained by their increased assertiveness.
“The inclusion of a non-debate training condition allowed us to causally claim that debate training, rather than just any training, improved assertiveness and increased leadership emergence,” Zhang says.
To some people, increasing assertiveness might not seem like an ideal recipe for success in an organizational setting, as it might seem likely to increase tensions or decrease cooperation. But as the authors note, the American Psychological Association conceptualizes assertiveness as “an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly, while maintaining respect for others.”
Lu adds: “Assertiveness is conceptually different from aggressiveness. To speak up in meetings or classrooms, people don’t need to be aggressive jerks. You can ask questions politely, yet still effectively express opinons. Of course, that’s different from not saying anything at all.”
Moreover, in the contemporary world where we all must compete for attention, refined communication skills may be more important than ever.
“Whether it is cutting filler or mastering pacing, knowing how to assert our opinions helps us sound more leader-like,” Zhang says.
How firms identify leaders
The research also finds that debate training benefits people across demographics: Its impact was not significantly different for men or women, for those born in the U.S. or outside it, or for different ethnic groups.
However, the findings raise still other questions about how firms identify leaders. As the results show, individuals might have incentive to seek debate training and other general workplace skills. But how much responsibility do firms have to understand and recognize the many kinds of skills, beyond assertiveness, that employees may have?
“We emphasize that the onus of breaking leadership barriers should not fall on individuals themelves,” Lu says. “Organizations should also recognize and appreciate different communication and leadership styles in the workplace.”
Lu also notes that ongoing work is needed to understand if those firms are properly valuing the attributes of their own leaders.
“There is an important distinction between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness,” Lu says. “Our paper looks at leadership emergence. It’s possible that people who are better listeners, who are more cooperative, and humbler, should also be selected for leadership positions because they are more effective leaders.”
This research was partly funded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Fourth-year Aravind Krishnan, the inaugural Sarah Katz Award recipient, is working to help shelter residents in Philadelphia better monitor their health.
For the last two years, the Perelman School of Medicine has partnered with the African Family Health Organization to offer weekly family-medicine/primary care clinics for recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.
Through a community-led partnership project, graduate student Eileen Feng and an interdisciplinary, cross-school team are working with local youth to tailor an AI-supported platform for healing through creative arts.
A single molecular switch is essential for blood stem cells to enter an activated, regenerative state in which they produce new blood cells, according to a preclinical study led by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.
Too Hot to Think Straight, Too Cold to Panic, a new reportfrom Cambridge Judge Business School, BCG and the University of Cambridge’s climaTraces Lab argues that failing to invest comes with significant economic consequences.
Allowing global warming to reach 3°C by 2100 could reduce cumulative economic output by 15% to 34%. Alternatively, investing 1% to 2% in mitigation and adaptation would limit warming to 2°C, reducing economic damages to 2% to 4%. This net cost of inaction is equivalent to 11% to 27% of cumulative GDP—equivalent to three times global health care spending, or eight times the amount needed to lift the world above the global poverty line by 2100.
“Research on climate change impacts across all regions and sectors is expanding rapidly,” said Kamiar Mohaddes, an Associate Professor in Economics and Policy at Cambridge Judge Business School and Director of the climaTRACES Lab.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) offer a strong case for investing in climate mitigation and adaptation to avoid damage to the global economy.
Research on climate change impacts across all regions and sectors is expanding rapidly
In a total of 16 disciplines, the university ranks among the 10 best in the world. These are the latest results of the QS World University Rankings according to subject.
NUS has been placed among the global top 10 for 22 subjects and top 20 for 36 subjects, according to the latest Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings (QS WUR) by Subject 2025 released on 12 March 2025. This marks the highest-ever number of NUS subjects to be ranked among the global top 10.
Notably, NUS boasts six subjects ranking top five in the world. History of Art retained its global number two ranking, while Civil & Structural Engineering as well as Social Policy & Administration both climbed to third place worldwide, reaffirming NUS’ excellence in these fields. Chemical Engineering, Computer Science& Information Systems and Electrical & Electronic Engineering secured fourth place globally.
Nursing made its debut in the global top 10, jumping 12 places to eighth. Pharmacy & Pharmacology also saw a significant improvement, advancing six places to share the eighth spot.
Steady improvements across the board
Among the five broad faculty areas, NUS has achieved a global top 10 position for Social Sciences and Management and a top 20 position forEngineering and Technology. Over the past three years, the University saw a consistent improvement in the rankings across all broad faculty areas, reflecting the University’s strong interdisciplinary focus.
Professor Aaron Thean, Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost, said: “We are immensely proud that NUS has achieved its best-ever performance this year in the QS World University Rankings by Subject, with 22 subjects in the global top 10, and 36 subjects in global top 20. The results reflect the University’s consistent trajectory of excellence, with steady improvements in education and research across disciplines over the years.
In particular, our strong performance across STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and Humanities subjects underscores the deep expertise and interdisciplinary approach that define NUS. This achievement is the result of the dedication and hard work of our faculty, staff, students, and alumni. As we continue to push boundaries in research, innovation, and education, we remain committed to nurturing future-ready graduates and contributing meaningfully to Singapore and the world.”
NUS leads the pack locally, with three out of five entries from Singapore in world’s top three
The QS WUR by Subject is an independent comparative analysis of the reputation and research output of more than 21,000 academic offerings across 55 subjects and five broad faculty areas. In the 2025 edition, 5,200 institutions from 148 locations were analysed with rankings published for 1,747 institutions.
Mr Ben Sowter, Senior Vice President at QS, said: “Singapore shines in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025, with four entries breaking into the global top three for the first time—highlighting the nation’s rise as a leading hub for world-class education and research.”
According to QS, nearly one-third (30 per cent) of Singapore’s 114 ranked entries secured top 10 positions in their respective subjects—an unparalleled achievement that sets the nation apart from all other countries and territories.
“With just six universities contributing 114 ranked entries—including 12 in the broad faculty areas—Singapore consistently outperforms its scale. Despite its relatively small system, it competes at the highest level globally, delivering excellence in teaching, research, and graduate outcomes,” Mr Sowter added.
Overall, NUS is represented in 41 subjects and five broad faculty areas, highlighting its extensive academic reach and strength in multidisciplinary education and research.
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