From fully believing that he had bungled one of his speeches to emerging champion at his first international public speaking competition, NUS Law final-year student Kamal Ashraf Bin Kamil Jumat’s experience at the World Universities Public Speaking Invitational Championship 2025 was quite the rollercoaster ride.

The University of Macau invited 11 prestigious universities, including NUS, Tsinghua University, Korea University, the University of Oxford and the University of British Columbia, to send representatives to the inaugural edition of the championship that it hosted on 30 August 2025. Participants were required to prepare and deliver a speech based on the theme “Creating a Diverse Future Together”, answer questions from a panel of judges, and deliver an impromptu speech based on a randomly selected topic.

When NUS was invited to field a student speaker for the competition, Ms Sim Ee Waun, a tutor at the Department of Communications and New Media (CNM), immediately recognised her student Kamal’s potential to do well on this stage and put his name into the pool of nominees. After he was selected, she mentored him in the lead-up to the competition.

Despite battling nervousness as a first-time competitor in a field of high-calibre speakers, Kamal completed the first two segments with relative confidence, trusting in his pre-competition training and rehearsals. His prepared speech, entitled “Bringing Tomorrow”, discussed how diversity grows through active, consistent efforts and used stories such as the origins of Singlish and his own experiences as a firefighter in National Service to encourage listeners to build trust through communication.

For the third segment, he hoped to draw topics relating to Education or Culture from the three possible categories of impromptu speech topics, as they could relate more closely to his experiences in youth and community volunteering.

Instead, he drew “How do friendships shape our personal growth?” from the Friendship category.

With just 10 seconds of preparation time, he recalled Ms Sim’s advice to “give a speech only you can give” and rapidly composed a speech using the philosophical metaphor of tabula rasa to frame anecdotes of how his multicultural friendships have shaped him.

Kamal felt extremely nervous during the impromptu speech and left the stage disappointed with his performance. He immediately texted Ms Sim: “I don’t think I made it.”

Ms Sim was watching the livestreamed competition and disagreed with his assessment. She described his impromptu speech as “brilliant,” noting: “Not only was his speech eloquent and personal, it carried good points too. Believe me, it is not easy to do this in 10 seconds.”

She added: “His win reminds us that on the world stage, we should expect to win. Why not? We may be a little red dot, but we do punch way above our weight, and Kamal is a shining example of that.”

Although Kamal was unhappy with the speech at the time, it ended up being a meaningful and precious element of his win.

“I managed to talk about how my friends from other races have always been allies to me, helping me to feel comfortable in preserving my traditions and my daily practices. These anecdotes didn’t fit into my prepared speech, so I’m glad I got to present these messages that are important to me, at a time when Singapore is celebrating SG60, diversity and multiculturalism,” he said.

Speaking from the heart

As a debater since primary school and now a law student, Kamal is no stranger to speaking before judges and an audience. He currently serves as a part-time debate coach for a local secondary school and chairs a national debating academy organised by the Malay Youth Literary Association. His law training also includes polishing his trial advocacy and interpersonal communication skills through pro bono projects at the Syariah Court.

In his quest to learn more about the art of public speaking, he took up Public Speaking and Critical Reasoning offered by CNM as an elective course in Semester 2 of AY2024/2025. “I wanted to learn the technical skills behind speaking in front of people and connecting with them — something a bit more based on personality and more heartfelt, rather than doing it as part of a job,” said Kamal, noting that he learnt how to tailor material to the audience and craft speeches in different styles.

Nominating him for the competition was an easy decision, said Ms Sim. “In my five years of teaching public speaking at NUS, Kamal stands out as an incredibly talented public speaker who speaks with conviction and polish, and he is sharp as a pin. So when there was a call to nominate students for this competition, it was only natural that I put his name forward.”

Kamal spent the second half of the semester and part of his summer writing and rewriting his draft with Ms Sim’s help via WhatsApp and Zoom calls, while juggling an internship that left him with little time to rehearse until he arrived in Macau two days before the competition.

He started his days in Macau at 6am to rehearse intensively in his hotel room before heading out for activities organised by the University of Macau, such as soundchecks and workshops with his fellow competitors. Although most of the contestants were friendly, Kamal grew nervous as he learnt about their competitive speaking experience and training.

“These were some of the best public speakers I’ve ever met,” he said. “They were fantastic and they came from very established institutions that are well known for their craft in the English language, so the pressure was there.”

His nervousness was offset by the knowledge that he had supportive family and friends who would be happy for him regardless of the results. His mother frequently reminded him to just enjoy himself, and his friends refrained from pressuring him to come back with a win.

“They knew there was no point in adding pressure onto me, because they knew I was going to do it myself anyway,” said Kamal in jest.

He came away from the experience with a deep respect for the other contestants and a drive to continue improving his craft. When he was asked to give an acceptance speech with some of his public speaking tips at the competition’s closing dinner, Kamal expressed his admiration for his fellow competitors by asking them to share their own tips with him.

“Some of them had styles which I couldn’t pull off. Sofia (Lopez Castillo, first runner-up) from the University of British Columbia — her style was very emotional, very heartfelt. I’m a bit too clean or refined sometimes, and it’s hard for me to dig deep and hit those emotive notes,” he said. “For every one word of advice I was asked to give, I knew I had ten times as much to learn in return.”

Another outstanding speaker he recalled was second runner-up Benjamin Thomas from Stanford University, who was impressively calm in his delivery, especially when answering the impromptu questions.

Kamal concluded: “There are elements that I want to take from all 10 other speakers to become a better speaker, because this is just at the university level and I can see all these different skills that I need to pick up. The biggest takeaway for me is that there’s a lot more that I can learn.”

The full recording of the World Universities Public Speaking Invitational Championship 2025 is available on YouTube.

The ground-shaking that an earthquake generates is only a fraction of the total energy that a quake releases. A quake can also generate a flash of heat, along with a domino-like fracturing of underground rocks. But exactly how much energy goes into each of these three processes is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to measure in the field.

Now MIT geologists have traced the energy that is released by “lab quakes” — miniature analogs of natural earthquakes that are carefully triggered in a controlled laboratory setting. For the first time, they have quantified the complete energy budget of such quakes, in terms of the fraction of energy that goes into heat, shaking, and fracturing.

They found that only about 10 percent of a lab quake’s energy causes physical shaking. An even smaller fraction — less than 1 percent — goes into breaking up rock and creating new surfaces. The overwhelming portion of a quake’s energy — on average 80 percent — goes into heating up the immediate region around a quake’s epicenter. In fact, the researchers observed that a lab quake can produce a temperature spike hot enough to melt surrounding material and turn it briefly into liquid melt.

The geologists also found that a quake’s energy budget depends on a region’s deformation history — the degree to which rocks have been shifted and disturbed by previous tectonic motions. The fractions of quake energy that produce heat, shaking, and rock fracturing can shift depending on what the region has experienced in the past.

“The deformation history — essentially what the rock remembers — really influences how destructive an earthquake could be,” says Daniel Ortega-Arroyo, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “That history affects a lot of the material properties in the rock, and it dictates to some degree how it is going to slip.”

The team’s lab quakes are a simplified analog of what occurs during a natural earthquake. Down the road, their results could help seismologists predict the likelihood of earthquakes in regions that are prone to seismic events. For instance, if scientists have an idea of how much shaking a quake generated in the past, they might be able to estimate the degree to which the quake’s energy also affected rocks deep underground by melting or breaking them apart. This in turn could reveal how much more or less vulnerable the region is to future quakes.

“We could never reproduce the complexity of the Earth, so we have to isolate the physics of what is happening, in these lab quakes,” says Matěj Peč, associate professor of geophysics at MIT. “We hope to understand these processes and try to extrapolate them to nature.”

Peč (pronounced “Peck”) and Ortega-Arroyo reported their results on Aug. 28 in the journal AGU Advances. Their MIT co-authors are Hoagy O’Ghaffari and Camilla Cattania, along with Zheng Gong and Roger Fu at Harvard University and Markus Ohl and Oliver Plümper at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Under the surface

Earthquakes are driven by energy that is stored up in rocks over millions of years. As tectonic plates slowly grind against each other, stress accumulates through the crust. When rocks are pushed past their material strength, they can suddenly slip along a narrow zone, creating a geologic fault. As rocks slip on either side of the fault, they produce seismic waves that ripple outward and upward.

We perceive an earthquake’s energy mainly in the form of ground shaking, which can be measured using seismometers and other ground-based instruments. But the other two major forms of a quake’s energy — heat and underground fracturing — are largely inaccessible with current technologies.

“Unlike the weather, where we can see daily patterns and measure a number of pertinent variables, it’s very hard to do that very deep in the Earth,” Ortega-Arroyo says. “We don’t know what’s happening to the rocks themselves, and the timescales over which earthquakes repeat within a fault zone are on the century-to-millenia timescales, making any sort of actionable forecast challenging.”

To get an idea of how an earthquake’s energy is partitioned, and how that energy budget might affect a region’s seismic risk, he and Peč went into the lab. Over the last seven years, Peč’s group at MIT has developed methods and instrumentation to simulate seismic events, at the microscale, in an effort to understand how earthquakes at the macroscale may play out.

“We are focusing on what’s happening on a really small scale, where we can control many aspects of failure and try to understand it before we can do any scaling to nature,” Ortega-Arroyo says.

Microshakes

For their new study, the team generated miniature lab quakes that simulate a seismic slipping of rocks along a fault zone. They worked with small samples of granite, which are representative of rocks in the seismogenic layer — the geologic region in the continental crust where earthquakes typically originate. They ground up the granite into a fine powder and mixed the crushed granite with a much finer powder of magnetic particles, which they used as a sort of internal temperature gauge. (A particle’s magnetic field strength will change in response to a fluctuation in temperature.)

The researchers placed samples of the powdered granite — each about 10 square millimeters and 1 millimeter thin — between two small pistons and wrapped the ensemble in a gold jacket. They then applied a strong magnetic field to orient the powder’s magnetic particles in the same initial direction and to the same field strength. They reasoned that any change in the particles’ orientation and field strength afterward should be a sign of how much heat that region experienced as a result of any seismic event.

Once samples were prepared, the team placed them one at a time into a custom-built apparatus that the researchers tuned to apply steadily increasing pressure, similar to the pressures that rocks experience in the Earth’s seismogenic layer, about 10 to 20 kilometers below the surface. They used custom-made piezoelectric sensors, developed by co-author O’Ghaffari, which they attached to either end of a sample to measure any shaking that occurred as they increased the stress on the sample.

They observed that at certain stresses, some samples slipped, producing a microscale seismic event similar to an earthquake. By analyzing the magnetic particles in the samples after the fact, they obtained an estimate of how much each sample was temporarily heated — a method developed in collaboration with Roger Fu’s lab at Harvard University. They also estimated the amount of shaking each sample experienced, using measurements from the piezoelectric sensor and numerical models. The researchers also examined each sample under the microscope, at different magnifications, to assess how the size of the granite grains changed — whether and how many grains broke into smaller pieces, for instance.

From all these measurements, the team was able to estimate each lab quake’s energy budget. On average, they found that about 80 percent of a quake’s energy goes into heat, while 10 percent generates shaking, and less than 1 percent goes into rock fracturing, or creating new, smaller particle surfaces. 

“In some instances we saw that, close to the fault, the sample went from room temperature to 1,200 degrees Celsius in a matter of microseconds, and then immediately cooled down once the motion stopped,” Ortega-Arroyo says. “And in one sample, we saw the fault move by about 100 microns, which implies slip velocities essentially about 10 meters per second. It moves very fast, though it doesn’t last very long.”

The researchers suspect that similar processes play out in actual, kilometer-scale quakes.

“Our experiments offer an integrated approach that provides one of the most complete views of the physics of earthquake-like ruptures in rocks to date,” Peč says. “This will provide clues on how to improve our current earthquake models and natural hazard mitigation.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

By Prof Sing Tien Foo, Provost's Chair Professor from the Dept of Real Estate at NUS Business School

• Lianhe Zaobao, 12 September 2025, Opinion, p18

• Lianhe Zaobao, 12 September 2025, Business, p21

• Lianhe Zaobao, 12 September 2025, Singapore, p8

Traditionally, developing new materials for cutting-edge applications — such as SpaceX’s Raptor engine — has taken a decade or more. But thanks to a breakthrough technology pioneered by an MIT research group now celebrating its 40th year, a key material for the Raptor was delivered in just a few years. The same innovation has accelerated the development of high-performance materials for the Apple Watch, U.S. Air Force jets, and Formula One race cars.

The MIT Steel Research Group (SRG) also led to a national initiative that “has already sparked a paradigm shift in how new materials are discovered, developed, and deployed,” according to a White House story describing the Materials Genome Initiative’s first five years.

Gregory B. Olson founded the SRG in 1985 with the goal of using computers to accelerate the hunt for new materials by plumbing databases of those materials’ fundamental properties. It was the beginning of a new field: computational materials design.

At the time, “nobody knew whether we could really do this,” remembers Olson, a professor of the practice in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “I have some documented evidence of agencies resisting the entire concept because, in their opinion, a material could never be designed.”

Eventually, however, Olson and colleagues showed that the approach worked. One of the most important results: In 2011 President Barack Obama made a speech “essentially announcing that this technology is real and it’s what everybody should be doing,” says Olson, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. In the speech, Obama launched the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI).

The MGI is developing “a fundamental database of the parameters that direct the assembly of the structures of materials,” much like the Human Genome Project “is a database that directs the assembly of the structures of life,” says Olson.

The goal is to use the MGI database to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, and at a fraction of the cost, compared to traditional methods, according to the MGI website.

At MIT, the SRG continues to focus on steel, “because it’s the material [the world has] studied the longest, so we have the deepest fundamental understanding of its properties,” says Olson, project principal investigator.

The Cybersteels Project, funded by the Office of Naval Research, brings together eight MIT faculty who are working to expand our knowledge of steel, eventually adding their data to the MGI. Major areas of study include the boundaries between the microscopic grains that make up a steel and the economic modeling of new steels.

Concludes Olson, “it has been tremendously satisfying to see how this technology has really blossomed in the hands of leading corporations and led to a national initiative to take it even further.”

For pregnant women, ultrasounds are an informative (and sometimes necessary) procedure. They typically produce two-dimensional black-and-white scans of fetuses that can reveal key insights, including biological sex, approximate size, and abnormalities like heart issues or cleft lip. If your doctor wants a closer look, they may use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which uses magnetic fields to capture images that can be combined to create a 3D view of the fetus.

MRIs aren’t a catch-all, though; the 3D scans are difficult for doctors to interpret well enough to diagnose problems because our visual system is not accustomed to processing 3D volumetric scans (in other words, a wrap-around look that also shows us the inner structures of a subject). Enter machine learning, which could help model a fetus’s development more clearly and accurately from data — although no such algorithm has been able to model their somewhat random movements and various body shapes.

That is, until a new approach called “Fetal SMPL” from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), and Harvard Medical School presented clinicians with a more detailed picture of fetal health. It was adapted from “SMPL” (Skinned Multi-Person Linear model), a 3D model developed in computer graphics to capture adult body shapes and poses, as a way to represent fetal body shapes and poses accurately. Fetal SMPL was then trained on 20,000 MRI volumes to predict the location and size of a fetus and create sculpture-like 3D representations. Inside each model is a skeleton with 23 articulated joints called a “kinematic tree,” which the system uses to pose and move like the fetuses it saw during training.

The extensive, real-world scans that Fetal SMPL learned from helped it develop pinpoint accuracy. Imagine stepping into a stranger’s footprint while blindfolded, and not only does it fit perfectly, but you correctly guess what shoe they wore — similarly, the tool closely matched the position and size of fetuses in MRI frames it hadn’t seen before. Fetal SMPL was only misaligned by an average of about 3.1 millimeters, a gap smaller than a single grain of rice.

The approach could enable doctors to precisely measure things like the size of a baby’s head or abdomen and compare these metrics with healthy fetuses at the same age. Fetal SMPL has demonstrated its clinical potential in early tests, where it achieved accurate alignment results on a small group of real-world scans.

“It can be challenging to estimate the shape and pose of a fetus because they’re crammed into the tight confines of the uterus,” says lead author, MIT PhD student, and CSAIL researcher Yingcheng Liu SM ’21. “Our approach overcomes this challenge using a system of interconnected bones under the surface of the 3D model, which represent the fetal body and its motions realistically. Then, it relies on a coordinate descent algorithm to make a prediction, essentially alternating between guessing pose and shape from tricky data until it finds a reliable estimate.”

In utero

Fetal SMPL was tested on shape and pose accuracy against the closest baseline the researchers could find: a system that models infant growth called “SMIL.” Since babies out of the womb are larger than fetuses, the team shrank those models by 75 percent to level the playing field.

The system outperformed this baseline on a dataset of fetal MRIs between the gestational ages of 24 and 37 weeks taken at Boston Children’s Hospital. Fetal SMPL was able to recreate real scans more precisely, as its models closely lined up with real MRIs.

The method was efficient at lining up their models to images, only needing three iterations to arrive at a reasonable alignment. In an experiment that counted how many incorrect guesses Fetal SMPL had made before arriving at a final estimate, its accuracy plateaued from the fourth step onward.

The researchers have just begun testing their system in the real world, where it produced similarly accurate models in initial clinical tests. While these results are promising, the team notes that they’ll need to apply their results to larger populations, different gestational ages, and a variety of disease cases to better understand the system’s capabilities.

Only skin deep

Liu also notes that their system only helps analyze what doctors can see on the surface of a fetus, since only bone-like structures lie beneath the skin of the models. To better monitor babies’ internal health, such as liver, lung, and muscle development, the team intends to make their tool volumetric, modeling the fetus’s inner anatomy from scans. Such upgrades would make the models more human-like, but the current version of Fetal SMPL already presents a precise (and unique) upgrade to 3D fetal health analysis.

“This study introduces a method specifically designed for fetal MRI that effectively captures fetal movements, enhancing the assessment of fetal development and health,” says Kiho Im, Harvard Medical School associate professor of pediatrics and staff scientist in the Division of Newborn Medicine at BCH’s Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center. Im, who was not involved with the paper, adds that this approach “will not only improve the diagnostic utility of fetal MRI, but also provide insights into the early functional development of the fetal brain in relation to body movements.”

“This work reaches a pioneering milestone by extending parametric surface human body models for the earliest shapes of human life: fetuses,” says Sergi Pujades, an associate professor at University Grenoble Alpes, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It allows us to detangle the shape and motion of a human, which has already proven to be key in understanding how adult body shape relates to metabolic conditions and how infant motion relates to neurodevelopmental disorders. In addition, the fact that the fetal model stems from, and is compatible with, the adult (SMPL) and infant (SMIL) body models, will allow us to study human shape and pose evolution over long periods of time. This is an unprecedented opportunity to further quantify how human shape growth and motion are affected by different conditions.”

Liu wrote the paper with three CSAIL members: Peiqi Wang SM ’22, PhD ’25; MIT PhD student Sebastian Diaz; and senior author Polina Golland, the Sunlin and Priscilla Chou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a principal investigator in MIT CSAIL, and the leader of the Medical Vision Group. BCH assistant professor of pediatrics Esra Abaci Turk, Inria researcher Benjamin Billot, and Harvard Medical School professor of pediatrics and professor of radiology Patricia Ellen Grant are also authors on the paper. This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health and the MIT CSAIL-Wistron Program.

The researchers will present their work at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in September.

For pregnant women, ultrasounds are an informative (and sometimes necessary) procedure. They typically produce two-dimensional black-and-white scans of fetuses that can reveal key insights, including biological sex, approximate size, and abnormalities like heart issues or cleft lip. If your doctor wants a closer look, they may use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which uses magnetic fields to capture images that can be combined to create a 3D view of the fetus.

MRIs aren’t a catch-all, though; the 3D scans are difficult for doctors to interpret well enough to diagnose problems because our visual system is not accustomed to processing 3D volumetric scans (in other words, a wrap-around look that also shows us the inner structures of a subject). Enter machine learning, which could help model a fetus’s development more clearly and accurately from data — although no such algorithm has been able to model their somewhat random movements and various body shapes.

That is, until a new approach called “Fetal SMPL” from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), and Harvard Medical School presented clinicians with a more detailed picture of fetal health. It was adapted from “SMPL” (Skinned Multi-Person Linear model), a 3D model developed in computer graphics to capture adult body shapes and poses, as a way to represent fetal body shapes and poses accurately. Fetal SMPL was then trained on 20,000 MRI volumes to predict the location and size of a fetus and create sculpture-like 3D representations. Inside each model is a skeleton with 23 articulated joints called a “kinematic tree,” which the system uses to pose and move like the fetuses it saw during training.

The extensive, real-world scans that Fetal SMPL learned from helped it develop pinpoint accuracy. Imagine stepping into a stranger’s footprint while blindfolded, and not only does it fit perfectly, but you correctly guess what shoe they wore — similarly, the tool closely matched the position and size of fetuses in MRI frames it hadn’t seen before. Fetal SMPL was only misaligned by an average of about 3.1 millimeters, a gap smaller than a single grain of rice.

The approach could enable doctors to precisely measure things like the size of a baby’s head or abdomen and compare these metrics with healthy fetuses at the same age. Fetal SMPL has demonstrated its clinical potential in early tests, where it achieved accurate alignment results on a small group of real-world scans.

“It can be challenging to estimate the shape and pose of a fetus because they’re crammed into the tight confines of the uterus,” says lead author, MIT PhD student, and CSAIL researcher Yingcheng Liu SM ’21. “Our approach overcomes this challenge using a system of interconnected bones under the surface of the 3D model, which represent the fetal body and its motions realistically. Then, it relies on a coordinate descent algorithm to make a prediction, essentially alternating between guessing pose and shape from tricky data until it finds a reliable estimate.”

In utero

Fetal SMPL was tested on shape and pose accuracy against the closest baseline the researchers could find: a system that models infant growth called “SMIL.” Since babies out of the womb are larger than fetuses, the team shrank those models by 75 percent to level the playing field.

The system outperformed this baseline on a dataset of fetal MRIs between the gestational ages of 24 and 37 weeks taken at Boston Children’s Hospital. Fetal SMPL was able to recreate real scans more precisely, as its models closely lined up with real MRIs.

The method was efficient at lining up their models to images, only needing three iterations to arrive at a reasonable alignment. In an experiment that counted how many incorrect guesses Fetal SMPL had made before arriving at a final estimate, its accuracy plateaued from the fourth step onward.

The researchers have just begun testing their system in the real world, where it produced similarly accurate models in initial clinical tests. While these results are promising, the team notes that they’ll need to apply their results to larger populations, different gestational ages, and a variety of disease cases to better understand the system’s capabilities.

Only skin deep

Liu also notes that their system only helps analyze what doctors can see on the surface of a fetus, since only bone-like structures lie beneath the skin of the models. To better monitor babies’ internal health, such as liver, lung, and muscle development, the team intends to make their tool volumetric, modeling the fetus’s inner anatomy from scans. Such upgrades would make the models more human-like, but the current version of Fetal SMPL already presents a precise (and unique) upgrade to 3D fetal health analysis.

“This study introduces a method specifically designed for fetal MRI that effectively captures fetal movements, enhancing the assessment of fetal development and health,” says Kiho Im, Harvard Medical School associate professor of pediatrics and staff scientist in the Division of Newborn Medicine at BCH’s Fetal-Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center. Im, who was not involved with the paper, adds that this approach “will not only improve the diagnostic utility of fetal MRI, but also provide insights into the early functional development of the fetal brain in relation to body movements.”

“This work reaches a pioneering milestone by extending parametric surface human body models for the earliest shapes of human life: fetuses,” says Sergi Pujades, an associate professor at University Grenoble Alpes, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It allows us to detangle the shape and motion of a human, which has already proven to be key in understanding how adult body shape relates to metabolic conditions and how infant motion relates to neurodevelopmental disorders. In addition, the fact that the fetal model stems from, and is compatible with, the adult (SMPL) and infant (SMIL) body models, will allow us to study human shape and pose evolution over long periods of time. This is an unprecedented opportunity to further quantify how human shape growth and motion are affected by different conditions.”

Liu wrote the paper with three CSAIL members: Peiqi Wang SM ’22, PhD ’25; MIT PhD student Sebastian Diaz; and senior author Polina Golland, the Sunlin and Priscilla Chou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a principal investigator in MIT CSAIL, and the leader of the Medical Vision Group. BCH assistant professor of pediatrics Esra Abaci Turk, Inria researcher Benjamin Billot, and Harvard Medical School professor of pediatrics and professor of radiology Patricia Ellen Grant are also authors on the paper. This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health and the MIT CSAIL-Wistron Program.

The researchers will present their work at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in September.

This spring, J-PAL North America — a regional office of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) — launched its first ever Learning Lab, centered on climate action. The Learning Lab convened a cohort of government leaders who are enacting a broad range of policies and programs to support the transition to a low-carbon economy. Through the Learning Lab, participants explored how to embed randomized evaluation into promising solutions to determine how to maximize changes in behavior — a strategy that can help advance decarbonization in the most cost-effective ways to benefit all communities. The inaugural cohort included more than 25 participants from state agencies and cities, including the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, and the cities of Lincoln, Nebraska; Newport News, Virginia; Orlando, Florida; and Philadelphia.

“State and local governments have demonstrated tremendous leadership in designing and implementing decarbonization policies and climate action plans over the past few years,” said Peter Christensen, scientific advisor of the J-PAL North America Environment, Energy, and Climate Change Sector. “And while these are informed by scientific projections on which programs and technologies may effectively and equitably reduce emissions, the projection methods involve a lot of assumptions. It can be challenging for governments to determine whether their programs are actually achieving the expected level of emissions reductions that we desperately need. The Climate Action Learning Lab was designed to support state and local governments in addressing this need — helping them to rigorously evaluate their programs to detect their true impact.”

From May to July, the Learning Lab offered a suite of resources for participants to leverage rigorous evaluation to identify effective and equitable climate mitigation solutions. Offerings included training lectures, one-on-one strategy sessions, peer learning engagements, and researcher collaboration. State and local leaders built skills and knowledge in evidence generation and use, reviewed and applied research insights to their own programmatic areas, and identified priority research questions to guide evidence-building and decision-making practices. Programs prioritized for evaluation covered topics such as compliance with building energy benchmarking policies, take-up rates of energy-efficient home improvement programs such as heat pumps and Solar for All, and scoring criteria for affordable housing development programs.

“We appreciated the chance to learn about randomized evaluation methodology, and how this impact assessment tool could be utilized in our ongoing climate action planning. With so many potential initiatives to pursue, this approach will help us prioritize our time and resources on the most effective solutions,” said Anna Shugoll, program manager at the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability.

This phase of the Learning Lab was possible thanks to grant funding from J-PAL North America’s longtime supporter and collaborator Arnold Ventures. The work culminated in an in-person summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 23, where Learning Lab participants delivered a presentation on their jurisdiction’s priority research questions and strategic evaluation plans. They also connected with researchers in the J-PAL network to further explore impact evaluation opportunities for promising decarbonization programs.

“The Climate Action Learning Lab has helped us identify research questions for some of the City of Orlando’s deep decarbonization goals. J-PAL staff, along with researchers in the J-PAL network, worked hard to bridge the gap between behavior change theory and the applied, tangible benefits that we achieve through rigorous evaluation of our programs,” said Brittany Sellers, assistant director for sustainability, resilience and future-ready for Orlando. “Whether we’re discussing an energy-efficiency policy for some of the biggest buildings in the City of Orlando or expanding [electric vehicle] adoption across the city, it’s been very easy to communicate some of these high-level research concepts and what they can help us do to actually pursue our decarbonization goals.”

The next phase of the Climate Action Learning Lab will center on building partnerships between jurisdictions and researchers in the J-PAL network to explore the launch of randomized evaluations, deepening the community of practice among current cohort members, and cultivating a broad culture of evidence building and use in the climate space. 

“The Climate Action Learning Lab provided a critical space for our city to collaborate with other cities and states seeking to implement similar decarbonization programs, as well as with researchers in the J-PAL network to help rigorously evaluate these programs,” said Daniel Collins, innovation team director at the City of Newport News. “We look forward to further collaboration and opportunities to learn from evaluations of our mitigation efforts so we, as a city, can better allocate resources to the most effective solutions.”

The Climate Action Learning Lab is one of several offerings under the J-PAL North America Evidence for Climate Action Project. The project’s goal is to convene an influential network of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to generate rigorous evidence to identify and advance equitable, high-impact policy solutions to climate change in the United States. In addition to the Learning Lab, J-PAL North America will launch a climate special topic request for proposals this fall to fund research on climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives. J-PAL will welcome applications from both research partnerships formed through the Learning Lab as well as other eligible applicants.

Local government leaders, researchers, potential partners, or funders committed to advancing climate solutions that work, and who want to learn more about the Evidence for Climate Action Project, may email na_eecc@povertyactionlab.org or subscribe to the J-PAL North America Climate Action newsletter.

NUS Chief Information Technology Officer, Ms Tan Shui-Min, has been named Transformational CIO of the Year at the SPARK Asia Digital Leaders Award 2025, which honours Chief Information Officers across Asia who have delivered game-changing outcomes through digital innovation.

Under Ms Tan’s visionary leadership, NUS has reimagined its digital landscape — from developing AI-Know, a university-wide platform that democratises AI access, to implementing green IT infrastructure that advances both operational efficiency and sustainability. AI-Know has introduced tools such as AI-Minute for automated meeting summaries and AI-Create for building no-code digital agents, saving the University more than 265,000 man-hours in 2024 and set to generate millions in cost savings and cost avoidance.

She has also championed sustainability through the Green Data Centre Network Upgrade Project, which reduced power consumption by 45 per cent and rack space by 49 per cent, resulting in significant energy and cost savings while advancing NUS’ Green Plan 2030 commitments.

Collaboration is a hallmark of Ms Tan’s leadership. She has pioneered a co-creation model with more than 120 departments, working closely with colleagues to identify pain points and design fit-for-purpose AI solutions. Examples include the laboratory inspection tool with the Office of Risk Management and Compliance, and chatbots with the Offices of Finance and Human Resources. These partnerships ensure business relevance, foster shared ownership, and accelerate adoption. She also spearheaded My Virtual Lab, NUS’ first 3D immersive virtual laboratory, which redefines STEM education by enabling interactive, risk-free training and collaborative simulations.

Looking ahead, NUS is scaling up research capabilities through expanded high-performance computing facilities, currently ranked among the world’s top 110 supercomputers. At the same time, initiatives such as NUSHub and the NextGeneSIS programme are enhancing student engagement and optimising the learner experience across both degree and lifelong learning pathways.

These initiatives are guided by the IT Strategic Plan blueprint envisioned and driven by Ms Tan in 2023. Anchored by four strategic goals — Digitally Empowered Business, Cyber Fortress, Flexible Infrastructure, and Future-Ready IT Workforce — the roadmap ensures technology initiatives are closely aligned with NUS’ mission and vision, supporting both operational excellence and future growth.

Reflecting on the award, Ms Tan said: “I am deeply honoured by this recognition, which is a testament to the collective spirit of NUS. It reflects our shared commitment to building a ‘Borderless University, Powered by Infinite Technology,’ where innovation is open and accessible to all. My guiding principle has always been to empower others – fostering an environment where staff and students feel encouraged to experiment, learn, and thrive.

Looking ahead, I remain committed to advancing our digital transformation, ensuring that technology not only keeps pace with the evolving needs of our university but truly enriches the everyday experiences of our community.”

The University’s flagship sustainability festival, NUS Sustainability CONNECT, returns for its third edition this September – featuring close to 40 events throughout the month!

While the festival has typically showcased sustainability research and best practices, there is a growing momentum across the wider NUS community to incorporate green initiatives into day-to-day work. More NUS units outside the traditional sustainability sphere are recognising the value and relevance of sustainability and are eager to share their efforts.

For instance, this year’s CONNECT welcomes partners such as NUS Libraries, NUS College (NUSC) and University Health Centre (UHC), all of which are organising events to engage and inspire the broader NUS community on sustainability efforts.

Walking the talk in sustainability: NUS Libraries’ guided tours and solar panel exhibition 

Did you know that BookBridge on Level 2 of NUS Central Library was among the first structures in Singapore to use tropical mass engineered timber, a renewable and sustainable building material?

Choosing eco-friendly construction materials is just one of the many ways NUS Libraries is making sustainability a daily reality. To showcase its efforts, NUS Libraries will be conducting a guided tour of the Central Library on 17 September 2025 to share how it is walking the talk in sustainability, including reducing its carbon footprint in daily operations.

In recent years, NUS Libraries has been steadily developing its four sustainability pillars – green libraries; green resources; green programming; and green digital and innovation – in support of the Singapore Green Plan 2030 and the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Beyond this, NUS Libraries will also be hosting a guided tour to a garden that was set up on campus in the early 1980s. Happening on 24 September 2025, this historical garden under the care of the Department of Biological Sciences, houses legacy plants, such as the cycads, which have been around in the garden since its founding years. Rarely open to the public, the garden offers a glimpse into the space that supports the department’s outreach and teaching activities.

In addition, NUS Central Library is running an exhibition – Solar Energising Heritage: Coloured Solar Panel Development for Historical Shophouses – from now till 6 October 2025. This collaborative project with the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS), NUS Museum and NUS Baba House features custom-designed coloured Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) panels developed for NUS Baba House, using SERIS’ unique dotlism pattern technology.

Going forward, NUS Libraries is committed to paving the way in advancing sustainability in teaching, learning and research.

Inspiring change: Student-led sustainability initiatives at NUS College’s Impact Festival

Committed to delivering interdisciplinary education, NUSC will present the Impact Festival on 17 September 2025 – a vibrant showcase of student projects from the Impact Experience programme. This is a capstone course where students collaborate with communities in Singapore and across Southeast Asia to drive meaningful social change.

Given that sustainability is inherently interdisciplinary, it is no surprise that a number of these projects focused on sustainability-related themes such as transforming food waste management, promoting sustainable tourism, protecting animal welfare, restoring coral reefs and cultivating sustainable agriculture.

One notable example is a project led by Team Bayanihan (which means unity in Tagalog) comprising seven NUSC students. For decades, bamboo has been viewed as the poor man’s timber in the Philippines. To change this mindset, the team developed a unique bamboo-based curriculum to help Filipino youth appreciate this sustainable resource that is readily available in their own backyard. 

In partnership with Grow School Philippines, Team Bayanihan conducted three workshops in Nasugbu, Batangas, teaching hundreds of young people the art of bamboo weaving and the science of structural design. The goal was to showcase bamboo’s versatility, both as a material for crafts and a medium for constructing larger structures, to the next generation of Filipinos. Through this, Team Bayanihan hopes to inspire youth across the Philippines to embrace the beauty and utility of bamboo in building a more sustainable future.  

Championing sustainability through healthy eating: UHC’s sustainable granola workshop

Eating healthily and supporting the planet can go hand in hand, and UHC is keen to demonstrate how.

It is conducting a sustainable granola workshop on 19 September 2025 to share with participants how spent grains can be upcycled into nutritious granola. Guided by experts in the sustainable food innovation sector, participants will not only create and sample their own sustainable granola, but also take home a recipe kit on how to make these wholesome grains.

The complimentary workshop for NUS staff, which was fully booked within a day, is part of the Centre’s Feel Good Friday series, which explores practical ways for the NUS community to adopt greener habits while maintaining a balanced diet and nutrition.

Encouraged by the strong response, UHC plans to offer more workshops to promote sustainable habits and healthy eating across the NUS community.

To learn more about NUS Sustainability CONNECT or register your interest for the above events, please click here.

By NUS Sustainability and Resilience Unit

By Dr Clemens Chay, Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute at NUS

• CNA Online, 10 September 2025

• Lianhe Zaobao Online, 10 September 2025

Each year, the U.S. energy industry loses an estimated 3 percent of its natural gas production, valued at $1 billion in revenue, to leaky infrastructure. Escaping invisibly into the air, these methane gas plumes can now be detected, imaged, and measured using a specialized lidar flown on small aircraft.

This lidar is a product of Bridger Photonics, a leading methane-sensing company based in Bozeman, Montana. MIT Lincoln Laboratory developed the lidar's optical-power amplifier, a key component of the system, by advancing its existing slab-coupled optical waveguide amplifier (SCOWA) technology. The methane-detecting lidar is 10 to 50 times more capable than other airborne remote sensors on the market.

"This drone-capable sensor for imaging methane is a great example of Lincoln Laboratory technology at work, matched with an impactful commercial application," says Paul Juodawlkis, who pioneered the SCOWA technology with Jason Plant in the Advanced Technology Division and collaborated with Bridger Photonics to enable its commercial application.

Today, the product is being adopted widely, including by nine of the top 10 natural gas producers in the United States. "Keeping gas in the pipe is good for everyone — it helps companies bring the gas to market, improves safety, and protects the outdoors," says Pete Roos, founder and chief innovation officer at Bridger. "The challenge with methane is that you can't see it. We solved a fundamental problem with Lincoln Laboratory."

A laser source "miracle"

In 2014, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) was seeking a cost-effective and precise way to detect methane leaks. Highly flammable and a potent pollutant, methane gas (the primary constituent of natural gas) moves through the country via a vast and intricate pipeline network. Bridger submitted a research proposal in response to ARPA-E's call and was awarded funding to develop a small, sensitive aerial lidar.

Aerial lidar sends laser light down to the ground and measures the light that reflects back to the sensor. Such lidar is often used for producing detailed topography maps. Bridger's idea was to merge topography mapping with gas measurements. Methane absorbs light at the infrared wavelength of 1.65 microns. Operating a laser at that wavelength could allow a lidar to sense the invisible plumes and measure leak rates.

"This laser source was one of the hardest parts to get right. It's a key element," Roos says. His team needed a laser source with specific characteristics to emit powerfully enough at a wavelength of 1.65 microns to work from useful altitudes. Roos recalled the ARPA-E program manager saying they needed a "miracle" to pull it off.

Through mutual connections, Bridger was introduced to a Lincoln Laboratory technology for optically amplifying laser signals: the SCOWA. When Bridger contacted Juodawlkis and Plant, they had been working on SCOWAs for a decade. Although they had never investigated SCOWAs at 1.65 microns, they thought that the fundamental technology could be extended to operate at that wavelength. Lincoln Laboratory received ARPA-E funding to develop 1.65-micron SCOWAs and provide prototype units to Bridger for incorporation into their gas-mapping lidar systems.

"That was the miracle we needed," Roos says.

A legacy in laser innovation

Lincoln Laboratory has long been a leader in semiconductor laser and optical emitter technology. In 1962, the laboratory was among the first to demonstrate the diode laser, which is now the most widespread laser used globally. Several spinout companies, such as Lasertron and TeraDiode, have commercialized innovations stemming from the laboratory's laser research, including those for fiber-optic telecommunications and metal-cutting applications.

In the early 2000s, Juodawlkis, Plant, and others at the laboratory recognized a need for a stable, powerful, and bright single-mode semiconductor optical amplifier, which could enhance lidar and optical communications. They developed the SCOWA (slab-coupled optical waveguide amplifier) concept by extending earlier work on slab-coupled optical waveguide lasers (SCOWLs). The initial SCOWA was funded under the laboratory's internal technology investment portfolio, a pool of R&D funding provided by the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering to seed new technology ideas. These ideas often mature into sponsored programs or lead to commercialized technology.

"Soon, we developed a semiconductor optical amplifier that was 10 times better than anything that had ever been demonstrated before," Plant says. Like other semiconductor optical amplifiers, the SCOWA guides laser light through semiconductor material. This process increases optical power as the laser light interacts with electrons, causing them to shed photons at the same wavelength as the input laser. The SCOWA's unique light-guiding design enables it to reach much higher output powers, creating a powerful and efficient beam. They demonstrated SCOWAs at various wavelengths and applied the technology to projects for the Department of Defense.

When Bridger Photonics reached out to Lincoln Laboratory, the most impactful application of the device yet emerged. Working iteratively through the ARPA-E funding and a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), the team increased Bridger's laser power by more than tenfold. This power boost enabled them to extend the range of the lidar to elevations over 1,000 feet.

"Lincoln Laboratory had the knowledge of what goes on inside the optical amplifier — they could take our input, adjust the recipe, and make a device that worked very well for us," Roos says.

The Gas Mapping Lidar was commercially released in 2019. That same year, the product won an R&D 100 Award, recognizing it as a revolutionary advancement in the marketplace.

A technology transfer takes off

Today, the United States is the world's largest natural gas supplier, driving growth in the methane-sensing market. Bridger Photonics deploys its Gas Mapping Lidar for customers nationwide, attaching the sensor to planes and drones and pinpointing leaks across the entire supply chain, from where gas is extracted, piped through the country, and delivered to businesses and homes. Customers buy the data from these scans to efficiently locate and repair leaks in their gas infrastructure. In January 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency provided regulatory approval for the technology.

According to Bruce Niemeyer, president of Chevron's shale and tight operations, the lidar capability has been game-changing: "Our goal is simple — keep methane in the pipe. This technology helps us assure we are doing that … It can find leaks that are 10 times smaller than other commercial providers are capable of spotting."

At Lincoln Laboratory, researchers continue to innovate new devices in the national interest. The SCOWA is one of many technologies in the toolkit of the laboratory's Microsystems Prototyping Foundry, which will soon be expanded to include a new Compound Semiconductor Laboratory – Microsystem Integration Facility. Government, industry, and academia can access these facilities through government-funded projects, CRADAs, test agreements, and other mechanisms.

At the direction of the U.S. government, the laboratory is also seeking industry transfer partners for a technology that couples SCOWA with a photonic integrated circuit platform. Such a platform could advance quantum computing and sensing, among other applications.

"Lincoln Laboratory is a national resource for semiconductor optical emitter technology," Juodawlkis says.

NUS paid tribute to seven outstanding educators, researchers and professionals for their contributions to the University, Singapore and the global community at the NUS University Awards 2025. The annual Awards recognise members of the NUS community who are trailblazers in their fields and have made sterling contributions to NUS, Singapore, and the global community.

Speaking at the awards ceremony held at the University Cultural Centre on 12 September 2025, NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye highlighted the significance of this year’s awards, noting that 2025 marks NUS’ 120th anniversary. He thanked all award winners for their contributions and commitment towards building NUS into what it is today. 

Acknowledging the central role of AI in shaping the future, Prof Tan emphasised that as a forward-looking university, NUS must not remain on the sidelines while others build capabilities, innovate and ride the AI wave. To this end, NUS is mounting a robust and comprehensive approach to AI that spans its core mission areas of education, research, innovation and enterprise, as well as administration. “We will stay ahead, empower and uplift the whole organisation to fully leverage on AI in all that we do. We are striving forward, with AI and through AI, towards our vision to be a leading global university, shaping the future,” he added.

Top accolade - Outstanding Service Award

This year, the prestigious Outstanding Service Award was conferred on Professor Cheong Koon Hean, Rector of NUS College and Chairman of the Centre for Liveable Cities Advisory Panel under the Ministry of National Development; and Mr Liew Mun Leong, CEO of Gelephu Mindfulness City and Founder and Principal Consultant of Building People Consultancy Pte Ltd., in recognition of their inspiring leadership and dedicated service. Both are accomplished individuals who have made sustained contributions in selflessly serving the University and society.

Professor Cheong Koon Hean

A globally recognised urban planner and architect, Prof Cheong is instrumental in shaping Singapore’s urban form across multiple decades, from strategic land use and heritage conservation to sustainable public housing and smart‑town innovation.

As former CEO of both the Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Housing & Development Board, she redefined the standards of city-making—spearheading transformative plans for Marina Bay and introducing new generations of public housing marked by inclusivity, biophilia and smart technologies.

As a member of the NUS Board of Trustees for 12 years and now the Rector of NUS College, Prof Cheong bridges academia with public policy through her extensive experience in public service. She has also served on the advisory committees of the former NUS School of Design and Engineering, and NUS Faculty of Engineering.

Currently Chairman of the Centre for Liveable Cities Advisory Panel and the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Prof Cheong continues to influence national and international agendas on urban innovation and sustainability. She also advances global urban sustainability through her many advisory and leadership roles with institutes such as the International Federation for Housing and Planning, the Urban Land Institute, and the World Economic Forum’s Real Estate and Urbanisation Council.

Delivering the citation for Prof Cheong’s conferment, Professor Simon Chesterman, NUS Vice Provost (Educational Innovation) and Dean of NUS College said, “Professor Cheong is a stateswoman of city planning and a champion of public service. Her leadership exemplifies the integration of academic excellence, policy insight and civic responsibility.”

On her motivation to serve, Prof Cheong shared, “One of the greatest rewards in serving NUS is to see it grow from strength to strength. My wish is for NUS to not only achieve world-class academic excellence, but to also be the catalyst that encourages curiosity, innovation and risk-taking, nurturing young hearts and minds to think beyond grades and self, aspiring to make a better world.”

Watch this inspiring video on Prof Cheong’s dedicated contributions towards the University and society.

Mr Liew Mun Leong

The veteran corporate leader’s five-decade career is marked by many valuable contributions to both public infrastructure and private enterprise. Contributing to Singapore’s journey towards becoming a key transportation hub, Mr Liew played a pivotal role in the corporatisation of Changi Airport. He also provided strategic leadership across major infrastructure projects, including Terminal 4, Jewel Changi Airport and Changi East.

In the private sector over a span of 32 years, he led as CEO and was an active board member of several significant companies, many of which were publicly listed. These include CapitaLand, Capital Mall Trust (the first REIT in Singapore) and the Singapore Exchange. He also chaired the boards of Capital Mall Asia, Changi Airport Group, Surbana Jurong Consultancy Holding and Pavilion Gas.

Throughout his extensive career, Mr Liew has shared his expertise in engineering, strategic management and infrastructure development on various boards and panels. In 2024, he was appointed by Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck as CEO of Gelephu Mindfulness City, a special administrative region envisioned as a vibrant economic hub within Bhutan.

An NUS alumnus, Mr Liew was Provost’s Chair Professor (Practice) at the NUS Business School, Faculty of Engineering, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He also provided expertise on various boards within NUS, including NUS Business School's management advisory board and NUS School of Continuing and Lifelong Education’s inaugural industry advisory board, where he fostered collaborations between academia and industry. Mr Liew was also the Rector of Ridge View Residential College, where he provided mentorship to students.

Delivering the citation for Mr Liew’s conferment, Professor Teo Kie Leong, Dean of the College of Design and Engineering at NUS, lauded his visionary leadership and dedicated services to Singapore, as well as NUS, “Mr Liew’s impact is felt both nationally and internationally, spanning the fields of engineering, infrastructure development, business and public service.”

Sharing his aspirations for the University, Mr Liew said, “Having served as Practice Chair Professor (pro-bono) across Business, Public Policy, and Engineering in NUS, I encourage the university to deepen its engagement and foster stronger collaboration between academia and industry. A university’s ultimate measure lies not only in education but in the practical application of knowledge—preparing graduates to innovate, lead and deliver impactful solutions to real-world challenges.

Watch this inspiring video on Mr Liew’s dedicated contributions towards the University and society.

The honour roll

The NUS University Awards 2025 also recognised the accomplishments of five outstanding educators and researchers.

University Research Recognition Award

Professor Liu Xiaogang, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, and the Department of Surgery, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, was recognised for his groundbreaking research that has placed NUS at the forefront of his area of expertise.  

A global leader in nanophotonics and bioimaging, Prof Liu has made transformative contributions to the development of advanced X-ray imaging and optical sensing technologies. His work on all-inorganic perovskite nanoscintillators and high-resolution X-ray luminescence extension imaging has redefined deep-tissue visualisation. This remarkable research has enabled breakthroughs in diagnostics, radiotherapy monitoring and multi-spectral imaging.

Young Researcher Award

Assistant Professor Hou Yi from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, College of Design and Engineering; and Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore was commended for conducting groundbreaking research with the potential to extend the frontiers of knowledge in his field.

A Presidential Young Professor, Asst Prof Hou has made sterling contributions to the field of renewable energy, particularly in perovskite solar cell technology. He has received global acknowledgement for his work, including his inclusion in the MIT Innovators Under 35 list for the Asia-Pacific region. His recognition as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in the Cross-Field category from 2022 to 2024 further highlights his exceptional impact on his field.

Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award

Professor Yan Ning from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, College of Design and Engineering, was honoured for his excellent and committed mentorship in nurturing the next generation of scholars and thought leaders.

Prof Yan is one of the world’s foremost names in the broad area of catalysis, particularly in the conversion of waste biomass feedstocks into valuable molecules such as amino acids and fuels. Under his guidance, his students have made many impactful research contributions, won prestigious awards at various international scientific competitions, and flourished in diverse and illustrious careers as academics, industry practitioners, and even entrepreneurs.

Outstanding Educator Award

Two faculty members were acknowledged for being exemplary educators who have excelled in engaging and inspiring students in their quest for knowledge:

1) Associate Professor Damith Chatura Rajapakse from the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing

Assoc Prof Rajapakse is a teacher who inspires, a mentor who empowers, and an innovator whose influence is felt far beyond the campus. His teaching evaluations consistently soar above School and Department averages, and his students regularly nominate him for best teaching in every course he conducts. A trailblazer in educational technology, Assoc Prof Rajapakse also has a flagship innovation known as TEAMMATES, a peer-evaluation platform now used by over a million users across more than 1,500 institutions worldwide, which has significantly enhanced collaborative learning.

2) Associate Professor Peter Alan Todd from the Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science; and Tropical Marine Science Institute

An experimental marine ecologist who focuses on organism-environment interactions in nearshore waters, Assoc Prof Todd’s teaching philosophy is “learning by doing science”. He employs problem-based learning to inspire creative thinking and designs authentic assignments that challenge students to use high-level cognitive skills. His courses are designed to encourage knowledge synthesis where students get to produce “ready-for-submission” scientific papers. Over 50 journal papers by undergraduate students as first authors have been published with his guidance.

Read more about the NUS University Awards recipients here and the NUS press release here.

A new MIT initiative known as Day of Design offers free, open-source, hands-on design activities for all classrooms, in addition to professional development opportunities and signature events. The material engages pK-12 learners in the skills they need to solve complex open-ended problems while also considering user, social, and environmental needs. Inspired by Day of AI and Day of Climate, it is a new collaborative effort by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) and the WPS Institute, with support from the MIT Museum and the MIT pK-12 Initiative.

“At MIT, design is practiced across departments — from the more obvious ones, like architecture and mechanical engineering, to less apparent ones, like biology and chemistry. Design skills support students in becoming strong collaborators, idea-makers, and human-centered problem-solvers. The Day of Design initiative seeks to share these skills with the K-12 audience through bite-sized, engaging activities for every classroom,” says Rosa Weinberg, who co-led the development of Day of Design and serves as MAD’s K–12 design education lead.

These interdisciplinary resources are designed collaboratively with feedback from teachers and grounded in exciting themes across science, humanities, art, engineering, and other subject areas, serving educators and learners regardless of their experience with design and making. Activities are scaffolded like “grammar lessons” for design education, including classroom-ready slides, handouts, tutorial videos, and facilitation tips supporting 21st century mindsets. All materials will be shared online, enabling educators to use the content as-is, or modify it as needed for their classrooms and other informal learning settings.

Rachel Adams, a former teacher and head of teaching and learning at the WPS Institute, explains, “There can be a gap between open-ended teaching materials and what teachers actually need in their classrooms. Day of Design classroom materials are piloted and workshopped by an interdisciplinary cohort of teachers who make up our Teacher Innovation Fellowship. This collaborative design process allows us to bridge the gap between cutting-edge MIT research with practical student-centered design lessons. These materials represent a new way of thinking that honors both the innovation happening in the labs at MIT and the real-world needs of educators.” 

Day of Design also features signature events and a yearly, real-world challenge that brings all the design skills together. It is intended for educators who want ready-to-use design and making activities that connect to their subject areas and mindsets, and for students eager to develop problem-solving skills, creativity, and hands-on experience. Schools and districts looking to engage learners through interdisciplinary, project-based approaches can adopt the program as a flexible framework, while community partners can use it to provide young people with tools and spaces to create.

Cedric Jacobson, a chemistry teacher at Brooke High School in Boston who participated in MAD’s Teacher Innovation Fellowship and contributed to testing the Day of Design curriculum, emphasizes it “provides opportunities for teachers to practice and interact with design principles in concrete ways through multiple lesson structures. This process empowers them to try design principles in model lessons before preparing to use them in their own curriculum.”

Evan Milstein-Greengart, another Teacher Innovation Fellow, describes how “having this hands-on experience changed the way I thought about education. I felt like a kid again — going back to playground learning — and I want to bring that same spirit into my classroom.” 

Closing the skills gap through design education

Technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotech are reshaping work and society. The World Economic Forum estimates that 39 percent of key job skills will change by 2030. At the same time, research shows student engagement drops sharply in high school, with a third of students experiencing what is often called the “engagement cliff.” Many do not encounter design until college, if at all.

There is a growing need to foster not just technical literacy, but design fluency — the ability to approach complex problems with empathy, creativity, and critical thinking. Design education helps students prototype solutions, iterate based on feedback, and communicate ideas clearly. Studies have shown it can improve creative thinking, motivation, problem-solving, self-efficacy, and academic achievement.

At MIT, design is a way of thinking and creating that spans disciplines — from bioengineering and architecture to mechanical systems and public policy. It is both creative and analytical, grounded in iteration, user input, and systems thinking. Day of Design reflects MIT’s “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”) motto and extends the tools of design to young learners and educators.

“The workshops help students develop skills that can be applied across multiple subject areas, using topics that draw context from MIT research while remaining exciting and accessible to middle and high school students,” explains Weinberg. “For example, ‘Cosmic Comfort,’ one of our pilot workshops, was inspired by MIT's Space Architecture course (MAS.S66/4.154/16.89). It challenges students to consider how you might make a lunar habitat feel like home, while focusing on developing the crucial design skill of ideation — the ability to generate multiple creative solutions.”

Building on an MIT legacy

Day of Design builds on the model of Day of AI and Day of Climate, two ongoing efforts by MIT RAISE and the MIT pK-12 Initiative. All three initiatives share free, open-source activities, professional development materials, and events that connect MIT research with educators and students worldwide. Since 2021, Day of AI has reached more than 42,000 teachers and 1.5 million students in 170 countries and all 50 U.S. states. Day of Climate, launched in March 2025, has already recorded over 50,000 website visitors, 300 downloads of professional development materials, and an April launch event at the MIT Museum that drew 200 participants.

“Day of Design builds on the spirit of Day of AI and Day of Climate by inviting young people to engage with real-world challenges through creative work, meaningful collaboration, and deep empathy for others. These initiatives reflect MIT’s commitment to hands-on, transdisciplinary learning, empowering future young leaders not just to understand the world, but to shape it,” says Claudia Urrea, executive director for the pK–12 Initiative at MIT Open Learning. 

Kicking off with connection

“Learning and creating together in person sparks the kind of ideas and connections that are hard to make any other way. Collective learning helps everyone think bigger and more creatively, while building a more deeply connected community that keeps that growth alive,” observes Caitlin Morris, PhD student in Fluid Interfaces, a 2024 MAD Design Fellow, and co-organizer of Day of Design: Connect, which will kick off Day of Design on Sept. 25. 

Following the launch, the first set of classroom resources will be introduced during the 2025–26 school year, starting with activities for grades 7–12. Additional resources for younger learners, along with training opportunities for educators, will be added over time. Each year, new design skills and mindsets will be incorporated, creating a growing library of activities. While initial events will take place at MIT, organizers plan to expand programming globally.

Teacher Innovation Fellow Jessica Toupin, who piloted Day of Design activities in her math classroom, reflects on the impact: “As a math teacher, I don’t always get to focus on design. This material reminded me of the joy of learning — and when I brought it into my classroom, students who had struggled came alive. Just the ability to play and build showed me they were capable of so much more.”

The National University of Singapore (NUS) today recognised seven outstanding individuals who distinguished themselves with their achievements and contributions in the areas of education, research, mentorship and service to the University, Singapore and the global community. They are recipients of the annual NUS University Awards which recognise educators, researchers and professionals for their exceptional contributions to the University, Singapore and the global community.

This year, the prestigious Outstanding Service Award was conferred on Professor Cheong Koon Hean, Rector of NUS College and Chairman of the Centre for Liveable Cities Advisory Panel, Ministry of National Development; and Mr Liew Mun Leong, CEO of Gelephu Mindfulness City and Founder and Principal Consultant of Building People Consultancy Pte Ltd., in recognition of their inspiring leadership and dedicated service. Both are accomplished individuals who have made sustained contributions in selflessly serving the University and society.

NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye said, “This year’s University Awards recipients have won their award in a special year. 2025 is a significant year for NUS as we celebrate our 120th anniversary. We are proud of the profound dedication of our winners to pursuing excellence in education, research and service at the highest levels, raising the standards and reputation of NUS as a leading global university, shaping the future. The impact of their work is far-reaching, and their contributions have left an indelible mark that inspires us to scale greater heights. I extend my heartiest congratulations to all award recipients.”

Besides the Outstanding Service Award, the other award categories are University Research Recognition Award, Young Researcher Award, Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award and Outstanding Educator Award.

Outstanding Service Award

Professor Cheong Koon Hean

A globally recognised urban planner and architect, Professor Cheong Koon Hean is instrumental in shaping Singapore’s urban form across multiple decades, from strategic land use and heritage conservation to sustainable public housing and smart‑town innovation.

As former CEO of both the Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Housing & Development Board, she redefined the standards of city-making—spearheading transformative plans for Marina Bay and introducing new generations of public housing marked by inclusivity, biophilia and smart technologies.

As a member of the NUS Board of Trustees for 12 years and now the Rector of NUS College, Professor Cheong bridges academia with public policy through her extensive experience in public service. She has also served on the advisory committees of the former NUS School of Design and Engineering, and NUS Faculty of Engineering.

Currently Chairman of the Centre for Liveable Cities Advisory Panel, Ministry of National Development and the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Professor Cheong continues to influence national and international agendas on urban innovation and sustainability. She also advances global urban sustainability through her many advisory and leadership roles with institutes such as the International Federation for Housing and Planning, the Urban Land Institute, and the World Economic Forum’s Real Estate and Urbanisation Council.

Mr Liew Mun Leong

Mr Liew Mun Leong’s five-decade career as a veteran corporate leader is marked by many valuable contributions to both public infrastructure and private enterprise. Contributing to Singapore’s journey towards becoming a key transportation hub, he played a pivotal role in the corporatisation of Changi Airport. He also provided strategic leadership across major infrastructure projects, including Terminal 4, Jewel Changi Airport and Changi East.

In the private sector over a span of 32 years, he led as CEO and was an active board member of several significant companies, many of which were publicly listed. These include CapitaLand, Capital Mall Trust (the first REIT in Singapore) and the Singapore Exchange. He also chaired the boards of Capital Mall Asia, Changi Airport Group, Surbana Jurong Consultancy Holding and Pavilion Gas.

Throughout his extensive career, Mr Liew has shared his expertise in engineering, strategic management and infrastructure development on various boards and panels. In 2024, he was appointed by Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck as CEO of Gelephu Mindfulness City, a special administrative region envisioned as a vibrant economic hub within Bhutan.

An NUS alumnus, Mr Liew was Provost’s Chair Professor (Practice) at the NUS Business School, Faculty of Engineering, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He also provided expertise on various boards within NUS, including NUS Business School's management advisory board and NUS School of Continuing and Lifelong Education’s inaugural industry advisory board, where he fostered collaborations between academia and industry. Mr Liew was also the Rector of Ridge View Residential College, where he provided mentorship to students.

Five exemplary educators and researchers honoured

The NUS University Awards also celebrated the accomplishments of five outstanding academics and researchers:

University Research Recognition Award

1) Professor Liu Xiaogang, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science; and the Department of Surgery, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine

A global leader in nanophotonics and bioimaging, Prof Liu has made transformative contributions to the development of advanced X-ray imaging and optical sensing technologies. His work on all-inorganic perovskite nanoscintillators and high-resolution X-ray luminescence extension imaging has redefined deep-tissue visualisation. This remarkable research has enabled breakthroughs in diagnostics, radiotherapy monitoring and multi-spectral imaging.

Young Researcher Award

2) Assistant Professor Hou Yi, Presidential Young Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, College of Design and Engineering; and Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore

Asst Prof Hou has made groundbreaking contributions to the field of renewable energy, particularly in perovskite solar cell technology. He has received global acknowledgement for his work, including his inclusion in the MIT Innovators Under 35 list for the Asia-Pacific region. His recognition as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in the Cross-Field category from 2022 to 2024 further highlights his exceptional impact on his field.

Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award

3) Professor Yan Ning from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, College of Design and Engineering

Prof Yan is one of the world’s foremost names in the broad area of catalysis, particularly in the conversion of waste biomass feedstocks into valuable molecules such as amino acids and fuels. Under his guidance, his students have made many impactful research contributions, won prestigious awards at various international scientific competitions, and flourished in diverse and illustrious careers as academics, industry practitioners, and even entrepreneurs.

Outstanding Educator Award

4) Associate Professor Damith Chatura Rajapakse from the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing

Assoc Prof Rajapakse is a teacher who inspires, a mentor who empowers, and an innovator whose influence is felt far beyond the campus. His teaching evaluations consistently soar above School and Department averages, and his students regularly nominate him for best teaching in every course he conducts. A trailblazer in educational technology, Assoc Prof Rajapakse also has a flagship innovation known as TEAMMATES, a peer-evaluation platform now used by over a million users across more than 1,500 institutions worldwide, which has significantly enhanced collaborative learning.

5) Associate Professor Peter Alan Todd from the Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science; and Tropical Marine Science Institute

An experimental marine ecologist who focuses on organism-environment interactions in nearshore waters, Assoc Prof Todd’s teaching philosophy is “learning by doing science”. He employs problem-based learning to inspire creative thinking, and designs authentic assignments that challenge students to use high-level cognitive skills. His courses are designed to encourage knowledge synthesis where students get to produce “ready-for-submission” scientific papers. Over 50 journal papers by undergraduate students as first authors have been published with his guidance.

As part of NUS Global Relations Office’s Study Trips for Engagement and EnRichment (STEER) programme, 15 NUS students from the College of Alice & Peter Tan (CAPT) embarked on a 10-day overseas trip to multiple municipalities and districts in Timor-Leste, including Dili, Ermera and Metinaro. Led by Dr Toh Tai Chong, Director of Residential Life and Resident Fellow at CAPT, the trip centred on the themes of youth and community development. Despite being the youngest Southeast Asian country, independent since 2002, Timor-Leste offered students the chance to gain deep insights into the country’s agricultural, educational and community leadership systems through engagement with various stakeholders, communities and organisations.

Agriculture as the backbone of Timor-Leste’s economy

Coffee is one of Timor-Leste’s top export crops, deeply rooted in the country’s history due to Portuguese colonisation. Today it remains a vital part of the nation’s economy and identity, and the team had the chance to visit various coffee production sites and local cafes, experiencing firsthand the full harvesting process.

Alongside coffee production, the Timorese government is also positioning agriculture as one of the country’s key exports by tapping on the country’s land space and natural potential for agricultural production. To support this push, universities like Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa'e and University of Peace, are training youth in agriculture.

Through conversations with university students and professors, the CAPT team discovered the importance Timorese youths placed on agricultural education as a pathway to improve their country’s farming industry. Many have aspirations to work abroad, particularly in places like Australia, in order to bring back new agricultural techniques to benefit their communities.

However, it has been challenging with the country’s long dry seasons lasting up to nine months, and growing concerns about climate change, resource depletion and pollution that make environmental conservation even more critical. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Permatil hope to address this by equipping young people with knowledge about permaculture and water restoration, empowering them to implement sustainable agricultural practices in their own communities.

Education as a means to engage and empower youths

To learn more about the youths and the local education system, the team visited different educational institutions, from pre-schools to universities. They were able to gather deeper insights on the ground about the education scene in relation to their pre-trip seminars conducted by  professionals who shared their personal and professional experiences working in Timor-Leste. One notable takeaway was how the importance of agriculture was actively communicated to young people. Many universities offer agricultural courses aimed at equipping the next generation with the skills needed to sustain and advance the industry so vital to the country’s development.

On a more personal level, the team was deeply moved by conversations with students, teachers and staff, many of whom shared that they aspired to become educators in order to give back to society. Clarence, a Year Three CAPTain from the Faculty of Science, said, “It is heartening to see the passion of these students and staff — not just in educating us, but in their eagerness to connect. Despite the challenges they face, it was truly inspiring to witness their determination and intentionality they display in creating meaning and value for themselves and their communities.”

Uniting communities through community leadership

Another key theme which surfaced during the trip was the quiet strength of community leadership. Many of the community leaders the students met shared about their desire to give back and empower fellow Timorese by providing them with jobs, training and skills to uplift their families. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and a deep commitment to their communities, these leaders have creatively leveraged existing resources to advocate for a range of causes – from sustainability and women’s rights, to coffee production and local spirits – while carefully balancing support from NGOs with their pursuit of self-reliance. When visiting one of the NGO, Alola Foundation, Year 2 CAPTain and Business student Lynette Saw (pictured in the left photo below) was inspired by the stories that were shared at the visit and how it only takes a collective vision to spark meaningful, intergenerational change for women in Timor Leste.

Given the constraints faced by the local government, the students saw how community leadership plays an important role in Timor-Leste’s development, and how local initiatives and grassroots leaders complement the government’s work by helping to drive social progress and enhance community resilience. Year Three CAPTain from the College of Design and Engineering Tan When Young, not only held deep respect for the community leaders but developed a newfound respect for the meaningful work that the NGOs do. “Many of the NGOs truly went above and beyond in the work to support the local communities. While it is definitely not easy and there are a lot of challenges, it is heartening to witness the fruits of their labour.”

The trip left the team cognisant of the challenges this young nation faces, yet deeply hopeful about its untapped potential. With the right support systems and sustained investment in the local communities, they believe that Timor-Leste has the potential to flourish – grounded in unity and driven by a shared vision and strong sense of national identity.

• Channel 5 News, 9 September 2025
• The Straits Times, 10 September 2025, The Big Story, pA2
• Lianhe Zaobao, 10 September 2025, Focus, p3
• CNA Online, 10 September 2025
• Suria News Online, 10 September 2025
• Berita Harian, 10 September 2025, p10
• Warna 94.2FM, 10 September 2025
• Tamil Murasu, 11 September 2025, p2

By Dr Azhar Ibrahim Alwee, Senior Lecturer from the Dept of Malay Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS

• Suria News Online, 9 September 2025

Researchers at the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a powerful tool capable of scanning thousands of biological samples to detect transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNA) modifications — tiny chemical changes to RNA molecules that help control how cells grow, adapt to stress, and respond to diseases such as cancer and antibiotic‑resistant infections. This tool opens up new possibilities for science, health care, and industry — from accelerating disease research and enabling more precise diagnostics to guiding the development of more effective medical treatments for diseases such as cancer and antibiotic-resistant infections.

For this study, the SMART AMR team worked in collaboration with researchers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the University of Florida, the University at Albany in New York, and Lodz University of Technology in Poland.

Addressing current limitations in RNA modification profiling

Cancer and infectious diseases are complicated health conditions in which cells are forced to function abnormally by mutations in their genetic material or by instructions from an invading microorganism. The SMART-led research team is among the world’s leaders in understanding how the epitranscriptome — the over 170 different chemical modifications of all forms of RNA — controls growth of normal cells and how cells respond to stressful changes in the environment, such as loss of nutrients or exposure to toxic chemicals. The researchers are also studying how this system is corrupted in cancer or exploited by viruses, bacteria, and parasites in infectious diseases.

Current molecular methods used to study the expansive epitranscriptome and all of the thousands of different types of modified RNA are often slow, labor-intensive, costly, and involve hazardous chemicals, which limits research capacity and speed.

To solve this problem, the SMART team developed a new tool that enables fast, automated profiling of tRNA modifications — molecular changes that regulate how cells survive, adapt to stress, and respond to disease. This capability allows scientists to map cell regulatory networks, discover novel enzymes, and link molecular patterns to disease mechanisms, paving the way for better drug discovery and development, and more accurate disease diagnostics. 

Unlocking the complexity of RNA modifications

SMART’s open-access research, recently published in Nucleic Acids Research and titled “tRNA modification profiling reveals epitranscriptome regulatory networks in Pseudomonas aeruginosa,” shows that the tool has already enabled the discovery of previously unknown RNA-modifying enzymes and the mapping of complex gene regulatory networks. These networks are crucial for cellular adaptation to stress and disease, providing important insights into how RNA modifications control bacterial survival mechanisms. 

Using robotic liquid handlers, researchers extracted tRNA from more than 5,700 genetically modified strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that causes infections such as pneumonia, urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections, and wound infections. Samples were enzymatically digested and analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), a technique that separates molecules based on their physical properties and identifies them with high precision and sensitivity. 

As part of the study, the process generated over 200,000 data points in a high-resolution approach that revealed new tRNA-modifying enzymes and simplified gene networks controlling how cells respond and adapt to stress. For example, the data revealed that the methylthiotransferase MiaB, one of the enzymes responsible for tRNA modification ms2i6A, was found to be sensitive to the availability of iron and sulfur and to metabolic changes when oxygen is low. Discoveries like this highlight how cells respond to environmental stresses, and could lead to future development of therapies or diagnostics.

SMART’s automated system was specially designed to profile tRNA modifications across thousands of samples rapidly and safely. Unlike traditional methods, this tool integrates robotics to automate sample preparation and analysis, eliminating the need for hazardous chemical handling and reducing costs. This advancement increases safety, throughput, and affordability, enabling routine large-scale use in research and clinical labs.

A faster and automated way to study RNA

As the first system capable of quantitative, system‑wide profiling of tRNA modifications at this scale, the tool provides a unique and comprehensive view of the epitranscriptome — the complete set of RNA chemical modifications within cells. This capability allows researchers to validate hypotheses about RNA modifications, uncover novel biology, and identify promising molecular targets for developing new therapies.

“This pioneering tool marks a transformative advance in decoding the complex language of RNA modifications that regulate cellular responses,” says Professor Peter Dedon, co-lead principal investigator at SMART AMR, professor of biological engineering at MIT, and corresponding author of the paper. “Leveraging AMR’s expertise in mass spectrometry and RNA epitranscriptomics, our research uncovers new methods to detect complex gene networks critical for understanding and treating cancer, as well as antibiotic-resistant infections. By enabling rapid, large-scale analysis, the tool accelerates both fundamental scientific discovery and the development of targeted diagnostics and therapies that will address urgent global health challenges.”

Accelerating research, industry, and health-care applications

This versatile tool has broad applications across scientific research, industry, and health care. It enables large-scale studies of gene regulation, RNA biology, and cellular responses to environmental and therapeutic challenges. The pharmaceutical and biotech industry can harness it for drug discovery and biomarker screening, efficiently evaluating how potential drugs affect RNA modifications and cellular behavior. This aids the development of targeted therapies and personalized medical treatments.

“This is the first tool that can rapidly and quantitatively profile RNA modifications across thousands of samples,” says Jingjing Sun, research scientist at SMART AMR and first author of the paper. “It has not only allowed us to discover new RNA-modifying enzymes and gene networks, but also opens the door to identifying biomarkers and therapeutic targets for diseases such as cancer and antibiotic-resistant infections. For the first time, large-scale epitranscriptomic analysis is practical and accessible.”

Looking ahead: advancing clinical and pharmaceutical applications

Moving forward, SMART AMR plans to expand the tool’s capabilities to analyze RNA modifications in human cells and tissues, moving beyond microbial models to deepen understanding of disease mechanisms in humans. Future efforts will focus on integrating the platform into clinical research to accelerate the discovery of biomarkers and therapeutic targets. The translation of the technology into an epitranscriptome-wide analysis tool that can be used in pharmaceutical and health-care settings will drive the development of more effective and personalized treatments.

The research conducted at SMART is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program.

Researchers at the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a powerful tool capable of scanning thousands of biological samples to detect transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNA) modifications — tiny chemical changes to RNA molecules that help control how cells grow, adapt to stress, and respond to diseases such as cancer and antibiotic‑resistant infections. This tool opens up new possibilities for science, health care, and industry — from accelerating disease research and enabling more precise diagnostics to guiding the development of more effective medical treatments for diseases such as cancer and antibiotic-resistant infections.

For this study, the SMART AMR team worked in collaboration with researchers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, the University of Florida, the University at Albany in New York, and Lodz University of Technology in Poland.

Addressing current limitations in RNA modification profiling

Cancer and infectious diseases are complicated health conditions in which cells are forced to function abnormally by mutations in their genetic material or by instructions from an invading microorganism. The SMART-led research team is among the world’s leaders in understanding how the epitranscriptome — the over 170 different chemical modifications of all forms of RNA — controls growth of normal cells and how cells respond to stressful changes in the environment, such as loss of nutrients or exposure to toxic chemicals. The researchers are also studying how this system is corrupted in cancer or exploited by viruses, bacteria, and parasites in infectious diseases.

Current molecular methods used to study the expansive epitranscriptome and all of the thousands of different types of modified RNA are often slow, labor-intensive, costly, and involve hazardous chemicals, which limits research capacity and speed.

To solve this problem, the SMART team developed a new tool that enables fast, automated profiling of tRNA modifications — molecular changes that regulate how cells survive, adapt to stress, and respond to disease. This capability allows scientists to map cell regulatory networks, discover novel enzymes, and link molecular patterns to disease mechanisms, paving the way for better drug discovery and development, and more accurate disease diagnostics. 

Unlocking the complexity of RNA modifications

SMART’s open-access research, recently published in Nucleic Acids Research and titled “tRNA modification profiling reveals epitranscriptome regulatory networks in Pseudomonas aeruginosa,” shows that the tool has already enabled the discovery of previously unknown RNA-modifying enzymes and the mapping of complex gene regulatory networks. These networks are crucial for cellular adaptation to stress and disease, providing important insights into how RNA modifications control bacterial survival mechanisms. 

Using robotic liquid handlers, researchers extracted tRNA from more than 5,700 genetically modified strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that causes infections such as pneumonia, urinary tract infections, bloodstream infections, and wound infections. Samples were enzymatically digested and analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), a technique that separates molecules based on their physical properties and identifies them with high precision and sensitivity. 

As part of the study, the process generated over 200,000 data points in a high-resolution approach that revealed new tRNA-modifying enzymes and simplified gene networks controlling how cells respond and adapt to stress. For example, the data revealed that the methylthiotransferase MiaB, one of the enzymes responsible for tRNA modification ms2i6A, was found to be sensitive to the availability of iron and sulfur and to metabolic changes when oxygen is low. Discoveries like this highlight how cells respond to environmental stresses, and could lead to future development of therapies or diagnostics.

SMART’s automated system was specially designed to profile tRNA modifications across thousands of samples rapidly and safely. Unlike traditional methods, this tool integrates robotics to automate sample preparation and analysis, eliminating the need for hazardous chemical handling and reducing costs. This advancement increases safety, throughput, and affordability, enabling routine large-scale use in research and clinical labs.

A faster and automated way to study RNA

As the first system capable of quantitative, system‑wide profiling of tRNA modifications at this scale, the tool provides a unique and comprehensive view of the epitranscriptome — the complete set of RNA chemical modifications within cells. This capability allows researchers to validate hypotheses about RNA modifications, uncover novel biology, and identify promising molecular targets for developing new therapies.

“This pioneering tool marks a transformative advance in decoding the complex language of RNA modifications that regulate cellular responses,” says Professor Peter Dedon, co-lead principal investigator at SMART AMR, professor of biological engineering at MIT, and corresponding author of the paper. “Leveraging AMR’s expertise in mass spectrometry and RNA epitranscriptomics, our research uncovers new methods to detect complex gene networks critical for understanding and treating cancer, as well as antibiotic-resistant infections. By enabling rapid, large-scale analysis, the tool accelerates both fundamental scientific discovery and the development of targeted diagnostics and therapies that will address urgent global health challenges.”

Accelerating research, industry, and health-care applications

This versatile tool has broad applications across scientific research, industry, and health care. It enables large-scale studies of gene regulation, RNA biology, and cellular responses to environmental and therapeutic challenges. The pharmaceutical and biotech industry can harness it for drug discovery and biomarker screening, efficiently evaluating how potential drugs affect RNA modifications and cellular behavior. This aids the development of targeted therapies and personalized medical treatments.

“This is the first tool that can rapidly and quantitatively profile RNA modifications across thousands of samples,” says Jingjing Sun, research scientist at SMART AMR and first author of the paper. “It has not only allowed us to discover new RNA-modifying enzymes and gene networks, but also opens the door to identifying biomarkers and therapeutic targets for diseases such as cancer and antibiotic-resistant infections. For the first time, large-scale epitranscriptomic analysis is practical and accessible.”

Looking ahead: advancing clinical and pharmaceutical applications

Moving forward, SMART AMR plans to expand the tool’s capabilities to analyze RNA modifications in human cells and tissues, moving beyond microbial models to deepen understanding of disease mechanisms in humans. Future efforts will focus on integrating the platform into clinical research to accelerate the discovery of biomarkers and therapeutic targets. The translation of the technology into an epitranscriptome-wide analysis tool that can be used in pharmaceutical and health-care settings will drive the development of more effective and personalized treatments.

The research conducted at SMART is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program.

By Dr Qi Dongtao, Senior Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute at NUS

• Lianhe Zaobao, 9 September 2025, Opinion, p17

By Dr Ruklanthi de Alwis, Deputy Director of the Centre for Outbreak Preparedness and Asst Prof in the Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme, Duke-NUS Medical School; Assoc Prof Yeo Tsin Wen, from the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at NTU and from Woodlands Health; Prof Lisa Ng, Executive Director of the Infectious Diseases Labs at A*STAR; and Prof Neelika Malavige, from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura

• The Straits Times, 9 September 2025, Opinion, pB2

By Mr Sriram Iyer, Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Management and Organisation at NUS Business School

• The Straits Times, 9 September 2025, Opinion, pB2

• Suria News Online, 9 September 2025

• The Business Times, 9 September 2025, p3

• The Straits Times Online, 8 September 2025

• CNA, 8 September 2025
• Channel 5 News, 8 September 2025
• CNA Online, 8 September 2025
• Suria News Online, 8 September 2025
• Lianhe Zaobao, 9 September 2025, Singapore, p6

• Suria News Online, 7 September 2025

• The Straits Times, 8 September 2025, Science, pA16

• The Straits Times, 8 September 2025, Science, pA16

• The Straits Times, 8 September 2025, Singapore, pA15
• Tamil Murasu, 8 September 2025, p3

Solar photovoltaics (PV) and green roofs are increasingly being adopted worldwide as sustainable solutions for urban environments. While PV systems help to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and lower greenhouse gas emissions, green roofs lower building energy use for air conditioning, mitigate urban heat island effects, and enhance the aesthetics of rooftops.

When combined, these systems allow for more efficient use of rooftop space by harnessing the cooling benefits of rooftop greenery and the generation of renewable electricity from solar panels.

A joint research study by the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), and the National Parks Board (NParks) demonstrates the benefits of co-locating solar panels and green roofs in tropical climates – an area that is less well-studied compared to temperate regions.

Leading the research effort from NUS is Associate Professor Stephen Tay from the Department of the Built Environment at the College of Design and Engineering in NUS. The research findings were published online in the scientific journal Applied Energy on 4 June 2025.

“Our study shows that co-locating solar photovoltaics with green roofs in a tropical climate is technically feasible with multiple benefits – from improving solar panel performance and supporting greenery growth, to lowering roof surface temperature. These findings highlight the potential of integrating solar energy generation with rooftop greenery to advance sustainable urban developments in Singapore and beyond,” said Assoc Prof Tay.

Comparative analysis of four different set-ups

To evaluate the performance of co-located solar panels and green roofs under tropical conditions, an experimental study was conducted on the seventh-floor rooftop of Alexandra Primary School. Four different set-ups were monitored over a 12-month period, from November 2021 to October 2022, and a comparative analysis was conducted to assess the impact on solar energy generation, plant growth, and roof temperature.

The four rooftop set-ups comprised a bare concrete roof (BR-CT), a bare green roof (BR-GR), solar panels on bare concrete (PV-CT), and solar panels with green roof (PV-GR).

The study found that the PV-GR set-up delivered the highest overall performance, achieving both the highest photovoltaic performance, along with the lowest and most stable roof surface temperature. This enhances solar energy generation while providing effective cooling through greenery and shading. In addition, greenery growth in the PV-GR set-up improved significantly compared to the BR-GR set-up, with a 19.8 per cent higher horizontal coverage.

Other benefits were also highlighted in the study. Firstly, in the PV-GR set-up, evapotranspiration from plants was found to have a cooling effect on solar panels, which increased the performance ratio of the solar panels by an average of 1.3 per cent under clear sky conditions as compared to the PV-CT set-up.

Secondly, the co-location of solar panels and green roofs allows buildings to stay cooler. Roof surface temperatures were reduced by up to 4.7 deg C when compared to the BR-CT set-up, while indoor ceiling surface temperatures decreased by as much as 3 deg C when compared to the PV-CT set-up, as the roof is shielded from direct sunlight. Additionally, the PV-GR set-up exhibited the lowest variability in indoor ceiling temperatures, with average ceiling temperatures remaining below 30.5 deg C when compared with the PV-CT set-up, where indoor ceiling temperature can exceed 33 deg C in the day.

Thirdly, the research also tested five shade-tolerant plant species for green roof applications. Among them, Pilea depressa, Pilea nummulariifolia, Heterotis rotundifolia, and Sphagneticola trilobata achieved an average of 20 per cent higher horizontal coverage for the PV-GR set-up. Notably, Pilea depressa showed the most significant improvement when compared to the BR-GR set-up, indicating its suitability for co-located solar panel–green roof installations.

Optimising Singapore’s rooftop spaces for synergistic benefits

This study demonstrates that co-locating solar panels with green roofs is technically feasible, and offers three key benefits – enhanced solar energy generation, improved greenery coverage, and reduced thermal impact to the building.

For building owners, the outcomes from this study demonstrate the feasibility and added benefits of solar panel-green roof systems. Cumulatively, the impact from these benefits may translate into potential cost savings.

Given Singapore’s limited rooftop space, the co-location of solar panels and green roofs represents a smarter use of space, contributing to the nation’s green building initiatives and advancing its vision of becoming both a “Low-Carbon City” and a “City in Nature”.

“No man is an island.” This maxim held true during the inaugural Shaping Healthcare Innovation For Tomorrow (SHIFT) hackathon, a ground-up hackathon that empowers students to co-create innovative solutions to real-world healthcare challenges.

Organised by the Singapore Nursing Innovation Group (SNIG), a student-led initiative under the NUS Alice Lee Centre for Nursing Studies (NUS Nursing), over 100 students from five local universities and polytechnics — NUS, the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), Ngee Ann Polytechnic , Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) and the Institute of Technical Education — collaborated on winning innovations spanning three subthemes: Chronic Disease Prevention & Early Detection, Lifestyle & Behavioural Health Modification, and Ageing Population & Preventive Care.

Held from 31 August to 6 September 2025, the interdisciplinary hackathon comprised almost 30 teams, with at least one Nursing student per team, offering a valuable opportunity for students to collaborate across fields and gain mentorship from healthcare professionals.

At the final showcase on 6 September 2025, three teams walked away with top honours for their innovative ideas — a smart sock, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) social network, and a behavioural change virtual pet — all poised to shape the future of healthcare.

Grand Prize: SafeStep Smart Sock

The top prize went to Team Wildcard — a trio from NUS comprising Magdalene Lim from NUS Nursing, Roopashini Sivananthan  from NUS College of Design and Engineering, and Hanzalah bin Azmi from the NUS Faculty of Law. Their prototype, SafeStep, is a breathable smart sock equipped with sensors that detect falls in real time and alert both wearer and caregiver. Designed for visually impaired elders, the sock aims to reduce fall-related injuries, one of the greatest impediments to seniors’ independence.

The smart sock is not the team’s first healthcare project. The trio, who first met at a design thinking workshop, had earlier collaborated on a pacifier for babies with cleft palates. They are now testing the viability and user experience of SafeStep by advancing it into the prototyping stage, with plans to conduct user interviews and design validation to ensure it meets patient and caregiver needs.

For Magdalene, the hackathon was a chance to bridge classroom learning with real-world insights. “As a student nurse, I don’t always have the full picture of what is being done in the community,” she said. “Our mentor’s wealth of experience really helped us see where the true pain points and gaps lie. That guidance shaped how we refined our idea, and it gave me a much deeper appreciation of how innovation must be rooted in real-world practice.”

1st Runner-Up: KampongNET for Seniors

Ctrl + Alt + Debride — comprising Winnie Low and Ivan Tan from NUS Nursing and NUS Faculty of Science (FoS), Maryam Syamilah Binti Mahmood Shah from SIT Computing Science, and Yi Jiaxin and Onquit Jake Davis Areglo from NYP School of Information Technology — took second place with KampongNET, a digital social platform with an AI voice assistant. Built for seniors living in rental homes within Silver Zone areas, the solution combats social isolation by fostering conversations and connections.

Several members of the team first met in NYP as volunteers. Winnie was the catalyst who brought them together, spurred by the opportunity to merge two disciplines rarely seen side by side. “Coding and nursing are such distinct fields, but through this hackathon we finally had the opportunity to merge them. I don’t see many nursing-focused hackathons — most are technically heavy and can feel daunting. When I saw this opportunity, I wanted to give it a try, especially with friends I knew from NYP,” she said.

2nd Runner-Up: HabiTot Virtual Pet

In third place, The Fantastic Four — Jin Li Yao and Daniel Chong Zhao Yang from FoS), Guo Xinyi from NUS Nursing, and Peh Jia En Leticia from NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences — developed HabiTot, a Tamagotchi-inspired virtual pet that rewards children for spending less time on screens. The playful interface nudges kids toward social interaction, hobbies, and healthier daily routines.

Team member Li Yao said the hackathon provided a springboard for the team to think bigger. “We see real potential in HabiTot, and when time allows, we hope to expand the idea into a patent and explore collaborations to turn it into a working prototype. This hackathon gave us a starting point, and we’re excited to see how far it could go with the right partners.”

For NUS Nursing Asst Prof Jocelyn Chew, who founded SNIG, this stemmed from a conviction that nursing should be recognised not only for its role in bedside care, but also for its strength in problem-solving at the frontlines.

Her vision is for SNIG to grow into a national platform where nurses at all levels engage in cross-institutional collaboration, entrepreneurship, and evidence-based change. “We want to create an ecosystem that empowers nurses to go beyond solely delivering care, to also design the systems, technologies, and models of care that will shape the future of healthcare,” she said. That philosophy inspired SNIG’s first flagship project, the SHIFT Hackathon — a proving ground where students, practitioners, technologists, and community partners came together to co-create solutions.

SHIFT’s student organising committee, led by third-year NUS Nursing students Weslyn Low and Magdalene Tong, spearheaded the planning of the hackathon. They were supported by 25 nursing mentors from hospitals across Singapore, who guided teams through the fast-paced ideation and prototyping process.

Dr Lee Yee Mei, Deputy Director of Nursing at National University Hospital and one of the mentors, described the hackathon as both inspiring and a proud moment for the profession. Seeing students step up to innovate, she said, showed their potential to create ideas that benefit patients and nurses alike. She encouraged students to view innovation as part of nursing education itself — where even something as basic as measuring vital signs can be re-imagined.

Mr Wong Kok Cheong, Deputy Director of Nursing at Changi General Hospital and one of the judges for the hackathon, shared that it was indicative of a larger shift in nursing as a profession. “Nursing innovation is the next milestone for nurses – with an ageing population and shrinking workforce, innovation is essential to improving productivity and patient outcomes.”

At MIT, a few scribbles on a whiteboard can turn into a potentially transformational cancer treatment.

This scenario came to fruition this week when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a system for treating an aggressive form of bladder cancer. More than a decade ago, the system started as an idea in the lab of MIT Professor Michael Cima at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, enabled by funding from the National Institutes of Health and MIT’s Deshpande Center.

The work that started with a few researchers at MIT turned into a startup, TARIS Biomedical LLC, that was co-founded by Cima and David H. Koch Institute Professor Robert Langer, and acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2019. In developing the core concept of a device for local drug delivery to the bladder — which represents a new paradigm in bladder cancer treatment — the MIT team approached drug delivery like an engineering problem.

“We spoke to urologists and sketched out the problems with past treatments to get to a set of design parameters,” says Cima, a David H. Koch Professor of Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering. “Part of our criteria was it had to fit into urologists’ existing procedures. We wanted urologists to know what to do with the system without even reading the instructions for use. That’s pretty much how it came out.”

To date, the system has been used in patients thousands of times. In one study involving people with high-risk, non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer whose disease had proven resistant to standard care, doctors could find no evidence of cancer in 82.4 percent of patients treated with the system. More than 50 percent of those patients were still cancer-free nine months after treatment.

The results are extremely gratifying for the team of researchers that worked on it at MIT, including Langer and Heejin Lee SM ’04, PhD ’09, who developed the system as part of his PhD thesis. And Cima says far more people deserve credit than just the ones who scribbled on his whiteboard all those years ago.

“Drug products like this take an enormous amount of effort,” says Cima. “There are probably more than 1,000 people that have been involved in developing and commercializing the system: the MIT inventors, the urologists they consulted, the scientists at TARIS, the scientists at Johnson & Johnson — and that’s not including all the patients who participated in clinical trials. I also want to emphasize the importance of the MIT ecosystem, and the importance of giving people the resources to pursue arguably crazy ideas. We need to continue to support those kinds of activities.”

In the mid 2000s, Langer connected Cima with a urologist at Boston Children’s Hospital who was seeking a new treatment for a painful bladder disease known as interstitial cystitis. The standard treatment required frequent drug infusions into a patient’s bladder through a catheter, which provided only temporary relief.

A group of researchers including Cima; Lee; Hong Linh Ho Duc SM ’05, PhD ’09; Grace Kim PhD ’08; and Karen Daniel PhD ’09 began speaking with urologists and people who had run failed clinical trials involving bladder treatments to understand what went wrong. All that information went on Cima’s whiteboard over the course of several weeks. Fortunately, Cima also scribbled “Do not erase!”

“We learned a lot in the process of writing everything down,” Cima says. “We learned what not to build and what to avoid.”

With the problem well-defined, Cima received a grant from MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, which allowed Lee to work on designing a better solution as part of his PhD thesis.

One of the key advances the group made was using a special alloy that gave the device “shape memory” so that it could be straightened out and inserted into the bladder through a catheter. Then it would fold up, preventing it from being expelled during urination.

The new design was able to slowly release drugs over a two-week period — far longer than any other approach — and could then be removed using a thin, flexible tube commonly used in urology, called a cystoscope. The progress was enough for Cima and Langer, who are both serial entrepreneurs, to found TARIS Biomedical and license the technology from MIT. Lee and three other MIT graduates joined the company.

“It was a real pleasure working with Mike Cima, our students, and colleagues on this novel drug delivery system, which is already changing patients’ lives,” Langer says, “It’s a great example of how research at the Koch Institute starts with basic science and engineering and ends up with new treatments for cancer patients.”

The FDA’s approval of the system for the treatment of certain patients with high-risk, non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer now means that patients with this disease may have a better treatment option. Moving forward, Cima hopes the system continues to be explored to treat other diseases.

By Dr Azhar Ibrahim, Senior Lecturer at the Dept of Malay Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS

• Berita Minggu, 7 September 2025, p11

By Ms Nurul ‘Ain Binte Razali, Part-time Lecturer at the Centre for Language Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS

• Berita Minggu, 7 September 2025, p16

Whether you’re an artist, advertising specialist, or just looking to spruce up your home, turning everyday objects into dynamic displays is a great way to make them more visually engaging. For example, you could turn a kids’ book into a handheld cartoon of sorts, making the reading experience more immersive and memorable for a child.

But now, thanks to MIT researchers, it’s also possible to make dynamic displays without using electronics, using barrier-grid animations (or scanimations), which use printed materials instead. This visual trick involves sliding a patterned sheet across an image to create the illusion of a moving image. The secret of barrier-grid animations lies in its name: An overlay called a barrier (or grid) often resembling a picket fence moves across, rotates around, or tilts toward an image to reveal frames in an animated sequence. That underlying picture is a combination of each still, sliced and interwoven to present a different snapshot depending on the overlay’s position.

While tools exist to help artists create barrier-grid animations, they’re typically used to create barrier patterns that have straight lines. Building off of previous work in creating images that appear to move, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a tool that allows users to explore more unconventional designs. From zigzags to circular patterns, the team’s “FabObscura” software turns unique concepts into printable scanimations, helping users add dynamic animations to things like pictures, toys, and decor.

MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL researcher Ticha Sethapakdi SM ’19, a lead author on a paper presenting FabObscura, says that the system is a one-size-fits-all tool for customizing barrier-grid animations. This versatility extends to unconventional, elaborate overlay designs, like pointed, angled lines to animate a picture you might put on your desk, or the swirling, hypnotic appearance of a radial pattern you could spin over an image placed on a coin or a Frisbee.

“Our system can turn a seemingly static, abstract image into an attention-catching animation,” says Sethapakdi. “The tool lowers the barrier to entry to creating these barrier-grid animations, while helping users express a variety of designs that would’ve been very time-consuming to explore by hand.”

Behind these novel scanimations is a key finding: Barrier patterns can be expressed as any continuous mathematical function — not just straight lines. Users can type these equations into a text box within the FabObscura program, and then see how it graphs out the shape and movement of a barrier pattern. If you wanted a traditional horizontal pattern, you’d enter in a constant function, where the output is the same no matter the input, much like drawing a straight line across a graph. For a wavy design, you’d use a sine function, which is smooth and resembles a mountain range when plotted out. The system’s interface includes helpful examples of these equations to guide users toward their preferred pattern.

A simple interface for elaborate ideas

FabObscura works for all known types of barrier-grid animations, supporting a variety of user interactions. The system enables the creation of a display with an appearance that changes depending on your viewpoint. FabObscura also allows you to create displays that you can animate by sliding or rotating a barrier over an image.

To produce these designs, users can upload a folder of frames of an animation (perhaps a few stills of a horse running), or choose from a few preset sequences (like an eye blinking) and specify the angle your barrier will move. After previewing your design, you can fabricate the barrier and picture onto separate transparent sheets (or print the image on paper) using a standard 2D printer, such as an inkjet. Your image can then be placed and secured on flat, handheld items such as picture frames, phones, and books.

You can enter separate equations if you want two sequences on one surface, which the researchers call “nested animations.” Depending on how you move the barrier, you’ll see a different story being told. For example, CSAIL researchers created a car that rotates when you move its sheet vertically, but transforms into a spinning motorcycle when you slide the grid horizontally.

These customizations lead to unique household items, too. The researchers designed an interactive coaster that you can switch from displaying a “coffee” icon to symbols of a martini and a glass of water by pressing your fingers down on the edges of its surface. The team also spruced up a jar of sunflower seeds, producing a flower animation on the lid that blooms when twisted off.

Artists, including graphic designers and printmakers, could also use this tool to make dynamic pieces without needing to connect any wires. The tool saves them crucial time to explore creative, low-power designs, such as a clock with a mouse that runs along as it ticks. FabObscura could produce animated food packaging, or even reconfigurable signage for places like construction sites or stores that notify people when a particular area is closed or a machine isn’t working.

Keep it crisp

FabObscura’s barrier-grid creations do come with certain trade-offs. While nested animations are novel and more dynamic than a single-layer scanimation, their visual quality isn’t as strong. The researchers wrote design guidelines to address these challenges, recommending users upload fewer frames for nested animations to keep the interlaced image simple and stick to high-contrast images for a crisper presentation.

In the future, the researchers intend to expand what users can upload to FabObscura, like being able to drop in a video file that the program can then select the best frames from. This would lead to even more expressive barrier-grid animations.

FabObscura might also step into a new dimension: 3D. While the system is currently optimized for flat, handheld surfaces, CSAIL researchers are considering implementing their work into larger, more complex objects, possibly using 3D printers to fabricate even more elaborate illusions.

Sethapakdi wrote the paper with several CSAIL affiliates: Zhejiang University PhD student and visiting researcher Mingming Li; MIT EECS PhD student Maxine Perroni-Scharf; MIT postdoc Jiaji Li; MIT associate professors Arvind Satyanarayan and Justin Solomon; and senior author and MIT Associate Professor Stefanie Mueller, leader of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Engineering Group at CSAIL. Their work will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) this month.

Whether you’re an artist, advertising specialist, or just looking to spruce up your home, turning everyday objects into dynamic displays is a great way to make them more visually engaging. For example, you could turn a kids’ book into a handheld cartoon of sorts, making the reading experience more immersive and memorable for a child.

But now, thanks to MIT researchers, it’s also possible to make dynamic displays without using electronics, using barrier-grid animations (or scanimations), which use printed materials instead. This visual trick involves sliding a patterned sheet across an image to create the illusion of a moving image. The secret of barrier-grid animations lies in its name: An overlay called a barrier (or grid) often resembling a picket fence moves across, rotates around, or tilts toward an image to reveal frames in an animated sequence. That underlying picture is a combination of each still, sliced and interwoven to present a different snapshot depending on the overlay’s position.

While tools exist to help artists create barrier-grid animations, they’re typically used to create barrier patterns that have straight lines. Building off of previous work in creating images that appear to move, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a tool that allows users to explore more unconventional designs. From zigzags to circular patterns, the team’s “FabObscura” software turns unique concepts into printable scanimations, helping users add dynamic animations to things like pictures, toys, and decor.

MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL researcher Ticha Sethapakdi SM ’19, a lead author on a paper presenting FabObscura, says that the system is a one-size-fits-all tool for customizing barrier-grid animations. This versatility extends to unconventional, elaborate overlay designs, like pointed, angled lines to animate a picture you might put on your desk, or the swirling, hypnotic appearance of a radial pattern you could spin over an image placed on a coin or a Frisbee.

“Our system can turn a seemingly static, abstract image into an attention-catching animation,” says Sethapakdi. “The tool lowers the barrier to entry to creating these barrier-grid animations, while helping users express a variety of designs that would’ve been very time-consuming to explore by hand.”

Behind these novel scanimations is a key finding: Barrier patterns can be expressed as any continuous mathematical function — not just straight lines. Users can type these equations into a text box within the FabObscura program, and then see how it graphs out the shape and movement of a barrier pattern. If you wanted a traditional horizontal pattern, you’d enter in a constant function, where the output is the same no matter the input, much like drawing a straight line across a graph. For a wavy design, you’d use a sine function, which is smooth and resembles a mountain range when plotted out. The system’s interface includes helpful examples of these equations to guide users toward their preferred pattern.

A simple interface for elaborate ideas

FabObscura works for all known types of barrier-grid animations, supporting a variety of user interactions. The system enables the creation of a display with an appearance that changes depending on your viewpoint. FabObscura also allows you to create displays that you can animate by sliding or rotating a barrier over an image.

To produce these designs, users can upload a folder of frames of an animation (perhaps a few stills of a horse running), or choose from a few preset sequences (like an eye blinking) and specify the angle your barrier will move. After previewing your design, you can fabricate the barrier and picture onto separate transparent sheets (or print the image on paper) using a standard 2D printer, such as an inkjet. Your image can then be placed and secured on flat, handheld items such as picture frames, phones, and books.

You can enter separate equations if you want two sequences on one surface, which the researchers call “nested animations.” Depending on how you move the barrier, you’ll see a different story being told. For example, CSAIL researchers created a car that rotates when you move its sheet vertically, but transforms into a spinning motorcycle when you slide the grid horizontally.

These customizations lead to unique household items, too. The researchers designed an interactive coaster that you can switch from displaying a “coffee” icon to symbols of a martini and a glass of water by pressing your fingers down on the edges of its surface. The team also spruced up a jar of sunflower seeds, producing a flower animation on the lid that blooms when twisted off.

Artists, including graphic designers and printmakers, could also use this tool to make dynamic pieces without needing to connect any wires. The tool saves them crucial time to explore creative, low-power designs, such as a clock with a mouse that runs along as it ticks. FabObscura could produce animated food packaging, or even reconfigurable signage for places like construction sites or stores that notify people when a particular area is closed or a machine isn’t working.

Keep it crisp

FabObscura’s barrier-grid creations do come with certain trade-offs. While nested animations are novel and more dynamic than a single-layer scanimation, their visual quality isn’t as strong. The researchers wrote design guidelines to address these challenges, recommending users upload fewer frames for nested animations to keep the interlaced image simple and stick to high-contrast images for a crisper presentation.

In the future, the researchers intend to expand what users can upload to FabObscura, like being able to drop in a video file that the program can then select the best frames from. This would lead to even more expressive barrier-grid animations.

FabObscura might also step into a new dimension: 3D. While the system is currently optimized for flat, handheld surfaces, CSAIL researchers are considering implementing their work into larger, more complex objects, possibly using 3D printers to fabricate even more elaborate illusions.

Sethapakdi wrote the paper with several CSAIL affiliates: Zhejiang University PhD student and visiting researcher Mingming Li; MIT EECS PhD student Maxine Perroni-Scharf; MIT postdoc Jiaji Li; MIT associate professors Arvind Satyanarayan and Justin Solomon; and senior author and MIT Associate Professor Stefanie Mueller, leader of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Engineering Group at CSAIL. Their work will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) this month.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) recently announced that it has selected MIT to establish a new research center dedicated to advancing the predictive simulation of extreme environments, such as those encountered in hypersonic flight and atmospheric re-entry. The center will be part of the fourth phase of NNSA's Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP-IV), which supports frontier research advancing the predictive capabilities of high-performance computing for open science and engineering applications relevant to national security mission spaces.

The Center for the Exascale Simulation of Coupled High-Enthalpy Fluid–Solid Interactions (CHEFSI) — a joint effort of the MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) — plans to harness cutting-edge exascale supercomputers and next-generation algorithms to simulate with unprecedented detail how extremely hot, fast-moving gaseous and solid materials interact. The understanding of these extreme environments — characterized by temperatures of more than 1,500 degrees Celsius and speeds as high as Mach 25 — and their effect on vehicles is central to national security, space exploration, and the development of advanced thermal protection systems.

“CHEFSI will capitalize on MIT’s deep strengths in predictive modeling, high-performance computing, and STEM education to help ensure the United States remains at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation,” says Ian A. Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research. “The center’s particular relevance to national security and advanced technologies exemplifies MIT’s commitment to advancing research with broad societal benefit.”

CHEFSI is one of five new Predictive Simulation Centers announced by the NNSA as part of a program expected to provide up to $17.5 million to each center over five years.

CHEFSI’s research aims to couple detailed simulations of high-enthalpy gas flows with models of the chemical, thermal, and mechanical behavior of solid materials, capturing phenomena such as oxidation, nitridation, ablation, and fracture. Advanced computational models — validated by carefully designed experiments — can address the limitations of flight testing by providing critical insights into material performance and failure.

“By integrating high-fidelity physics models with artificial intelligence-based surrogate models, experimental validation, and state-of-the-art exascale computational tools, CHEFSI will help us understand and predict how thermal protection systems perform under some of the harshest conditions encountered in engineering systems,” says Raúl Radovitzky, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, associate director of the ISN, and director of CHEFSI. “This knowledge will help in the design of resilient systems for applications ranging from reusable spacecraft to hypersonic vehicles.”

Radovitzky will be joined on the center’s leadership team by Youssef Marzouk, the Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, co-director of the MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE), and recently named the associate dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; and Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou, the Quentin Berg (1937) Professor of Mechanical Engineering and co-director of CCSE, who will serve as associate directors. The center co-principal investigators include MIT faculty members across the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, and Mechanical Engineering. Franklin Hadley will lead center operations, with administration and finance under the purview of Joshua Freedman. Hadley and Freedman are both members of the ISN headquarters team. 

CHEFSI expects to collaborate extensively with the DoE/NNSA national laboratories — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories — and, in doing so, offer graduate students and postdocs immersive research experiences and internships at these facilities.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) recently announced that it has selected MIT to establish a new research center dedicated to advancing the predictive simulation of extreme environments, such as those encountered in hypersonic flight and atmospheric re-entry. The center will be part of the fourth phase of NNSA's Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP-IV), which supports frontier research advancing the predictive capabilities of high-performance computing for open science and engineering applications relevant to national security mission spaces.

The Center for the Exascale Simulation of Coupled High-Enthalpy Fluid–Solid Interactions (CHEFSI) — a joint effort of the MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) — plans to harness cutting-edge exascale supercomputers and next-generation algorithms to simulate with unprecedented detail how extremely hot, fast-moving gaseous and solid materials interact. The understanding of these extreme environments — characterized by temperatures of more than 1,500 degrees Celsius and speeds as high as Mach 25 — and their effect on vehicles is central to national security, space exploration, and the development of advanced thermal protection systems.

“CHEFSI will capitalize on MIT’s deep strengths in predictive modeling, high-performance computing, and STEM education to help ensure the United States remains at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation,” says Ian A. Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research. “The center’s particular relevance to national security and advanced technologies exemplifies MIT’s commitment to advancing research with broad societal benefit.”

CHEFSI is one of five new Predictive Simulation Centers announced by the NNSA as part of a program expected to provide up to $17.5 million to each center over five years.

CHEFSI’s research aims to couple detailed simulations of high-enthalpy gas flows with models of the chemical, thermal, and mechanical behavior of solid materials, capturing phenomena such as oxidation, nitridation, ablation, and fracture. Advanced computational models — validated by carefully designed experiments — can address the limitations of flight testing by providing critical insights into material performance and failure.

“By integrating high-fidelity physics models with artificial intelligence-based surrogate models, experimental validation, and state-of-the-art exascale computational tools, CHEFSI will help us understand and predict how thermal protection systems perform under some of the harshest conditions encountered in engineering systems,” says Raúl Radovitzky, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, associate director of the ISN, and director of CHEFSI. “This knowledge will help in the design of resilient systems for applications ranging from reusable spacecraft to hypersonic vehicles.”

Radovitzky will be joined on the center’s leadership team by Youssef Marzouk, the Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, co-director of the MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE), and recently named the associate dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; and Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou, the Quentin Berg (1937) Professor of Mechanical Engineering and co-director of CCSE, who will serve as associate directors. The center co-principal investigators include MIT faculty members across the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, and Mechanical Engineering. Franklin Hadley will lead center operations, with administration and finance under the purview of Joshua Freedman. Hadley and Freedman are both members of the ISN headquarters team. 

CHEFSI expects to collaborate extensively with the DoE/NNSA national laboratories — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories — and, in doing so, offer graduate students and postdocs immersive research experiences and internships at these facilities.

The following article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project.

On Sept. 14, 2015, a signal arrived on Earth, carrying information about a pair of remote black holes that had spiraled together and merged. The signal had traveled about 1.3 billion years to reach us at the speed of light — but it was not made of light. It was a different kind of signal: a quivering of space-time called gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years prior. On that day 10 years ago, the twin detectors of the U.S. National Science Foundation Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (NSF LIGO) made the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves, whispers in the cosmos that had gone unheard until that moment.

The historic discovery meant that researchers could now sense the universe through three different means. Light waves, such as X-rays, optical, radio, and other wavelengths of light, as well as high-energy particles called cosmic rays and neutrinos, had been captured before, but this was the first time anyone had witnessed a cosmic event through the gravitational warping of space-time. For this achievement, first dreamed up more than 40 years prior, three of the team’s founders won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics: MIT’s Rainer Weiss, professor emeritus of physics (who recently passed away at age 92); Caltech’s Barry Barish, the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus; and Caltech’s Kip Thorne, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus.

Today, LIGO, which consists of detectors in both Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, routinely observes roughly one black hole merger every three days. LIGO now operates in coordination with two international partners, the Virgo gravitational-wave detector in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. Together, the gravitational-wave-hunting network, known as the LVK (LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA), has captured a total of about 300 black hole mergers, some of which are confirmed while others await further analysis. During the network’s current science run, the fourth since the first run in 2015, the LVK has discovered more than 200 candidate black hole mergers, more than double the number caught in the first three runs.

The dramatic rise in the number of LVK discoveries over the past decade is owed to several improvements to their detectors — some of which involve cutting-edge quantum precision engineering. The LVK detectors remain by far the most precise rulers for making measurements ever created by humans. The space-time distortions induced by gravitational waves are incredibly miniscule. For instance, LIGO detects changes in space-time smaller than 1/10,000 the width of a proton. That’s 1/700 trillionth the width of a human hair.

“Rai Weiss proposed the concept of LIGO in 1972, and I thought, ‘This doesn’t have much chance at all of working,’” recalls Thorne, an expert on the theory of black holes. “It took me three years of thinking about it on and off and discussing ideas with Rai and Vladimir Braginsky [a Russian physicist], to be convinced this had a significant possibility of success. The technical difficulty of reducing the unwanted noise that interferes with the desired signal was enormous. We had to invent a whole new technology. NSF was just superb at shepherding this project through technical reviews and hurdles.”

Nergis Mavalvala, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics at MIT and dean of the MIT School of Science, says that the challenges the team overcame to make the first discovery are still very much at play. “From the exquisite precision of the LIGO detectors to the astrophysical theories of gravitational-wave sources, to the complex data analyses, all these hurdles had to be overcome, and we continue to improve in all of these areas,” Mavalvala says. “As the detectors get better, we hunger for farther, fainter sources. LIGO continues to be a technological marvel.”

The clearest signal yet

LIGO’s improved sensitivity is exemplified in a recent discovery of a black hole merger referred to as GW250114. (The numbers denote the date the gravitational-wave signal arrived at Earth: January 14, 2025.) The event was not that different from LIGO’s first-ever detection (called GW150914) — both involve colliding black holes about 1.3 billion light-years away with masses between 30 to 40 times that of our sun. But thanks to 10 years of technological advances reducing instrumental noise, the GW250114 signal is dramatically clearer.

“We can hear it loud and clear, and that lets us test the fundamental laws of physics,” says LIGO team member Katerina Chatziioannou, Caltech assistant professor of physics and William H. Hurt Scholar, and one of the authors of a new study on GW250114 published in the Physical Review Letters.

By analyzing the frequencies of gravitational waves emitted by the merger, the LVK team provided the best observational evidence captured to date for what is known as the black hole area theorem, an idea put forth by Stephen Hawking in 1971 that says the total surface areas of black holes cannot decrease. When black holes merge, their masses combine, increasing the surface area. But they also lose energy in the form of gravitational waves. Additionally, the merger can cause the combined black hole to increase its spin, which leads to it having a smaller area. The black hole area theorem states that despite these competing factors, the total surface area must grow in size.

Later, Hawking and physicist Jacob Bekenstein concluded that a black hole’s area is proportional to its entropy, or degree of disorder. The findings paved the way for later groundbreaking work in the field of quantum gravity, which attempts to unite two pillars of modern physics: general relativity and quantum physics.

In essence, the LIGO detection allowed the team to “hear” two black holes growing as they merged into one, verifying Hawking’s theorem. (Virgo and KAGRA were offline during this particular observation.) The initial black holes had a total surface area of 240,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Oregon), while the final area was about 400,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of California) — a clear increase. This is the second test of the black hole area theorem; an initial test was performed in 2021 using data from the first GW150914 signal, but because that data were not as clean, the results had a confidence level of 95 percent compared to 99.999 percent for the new data.

Thorne recalls Hawking phoning him to ask whether LIGO might be able to test his theorem immediately after he learned of the 2015 gravitational-wave detection. Hawking died in 2018 and sadly did not live to see his theory observationally verified. “If Hawking were alive, he would have reveled in seeing the area of the merged black holes increase,” Thorne says.

The trickiest part of this type of analysis had to do with determining the final surface area of the merged black hole. The surface areas of pre-merger black holes can be more readily gleaned as the pair spiral together, roiling space-time and producing gravitational waves. But after the black holes coalesce, the signal is not as clear-cut. During this so-called ringdown phase, the final black hole vibrates like a struck bell.

In the new study, the researchers precisely measured the details of the ringdown phase, which allowed them to calculate the mass and spin of the black hole and, subsequently, determine its surface area. More specifically, they were able, for the first time, to confidently pick out two distinct gravitational-wave modes in the ringdown phase. The modes are like characteristic sounds a bell would make when struck; they have somewhat similar frequencies but die out at different rates, which makes them hard to identify. The improved data for GW250114 meant that the team could extract the modes, demonstrating that the black hole’s ringdown occurred exactly as predicted by math models based on the Teukolsky formalism — devised in 1972 by Saul Teukolsky, now a professor at Caltech and Cornell University.

Another study from the LVK, submitted to Physical Review Letters today, places limits on a predicted third, higher-pitched tone in the GW250114 signal, and performs some of the most stringent tests yet of general relativity’s accuracy in describing merging black holes.

“A decade of improvements allowed us to make this exquisite measurement,” Chatziioannou says. “It took both of our detectors, in Washington and Louisiana, to do this. I don’t know what will happen in 10 more years, but in the first 10 years, we have made tremendous improvements to LIGO’s sensitivity. This not only means we are accelerating the rate at which we discover new black holes, but we are also capturing detailed data that expand the scope of what we know about the fundamental properties of black holes.”

Jenne Driggers, detection lead senior scientist at LIGO Hanford, adds, “It takes a global village to achieve our scientific goals. From our exquisite instruments, to calibrating the data very precisely, vetting and providing assurances about the fidelity of the data quality, searching the data for astrophysical signals, and packaging all that into something that telescopes can read and act upon quickly, there are a lot of specialized tasks that come together to make LIGO the great success that it is.”

Pushing the limits

LIGO and Virgo have also unveiled neutron stars over the past decade. Like black holes, neutron stars form from the explosive deaths of massive stars, but they weigh less and glow with light. Of note, in August 2017, LIGO and Virgo witnessed an epic collision between a pair of neutron stars — a kilonova — that sent gold and other heavy elements flying into space and drew the gaze of dozens of telescopes around the world, which captured light ranging from high-energy gamma rays to low-energy radio waves. The “multi-messenger” astronomy event marked the first time that both light and gravitational waves had been captured in a single cosmic event. Today, the LVK continues to alert the astronomical community to potential neutron star collisions, who then use telescopes to search the skies for signs of kilonovae.

“The LVK has made big strides in recent years to make sure we’re getting high-quality data and alerts out to the public in under a minute, so that astronomers can look for multi-messenger signatures from our gravitational-wave candidates,” Driggers says.

“The global LVK network is essential to gravitational-wave astronomy,” says Gianluca Gemme, Virgo spokesperson and director of research at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy. “With three or more detectors operating in unison, we can pinpoint cosmic events with greater accuracy, extract richer astrophysical information, and enable rapid alerts for multi-messenger follow-up. Virgo is proud to contribute to this worldwide scientific endeavor.”

Other LVK scientific discoveries include the first detection of collisions between one neutron star and one black hole; asymmetrical mergers, in which one black hole is significantly more massive than its partner black hole; the discovery of the lightest black holes known, challenging the idea that there is a “mass gap” between neutron stars and black holes; and the most massive black hole merger seen yet with a merged mass of 225 solar masses. For reference, the previous record holder for the most massive merger had a combined mass of 140 solar masses.

Even in the decades before LIGO began taking data, scientists were building foundations that made the field of gravitational-wave science possible. Breakthroughs in computer simulations of black hole mergers, for example, allow the team to extract and analyze the feeble gravitational-wave signals generated across the universe.

LIGO’s technological achievements, beginning as far back as the 1980s, include several far-reaching innovations, such as a new way to stabilize lasers using the so-called Pound–Drever–Hall technique. Invented in 1983 and named for contributing physicists Robert Vivian Pound, the late Ronald Drever of Caltech (a founder of LIGO), and John Lewis Hall, this technique is widely used today in other fields, such as the development of atomic clocks and quantum computers. Other innovations include cutting-edge mirror coatings that almost perfectly reflect laser light; “quantum squeezing” tools that enable LIGO to surpass sensitivity limits imposed by quantum physics; and new artificial intelligence methods that could further hush certain types of unwanted noise.

“What we are ultimately doing inside LIGO is protecting quantum information and making sure it doesn’t get destroyed by external factors,” Mavalvala says. “The techniques we are developing are pillars of quantum engineering and have applications across a broad range of devices, such as quantum computers and quantum sensors.”

In the coming years, the scientists and engineers of LVK hope to further fine-tune their machines, expanding their reach deeper and deeper into space. They also plan to use the knowledge they have gained to build another gravitational-wave detector, LIGO India. Having a third LIGO observatory would greatly improve the precision with which the LVK network can localize gravitational-wave sources.

Looking farther into the future, the team is working on a concept for an even larger detector, called Cosmic Explorer, which would have arms 40 kilometers long. (The twin LIGO observatories have 4-kilometer arms.) A European project, called Einstein Telescope, also has plans to build one or two huge underground interferometers with arms more than 10 kilometers long. Observatories on this scale would allow scientists to hear the earliest black hole mergers in the universe.

“Just 10 short years ago, LIGO opened our eyes for the first time to gravitational waves and changed the way humanity sees the cosmos,” says Aamir Ali, a program director in the NSF Division of Physics, which has supported LIGO since its inception. “There’s a whole universe to explore through this completely new lens and these latest discoveries show LIGO is just getting started.”

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration

LIGO is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which together conceived and built the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the United Kingdom (Science and Technology Facilities Council), and Australia (Australian Research Council) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,600 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. Additional partners are listed at my.ligo.org/census.php.

The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 1,000 members from 175 institutions in 20 different (mainly European) countries. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy, and is funded by the French National Center for Scientific Research, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, the National Institute of Subatomic Physics in the Netherlands, The Research Foundation – Flanders, and the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research. A list of the Virgo Collaboration groups can be found on the project website.

KAGRA is the laser interferometer with 3-kilometer arm length in Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. The host institute is the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research of the University of Tokyo, and the project is co-hosted by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization. The KAGRA collaboration is composed of more than 400 members from 128 institutes in 17 countries/regions. KAGRA’s information for general audiences is at the website gwcenter.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/. Resources for researchers are accessible at gwwiki.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/JGWwiki/KAGRA. 

A new study from MIT neuroscientists reveals how rare variants of a gene called ABCA7 may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s in some of the people who carry it.

Dysfunctional versions of the ABCA7 gene, which are found in a very small proportion of the population, contribute strongly to Alzheimer’s risk. In the new study, the researchers discovered that these mutations can disrupt the metabolism of lipids that play an important role in cell membranes.

This disruption makes neurons hyperexcitable and leads them into a stressed state that can damage DNA and other cellular components. These effects, the researchers found, could be reversed by treating neurons with choline, an important building block precursor needed to make cell membranes.

“We found pretty strikingly that when we treated these cells with choline, a lot of the transcriptional defects were reversed. We also found that the hyperexcitability phenotype and elevated amyloid beta peptides that we observed in neurons that lost ABCA7 was reduced after treatment,” says Djuna von Maydell, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study.

Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Picower Professor in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature.

Membrane dysfunction

Genomic studies of Alzheimer’s patients have found that people who carry variants of ABCA7 that generate reduced levels of functional ABCA7 protein have about double the odds of developing Alzheimer’s as people who don’t have those variants.

ABCA7 encodes a protein that transports lipids across cell membranes. Lipid metabolism is also the primary target of a more common Alzheimer’s risk factor known as APOE4. In previous work, Tsai’s lab has shown that APOE4, which is found in about half of all Alzheimer’s patients, disrupts brain cells’ ability to metabolize lipids and respond to stress.

To explore how ABCA7 variants might contribute to Alzheimer’s risk, the researchers obtained tissue samples from the Religious Orders Study/Memory and Aging Project (ROSMAP), a longitudinal study that has tracked memory, motor, and other age-related changes in older people since 1994. Of about 1,200 samples in the dataset that had genetic information available, the researchers obtained 12 from people who carried a rare variant of ABCA7.

The researchers performed single-cell RNA sequencing of neurons from these ABCA7 carriers, allowing them to determine which other genes are affected when ABCA7 is missing. They found that the most significantly affected genes fell into three clusters related to lipid metabolism, DNA damage, and oxidative phosphorylation (the metabolic process that cells use to capture energy as ATP).

To investigate how those alterations could affect neuron function, the researchers introduced ABCA7 variants into neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells.

These cells showed many of the same gene expression changes as the cells from the patient samples, especially among genes linked to oxidative phosphorylation. Further experiments showed that the “safety valve” that normally lets mitochondria limit excess build-up of electrical charge was less active. This can lead to oxidative stress, a state that occurs when too many cell-damaging free radicals build up in tissues.

Using these engineered cells, the researchers also analyzed the effects of ABCA7 variants on lipid metabolism. Cells with the variants altered metabolism of a molecule called phosphatidylcholine, which could lead to membrane stiffness and may explain why the mitochondrial membranes of the cells were unable to function normally.

A boost in choline

Those findings raised the possibility that intervening in phosphatidylcholine metabolism might reverse some of the cellular effects of ABCA7 loss. To test that idea, the researchers treated neurons with ABCA7 mutations with a molecule called CDP-choline, a precursor of phosphatidylcholine.

As these cells began producing new phosphatidylcholine (both saturated and unsaturated forms), their mitochondrial membrane potentials also returned to normal, and their oxidative stress levels went down.

The researchers then used induced pluripotent stem cells to generate 3D tissue organoids made of neurons with the ABCA7 variant. These organoids developed higher levels of amyloid beta proteins, which form the plaques seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. However, those levels returned to normal when the organoids were treated with CDP-choline. The treatment also reduced neurons’ hyperexcitability.

In a 2021 paper, Tsai’s lab found that CDP-choline treatment could also reverse many of the effects of another Alzheimer’s-linked gene variant, APOE4, in mice. She is now working with researchers at the University of Texas and MD Anderson Cancer Center on a clinical trial exploring how choline supplements affect people who carry the APOE4 gene.

Choline is naturally found in foods such as eggs, meat, fish, and some beans and nuts. Boosting choline intake with supplements may offer a way for many people to reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s disease, Tsai says.

“From APOE4 to ABCA7 loss of function, my lab demonstrates that disruption of lipid homeostasis leads to the development of Alzheimer’s-related pathology, and that restoring lipid homeostasis, such as through choline supplementation, can ameliorate these pathological phenotypes,” she says.

In addition to the rare variants of ABCA7 that the researchers studied in this paper, there is also a more common variant that is found at a frequency of about 18 percent in the population. This variant was thought to be harmless, but the MIT team showed that cells with this variant exhibited many of the same gene alterations in lipid metabolism that they found in cells with the rare ABCA7 variants.

“There’s more work to be done in this direction, but this suggests that ABCA7 dysfunction might play an important role in a much larger part of the population than just people who carry the rare variants,” von Maydell says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, the Freedom Together Foundation, the Carol and Gene Ludwig Family Foundation, James D. Cook, and the National Institutes of Health.

Over 300 students from across NUS gathered for “Building an Innovation Mindset” on 20 August 2025, a dynamic half-day event under the NUSOne initiative, hosted by NUS Enterprise in collaboration with the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) and the Office of the Provost. More than a theoretical introduction to entrepreneurship, the event offered an experiential journey, showing students how curiosity can be transformed into action, and how ideas can drive tangible, real-world impact.

Engineering innovation with entrepreneurial thinking

In the “Ideas to Innovation” lecture by Associate Professor Khoo Eng Tat, Assistant Dean (Research & Technology) at CDE, students were encouraged to view engineering (and learning) not just as calculations and prototypes, but as a platform for innovation and enterprise. His message: Entrepreneurial mindset is not innate – it is cultivated through questioning assumptions, embracing experimentation, and most importantly, learning from failure.

Luis Olguin Reyes, a Year 4 student at NUS Business School, aptly shared: “Failure is part of success, like in everything, but especially in entrepreneurship.” The sentiment captured the spirit of the lecture, reminding students that setbacks are not endpoints, but stepping stones for learning.

Founders’ fireside chat: Turning passion into purpose

A highlight of the afternoon was the panel discussion on “How Founders Bring Passion to Life”, moderated by Remi Choong, partner at deep-tech venture capital firm Elev8.vc. Three NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) alumni also shared their journeys:

·       Grace Chia, Co-Founder & CEO of BeeX Autonomous Systems

·       M. Ibnur Rashad, Founder & CEO of Ground-Up Innovation Labs for Development (GUILD)

·       Chang Qingyang, Co-founder & CEO of ConcreteAI

Their stories were not polished pitches but honest reflections on long nights, bold pivots, and repeated failures. Through these raw insights, students saw how resilience, curiosity and adaptability are the real engines behind innovation.

Students left inspired to take bold actions, embrace diverse perspectives, and approach challenges with creativity. For Leonard Goh, Year 2 student at NUS School of Computing, he found the session eye-opening and quoted M. Ibnur Rashad: “Failure is the norm in entrepreneurship, and it should be expected, not avoided.”

For Reiner Ong, Year 2 student at NUS CDE, this was an eye-opener. She reflected, “I’ve always been afraid to start my own entrepreneurial journey because I feared setbacks. But after today’s panel, I’ve learned that failure is just part of the journey, and we must embrace and learn from it.”

Building mindsets, block by block

The event closed with “Problem Solving Piece by Piece”, a hands-on challenge using the SOMA cube, a classic spatial puzzle made of interlocking pieces. The activity sparked laughter, collaboration, and creative problem-solving, teaching participants the value of persistence, teamwork, and breaking complex challenges into manageable steps, key habits for building an entrepreneurial mindset.

Neryss Ho, Year 2 student at CDE, shared, “We were tasked to build the tallest tower using just a few 3D blocks, and it was so much fun thinking of creative ways to solve the problem. It was definitely my favourite activity.”

The activity underscored a vital truth: complex problems can be tackled when broken into parts - mirroring the process of entrepreneurial problem-solving in the real world.

Key takeaways: Planting the seeds of an entrepreneurial future

By the end of the event, one thing was clear: Entrepreneurship isn’t just about launching start-ups – it is a mindset. It is about cultivating curiosity and courage to ask “What if?”, and about embracing failure as a learning opportunity. It is about turning problems into possibilities, and taking the first small step toward something bigger.

Many students walked away with concrete goals, from solving one real-world problem a month to forming project teams with peers from different faculties.

“Building an Innovation Mindset” was more than a typical classroom lesson. It offered students not only a window into how ventures are built, but also personal growth in building confidence, skills, and an entrepreneurial mindset to take their first steps toward launching their own innovations and turning ideas into tangible impact.

By NUS Enterprise

Seven technologies developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, either wholly or with collaborators, have earned 2025 R&D 100 Awards. This annual awards competition recognizes the year's most significant new technologies, products, and materials available on the marketplace or transitioned to use. An independent panel of technology experts and industry professionals selects the winners.

"Winning an R&D 100 Award is a recognition of the exceptional creativity and effort of our scientists and engineers. The awarded technologies reflect Lincoln Laboratory's mission to transform innovative ideas into real-world solutions for U.S. national security, industry, and society," says Melissa Choi, director of Lincoln Laboratory.

Lincoln Laboratory's winning technologies enhance national security in a range of ways, from securing satellite communication links and identifying nearby emitting devices to providing a layer of defense for U.S. Army vehicles and protecting service members from chemical threats. Other technologies are pushing frontiers in computing, enabling the 3D integration of chips and the close inspection of superconducting electronics. Industry is also benefiting from these developments — for example, by adopting an architecture that streamlines the development of laser communications terminals.

The online publication R&D World manages the awards program. Recipients span Fortune 500 companies, federally funded research institutions, academic and government labs, and small companies. Since 2010, Lincoln Laboratory has received 108 R&D 100 Awards.

Protecting lives 

Tactical Optical Spherical Sensor for Interrogating Threats (TOSSIT) is a throwable, baseball-sized sensor that remotely detects hazardous vapors and aerosols. It is designed to alert soldiers, first responders, and law enforcement to the presence of chemical threats, like nerve and blister agents, industrial chemical accidents, or fentanyl dust. Users can simply toss, drone-drop, or launch TOSSIT into an area of concern. To detect specific chemicals, the sensor samples the air with a built-in fan and uses an internal camera to observe color changes on a removable dye card. If chemicals are present, TOSSIT alerts users wirelessly on an app or via audible, light-up, or vibrational alarms in the sensor.

"TOSSIT fills an unmet need for a chemical-vapor point sensor, one that senses the immediate environment around it, that can be kinetically deployed ahead of service personnel. It provides a low-cost sensing option for vapors and solid aerosol threats — think toxic dust particles — that would otherwise not be detectable by small deployed sensor systems,” says principal investigator Richard Kingsborough. TOSSIT has been tested extensively in the field and is currently being transferred to the military. 

Wideband Selective Propagation Radar (WiSPR) is an advanced radar and communications system developed to protect U.S. Army armored vehicles. The system's active electronically scanned antenna array extends signal range at millimeter-wave frequencies, steering thousands of beams per second to detect incoming kinetic threats while enabling covert communications between vehicles. WiSPR is engineered to have a low probability of detection, helping U.S. Army units evade adversaries seeking to detect radio-frequency (RF) energy emitting from radars. The system is currently in production.

"Current global conflicts are highlighting the susceptibility of armored vehicles to adversary anti-tank weapons. By combining custom technologies and commercial off-the-shelf hardware, the Lincoln Laboratory team produced a WiSPR prototype as quickly and efficiently as possible," says program manager Christopher Serino, who oversaw WiSPR development with principal investigator David Conway.

Advancing computing

Bumpless Integration of Chiplets to Al-Optimized Fabric is an approach that enables the fabrication of next-generation 2D, 2.5D, and 3D integrated circuits. As data-processing demands increase, designers are exploring 3D stacked assemblies of small specialized chips (chiplets) to pack more power into devices. Tiny bumps of conductive material are used to electrically connect these stacks, but these microbumps cannot accommodate the extremely dense, massively interconnected components needed for future microcomputers. To address this issue, Lincoln Laboratory developed a technique eliminating microbumps. Key to this technique is a lithographically produced fabric allowing electrical bonding of chiplet stack layers. Researchers used an AI-driven decision-tree approach to optimize the design of this fabric. This bumpless feature can integrate hundreds of chiplets that perform like a single chip, improving data-processing speed and power efficiency, especially for high-performance AI applications.

"Our novel, bumpless, heterogeneous chiplet integration is a transformative approach addressing two semiconductor industry challenges: expanding chip yield and reducing cost and time to develop systems," says principal investigator Rabindra Das.

Quantum Diamond Magnetic Cryomicroscope is a breakthrough in magnetic field imaging for characterizing superconducting electronics, a promising frontier in high-performance computing. Unlike traditional techniques, this system delivers fast, wide-field, high-resolution imaging at the cryogenic temperatures required for superconducting devices. The instrument combines an optical microscopy system with a cryogenic sensor head containing a diamond engineered with nitrogen-vacancy centers — atomic-scale defects highly sensitive to magnetic fields. The cryomicroscope enables researchers to directly visualize trapped magnetic vortices that interfere with critical circuit components, helping to overcome a major obstacle to scaling superconducting electronics.

“The cryomicroscope gives us an unprecedented window into magnetic behavior in superconducting devices, accelerating progress toward next-generation computing technologies,” says Pauli Kehayias, joint principal investigator with Jennifer Schloss. The instrument is currently advancing superconducting electronics development at Lincoln Laboratory and is poised to impact materials science and quantum technology more broadly.

Enhancing communications 

Lincoln Laboratory Radio Frequency Situational Awareness Model (LL RF-SAM) utilizes advances in AI to enhance U.S. service members' vigilance over the electromagnetic spectrum. The modern spectrum can be described as a swamp of mixed signals originating from civilian, military, or enemy sources. In near-real time, LL RF-SAM inspects these signals to disentangle and identify nearby waveforms and their originating devices. For example, LL RF-SAM can help a user identify a particular packet of energy as a drone transmission protocol and then classify whether that drone is part of a corpus of friendly or enemy drones.

"This type of enhanced context helps military operators make data-driven decisions. The future adoption of this technology will have profound impact across communications, signals intelligence, spectrum management, and wireless infrastructure security," says principal investigator Joey Botero. 

Modular, Agile, Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT) is a laser communications (lasercom) terminal architecture that facilitates mission-enabling lasercom solutions adaptable to various space platforms and operating environments. Lasercom is rapidly becoming the go-to technology for space-to-space links in low Earth orbit because of its ability to support significantly higher data rates compared to radio frequency terminals. However, it has yet to be used operationally or commercially for longer-range space-to-ground links, as such systems often require custom designs for specific missions. MASCOT's modular, agile, and scalable design streamlines the process for building lasercom terminals suitable for a range of missions, from near Earth to deep space. MAScOT made its debut on the International Space Station in 2023 to demonstrate NASA's first two-way lasercom relay system, and is now being prepared to serve in an operational capacity on Artemis II, NASA's moon flyby mission scheduled for 2026. Two industry-built terminals have adopted the MAScOT architecture, and technology transfer to additional industry partners is ongoing.

"MAScOT is the latest lasercom terminal designed by Lincoln Laboratory engineers following decades of pioneering lasercom work with NASA, and it is poised to support lasercom for decades to come," says Bryan Robinson, who co-led MAScOT development with Tina Shih. 

Protected Anti-jam Tactical SATCOM (PATS) Key Management System (KMS) Prototype addresses the critical challenge of securely distributing cryptographic keys for military satellite communications (SATCOM) during terminal jamming, compromise, or disconnection. Realizing the U.S. Space Systems Command's vision for resilient, protected tactical SATCOM, the PATS KMS Prototype leverages innovative, bandwidth-efficient protocols and algorithms to enable real-time, scalable key distribution over wireless links, even under attack, so that warfighters can communicate securely in contested environments. PATS KMS is now being adopted as the core of the Department of Defense's next-generation SATCOM architecture.

"PATS KMS is not just a technology — it's a linchpin enabler of resilient, modern SATCOM, built for the realities of today's contested battlefield. We worked hand-in-hand with government stakeholders, operational users, and industry partners across a multiyear, multiphase journey to bring this capability to life," says Joseph Sobchuk, co-principal investigator with Nancy List. The R&D 100 Award is shared with the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command, whose “visionary leadership has been instrumental in shaping the future of protected tactical SATCOM,” Sobchuk adds.

When cells are healthy, we don’t expect them to suddenly change cell types. A skin cell on your hand won’t naturally morph into a brain cell, and vice versa. That’s thanks to epigenetic memory, which enables the expression of various genes to “lock in” throughout a cell’s lifetime. Failure of this memory can lead to diseases, such as cancer.

Traditionally, scientists have thought that epigenetic memory locks genes either “on” or “off” — either fully activated or fully repressed, like a permanent Lite-Brite pattern. But MIT engineers have found that the picture has many more shades.

In a new study appearing today in Cell Genomics, the team reports that a cell’s memory is set not by on/off switching but through a more graded, dimmer-like dial of gene expression.

The researchers carried out experiments in which they set the expression of a single gene at different levels in different cells. While conventional wisdom would assume the gene should eventually switch on or off, the researchers found that the gene’s original expression persisted: Cells whose gene expression was set along a spectrum between on and off remained in this in-between state.

The results suggest that epigenetic memory — the process by which cells retain gene expression and “remember” their identity — is not binary but instead analog, which allows for a spectrum of gene expression and associated cell identities.

“Our finding opens the possibility that cells commit to their final identity by locking genes at specific levels of gene expression instead of just on and off,” says study author Domitilla Del Vecchio, professor of mechanical and biological engineering at MIT. “The consequence is that there may be many more cell types in our body than we know and recognize today, that may have important functions and could underlie healthy or diseased states.”

The study’s MIT lead authors are Sebastian Palacios and Simone Bruno, with additional co-authors.

Beyond binary

Every cell shares the same genome, which can be thought of as the starting ingredient for life. As a cell takes shape, it differentiates into one type or another, through the expression of genes in its genome. Some genes are activated, while others are repressed. The combination steers a cell toward one identity versus another.

A process of DNA methylation, by which certain molecules attach to the genes’ DNA, helps lock their expression in place. DNA methylation assists a cell to “remember” its unique pattern of gene expression, which ultimately establishes the cell’s identity.

Del Vecchio’s group at MIT applies mathematics and genetic engineering to understand cellular molecular processes and to engineer cells with new capabilities. In previous work, her group was experimenting with DNA methylation and ways to lock the expression of certain genes in ovarian cells.

“The textbook understanding was that DNA methylation had a role to lock genes in either an on or off state,” Del Vecchio says. “We thought this was the dogma. But then we started seeing results that were not consistent with that.”

While many of the cells in their experiment exhibited an all-or-nothing expression of genes, a significant number of cells appeared to freeze genes in an in-between state — neither entirely on or off.

“We found there was a spectrum of cells that expressed any level between on and off,” Palacios says. “And we thought, how is this possible?”

Shades of blue

In their new study, the team aimed to see whether the in-between gene expression they observed was a fluke or a more established property of cells that until now has gone unnoticed.

“It could be that scientists disregarded cells that don’t have a clear commitment, because they assumed this was a transient state,” Del Vecchio says. “But actually these in-between cell types may be permanent states that could have important functions.”

To test their idea, the researchers ran experiments with hamster ovarian cells — a line of cells commonly used in the laboratory. In each cell, an engineered gene was initially set to a different level of expression. The gene was turned fully on in some cells, completely off in others, and set somewhere in between on and off for the remaining cells.

The team paired the engineered gene with a fluorescent marker that lights up with a brightness corresponding to the gene’s level of expression. The researchers introduced, for a short time, an enzyme that triggers the gene’s DNA methylation, a natural gene-locking mechanism. They then monitored the cells over five months to see whether the modification would lock the genes in place at their in-between expression levels, or whether the genes would migrate toward fully on or off states before locking in.

“Our fluorescent marker is blue, and we see cells glow across the entire spectrum, from really shiny blue, to dimmer and dimmer, to no blue at all,” Del Vecchio says. “Every intensity level is maintained over time, which means gene expression is graded, or analog, and not binary. We were very surprised, because we thought after such a long time, the gene would veer off, to be either fully on or off, but it did not.”

The findings open new avenues into engineering more complex artificial tissues and organs by tuning the expression of certain genes in a cell’s genome, like a dial on a radio, rather than a switch. The results also complicate the picture of how a cell’s epigenetic memory works to establish its identity. It opens up the possibility that cell modifications such as those exhibited in therapy-resistant tumors could be treated in a more precise fashion.

“Del Vecchio and colleagues have beautifully shown how analog memory arises through chemical modifications to the DNA itself,” says Michael Elowitz, professor of biology and biological engineering at the California institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. “As a result, we can now imagine repurposing this natural analog memory mechanism, invented by evolution, in the field of synthetic biology, where it could help allow us to program permanent and precise multicellular behaviors.”

“One of the things that enables the complexity in humans is epigenetic memory,” Palacios says. “And we find that it is not what we thought. For me, that’s actually mind-blowing. And I think we’re going to find that this analog memory is relevant for many different processes across biology.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, MODULUS, and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship through the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Using tiny particles shaped like bottlebrushes, MIT chemists have found a way to deliver a large range of chemotherapy drugs directly to tumor cells.

To guide them to the right location, each particle contains an antibody that targets a specific tumor protein. This antibody is tethered to bottlebrush-shaped polymer chains carrying dozens or hundreds of drug molecules — a much larger payload than can be delivered by any existing antibody-drug conjugates.

In mouse models of breast and ovarian cancer, the researchers found that treatment with these conjugated particles could eliminate most tumors. In the future, the particles could be modified to target other types of cancer, by swapping in different antibodies.

“We are excited about the potential to open up a new landscape of payloads and payload combinations with this technology, that could ultimately provide more effective therapies for cancer patients,” says Jeremiah Johnson, the A. Thomas Geurtin Professor of Chemistry at MIT, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the new study.

MIT postdoc Bin Liu is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Biotechnology.

A bigger drug payload

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are a promising type of cancer treatment that consist of a cancer-targeting antibody attached to a chemotherapy drug. At least 15 ADCs have been approved by the FDA to treat several different types of cancer.

This approach allows specific targeting of a cancer drug to a tumor, which helps to prevent some of the side effects that occur when chemotherapy drugs are given intravenously. However, one drawback to currently approved ADCs is that only a handful of drug molecules can be attached to each antibody. That means they can only be used with very potent drugs — usually DNA-damaging agents or drugs that interfere with cell division.

To try to use a broader range of drugs, which are often less potent, Johnson and his colleagues decided to adapt bottlebrush particles that they had previously invented. These particles consist of a polymer backbone that are attached to tens to hundreds of “prodrug” molecules — inactive drug molecules that are activated upon release within the body. This structure allows the particles to deliver a wide range of drug molecules, and the particles can be designed to carry multiple drugs in specific ratios.

Using a technique called click chemistry, the researchers showed that they could attach one, two, or three of their bottlebrush polymers to a single tumor-targeting antibody, creating an antibody-bottlebrush conjugate (ABC). This means that just one antibody can carry hundreds of prodrug molecules. The currently approved ADCs can carry a maximum of about eight drug molecules.

The huge number of payloads in the ABC particles allows the researchers to incorporate less potent cancer drugs such as doxorubicin or paclitaxel, which enhances the customizability of the particles and the variety of drug combinations that can be used.

“We can use antibody-bottlebrush conjugates to increase the drug loading, and in that case, we can use less potent drugs,” Liu says. “In the future, we can very easily copolymerize with multiple drugs together to achieve combination therapy.”

The prodrug molecules are attached to the polymer backbone by cleavable linkers. After the particles reach a tumor site, some of these linkers are broken right away, allowing the drugs to kill nearby cancer cells even if they don’t express the target antibody. Other particles are absorbed into cells with the target antibody before releasing their toxic payload.

Effective treatment

For this study, the researchers created ABC particles carrying a few different types of drugs: microtubule inhibitors called MMAE and paclitaxel, and two DNA-damaging agents, doxorubicin and SN-38. They also designed ABC particles carrying an experimental type of drug known as PROTAC (proteolysis-targeting chimera), which can selectively degrade disease-causing proteins inside cells.

Each bottlebrush was tethered to an antibody targeting either HER2, a protein often overexpressed in breast cancer, or MUC1, which is commonly found in ovarian, lung, and other types of cancer.

The researchers tested each of the ABCs in mouse models of breast or ovarian cancer and found that in most cases, the ABC particles were able to eradicate the tumors. This treatment was significantly more effective than giving the same bottlebrush prodrugs by injection, without being conjugated to a targeting antibody.

“We used a very low dose, almost 100 times lower compared to the traditional small-molecule drug, and the ABC still can achieve much better efficacy compared to the small-molecule drug given on its own,” Liu says.

These ABCs also performed better than two FDA-approved ADCs, T-DXd and TDM-1, which both use HER2 to target cells. T-DXd carries deruxtecan, which interferes with DNA replication, and TDM-1 carries emtansine, a microtubule inhibitor.

In future work, the MIT team plans to try delivering combinations of drugs that work by different mechanisms, which could enhance their overall effectiveness. Among these could be immunotherapy drugs such as STING activators.

The researchers are also working on swapping in different antibodies, such as antibodies targeting EGFR, which is widely expressed in many tumors. More than 100 antibodies have been approved to treat cancer and other diseases, and in theory any of those could be conjugated to cancer drugs to create a targeted therapy.

The research was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, the Ludwig Center at MIT, and the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program. 

By Prof Teo Yik Ying, Vice-President for Global Health and Dean of the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at NUS

• The Straits Times, 4 September 2025, Opinion, pB4

• 8world Online, 3 September 2025
• The Business Times, 4 September 2025, p11
• Lianhe Zaobao, 4 September 2025, Business, p27

By Dr Azhar Ibrahim Alwee, Senior Lecturer from the Department of Malay Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS

• Berita Minggu, 31 August 2025, p11

     David Baltimore - Infinite History (2010)
     Video: MIT | Watch with transcript

Baltimore was born in New York City in 1938. His scientific career began at Swarthmore College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree with high honors in chemistry in 1960. He then began doctoral studies in biophysics at MIT, but in 1961 shifted his focus to animal viruses and moved to what is now the Rockefeller University, where he did his thesis work in the lab of Richard Franklin.

After completing postdoctoral fellowships with James Darnell at MIT and Jerard Hurwitz at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Baltimore launched his own lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1965 to 1968. Then, in 1968, he returned to MIT as a member of its biology faculty, where he remained until 1990. (Whitehead Institute’s members hold parallel appointments as faculty in the MIT Department of Biology.)

In 1990, Baltimore left the Whitehead Institute and MIT to become the president of Rockefeller University. He returned to MIT from 1994 to 1997, serving as an Institute Professor, after which he was named president of Caltech. Baltimore held that position until 2006, when he was elected to a three-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

For decades, Baltimore has been viewed not just as a brilliant scientist and talented academic leader, but also as a wise counsel to the scientific community. For example, he helped organize the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, which created stringent safety guidelines for the study and use of recombinant DNA technology. He played a leadership role in the development of policies on AIDS research and treatment, and on genomic editing. Serving as an advisor to both organizations and individual scientists, he helped to shape the strategic direction of dozens of institutions and to advance the careers of generations of researchers. As Founding Member Robert Weinberg summarizes it, “He had no tolerance for nonsense and weak science.”  

In 2023, the Whitehead Institute established the endowed David Baltimore Chair in Biomedical Research, honoring Baltimore’s six decades of scientific, academic, and policy leadership and his impact on advancing innovative basic biomedical research.

“David was a visionary leader in science and the institutions that sustain it. He devoted his career to advancing scientific knowledge and strengthening the communities that make discovery possible, and his leadership of Whitehead Institute exemplified this,” says Richard Young, MIT professor of biology and Whitehead Institute member. “David approached life with keen observation, boundless curiosity, and a gift for insight that made him both a brilliant scientist and a delightful companion. His commitment to mentoring and supporting young scientists left a lasting legacy, inspiring the next generation to pursue impactful contributions to biomedical research. Many of us found in him not only a mentor and role model, but also a steadfast friend whose presence enriched our lives and whose absence will be profoundly felt.”

Most people recognize Alzheimer’s disease from its devastating symptoms such as memory loss, while new drugs target pathological aspects of disease manifestations, such as plaques of amyloid proteins. Now, a sweeping new open-access study in the Sept. 4 edition of Cell by MIT researchers shows the importance of understanding the disease as a battle over how well brain cells control the expression of their genes. The study paints a high-resolution picture of a desperate struggle to maintain healthy gene expression and gene regulation, where the consequences of failure or success are nothing less than the loss or preservation of cell function and cognition.

The study presents a first-of-its-kind, multimodal atlas of combined gene expression and gene regulation spanning 3.5 million cells from six brain regions, obtained by profiling 384 post-mortem brain samples across 111 donors. The researchers profiled both the “transcriptome,” showing which genes are expressed into RNA, and the “epigenome,” the set of chromosomal modifications that establish which DNA regions are accessible and thus utilized between different cell types.

The resulting atlas revealed many insights showing that the progression of Alzheimer’s is characterized by two major epigenomic trends. The first is that vulnerable cells in key brain regions suffer a breakdown of the rigorous nuclear “compartments” they normally maintain to ensure some parts of the genome are open for expression but others remain locked away. The second major finding is that susceptible cells experience a loss of “epigenomic information,” meaning they lose their grip on the unique pattern of gene regulation and expression that gives them their specific identity and enables their healthy function.

Accompanying the evidence of compromised compartmentalization and the erosion of epigenomic information are many specific findings pinpointing molecular circuitry that breaks down by cell type, by region, and gene network. They found, for instance, that when epigenomic conditions deteriorate, that opens the door to expression of many genes associated with disease, whereas if cells manage to keep their epigenomic house in order, they can keep disease-associated genes in check. Moreover, the researchers clearly saw that when the epigenomic breakdowns were occurring people lost cognitive ability, but where epigenomic stability remained, so did cognition.

“To understand the circuitry, the logic responsible for gene expression changes in Alzheimer’s disease [AD], we needed to understand the regulation and upstream control of all the changes that are happening, and that’s where the epigenome comes in,” says senior author Manolis Kellis, a professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and head of MIT’s Computational Biology Group. “This is the first large-scale, single-cell, multi-region gene-regulatory atlas of AD, systematically dissecting the dynamics of epigenomic and transcriptomic programs across disease progression and resilience.”

By providing that detailed examination of the epigenomic mechanisms of Alzheimer’s progression, the study provides a blueprint for devising new Alzheimer’s treatments that can target factors underlying the broad erosion of epigenomic control or the specific manifestations that affect key cell types such as neurons and supporting glial cells.

“The key to developing new and more effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease depends on deepening our understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to the breakdowns of cellular and network function in the brain,” says Picower Professor and co-corresponding author Li-Huei Tsai, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and a founding member of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, along with Kellis. “This new data advances our understanding of how epigenomic factors drive disease.”

Kellis Lab members Zunpeng Liu and Shanshan Zhang are the study’s co-lead authors.

Compromised compartments and eroded information

Among the post-mortem brain samples in the study, 57 came from donors to the Religious Orders Study or the Rush Memory and Aging Project (collectively known as “ROSMAP”) who did not have AD pathology or symptoms, while 33 came from donors with early-stage pathology and 21 came from donors at a late stage. The samples therefore provided rich information about the symptoms and pathology each donor was experiencing before death.

In the new study, Liu and Zhang combined analyses of single-cell RNA sequencing of the samples, which measures which genes are being expressed in each cell, and ATACseq, which measures whether chromosomal regions are accessible for gene expression. Considered together, these transcriptomic and epigenomic measures enabled the researchers to understand the molecular details of how gene expression is regulated across seven broad classes of brain cells (e.g., neurons or other glial cell types) and 67 subtypes of cell types (e.g., 17 kinds of excitatory neurons or six kinds of inhibitory ones).

The researchers annotated more than 1 million gene-regulatory control regions that different cells employ to establish their specific identities and functionality using epigenomic marking. Then, by comparing the cells from Alzheimer’s brains to the ones without, and accounting for stage of pathology and cognitive symptoms, they could produce rigorous associations between the erosion of these epigenomic markings, and ultimately loss of function.

For instance, they saw that among people who advanced to late-stage AD, normally repressive compartments opened up for more expression and compartments that were normally more open during health became more repressed. Worryingly, when the normally repressive compartments of brain cells opened up, they became more afflicted with disease.

“For Alzheimer’s patients, repressive compartments opened up, and gene expression levels increased, which was associated with decreased cognitive function,” explains Liu.

But when cells managed to keep their compartments in order such that they expressed the genes they were supposed to, people remained cognitively intact.

Meanwhile, based on the cells’ expression of their regulatory elements, the researchers created an epigenomic information score for each cell. Generally, information declined as pathology progressed, but that was particularly notable among cells in the two brain regions affected earliest in Alzheimer’s: the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. The analyses also highlighted specific cell types that were especially vulnerable including microglia that play immune and other roles, oligodendrocytes that produce myelin insulation for neurons, and particular kinds of excitatory neurons.

Risk genes and “chromatin guardians”

Detailed analyses in the paper highlighted how epigenomic regulation tracked with disease-related problems, Liu notes. The e4 variant of the APOE gene, for instance, is widely understood to be the single biggest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s. In APOE4 brains, microglia initially responded to the emerging disease pathology with an increase in their epigenomic information, suggesting that they were stepping up to their unique responsibility to fight off disease. But as the disease progressed, the cells exhibited a sharp drop off in information, a sign of deterioration and degeneration. This turnabout was strongest in people who had two copies of APOE4, rather than just one. The findings, Kellis said, suggest that APOE4 might destabilize the genome of microglia, causing them to burn out.

Another example is the fate of neurons expressing the gene RELN and its protein Reelin. Prior studies, including by Kellis and Tsai, have shown that RELN- expressing neurons in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus are especially vulnerable in Alzheimer’s, but promote resilience if they survive. The new study sheds new light on their fate by demonstrating that they exhibit early and severe epigenomic information loss as disease advances, but that in people who remained cognitively resilient the neurons maintained epigenomic information.

In yet another example, the researchers tracked what they colloquially call “chromatin guardians” because their expression sustains and regulates cells’ epigenomic programs. For instance, cells with greater epigenomic erosion and advanced AD progression displayed increased chromatin accessibility in areas that were supposed to be locked down by Polycomb repression genes or other gene expression silencers. While resilient cells expressed genes promoting neural connectivity, epigenomically eroded cells expressed genes linked to inflammation and oxidative stress.

“The message is clear: Alzheimer’s is not only about plaques and tangles, but about the erosion of nuclear order itself,” Kellis says. “Cognitive decline emerges when chromatin guardians lose ground to the forces of erosion, switching from resilience to vulnerability at the most fundamental level of genome regulation.

“And when our brain cells lose their epigenomic memory marks and epigenomic information at the lowest level deep inside our neurons and microglia, it seems that Alheimer’s patients also lose their memory and cognition at the highest level.”

Other authors of the paper are Benjamin T. James, Kyriaki Galani, Riley J. Mangan, Stuart Benjamin Fass, Chuqian Liang, Manoj M. Wagle, Carles A. Boix, Yosuke Tanigawa, Sukwon Yun, Yena Sung, Xushen Xiong, Na Sun, Lei Hou, Martin Wohlwend, Mufan Qiu, Xikun Han, Lei Xiong, Efthalia Preka, Lei Huang, William F. Li, Li-Lun Ho, Amy Grayson, Julio Mantero, Alexey Kozlenkov, Hansruedi Mathys, Tianlong Chen, Stella Dracheva, and David A. Bennett.

Funding for the research came from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, the Freedom Together Foundation, the Robert A. and Renee E. Belfer Family Foundation, Eduardo Eurnekian, and Joseph P. DiSabato.

Most people recognize Alzheimer’s disease from its devastating symptoms such as memory loss, while new drugs target pathological aspects of disease manifestations, such as plaques of amyloid proteins. Now, a sweeping new open-access study in the Sept. 4 edition of Cell by MIT researchers shows the importance of understanding the disease as a battle over how well brain cells control the expression of their genes. The study paints a high-resolution picture of a desperate struggle to maintain healthy gene expression and gene regulation, where the consequences of failure or success are nothing less than the loss or preservation of cell function and cognition.

The study presents a first-of-its-kind, multimodal atlas of combined gene expression and gene regulation spanning 3.5 million cells from six brain regions, obtained by profiling 384 post-mortem brain samples across 111 donors. The researchers profiled both the “transcriptome,” showing which genes are expressed into RNA, and the “epigenome,” the set of chromosomal modifications that establish which DNA regions are accessible and thus utilized between different cell types.

The resulting atlas revealed many insights showing that the progression of Alzheimer’s is characterized by two major epigenomic trends. The first is that vulnerable cells in key brain regions suffer a breakdown of the rigorous nuclear “compartments” they normally maintain to ensure some parts of the genome are open for expression but others remain locked away. The second major finding is that susceptible cells experience a loss of “epigenomic information,” meaning they lose their grip on the unique pattern of gene regulation and expression that gives them their specific identity and enables their healthy function.

Accompanying the evidence of compromised compartmentalization and the erosion of epigenomic information are many specific findings pinpointing molecular circuitry that breaks down by cell type, by region, and gene network. They found, for instance, that when epigenomic conditions deteriorate, that opens the door to expression of many genes associated with disease, whereas if cells manage to keep their epigenomic house in order, they can keep disease-associated genes in check. Moreover, the researchers clearly saw that when the epigenomic breakdowns were occurring people lost cognitive ability, but where epigenomic stability remained, so did cognition.

“To understand the circuitry, the logic responsible for gene expression changes in Alzheimer’s disease [AD], we needed to understand the regulation and upstream control of all the changes that are happening, and that’s where the epigenome comes in,” says senior author Manolis Kellis, a professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and head of MIT’s Computational Biology Group. “This is the first large-scale, single-cell, multi-region gene-regulatory atlas of AD, systematically dissecting the dynamics of epigenomic and transcriptomic programs across disease progression and resilience.”

By providing that detailed examination of the epigenomic mechanisms of Alzheimer’s progression, the study provides a blueprint for devising new Alzheimer’s treatments that can target factors underlying the broad erosion of epigenomic control or the specific manifestations that affect key cell types such as neurons and supporting glial cells.

“The key to developing new and more effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease depends on deepening our understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to the breakdowns of cellular and network function in the brain,” says Picower Professor and co-corresponding author Li-Huei Tsai, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and a founding member of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, along with Kellis. “This new data advances our understanding of how epigenomic factors drive disease.”

Kellis Lab members Zunpeng Liu and Shanshan Zhang are the study’s co-lead authors.

Compromised compartments and eroded information

Among the post-mortem brain samples in the study, 57 came from donors to the Religious Orders Study or the Rush Memory and Aging Project (collectively known as “ROSMAP”) who did not have AD pathology or symptoms, while 33 came from donors with early-stage pathology and 21 came from donors at a late stage. The samples therefore provided rich information about the symptoms and pathology each donor was experiencing before death.

In the new study, Liu and Zhang combined analyses of single-cell RNA sequencing of the samples, which measures which genes are being expressed in each cell, and ATACseq, which measures whether chromosomal regions are accessible for gene expression. Considered together, these transcriptomic and epigenomic measures enabled the researchers to understand the molecular details of how gene expression is regulated across seven broad classes of brain cells (e.g., neurons or other glial cell types) and 67 subtypes of cell types (e.g., 17 kinds of excitatory neurons or six kinds of inhibitory ones).

The researchers annotated more than 1 million gene-regulatory control regions that different cells employ to establish their specific identities and functionality using epigenomic marking. Then, by comparing the cells from Alzheimer’s brains to the ones without, and accounting for stage of pathology and cognitive symptoms, they could produce rigorous associations between the erosion of these epigenomic markings, and ultimately loss of function.

For instance, they saw that among people who advanced to late-stage AD, normally repressive compartments opened up for more expression and compartments that were normally more open during health became more repressed. Worryingly, when the normally repressive compartments of brain cells opened up, they became more afflicted with disease.

“For Alzheimer’s patients, repressive compartments opened up, and gene expression levels increased, which was associated with decreased cognitive function,” explains Liu.

But when cells managed to keep their compartments in order such that they expressed the genes they were supposed to, people remained cognitively intact.

Meanwhile, based on the cells’ expression of their regulatory elements, the researchers created an epigenomic information score for each cell. Generally, information declined as pathology progressed, but that was particularly notable among cells in the two brain regions affected earliest in Alzheimer’s: the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. The analyses also highlighted specific cell types that were especially vulnerable including microglia that play immune and other roles, oligodendrocytes that produce myelin insulation for neurons, and particular kinds of excitatory neurons.

Risk genes and “chromatin guardians”

Detailed analyses in the paper highlighted how epigenomic regulation tracked with disease-related problems, Liu notes. The e4 variant of the APOE gene, for instance, is widely understood to be the single biggest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s. In APOE4 brains, microglia initially responded to the emerging disease pathology with an increase in their epigenomic information, suggesting that they were stepping up to their unique responsibility to fight off disease. But as the disease progressed, the cells exhibited a sharp drop off in information, a sign of deterioration and degeneration. This turnabout was strongest in people who had two copies of APOE4, rather than just one. The findings, Kellis said, suggest that APOE4 might destabilize the genome of microglia, causing them to burn out.

Another example is the fate of neurons expressing the gene RELN and its protein Reelin. Prior studies, including by Kellis and Tsai, have shown that RELN- expressing neurons in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus are especially vulnerable in Alzheimer’s, but promote resilience if they survive. The new study sheds new light on their fate by demonstrating that they exhibit early and severe epigenomic information loss as disease advances, but that in people who remained cognitively resilient the neurons maintained epigenomic information.

In yet another example, the researchers tracked what they colloquially call “chromatin guardians” because their expression sustains and regulates cells’ epigenomic programs. For instance, cells with greater epigenomic erosion and advanced AD progression displayed increased chromatin accessibility in areas that were supposed to be locked down by Polycomb repression genes or other gene expression silencers. While resilient cells expressed genes promoting neural connectivity, epigenomically eroded cells expressed genes linked to inflammation and oxidative stress.

“The message is clear: Alzheimer’s is not only about plaques and tangles, but about the erosion of nuclear order itself,” Kellis says. “Cognitive decline emerges when chromatin guardians lose ground to the forces of erosion, switching from resilience to vulnerability at the most fundamental level of genome regulation.

“And when our brain cells lose their epigenomic memory marks and epigenomic information at the lowest level deep inside our neurons and microglia, it seems that Alheimer’s patients also lose their memory and cognition at the highest level.”

Other authors of the paper are Benjamin T. James, Kyriaki Galani, Riley J. Mangan, Stuart Benjamin Fass, Chuqian Liang, Manoj M. Wagle, Carles A. Boix, Yosuke Tanigawa, Sukwon Yun, Yena Sung, Xushen Xiong, Na Sun, Lei Hou, Martin Wohlwend, Mufan Qiu, Xikun Han, Lei Xiong, Efthalia Preka, Lei Huang, William F. Li, Li-Lun Ho, Amy Grayson, Julio Mantero, Alexey Kozlenkov, Hansruedi Mathys, Tianlong Chen, Stella Dracheva, and David A. Bennett.

Funding for the research came from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, the Freedom Together Foundation, the Robert A. and Renee E. Belfer Family Foundation, Eduardo Eurnekian, and Joseph P. DiSabato.

At any given moment, trillions of particles called neutrinos are streaming through our bodies and every material in our surroundings, without noticeable effect. Smaller than electrons and lighter than photons, these ghostly entities are the most abundant particles with mass in the universe.

The exact mass of a neutrino is a big unknown. The particle is so small, and interacts so rarely with matter, that it is incredibly difficult to measure. Scientists attempt to do so by harnessing nuclear reactors and massive particle accelerators to generate unstable atoms, which then decay into various byproducts including neutrinos. In this way, physicists can manufacture beams of neutrinos that they can probe for properties including the particle’s mass.

Now MIT physicists propose a much more compact and efficient way to generate neutrinos that could be realized in a tabletop experiment.

In a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters, the physicists introduce the concept for a “neutrino laser” — a burst of neutrinos that could be produced by laser-cooling a gas of radioactive atoms down to temperatures colder than interstellar space. At such frigid temps, the team predicts the atoms should behave as one quantum entity, and radioactively decay in sync.

The decay of radioactive atoms naturally releases neutrinos, and the physicists say that in a coherent, quantum state this decay should accelerate, along with the production of neutrinos. This quantum effect should produce an amplified beam of neutrinos, broadly similar to how photons are amplified to produce conventional laser light.

“In our concept for a neutrino laser, the neutrinos would be emitted at a much faster rate than they normally would, sort of like a laser emits photons very fast,” says study co-author Ben Jones PhD ’15, an associate professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington.

As an example, the team calculated that such a neutrino laser could be realized by trapping 1 million atoms of rubidium-83. Normally, the radioactive atoms have a half-life of about 82 days, meaning that half the atoms decay, shedding an equivalent number of neutrinos, every 82 days. The physicists show that, by cooling rubidium-83 to a coherent, quantum state, the atoms should undergo radioactive decay in mere minutes.

“This is a novel way to accelerate radioactive decay and the production of neutrinos, which to my knowledge, has never been done,” says co-author Joseph Formaggio, professor of physics at MIT.

The team hopes to build a small tabletop demonstration to test their idea. If it works, they envision a neutrino laser could be used as a new form of communication, by which the particles could be sent directly through the Earth to underground stations and habitats. The neutrino laser could also be an efficient source of radioisotopes, which, along with neutrinos, are byproducts of radioactive decay. Such radioisotopes could be used to enhance medical imaging and cancer diagnostics.

Coherent condensate

For every atom in the universe, there are about a billion neutrinos. A large fraction of these invisible particles may have formed in the first moments following the Big Bang, and they persist in what physicists call the “cosmic neutrino background.” Neutrinos are also produced whenever atomic nuclei fuse together or break apart, such as in the fusion reactions in the sun’s core, and in the normal decay of radioactive materials.

Several years ago, Formaggio and Jones separately considered a novel possibility: What if a natural process of neutrino production could be enhanced through quantum coherence? Initial explorations revealed fundamental roadblocks in realizing this. Years later, while discussing the properties of ultracold tritium (an unstable isotope of hydrogen that undergoes radioactive decay) they asked: Could the production of neutrinos be enhanced if radioactive atoms such as tritium could be made so cold that they could be brought into a quantum state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate?

A Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC, is a state of matter that forms when a gas of certain particles is cooled down to near absolute zero. At this point, the particles are brought down to their lowest energy level and stop moving as individuals. In this deep freeze, the particles can start to “feel” each others’ quantum effects, and can act as one coherent entity — a unique phase that can result in exotic physics.

BECs have been realized in a number of atomic species. (One of the first instances was with sodium atoms, by MIT’s Wolfgang Ketterle, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for the result.) However, no one has made a BEC from radioactive atoms. To do so would be exceptionally challenging, as most radioisotopes have short half-lives and would decay entirely before they could be sufficiently cooled to form a BEC.

Nevertheless, Formaggio wondered, if radioactive atoms could be made into a BEC, would this enhance the production of neutrinos in some way? In trying to work out the quantum mechanical calculations, he found initially that no such effect was likely.

“It turned out to be a red herring — we can’t accelerate the process of radioactive decay, and neutrino production, just by making a Bose-Einstein condensate,” Formaggio says.

In sync with optics

Several years later, Jones revisited the idea, with an added ingredient: superradiance — a phenomenon of quantum optics that occurs when a collection of light-emitting atoms is stimulated to behave in sync. In this coherent phase, it’s predicted that the atoms should emit a burst of photons that is “superradiant,” or more radiant than when the atoms are normally out of sync.

Jones proposed to Formaggio that perhaps a similar superradiant effect is possible in a radioactive Bose-Einstein condensate, which could then result in a similar burst of neutrinos. The physicists went to the drawing board to work out the equations of quantum mechanics governing how light-emitting atoms morph from a coherent starting state into a superradiant state. They used the same equations to work out what radioactive atoms in a coherent BEC state would do.

“The outcome is: You get a lot more photons more quickly, and when you apply the same rules to something that gives you neutrinos, it will give you a whole bunch more neutrinos more quickly,” Formaggio explains. “That’s when the pieces clicked together, that superradiance in a radioactive condensate could enable this accelerated, laser-like neutrino emission.”

To test their concept in theory, the team calculated how neutrinos would be produced from a cloud of 1 million super-cooled rubidium-83 atoms. They found that, in the coherent BEC state, the atoms radioactively decayed at an accelerating rate, releasing a laser-like beam of neutrinos within minutes.

Now that the physicists have shown in theory that a neutrino laser is possible, they plan to test the idea with a small tabletop setup.

“It should be enough to take this radioactive material, vaporize it, trap it with lasers, cool it down, and then turn it into a Bose-Einstein condensate,” Jones says. “Then it should start doing this superradiance spontaneously.”

The pair acknowledge that such an experiment will require a number of precautions and careful manipulation.

“If it turns out that we can show it in the lab, then people can think about: Can we use this as a neutrino detector? Or a new form of communication?” Formaggio says. “That’s when the fun really starts.”

In the search for habitable exoplanets, atmospheric conditions play a key role in determining if a planet can sustain liquid water. Suitable candidates often sit in the “Goldilocks zone,” a distance that is neither too close nor too far from their host star to allow liquid water. With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers are collecting improved observations of exoplanet atmospheres that will help determine which exoplanets are good candidates for further study.

In an open-access paper published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers used JWST to take a closer look at the atmosphere of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e, located in the TRAPPIST-1 system. While they haven’t found definitive proof of what it is made of — or if it even has an atmosphere — they were able to rule out several possibilities.

“The idea is: If we assume that the planet is not airless, can we constrain different atmospheric scenarios? Do those scenarios still allow for liquid water at the surface?” says Ana Glidden, a postdoc in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and the first author on the paper. The answers they found were yes.

The new data rule out a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, and place tighter constraints on other atmospheric conditions that are commonly created through secondary-generation, such as volcanic eruptions and outgassing from the planet’s interior. The data were consistent enough to still allow for the possibility of a surface ocean.

“TRAPPIST-1e remains one of our most compelling habitable-zone planets, and these new results take us a step closer to knowing what kind of world it is,” says Sara Seager, Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science at MIT and co-author on the study. “The evidence pointing away from Venus- and Mars-like atmospheres sharpens our focus on the scenarios still in play.”

The study’s co-authors also include collaborators from the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and members of the JWST-TST DREAMS Team.

Improved observations

Exoplanet atmospheres are studied using a technique called transmission spectroscopy. When a planet passes in front of its host star, the starlight is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere. Astronomers can determine which molecules are present in the atmosphere by seeing how the light changes at different wavelengths.

“Each molecule has a spectral fingerprint. You can compare your observations with those fingerprints to suss out which molecules may be present,” says Glidden.

JWST has a larger wavelength coverage and higher spectral resolution than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which makes it possible to observe molecules like carbon dioxide and methane that are more commonly found in our own solar system. However, the improved observations have also highlighted the problem of stellar contamination, where changes in the host star’s temperature due to things like sunspots and solar flares make it difficult to interpret data.

“Stellar activity strongly interferes with the planetary interpretation of the data because we can only observe a potential atmosphere through starlight,” says Glidden. “It is challenging to separate out which signals come from the star versus from the planet itself.”

Ruling out atmospheric conditions

The researchers used a novel approach to mitigate for stellar activity and, as a result, “any signal you can see varying visit-to-visit is most likely from the star, while anything that’s consistent between the visits is most likely the planet,” says Glidden.

The researchers were then able to compare the results to several different possible atmospheric scenarios. They found that carbon dioxide-rich atmospheres, like those of Mars and Venus, are unlikely, while a warm, nitrogen-rich atmosphere similar to Saturn’s moon Titan remains possible. The evidence, however, is too weak to determine if any atmosphere was present, let alone detecting a specific type of gas. Additional, ongoing observations that are already in the works will help to narrow down the possibilities.

“With our initial observations, we have showcased the gains made with JWST. Our follow-up program will help us to further refine our understanding of one of our best habitable-zone planets,” says Glidden.

In the search for habitable exoplanets, atmospheric conditions play a key role in determining if a planet can sustain liquid water. Suitable candidates often sit in the “Goldilocks zone,” a distance that is neither too close nor too far from their host star to allow liquid water. With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers are collecting improved observations of exoplanet atmospheres that will help determine which exoplanets are good candidates for further study.

In an open-access paper published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers used JWST to take a closer look at the atmosphere of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e, located in the TRAPPIST-1 system. While they haven’t found definitive proof of what it is made of — or if it even has an atmosphere — they were able to rule out several possibilities.

“The idea is: If we assume that the planet is not airless, can we constrain different atmospheric scenarios? Do those scenarios still allow for liquid water at the surface?” says Ana Glidden, a postdoc in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and the first author on the paper. The answers they found were yes.

The new data rule out a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, and place tighter constraints on other atmospheric conditions that are commonly created through secondary-generation, such as volcanic eruptions and outgassing from the planet’s interior. The data were consistent enough to still allow for the possibility of a surface ocean.

“TRAPPIST-1e remains one of our most compelling habitable-zone planets, and these new results take us a step closer to knowing what kind of world it is,” says Sara Seager, Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science at MIT and co-author on the study. “The evidence pointing away from Venus- and Mars-like atmospheres sharpens our focus on the scenarios still in play.”

The study’s co-authors also include collaborators from the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and members of the JWST-TST DREAMS Team.

Improved observations

Exoplanet atmospheres are studied using a technique called transmission spectroscopy. When a planet passes in front of its host star, the starlight is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere. Astronomers can determine which molecules are present in the atmosphere by seeing how the light changes at different wavelengths.

“Each molecule has a spectral fingerprint. You can compare your observations with those fingerprints to suss out which molecules may be present,” says Glidden.

JWST has a larger wavelength coverage and higher spectral resolution than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which makes it possible to observe molecules like carbon dioxide and methane that are more commonly found in our own solar system. However, the improved observations have also highlighted the problem of stellar contamination, where changes in the host star’s temperature due to things like sunspots and solar flares make it difficult to interpret data.

“Stellar activity strongly interferes with the planetary interpretation of the data because we can only observe a potential atmosphere through starlight,” says Glidden. “It is challenging to separate out which signals come from the star versus from the planet itself.”

Ruling out atmospheric conditions

The researchers used a novel approach to mitigate for stellar activity and, as a result, “any signal you can see varying visit-to-visit is most likely from the star, while anything that’s consistent between the visits is most likely the planet,” says Glidden.

The researchers were then able to compare the results to several different possible atmospheric scenarios. They found that carbon dioxide-rich atmospheres, like those of Mars and Venus, are unlikely, while a warm, nitrogen-rich atmosphere similar to Saturn’s moon Titan remains possible. The evidence, however, is too weak to determine if any atmosphere was present, let alone detecting a specific type of gas. Additional, ongoing observations that are already in the works will help to narrow down the possibilities.

“With our initial observations, we have showcased the gains made with JWST. Our follow-up program will help us to further refine our understanding of one of our best habitable-zone planets,” says Glidden.

Applying to NUS has become easier — the University has adopted a new digital system that offers a smoother, faster, and more intuitive experience for students.

A few years ago, NUS set out to reimagine and enhance the entire admissions journey, aiming to deliver a seamless and user-friendly experience for both applicants and administrators. This initiative to modernise the NUS Undergraduate Admission System (UAS 2) was recently featured as a case study by Gartner, a leading global research and advisory firm. Selected through a rigorous selection process and a thorough independent assessment, this recognition highlights the significant impact of NUS’ digital transformation efforts.

Putting automation at the core of the initiative, NUS Office of Admissions (NUS OAM) and NUS Information Technology (NUS IT) teamed up to transform the application experience, simplifying and optimising the entire process.

The new and modernised system was first launched in Academic Year 2022/23 and fully completed in June 2024. The introduction of the new system significantly enhanced the application process and enabled NUS OAM to efficiently handle a substantial increase in applications. The system also provided timely notifications of application outcomes — via email and SMS — to prospective students, reducing the volume of admissions enquiries to NUS OAM.

NUS Dean of Admissions Professor Goh Say Song said, “The application process marks students’ first pivotal step in their journey towards admission. When the process is simple and smooth, it instantly builds trust with the students and shows that we value their experience from the very beginning.”

This new platform enables automation and data-driven processes, replacing manual systems with a digitally enhanced approach to managing applications. This has optimised the use of IT resources and enabled more responsive and scalable operations. Extensive testing was also conducted by NUS OAM and NUS IT to ensure an integration of legacy systems with the new platform.

Transforming the application experience with automation

Automating the application process allowed NUS OAM to streamline its workflows, significantly reducing the time taken for administrators to process applications. Beyond enhancing operational productivity, the new platform offers applicants an intuitive, accessible and more personalised experience, setting NUS apart in an intensely competitive higher education landscape.

The modernisation of the admission system also had a tangible impact on the day-to-day work of administrators. With faster processing, more efficient use of IT resources, and higher applicant satisfaction, this reflects a broader cultural shift towards digital-first thinking and underscores the long-term value of the benefits of transformative technology.

NUS Chief Information Technology Officer Ms Tan Shui-Min shared, “Transforming an institution-wide system was fostered by strong cross-department collaboration that enabled us to overcome challenges and drive the platform’s success. The recognition as a Gartner case study reaffirmed NUS’s position as a digital leader in higher education and validated the efforts of our teams!”

Both teams have some nuggets of wisdom to share from the experience of facilitating this system upgrade. “Remain flexible, maintain an agile mindset when adopting new technology, and regularly engage and proactively communicate with end-users to determine adjustments that need to be made. The success of such initiatives lies in having a clear vision, a commitment to innovation, and a willingness to reimagine traditional processes for a better future.”

Artificial intelligence optimization offers a host of benefits for mechanical engineers, including faster and more accurate designs and simulations, improved efficiency, reduced development costs through process automation, and enhanced predictive maintenance and quality control.

“When people think about mechanical engineering, they're thinking about basic mechanical tools like hammers and … hardware like cars, robots, cranes, but mechanical engineering is very broad,” says Faez Ahmed, the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization and associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Within mechanical engineering, machine learning, AI, and optimization are playing a big role.”

In Ahmed’s course, 2.155/156 (AI and Machine Learning for Engineering Design), students use tools and techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning for mechanical engineering design, focusing on the creation of new products and addressing engineering design challenges.

“There’s a lot of reason for mechanical engineers to think about machine learning and AI to essentially expedite the design process,” says Lyle Regenwetter, a teaching assistant for the course and a PhD candidate in Ahmed’s Design Computation and Digital Engineering Lab (DeCoDE), where research focuses on developing new machine learning and optimization methods to study complex engineering design problems.

First offered in 2021, the class has quickly become one of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE)’s most popular non-core offerings, attracting students from departments across the Institute, including mechanical and civil and environmental engineering, aeronautics and astronautics, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and nuclear and computer science, along with cross-registered students from Harvard University and other schools.

The course, which is open to both undergraduate and graduate students, focuses on the implementation of advanced machine learning and optimization strategies in the context of real-world mechanical design problems. From designing bike frames to city grids, students participate in contests related to AI for physical systems and tackle optimization challenges in a class environment fueled by friendly competition.

Students are given challenge problems and starter code that “gave a solution, but [not] the best solution …” explains Ilan Moyer, a graduate student in MechE. “Our task was to [determine], how can we do better?” Live leaderboards encourage students to continually refine their methods.

Em Lauber, a system design and management graduate student, says the process gave space to explore the application of what students were learning and the practice skill of “literally how to code it.”

The curriculum incorporates discussions on research papers, and students also pursue hands-on exercises in machine learning tailored to specific engineering issues including robotics, aircraft, structures, and metamaterials. For their final project, students work together on a team project that employs AI techniques for design on a complex problem of their choice.

“It is wonderful to see the diverse breadth and high quality of class projects,” says Ahmed. “Student projects from this course often lead to research publications, and have even led to awards.” He cites the example of a recent paper, titled “GenCAD-Self-Repairing,” that went on to win the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Systems Engineering, Information and Knowledge Management 2025 Best Paper Award.

“The best part about the final project was that it gave every student the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in the class to an area that interests them a lot,” says Malia Smith, a graduate student in MechE. Her project chose “markered motion captured data” and looked at predicting ground force for runners, an effort she called “really gratifying” because it worked so much better than expected.

Lauber took the framework of a “cat tree” design with different modules of poles, platforms, and ramps to create customized solutions for individual cat households, while Moyer created software that is designing a new type of 3D printer architecture.

“When you see machine learning in popular culture, it’s very abstracted, and you have the sense that there’s something very complicated going on,” says Moyer. “This class has opened the curtains.” 

Climate change presents substantial challenges for Singapore and Southeast Asia. Recognising the importance of addressing these needs, NUS is contributing to a new national-level collaboration aimed at enhancing weather prediction for Singapore and the region by leveraging the latest advances in science and technology.

On 5 September 2025, Professor Liu Bin, NUS Deputy President (Research and Technology), signed a Memorandum of Understanding with partners from the National Environment Agency (NEA), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) to establish the Climate and Weather Research Alliance Singapore (CAWRAS).

CAWRAS serves as a national research platform to advance tropical climate and weather research for Singapore and Southeast Asia. It will also nurture local talent pipeline in weather and climate science. Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and the Environment Janil Puthucheary attended the launch as Guest-of-Honour.

Highlighting the significance of CAWRAS’ work, Dr Puthucheary said, “Climate science gives us a better glimpse into the future and helps reduce the uncertainty in climate projections, allowing us to plan and calibrate our various adaptation measures based on the latest available science, which we have done in areas such as coastal protection, flood resilience, heat resilience and food security. Weather services are crucial in providing the necessary data to government agencies and stakeholders for their operations.”

He added that there is a need to further understand tropical climate and weather systems, and develop localised, high-resolution products tailored to this region, which has our own uniqueness.

“The research alliance will bring together and harmonise the unique capabilities across our institutes,” said Dr Puthucheary. “This collaborative research model will also allow us to nurture a robust local talent pipeline in weather and climate science… We need to have that capability and expertise so that we position Singapore at the forefront of tropical urban weather and climate science.”

Five NUS projects have been awarded funding, among 10 projects, under a S$25 million Weather Science Research Programme funded under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 plan which will be implemented via CAWRAS.

NUS researchers will be spearheading the following research initiatives:

1.     Enhancing next-generation numerical weather prediction

Dr Srivatsan V Raghavan from the NUS Tropical Marine Science Institute, will be leading a project team to enhance Singapore’s weather science capabilities by leveraging high-resolution radar data to improve thunderstorm prediction within the critical 0-6 hour range and reduce false alarms for heavy rainfall events.

2.     Modelling Singapore's complex urban environment and its effects on weather, including extreme conditions

A team of scientists led by Professor Matthias Roth from the Department of Geography at NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences will look into developing a next-generation urban-scale weather forecasting system to improve prediction capabilities from the current 1.5km resolution used by the Meteorological Services Singapore to much finer neighbourhood scales (100-300m). The enhanced system will provide more detailed forecasts for urban heat, wind flows, extreme rainfall, and air pollution dispersion.

3.     Understanding the effects of air-sea-land interactions on the weather of the Maritime Continent

Dr Kaushik Sasmal from the Technology Centre for Offshore and Marine, Singapore, will drive research efforts to develop a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean-land modeling system to improve weather prediction in the Maritime Continent region, particularly for phenomena strongly influenced by air-sea-land interactions such as squall lines, atmospheric and marine vortices, and the diurnal cycle of rainfall.

4.     AI foundation models for regional weather prediction in the Maritime Continent

Assistant Professor Zhu Lailai from the Department of Mechanical Engineering under the College of Design and Engineering at NUS will be leading a project to establish a general framework for fine-tuning existing AI Foundation Models tailored to high-resolution regional weather prediction in the Maritime Continent. The aim is to strengthen extreme weather detection, with aviation identified as a priority application.

5.     Leveraging advanced techniques to transform complex ensemble data into actionable tropical weather forecasts

A team led by Assistant Professor He Xiaogang from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering under the College of Design and Engineering at NUS will be developing the Tropical Ensemble Model Post-processing with Explainable Scenario (TEMPEST) system to interpret ensemble forecasts through novel clustering algorithms.

Prof Liu said, “NUS welcomes this national research alliance as an integral part of our commitment to research and innovation in the areas of sustainability and climate change. Leveraging our research strengths such as urban climate modelling, hydroclimatology, artificial intelligence, and foundation modelling, we are excited to contribute significantly on a national level to Singapore's weather prediction capabilities while nurturing the next generation of weather and climate scientists.”

Elevating weather science capabilities, together

Led by the Centre for Climate Research Singapore, CAWRAS brings together leading research institutions to expand weather science capabilities at the national level. This coordinated effort comes at a time when advances in technology, such as high-resolution modelling, artificial intelligence, and enhanced observational networks, present new opportunities to improve weather prediction. The research alliance will expand its scope to include climate research on longer timescales in future.

The 10 research projects awarded under the WSRP, focus on four key areas: improving the use of weather observations, developing next-generation weather/climate models, performing a detailed historical weather re-analysis over recent decades for Southeast Asia, and enhancing weather prediction accuracy through advanced post-processing techniques.

Ms Koh Li-Na, Director-General of the Meteorological Service Singapore, NEA, said, "CAWRAS is a strong commitment by our research institutions, working with the Centre for Climate Research Singapore, to collectively tackle the unique challenges of predicting weather in our tropical urban environment and enhance our understanding of climate change. We look forward to translating science to improved services to bolster Singapore’s resilience in the face of climate change.”

Professor Lim Keng Hui, Assistant Chief Executive (Science & Engineering Research Council), A*STAR, said, "A*STAR is proud to contribute to this national effort to improve Singapore’s weather research. Our expertise in high performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI), modelling and simulation will contribute to the development of the Climate and Weather Research & Evaluation Testbed (CAWRET) and support regional analysis. We look forward to working closely with our partners to translate scientific innovations into practical solutions that strengthen Singapore’s resilience to weather-related challenges, particularly in sectors in aviation, maritime, and urban planning.”

Professor Ernst Kuipers, Vice President (Research) of NTU Singapore said, “Leveraging NTU’s established track record in Earth and environmental sciences, supported by infrastructure like the Earth Observatory of Singapore, and our pioneering Climate Transformation Programme, we are uniquely positioned to combine AI, remote sensing, and advanced environmental modelling to forecast tropical weather with enhanced accuracy. Through interdisciplinary collaboration spanning fields like medicine, public health, environmental engineering, and urban resilience, NTU will contribute to Singapore’s role as a leading hub for tropical weather and climate science research in Southeast Asia.”

• The Straits Times, 3 September 2025, The Big Story, pA6

• The Straits Times, 3 September 2025, The Big Story, pA6

Associate Professor Koh Ming Joo from NUS Department of Chemistry has been named an Asian Young Scientist Fellow in recognition of his achievements in base metal-catalysed alkene/alkyne functionalisations and glycosyl radical functionalisations, which have significantly accelerated small-molecule and carbohydrate synthesis. The Fellowship aims to support his exploration in catalytic skeletal editing transformations to create new functional molecules.

The Asian Young Scientist Fellowship (AYSF) announced 12 Fellows this year comprising accomplished early-career scientists selected for their exceptional scientific contributions and potential in their respective fields.

The AYSF annually selects early-career researchers in the fundamental science disciplines of life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics and computer science. Each Fellow receives USD100,000 over two years to support their research, along with benefits from participating in the AYSF annual conference, academic activities, and access to a network of young scientists across Asia and globally. 

Assoc Prof Koh said, “It’s an honour to be named an AYS Fellow and represent NUS on the international stage. I believe this Fellowship will boost our efforts to develop transformative skeletal editing reactions that have the capacity to change the landscape of organic synthesis.”

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The first comprehensive map of mouse brain activity has been unveiled by a large international collaboration of neuroscientists. 

Researchers from the International Brain Laboratory (IBL), including MIT neuroscientist Ila Fiete, published their open-access findings today in two papers in Nature, revealing insights into how decision-making unfolds across the entire brain in mice at single-cell resolution. This brain-wide activity map challenges the traditional hierarchical view of information processing in the brain and shows that decision-making is distributed across many regions in a highly coordinated way.

“This is the first time anyone has produced a full, brain-wide map of the activity of single neurons during decision-making,” explains co-founder of IBL Alexandre Pouget. “The scale is unprecedented as we recorded from over half-a-million neurons across mice in 12 labs, covering 279 brain areas, which together represent 95 percent of the mouse brain volume. The decision-making activity, and particularly reward, lit up the brain like a Christmas tree,” adds Pouget, who is also a group leader at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Modeling decision-making

The brain map was made possible by a major international collaboration of neuroscientists from multiple universities, including MIT. Researchers across 12 labs used state-of-the-art silicon electrodes, called neuropixels probes, for simultaneous neural recordings to measure brain activity while mice were carrying out a decision-making task.

“Participating in the International Brain Laboratory has added new ways for our group to contribute to science,” says Fiete, who is also a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and director of the K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center at MIT. “Our lab has helped standardize methods to analyze and generate robust conclusions from data. As computational neuroscientists interested in building models of how the brain works, access to brain-wide recordings is incredible: the traditional approach of recording from one or a few brain areas limited our ability to build and test theories, resulting in fragmented models. Now, we have the delightful but formidable task to make sense of how all parts of the brain coordinate to perform a behavior. Surprisingly, having a full view of the brain leads to simplifications in the models of decision-making,” says Fiete.

The labs collected data from mice performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor, and cognitive components. In the task, a mouse sits in front of a screen and a light appears on the left or right side. If the mouse then responds by moving a small wheel in the correct direction, it receives a reward.

In some trials, the light is so faint that the animal must guess which way to turn the wheel, for which it can use prior knowledge: the light tends to appear more frequently on one side for a number of trials, before the high-frequency side switches. Well-trained mice learn to use this information to help them make correct guesses. These challenging trials therefore allowed the researchers to study how prior expectations influence perception and decision-making.

Brain-wide results

The first paper, “A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour,” showed that decision-making signals are surprisingly distributed across the brain, not localized to specific regions. This adds brain-wide evidence to a growing number of studies that challenge the traditional hierarchical model of brain function, and emphasizes that there is constant communication across brain areas during decision-making, movement onset, and even reward. This means that neuroscientists will need to take a more holistic, brain-wide approach when studying complex behaviors in the future.

“The unprecedented breadth of our recordings pulls back the curtain on how the entire brain performs the whole arc of sensory processing, cognitive decision-making, and movement generation,” says Fiete. “Structuring a collaboration that collects a large standardized dataset which single labs could not assemble is a revolutionary new direction for systems neuroscience, initiating the field into the hyper-collaborative mode that has contributed to leaps forward in particle physics and human genetics. Beyond our own conclusions, the dataset and associated technologies, which were released much earlier as part of the IBL mission, have already become a massively used resource for the entire neuroscience community.”

The second paper, “Brain-wide representations of prior information,” showed that prior expectations — our beliefs about what is likely to happen based on our recent experience — are encoded throughout the brain. Surprisingly, these expectations are not only found in cognitive areas, but also brain areas that process sensory information and control actions. For example, expectations are even encoded in early sensory areas such as the thalamus, the brain’s first relay for visual input from the eye. This supports the view that the brain acts as a prediction machine, but with expectations encoded across multiple brain structures playing a central role in guiding behavior responses. These findings could have implications for understanding conditions such as schizophrenia and autism, which are thought to be caused by differences in the way expectations are updated in the brain.

“Much remains to be unpacked: If it is possible to find a signal in a brain area, does it mean that this area is generating the signal, or simply reflecting a signal generated somewhere else? How strongly is our perception of the world shaped by our expectations? Now we can generate some quantitative answers and begin the next phase experiments to learn about the origins of the expectation signals by intervening to modulate their activity,” says Fiete.

Looking ahead, the team at IBL plan to expand beyond their initial focus on decision-making to explore a broader range of neuroscience questions. With renewed funding in hand, IBL aims to expand its research scope and continue to support large-scale, standardized experiments.

New model of collaborative neuroscience

Officially launched in 2017, IBL introduced a new model of collaboration in neuroscience that uses a standardized set of tools and data processing pipelines shared across multiple labs, enabling the collection of massive datasets while ensuring data alignment and reproducibility. This approach to democratize and accelerate science draws inspiration from large-scale collaborations in physics and biology, such as CERN and the Human Genome Project.

All data from these studies, along with detailed specifications of the tools and protocols used for data collection, are openly accessible to the global scientific community for further analysis and research. Summaries of these resources can be viewed and downloaded on the IBL website under the sections: Data, Tools, Protocols.

This research was supported by grants from Wellcome, the Simons Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and by the Max Planck Society and the Humboldt Foundation.

The first comprehensive map of mouse brain activity has been unveiled by a large international collaboration of neuroscientists. 

Researchers from the International Brain Laboratory (IBL), including MIT neuroscientist Ila Fiete, published their open-access findings today in two papers in Nature, revealing insights into how decision-making unfolds across the entire brain in mice at single-cell resolution. This brain-wide activity map challenges the traditional hierarchical view of information processing in the brain and shows that decision-making is distributed across many regions in a highly coordinated way.

“This is the first time anyone has produced a full, brain-wide map of the activity of single neurons during decision-making,” explains co-founder of IBL Alexandre Pouget. “The scale is unprecedented as we recorded from over half-a-million neurons across mice in 12 labs, covering 279 brain areas, which together represent 95 percent of the mouse brain volume. The decision-making activity, and particularly reward, lit up the brain like a Christmas tree,” adds Pouget, who is also a group leader at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Modeling decision-making

The brain map was made possible by a major international collaboration of neuroscientists from multiple universities, including MIT. Researchers across 12 labs used state-of-the-art silicon electrodes, called neuropixels probes, for simultaneous neural recordings to measure brain activity while mice were carrying out a decision-making task.

“Participating in the International Brain Laboratory has added new ways for our group to contribute to science,” says Fiete, who is also a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and director of the K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center at MIT. “Our lab has helped standardize methods to analyze and generate robust conclusions from data. As computational neuroscientists interested in building models of how the brain works, access to brain-wide recordings is incredible: the traditional approach of recording from one or a few brain areas limited our ability to build and test theories, resulting in fragmented models. Now, we have the delightful but formidable task to make sense of how all parts of the brain coordinate to perform a behavior. Surprisingly, having a full view of the brain leads to simplifications in the models of decision-making,” says Fiete.

The labs collected data from mice performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor, and cognitive components. In the task, a mouse sits in front of a screen and a light appears on the left or right side. If the mouse then responds by moving a small wheel in the correct direction, it receives a reward.

In some trials, the light is so faint that the animal must guess which way to turn the wheel, for which it can use prior knowledge: the light tends to appear more frequently on one side for a number of trials, before the high-frequency side switches. Well-trained mice learn to use this information to help them make correct guesses. These challenging trials therefore allowed the researchers to study how prior expectations influence perception and decision-making.

Brain-wide results

The first paper, “A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour,” showed that decision-making signals are surprisingly distributed across the brain, not localized to specific regions. This adds brain-wide evidence to a growing number of studies that challenge the traditional hierarchical model of brain function, and emphasizes that there is constant communication across brain areas during decision-making, movement onset, and even reward. This means that neuroscientists will need to take a more holistic, brain-wide approach when studying complex behaviors in the future.

“The unprecedented breadth of our recordings pulls back the curtain on how the entire brain performs the whole arc of sensory processing, cognitive decision-making, and movement generation,” says Fiete. “Structuring a collaboration that collects a large standardized dataset which single labs could not assemble is a revolutionary new direction for systems neuroscience, initiating the field into the hyper-collaborative mode that has contributed to leaps forward in particle physics and human genetics. Beyond our own conclusions, the dataset and associated technologies, which were released much earlier as part of the IBL mission, have already become a massively used resource for the entire neuroscience community.”

The second paper, “Brain-wide representations of prior information,” showed that prior expectations — our beliefs about what is likely to happen based on our recent experience — are encoded throughout the brain. Surprisingly, these expectations are not only found in cognitive areas, but also brain areas that process sensory information and control actions. For example, expectations are even encoded in early sensory areas such as the thalamus, the brain’s first relay for visual input from the eye. This supports the view that the brain acts as a prediction machine, but with expectations encoded across multiple brain structures playing a central role in guiding behavior responses. These findings could have implications for understanding conditions such as schizophrenia and autism, which are thought to be caused by differences in the way expectations are updated in the brain.

“Much remains to be unpacked: If it is possible to find a signal in a brain area, does it mean that this area is generating the signal, or simply reflecting a signal generated somewhere else? How strongly is our perception of the world shaped by our expectations? Now we can generate some quantitative answers and begin the next phase experiments to learn about the origins of the expectation signals by intervening to modulate their activity,” says Fiete.

Looking ahead, the team at IBL plan to expand beyond their initial focus on decision-making to explore a broader range of neuroscience questions. With renewed funding in hand, IBL aims to expand its research scope and continue to support large-scale, standardized experiments.

New model of collaborative neuroscience

Officially launched in 2017, IBL introduced a new model of collaboration in neuroscience that uses a standardized set of tools and data processing pipelines shared across multiple labs, enabling the collection of massive datasets while ensuring data alignment and reproducibility. This approach to democratize and accelerate science draws inspiration from large-scale collaborations in physics and biology, such as CERN and the Human Genome Project.

All data from these studies, along with detailed specifications of the tools and protocols used for data collection, are openly accessible to the global scientific community for further analysis and research. Summaries of these resources can be viewed and downloaded on the IBL website under the sections: Data, Tools, Protocols.

This research was supported by grants from Wellcome, the Simons Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and by the Max Planck Society and the Humboldt Foundation.

3D printing has come a long way since its invention in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who pioneered stereolithography, a technique that solidifies liquid resin into solid objects using ultraviolet lasers. Over the decades, 3D printers have evolved from experimental curiosities into tools capable of producing everything from custom prosthetics to complex food designs, architectural models, and even functioning human organs. 

But as the technology matures, its environmental footprint has become increasingly difficult to set aside. The vast majority of consumer and industrial 3D printing still relies on petroleum-based plastic filament. And while “greener” alternatives made from biodegradable or recycled materials exist, they come with a serious trade-off: they’re often not as strong. These eco-friendly filaments tend to become brittle under stress, making them ill-suited for structural applications or load-bearing parts — exactly where strength matters most.

This trade-off between sustainability and mechanical performance prompted researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Hasso Plattner Institute to ask: Is it possible to build objects that are mostly eco-friendly, but still strong where it counts?

Their answer is SustainaPrint, a new software and hardware toolkit designed to help users strategically combine strong and weak filaments to get the best of both worlds. Instead of printing an entire object with high-performance plastic, the system analyzes a model through finite element analysis simulations, predicts where the object is most likely to experience stress, and then reinforces just those zones with stronger material. The rest of the part can be printed using greener, weaker filament, reducing plastic use while preserving structural integrity.

“Our hope is that SustainaPrint can be used in industrial and distributed manufacturing settings one day, where local material stocks may vary in quality and composition,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Maxine Perroni-Scharf, who is a lead author on a paper presenting the project. “In these contexts, the testing toolkit could help ensure the reliability of available filaments, while the software’s reinforcement strategy could reduce overall material consumption without sacrificing function.” 

For their experiments, the team used Polymaker’s PolyTerra PLA as the eco-friendly filament, and standard or Tough PLA from Ultimaker for reinforcement. They used a 20 percent reinforcement threshold to show that even a small amount of strong plastic goes a long way. Using this ratio, SustainaPrint was able to recover up to 70 percent of the strength of an object printed entirely with high-performance plastic.

They printed dozens of objects, from simple mechanical shapes like rings and beams to more functional household items such as headphone stands, wall hooks, and plant pots. Each object was printed three ways: once using only eco-friendly filament, once using only strong PLA, and once with the hybrid SustainaPrint configuration. The printed parts were then mechanically tested by pulling, bending, or otherwise breaking them to measure how much force each configuration could withstand. 

In many cases, the hybrid prints held up nearly as well as the full-strength versions. For example, in one test involving a dome-like shape, the hybrid version outperformed the version printed entirely in Tough PLA. The team believes this may be due to the reinforced version’s ability to distribute stress more evenly, avoiding the brittle failure sometimes caused by excessive stiffness.

“This indicates that in certain geometries and loading conditions, mixing materials strategically may actually outperform a single homogenous material,” says Perroni-Scharf. “It’s a reminder that real-world mechanical behavior is full of complexity, especially in 3D printing, where interlayer adhesion and tool path decisions can affect performance in unexpected ways.”

A lean, green, eco-friendly printing machine

SustainaPrint starts off by letting a user upload their 3D model into a custom interface. By selecting fixed regions and areas where forces will be applied, the software then uses an approach called “Finite Element Analysis” to simulate how the object will deform under stress. It then creates a map showing pressure distribution inside the structure, highlighting areas under compression or tension, and applies heuristics to segment the object into two categories: those that need reinforcement, and those that don’t.

Recognizing the need for accessible and low-cost testing, the team also developed a DIY testing toolkit to help users assess strength before printing. The kit has a 3D-printable device with modules for measuring both tensile and flexural strength. Users can pair the device with common items like pull-up bars or digital scales to get rough, but reliable performance metrics. The team benchmarked their results against manufacturer data and found that their measurements consistently fell within one standard deviation, even for filaments that had undergone multiple recycling cycles.

Although the current system is designed for dual-extrusion printers, the researchers believe that with some manual filament swapping and calibration, it could be adapted for single-extruder setups, too. In current form, the system simplifies the modeling process by allowing just one force and one fixed boundary per simulation. While this covers a wide range of common use cases, the team sees future work expanding the software to support more complex and dynamic loading conditions. The team also sees potential in using AI to infer the object’s intended use based on its geometry, which could allow for fully automated stress modeling without manual input of forces or boundaries.

3D for free

The researchers plan to release SustainaPrint open-source, making both the software and testing toolkit available for public use and modification. Another initiative they aspire to bring to life in the future: education. “In a classroom, SustainaPrint isn’t just a tool, it’s a way to teach students about material science, structural engineering, and sustainable design, all in one project,” says Perroni-Scharf. “It turns these abstract concepts into something tangible.”

As 3D printing becomes more embedded in how we manufacture and prototype everything from consumer goods to emergency equipment, sustainability concerns will only grow. With tools like SustainaPrint, those concerns no longer need to come at the expense of performance. Instead, they can become part of the design process: built into the very geometry of the things we make.

Co-author Patrick Baudisch, who is a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute, adds that “the project addresses a key question: What is the point of collecting material for the purpose of recycling, when there is no plan to actually ever use that material? Maxine presents the missing link between the theoretical/abstract idea of 3D printing material recycling and what it actually takes to make this idea relevant.”

Perroni-Scharf and Baudisch wrote the paper with CSAIL research assistant Jennifer Xiao; MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science master’s student Cole Paulin ’24; master’s student Ray Wang SM ’25 and PhD student Ticha Sethapakdi SM ’19 (both CSAIL members); Hasso Plattner Institute PhD student Muhammad Abdullah; and Associate Professor Stefanie Mueller, lead of the Human-Computer Interaction Engineering Group at CSAIL.

The researchers’ work was supported by a Designing for Sustainability Grant from the Designing for Sustainability MIT-HPI Research Program. Their work will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in September.

3D printing has come a long way since its invention in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who pioneered stereolithography, a technique that solidifies liquid resin into solid objects using ultraviolet lasers. Over the decades, 3D printers have evolved from experimental curiosities into tools capable of producing everything from custom prosthetics to complex food designs, architectural models, and even functioning human organs. 

But as the technology matures, its environmental footprint has become increasingly difficult to set aside. The vast majority of consumer and industrial 3D printing still relies on petroleum-based plastic filament. And while “greener” alternatives made from biodegradable or recycled materials exist, they come with a serious trade-off: they’re often not as strong. These eco-friendly filaments tend to become brittle under stress, making them ill-suited for structural applications or load-bearing parts — exactly where strength matters most.

This trade-off between sustainability and mechanical performance prompted researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Hasso Plattner Institute to ask: Is it possible to build objects that are mostly eco-friendly, but still strong where it counts?

Their answer is SustainaPrint, a new software and hardware toolkit designed to help users strategically combine strong and weak filaments to get the best of both worlds. Instead of printing an entire object with high-performance plastic, the system analyzes a model through finite element analysis simulations, predicts where the object is most likely to experience stress, and then reinforces just those zones with stronger material. The rest of the part can be printed using greener, weaker filament, reducing plastic use while preserving structural integrity.

“Our hope is that SustainaPrint can be used in industrial and distributed manufacturing settings one day, where local material stocks may vary in quality and composition,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Maxine Perroni-Scharf, who is a lead author on a paper presenting the project. “In these contexts, the testing toolkit could help ensure the reliability of available filaments, while the software’s reinforcement strategy could reduce overall material consumption without sacrificing function.” 

For their experiments, the team used Polymaker’s PolyTerra PLA as the eco-friendly filament, and standard or Tough PLA from Ultimaker for reinforcement. They used a 20 percent reinforcement threshold to show that even a small amount of strong plastic goes a long way. Using this ratio, SustainaPrint was able to recover up to 70 percent of the strength of an object printed entirely with high-performance plastic.

They printed dozens of objects, from simple mechanical shapes like rings and beams to more functional household items such as headphone stands, wall hooks, and plant pots. Each object was printed three ways: once using only eco-friendly filament, once using only strong PLA, and once with the hybrid SustainaPrint configuration. The printed parts were then mechanically tested by pulling, bending, or otherwise breaking them to measure how much force each configuration could withstand. 

In many cases, the hybrid prints held up nearly as well as the full-strength versions. For example, in one test involving a dome-like shape, the hybrid version outperformed the version printed entirely in Tough PLA. The team believes this may be due to the reinforced version’s ability to distribute stress more evenly, avoiding the brittle failure sometimes caused by excessive stiffness.

“This indicates that in certain geometries and loading conditions, mixing materials strategically may actually outperform a single homogenous material,” says Perroni-Scharf. “It’s a reminder that real-world mechanical behavior is full of complexity, especially in 3D printing, where interlayer adhesion and tool path decisions can affect performance in unexpected ways.”

A lean, green, eco-friendly printing machine

SustainaPrint starts off by letting a user upload their 3D model into a custom interface. By selecting fixed regions and areas where forces will be applied, the software then uses an approach called “Finite Element Analysis” to simulate how the object will deform under stress. It then creates a map showing pressure distribution inside the structure, highlighting areas under compression or tension, and applies heuristics to segment the object into two categories: those that need reinforcement, and those that don’t.

Recognizing the need for accessible and low-cost testing, the team also developed a DIY testing toolkit to help users assess strength before printing. The kit has a 3D-printable device with modules for measuring both tensile and flexural strength. Users can pair the device with common items like pull-up bars or digital scales to get rough, but reliable performance metrics. The team benchmarked their results against manufacturer data and found that their measurements consistently fell within one standard deviation, even for filaments that had undergone multiple recycling cycles.

Although the current system is designed for dual-extrusion printers, the researchers believe that with some manual filament swapping and calibration, it could be adapted for single-extruder setups, too. In current form, the system simplifies the modeling process by allowing just one force and one fixed boundary per simulation. While this covers a wide range of common use cases, the team sees future work expanding the software to support more complex and dynamic loading conditions. The team also sees potential in using AI to infer the object’s intended use based on its geometry, which could allow for fully automated stress modeling without manual input of forces or boundaries.

3D for free

The researchers plan to release SustainaPrint open-source, making both the software and testing toolkit available for public use and modification. Another initiative they aspire to bring to life in the future: education. “In a classroom, SustainaPrint isn’t just a tool, it’s a way to teach students about material science, structural engineering, and sustainable design, all in one project,” says Perroni-Scharf. “It turns these abstract concepts into something tangible.”

As 3D printing becomes more embedded in how we manufacture and prototype everything from consumer goods to emergency equipment, sustainability concerns will only grow. With tools like SustainaPrint, those concerns no longer need to come at the expense of performance. Instead, they can become part of the design process: built into the very geometry of the things we make.

Co-author Patrick Baudisch, who is a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute, adds that “the project addresses a key question: What is the point of collecting material for the purpose of recycling, when there is no plan to actually ever use that material? Maxine presents the missing link between the theoretical/abstract idea of 3D printing material recycling and what it actually takes to make this idea relevant.”

Perroni-Scharf and Baudisch wrote the paper with CSAIL research assistant Jennifer Xiao; MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science master’s student Cole Paulin ’24; master’s student Ray Wang SM ’25 and PhD student Ticha Sethapakdi SM ’19 (both CSAIL members); Hasso Plattner Institute PhD student Muhammad Abdullah; and Associate Professor Stefanie Mueller, lead of the Human-Computer Interaction Engineering Group at CSAIL.

The researchers’ work was supported by a Designing for Sustainability Grant from the Designing for Sustainability MIT-HPI Research Program. Their work will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in September.

The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) announced that Daniela Giardina has been named the new J-WAFS executive director. Giardina stepped into the role at the start of the fall semester, replacing founding executive director Renee J. Robins ’83, who is retiring after leading the program since its launch in 2014.

“Daniela brings a deep background in water and food security, along with excellent management and leadership skills,” says Robins. “Since I first met her nearly 10 years ago, I have been impressed with her commitment to working on global water and food challenges through research and innovation. I am so happy to know that I will be leaving J-WAFS in her experienced and capable hands.”

A decade of impact

J-WAFS fuels research, innovation, and collaboration to solve global water and food systems challenges. The mission of J-WAFS is to ensure safe and resilient supplies of water and food to meet the local and global needs of a dramatically growing population on a rapidly changing planet. J-WAFS funding opportunities are open to researchers in every MIT department, lab, and center, spanning all disciplines. Supported research projects include those involving engineering, science, technology, business, social science, economics, architecture, urban planning, and more. J-WAFS research and related activities include early-stage projects, sponsored research, commercialization efforts, student activities and mentorship, events that convene local and global experts, and international-scale collaborations.

The global water, food, and climate emergency makes J-WAFS’ work both timely and urgent. J-WAFS-funded researchers are achieving tangible, real-time solutions and results. Since its inception, J-WAFS has distributed nearly $26 million in grants, fellowships, and awards to the MIT community, supporting roughly 10 percent of MIT’s faculty and 300 students, postdocs, and research staff from 40 MIT departments, labs, and centers. J-WAFS grants have also helped researchers launch 13 startups and receive over $25 million in follow-on funding.

Giardina joins J-WAFS at an exciting time in the program’s history; in the spring, J-WAFS celebrated 10 years of supporting water and food research at MIT. The milestone was commemorated at a special event attended by MIT leadership, researchers, students, staff, donors, and others in the J-WAFS community. As J-WAFS enters its second decade, interest and opportunities for water and food research continue to grow. “I am truly honored to join J-WAFS at such a pivotal moment,” Giardina says.

Putting research into real-world practice

Giardina has nearly two decades of experience working with nongovernmental organizations and research institutions on humanitarian and development projects. Her work has taken her to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central and Southeast Asia, where she has focused on water and food security projects. She has conducted technical trainings and assessments, and managed projects from design to implementation, including monitoring and evaluation.

Giardina comes to MIT from Oxfam America, where she directed disaster risk reduction and climate resilience initiatives, working on approaches to strengthen local leadership, community-based disaster risk reduction, and anticipatory action. Her role at Oxfam required her to oversee multimillion-dollar initiatives, supervising international teams, managing complex donor portfolios, and ensuring rigorous monitoring across programs. She connected hands-on research with community-oriented implementation, for example, by partnering with MIT’s D-Lab to launch an innovation lab in rural El Salvador. Her experience will help guide J-WAFS as it pursues impactful research that will make a difference on the ground.

Beyond program delivery, Giardina has played a strategic leadership role in shaping Oxfam’s global disaster risk reduction strategy and representing the organization at high-level U.N. and academic forums. She is multilingual and adept at building partnerships across cultures, having worked with governments, funders, and community-based organizations to strengthen resilience and advance equitable access to water and food.

Giardina holds a PhD in sustainable development from the University of Brescia in Italy. She also holds a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the Politecnico of Milan in Italy and is a chartered engineer since 2005 (equivalent to a professional engineering license in the United States). She also serves as vice chair of the Boston Network for International Development, a nonprofit that connects and strengthens Boston’s global development community.

“I have seen first-hand how climate change, misuse of resources, and inequality are undermining water and food security around the globe,” says Giardina. “What particularly excites me about J-WAFS is its interdisciplinary approach in facilitating meaningful partnerships to solve many of these problems through research and innovation. I am eager to help expand J-WAFS’ impact by strengthening existing programs, developing new initiatives, and building strategic partnerships that translate MIT's groundbreaking research into real-world solutions,” she adds.

A legacy of leadership

Renee Robins will retire with over 23 years of service to MIT. Years before joining the staff, she graduated from MIT with dual bachelor’s degrees in both biology and humanities/anthropology. She then went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. In 1998, she came back to MIT to serve in various roles across campus, including with the Cambridge MIT Institute, the MIT Portugal Program, the Mexico City Program, the Program on Emerging Technologies, and the Technology and Policy Program. She also worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she managed a $15 million research program as it scaled from implementation in one public school district to 59 schools in seven districts across North Carolina.

In late 2014, Robins joined J-WAFS as its founding executive director, playing a pivotal role in building it from the ground up and expanding the team to six full-time professionals. She worked closely with J-WAFS founding director Professor John H. Lienhard V to develop and implement funding initiatives, develop, and shepherd corporate-sponsored research partnerships, and mentor students in the Water Club and Food and Agriculture Club, as well as numerous other students. Throughout the years, Robins has inspired a diverse range of researchers to consider how their capabilities and expertise can be applied to water and food challenges. Perhaps most importantly, her leadership has helped cultivate a vibrant community, bringing together faculty, students, and research staff to be exposed to unfamiliar problems and new methodologies, to explore how their expertise might be applied, to learn from one another, and to collaborate.

At the J-WAFS 10th anniversary event in May, Robins noted, “it has been a true privilege to work alongside John Lienhard, our dedicated staff, and so many others. It’s been particularly rewarding to see the growth of an MIT network of water and food researchers that J-WAFS has nurtured, which grew out of those few individuals who saw themselves to be working in solitude on these critical challenges.”

Lienhard also spoke, thanking Robins by saying she “was my primary partner in building J-WAFS and [she is] a strong leader and strategic thinker.”

Not only is Robins a respected leader, she is also a dear friend to so many at MIT and beyond. In 2021, she was recognized for her outstanding leadership and commitment to J-WAFS and the Institute with an MIT Infinite Mile Award in the area of the Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research.

Outside of MIT, Robins has served on the Board of Trustees for the International Honors Program — a comparative multi-site study abroad program, where she previously studied comparative culture and anthropology in seven countries around the world. Robins has also acted as an independent consultant, including work on program design and strategy around the launch of the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco.

Continuing the tradition of excellence

Giardina will report to J-WAFS director Rohit Karnik, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Food in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. Karnik was named the director of J-WAFS in January, succeeding John Lienhard, who retired earlier this year.

As executive director, Giardina will be instrumental in driving J-WAFS’ mission and impact. She will work with Karnik to help shape J-WAFS’ programs, long-term strategy, and goals. She will also be responsible for supervising J-WAFS staff, managing grant administration, and overseeing and advising on financial decisions.

“I am very grateful to John and Renee, who have helped to establish J-WAFS as the Institute’s preeminent program for water and food research and significantly expanded MIT’s research efforts and impact in the water and food space,” says Karnik. “I am confident that with Daniela as executive director, J-WAFS will continue in the tradition of excellence that Renee and John put into place, as we move into the program’s second decade,” he notes.

Giardina adds, “I am inspired by the lab’s legacy of Renee Robins and Professor Lienhard, and I look forward to working with Professor Karnik and the J-WAFS staff.”