Briger Hall will house the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and the Department of Geosciences.
Cleft lip and cleft palate are among the most common birth defects, occurring in about one in 1,050 births in the United States. These defects, which appear when the tissues that form the lip or the roof of the mouth do not join completely, are believed to be caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors.
In a new study, MIT biologists have discovered how a genetic variant often found in people with these facial malformations leads to the development of cleft lip and cleft palate.
Their findings suggest that the variant diminishes cells’ supply of transfer RNA, a molecule that is critical for assembling proteins. When this happens, embryonic face cells are unable to fuse to form the lip and roof of the mouth.
“Until now, no one had made the connection that we made. This particular gene was known to be part of the complex involved in the splicing of transfer RNA, but it wasn’t clear that it played such a crucial role for this process and for facial development. Without the gene, known as DDX1, certain transfer RNA can no longer bring amino acids to the ribosome to make new proteins. If the cells can’t process these tRNAs properly, then the ribosomes can’t make protein anymore,” says Michaela Bartusel, an MIT research scientist and the lead author of the study.
Cleft lip and cleft palate, also known as orofacial clefts, can be caused by genetic mutations, but in many cases, there is no known genetic cause.
“The mechanism for the development of these orofacial clefts is unclear, mostly because they are known to be impacted by both genetic and environmental factors,” Calo says. “Trying to pinpoint what might be affected has been very challenging in this context.”
To discover genetic factors that influence a particular disease, scientists often perform genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which can reveal variants that are found more often in people who have a particular disease than in people who don’t.
For orofacial clefts, some of the genetic variants that have regularly turned up in GWAS appeared to be in a region of DNA that doesn’t code for proteins. In this study, the MIT team set out to figure out how variants in this region might influence the development of facial malformations.
Their studies revealed that these variants are located in an enhancer region called e2p24.2. Enhancers are segments of DNA that interact with protein-coding genes, helping to activate them by binding to transcription factors that turn on gene expression.
The researchers found that this region is in close proximity to three genes, suggesting that it may control the expression of those genes. One of those genes had already been ruled out as contributing to facial malformations, and another had already been shown to have a connection. In this study, the researchers focused on the third gene, which is known as DDX1.
DDX1, it turned out, is necessary for splicing transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules, which play a critical role in protein synthesis. Each transfer RNA molecule transports a specific amino acid to the ribosome — a cell structure that strings amino acids together to form proteins, based on the instructions carried by messenger RNA.
While there are about 400 different tRNAs found in the human genome, only a fraction of those tRNAs require splicing, and those are the tRNAs most affected by the loss of DDX1. These tRNAs transport four different amino acids, and the researchers hypothesize that these four amino acids may be particularly abundant in proteins that embryonic cells that form the face need to develop properly.
When the ribosomes need one of those four amino acids, but none of them are available, the ribosome can stall, and the protein doesn’t get made.
The researchers are now exploring which proteins might be most affected by the loss of those amino acids. They also plan to investigate what happens inside cells when the ribosomes stall, in hopes of identifying a stress signal that could potentially be blocked and help cells survive.
Malfunctioning tRNA
While this is the first study to link tRNA to craniofacial malformations, previous studies have shown that mutations that impair ribosome formation can also lead to similar defects. Studies have also shown that disruptions of tRNA synthesis — caused by mutations in the enzymes that attach amino acids to tRNA, or in proteins involved in an earlier step in tRNA splicing — can lead to neurodevelopmental disorders.
“Defects in other components of the tRNA pathway have been shown to be associated with neurodevelopmental disease,” Calo says. “One interesting parallel between these two is that the cells that form the face are coming from the same place as the cells that form the neurons, so it seems that these particular cells are very susceptible to tRNA defects.”
The researchers now hope to explore whether environmental factors linked to orofacial birth defects also influence tRNA function. Some of their preliminary work has found that oxidative stress — a buildup of harmful free radicals — can lead to fragmentation of tRNA molecules. Oxidative stress can occur in embryonic cells upon exposure to ethanol, as in fetal alcohol syndrome, or if the mother develops gestational diabetes.
“I think it is worth looking for mutations that might be causing this on the genetic side of things, but then also in the future, we would expand this into which environmental factors have the same effects on tRNA function, and then see which precautions might be able to prevent any effects on tRNAs,” Bartusel says.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Anders Sejr Hansen, Class of 1943 Career Development Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, has been named as the recipient of the 2024-25 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award.
The annual award was established in fall 1982 as a permanent tribute to Institute Professor Emeritus Harold E. Edgerton for his great and enduring support for younger faculty members over the years. The purpose of the award is to recognize exceptional distinction in teaching, in research, and in service.
Hansen is the principal investigator of the Hansen Lab, which develops new methods to resolve 3D genome structure at high spatiotemporal resolution to understand how DNA looping and 3D folding regulates gene expression in health and disease. His areas of research include cancer biology, computational systems biology, instrumentation and measurement, and synthetic biology.
“My research focuses on how the expression of our genes is regulated,” says Hansen. “All the cells in our body have the same DNA and the same genes. Thus, the software or applications to each cell are the same. What’s different between a neuron and a blood cell is what genes they choose to express. My research focuses on understanding how this regulation takes place.”
Those who nominated Anders for the award emphasized his remarkable productivity, mentioning his two “highly cited, paradigm-shifting research articles in Science and Nature Genetics,” and his research presentations at 50 invited talks, including two keynotes, at universities and conferences worldwide. They also highlighted his passion for mentorship and career development for the 20 current members of his laboratory.
“Anders is an outstanding role model and ambassador of biological engineering, combining a powerful research program, run as a caring mentor, and innovative undergraduate education,” says Christopher Voigt, the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor in Biological Engineering and head of the Department of Biological Engineering.
Adds Laurie Boyer, a professor of biology and biological engineering, “His work reveals new insights into how we think about the dynamics of gene regulation that would not otherwise be possible. The Hansen Lab’s work provides a unified framework rapidly adopted by the field to learn how conserved regulators provide exquisite spatial and temporal control of gene expression in the context of 3D genome architecture.”
During the nomination process, students praised Hansen’s passion for his work, along with his ability to prepare them to apply their education outside the classroom.
“He always strives to guide each lab member towards both short-term scientific success and long-term career planning through regular one-on-one meetings, facilitating collaborations and access to scientific resources, and sharing his own experiences,” says Jin Yang, a graduate student in biological engineering and member of the Hansen Lab.
“Dr. Hansen's infectious excitement for the course material made it very enjoyable to come to class and envision potential applications of the fundamental topics he taught,” adds another one of his students. “Excellent lecturer!”
Hansen obtained his undergraduate and master’s degree in chemistry at Oxford University. He received his PhD in chemistry and chemical biology from Harvard University, where he applied systems biology approaches to understand how cells can encode and transmit information in the dynamics of transcription factor activation. For his postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley, Hansen developed new imaging approaches for dissecting the dynamics of architectural proteins with single-molecule resolution in living cells. Hansen joined MIT as an assistant professor of biological engineering in early 2020.
His recognitions include an NIH K99 Pathway to Independence Award (2019), NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2020), a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research Award (2021), an NSF CAREER Award (2024), and an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (2024).
Hansen has served on several committees at MIT, including the MIT Biological Engineering Graduate Program Admissions Committee, the MIT Computational and Systems Biology Graduate Admissions Committee, and the MIT Biological Engineering Graduate Recruiting Committee, of which he has been chair since 2023.
“I have known about the Edgerton Award since I started at MIT, and I think the broad focus on both research, teaching, and service really captures what makes MIT such a unique and wonderful place,” says Hansen. “I was therefore absolutely thrilled to receive the news that I would receive the Edgerton Award this year, and I am very grateful to all the wonderful colleagues here at MIT who have supported me over the years, and all the exceptional people in my lab whose work is being recognized.”
Around 3,100 people are diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) each year in the UK. It is an aggressive form of blood cancer that is very difficult to treat. Thanks to recent advances, individuals at high risk of AML can be identified years in advance using blood tests and blood DNA analysis, but there’s no suitable treatment that can prevent them from developing the disease.
In this study, Professor George Vassiliou and colleagues at the University of Cambridge investigated how to prevent abnormal blood stem cells with genetic changes from progressing to become AML. The work focused on the most common genetic change, which affects a gene called DNMT3A and is responsible for starting 10-15% of AML cases.
Professor Vassiliou, from the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Consultant Haematologist at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) co-led the study. He said: “Blood cancer poses unique challenges compared to solid cancers like breast or prostate, which can be surgically removed if identified early. With blood cancers, we need to identify people at risk and then use medical treatments to stop cancer progression throughout the body.”
The research team examined blood stem cells from mice with the same changes in DNMT3A as seen in the pre-cancerous cells in humans. Using a genome-wide screening technique, they showed that these cells depend more on mitochondrial metabolism than healthy cells, making this a potential weak spot. The researchers went on to confirm that metformin, and other mitochondria-targeting drugs, substantially slowed the growth of mutation-bearing blood cells in mice. Further experiments also showed that metformin could have the same effect on human blood cells with the DNMT3A mutation.
Dr Malgorzata Gozdecka, Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and first author of the research said: “Metformin is a drug that impacts mitochondrial metabolism, and these pre-cancerous cells need this energy to keep growing. By blocking this process, we stop the cells from expanding and progressing towards AML, whilst also reversing other effects of the mutated DNMT3A gene.”
In addition, the study looked at data from over 412,000 UK Biobank volunteers and found that people taking metformin were less likely to have changes in the DNMT3A gene. This link remained even after accounting for factors that could have confounded the results such as diabetes status and BMI.
Professor Brian Huntly, Head of the Department of Haematology at the University of Cambridge, Honorary Consultant Haematologist at CUH, and joint lead author of the research, added: “Metformin appears highly specific to this mutation rather than being a generic treatment. That specificity makes it especially compelling as a targeted prevention strategy.
“We’ve done the extensive research all the way from cell-based studies to human data, so we’re now at the point where we have a made a strong case for moving ahead with clinical trials. Importantly, metformin’s lack of toxicity will be a major advantage as it is already used by millions of people worldwide with a well-established safety profile.”
The results of the study, funded by Blood Cancer UK with additional support from Cancer Research UK, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (USA) and the Wellcome Trust, are published in Nature.
Dr Rubina Ahmed, Director of Research at Blood Cancer UK, said: “Blood cancer is the third biggest cancer killer in the UK, with over 280,000 people currently living with the disease. Our Blood Cancer Action plan shed light on the shockingly low survival for acute myeloid leukaemia, with only around 2 in 10 surviving for 5 years, and we urgently need better strategies to save lives. Repurposing safe, widely available drugs like metformin means we could potentially get new treatments to people faster, without the need for lengthy drug development pipelines.”
The next phase of this research will focus on clinical trials to test metformin’s effectiveness in people with changes in DNMT3A at increased risk of developing AML. With metformin already approved and widely used for diabetes, this repurposing strategy could dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring a new preventive therapy to patients.
Tanya Hollands, Research Information Manager at Cancer Research UK, who contributed funding for the lab-based screening in mice, said: “It's important that we work to find new ways to slow down or prevent AML in people at high risk. Therefore, it’s positive that the findings of this study suggest a possible link between a commonly-used diabetes drug and prevention of AML progression in some people. While this early-stage research is promising, clinical trials are now needed to find out if this drug could benefit people. We look forward to seeing how this work progresses.”
Metformin, a widely used and affordable diabetes drug, could prevent a form of acute myeloid leukaemia in people at high risk of the disease, a study in mice has suggested. Further research in clinical trials will be needed to confirm this works for patients.
We’ve done the extensive research all the way from cell-based studies to human data, so we’re now at the point where we have a made a strong case for moving ahead with clinical trials
The ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ of 367 CE was one of the most severe threats to Rome’s hold on Britain since the Boudiccan revolt three centuries earlier. Contemporary sources indicate that components of the garrison on Hadrian’s wall rebelled and allowed the Picts to attack the Roman province by land and sea. Simultaneously, the Scotti from modern-day Ireland invaded broadly in the west, and Saxons from the continent landed in the south.
Senior Roman commanders were captured or killed, and some soldiers reportedly deserted and joined the invaders. Throughout the spring and summer, small groups roamed and plundered the countryside. Britain’s descent into anarchy was disastrous for Rome and it took two years for generals dispatched by Valentian I, Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, to restore order. The final remnants of official Roman administration left Britain some 40 years later around 410 CE.
The University of Cambridge-led study, published today in Climatic Change, used oak tree-ring records to reconstruct temperature and precipitation levels in southern Britain during and after the ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ in 367 CE. Combining this data with surviving Roman accounts, the researchers argue that severe summer droughts in 364, 365 and 366 CE were a driving force in these pivotal events.
First author Charles Norman, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said: “We don’t have much archaeological evidence for the ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’. Written accounts from the period give some background, but our findings provide an explanation for the catalyst of this major event.”
The researchers found that southern Britain experienced an exceptional sequence of remarkably dry summers from 364 to 366 CE. In the period 350–500 CE, average monthly reconstructed rainfall in the main growing season (April–July) was 51 mm. But in 364 CE, it fell to just 29mm. 365 CE was even worse with 28mm, and 37mm the following year kept the area in crisis.
Professor Ulf Büntgen, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said: “Three consecutive droughts would have had a devastating impact on the productivity of Roman Britain’s most important agricultural region. As Roman writers tell us, this resulted in food shortages with all of the destabilizing societal effects this brings.”
Between 1836–2024 CE, southern Britain only experienced droughts of a similar magnitude seven times – mostly in recent decades, and none of these were consecutive, emphasising how exceptional these droughts were in Roman times. The researchers identified no other major droughts in southern Britain in the period 350–500 CE and found that other parts of northwestern Europe escaped these conditions.
Roman Britain’s main produce were crops like spelt wheat and six-row barley. Because the province had a wet climate, sowing these crops in spring was more viable than in winter, but this made them vulnerable to late spring and early summer moisture deficits, and early summer droughts could lead to total crop failure.
The researchers point to surviving accounts written by Roman chroniclers to corroborate these drought-driven grain deficits. By 367 CE, Ammianus Marcellinus described the population of Britain as in the “utmost conditions of famine”.
“Drought from 364 to 366 CE would have impacted spring-sown crop growth substantially, triggering poor harvests,” Charles Norman said. “This would have reduced the grain supply to Hadrian’s Wall, providing a plausible motive for the rebellion there which allowed the Picts into northern Britain.”
The study suggests that given the crucial role of grain in the contract between soldiers and the army, grain deficits may have contributed to other desertions in this period, and therefore a general weakening of the Roman army in Britain. In addition, the geographic isolation of Roman Britain likely combined with the severity of the prolonged drought to reduce the ability of Rome to alleviate the deficits.
Ultimately the researchers argue that military and societal breakdown in Roman Britain provided an ideal opportunity for peripheral tribes, including the Picts, Scotti and Saxons, to invade the province en masse with the intention of raiding rather than conquest. Their finding that the most severe conditions were restricted to southern Britain undermines the idea that famines in other provinces might have forced these tribes to invade.
Andreas Rzepecki, from the Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland-Pfalz, said: “Our findings align with the accounts of Roman chroniclers and the seemingly coordinated nature of the ‘Conspiracy’ suggests an organised movement of strong onto weak, rather than a more chaotic assault had the invaders been in a state of desperation.”
“The prolonged and extreme drought seems to have occurred during a particularly poor period for Roman Britain, in which food and military resources were being stripped for the Rhine frontier, while immigratory pressures increased.”
“These factors limited resilience, and meant a drought induced, partial-military rebellion and subsequent external invasion were able to overwhelm the weakened defences.”
The researchers expanded their climate-conflict analysis to the entire Roman Empire for the period 350–476 CE. They reconstructed the climate conditions immediately before and after 106 battles and found that a statistically significant number of battles were fought following dry years.
Tatiana Bebchuk, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said: “The relationship between climate and conflict is becoming increasingly clear in our own time so these findings aren’t just important for historians. Extreme climate conditions lead to hunger, which can lead to societal challenges, which eventually lead to outright conflict.”
Charles Norman, Ulf Büntgen, Paul Krusic and Tatiana Bebchuk are based at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge; Lothar Schwinden and Andreas Rzepecki are from the Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland-Pfalz in Trier. Ulf Büntgen is also affiliated with the Global Change Research Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences and the Department of Geography, Masaryk University in Brno.
Charles Norman was supported by Wolfson College, University of Cambridge (John Hughes PhD Studentship). Ulf Büntgen received funding from the Czech Science Foundation (# 23-08049S; Hydro8), the ERC Advanced Grant (# 882727; Monostar), and the ERC Synergy Grant (# 101118880; Synergy-Plague).
Three consecutive years of drought contributed to the ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’, a pivotal moment in the history of Roman Britain, a new Cambridge-led study reveals. Researchers argue that Picts, Scotti and Saxons took advantage of famine and societal breakdown caused by an extreme period of drought to inflict crushing blows on weakened Roman defences in 367 CE. While Rome eventually restored order, some historians argue that the province never fully recovered.
Our findings provide an explanation for the catalyst of this major event.
A new website led by University of Melbourne academics and designed for peopleundergoing IVF treatment will help them navigate and decide on optional extras or so-called add-ons during their treatment.
At Tembusu College, students are not just learning about society—they are learning with it. Through carefully designed, socially responsive learning experiences, the College’s Communities and Engagement (C&E) Senior Seminars invite students to step beyond their disciplinary boundaries and confront real-world complexity head-on.
Engaging directly with community partners, students co-create knowledge and build mutual understanding with individuals such as elderly residents, migrant workers and public health officers. For these students, such conversations become the curriculum—they are not only taught to think critically, but also to act meaningfully.
Each Academic Year, over 220 students from diverse academic backgrounds participate in small, interdisciplinary seminars that extend beyond classroom walls. Rather than relying solely on textbooks, they immerse themselves in complex social environments, engaging in participatory research and reflection to cultivate both intellectual rigour and emotional intelligence.
“As part of our diverse, humanistic, interdisciplinary, inquiry-oriented programmes that broadens students’ perspectives, we connect theory with practice, and transform ideas into impact,” explained Dr Connor Graham, Director of Studies at Tembusu College. “People-centred learning allows students to develop an awareness of others and their worldviews, reflexivity and adaptability in addition to the more academic outcomes of thinking critically and questioning with relevance”.
Building empathy through action
Tembusu College’s people-centred pedagogical model fosters openness across disciplines—from sociology and biomedical science to engineering and the arts—while uniting students under a shared ethos: Helping People and Species in Need, Engaging the World, Developing Creativity, and Promoting Interdisciplinarity.
In small-class settings and interdisciplinary teams, students apply methods such as ethnographic field notes, interviews, and participatory observation to tackle pressing social issues. These are not short-term projects. Many are rooted in longstanding partnerships with community organisations, allowing successive cohorts to build on previous work and deepen engagement over time.
One such course, Health and the Community in Singapore, is part of an ongoing partnership with the Health Promotion Board. It aims to bridge the STEM–non-STEM divide and understand gaps in public health literacy.
In April 2024, students conducted research into the health needs of youths using community-based participatory methods. One group designed a low-sodium dietary intervention tailored for NUS undergraduates, featuring a visually intuitive labelling system to nudge the making of healthier food choices. Their project received a grant from NUS Health & Wellbeing and is under plans for a collaborative pilot study with Associate Professor Alberto Salvo from the NUS Department of Economics.
In another course, Technologies and Ageing in Singapore, students explored the ageing process and the lived experiences of elderly citizens through interviews, fieldwork, and person-centred therapy frameworks. Between February and April 2024, one group developed an assistive tool to facilitate end-of-life planning conversations with seniors, which was piloted at the Evergreen Circle Active Ageing Centre and later adapted for use at St Luke’s Eldercare (Ayer Rajah).
Another group created Dig Deeper, a reflective card game designed to prompt family conversations about end-of-life matters. One parent who participated in the exercise said, “As a family, we’ve never really talked about end-of-life topics. We’re not that old yet, but this game really made us reflect on our beliefs and values, and the legacy we want to leave behind.” The student participant added, “It’s funny how I haven’t felt this close to my parents in such a long time. Sometimes we’re so busy doing our own things that we forget how important it is to connect.”
Understanding happiness through dialogue
The Happiness by Design course also exemplifies Tembusu College’s people-centred approach. Partnering with social enterprises such as Happiness Initiative Singapore, students explore the multifaceted nature of well-being and life satisfaction through interviews, focus groups, and thematic analysis.
Over the semester, students develop the interpersonal and professional competencies needed for working in real-world contexts. Their conversations with members of the public helped to ground abstract academic concepts in lived realities, often challenging assumptions and leaving a lasting emotional impact. Through these interactions, students expand their conceptual vocabulary and come to understand well-being as a dynamic, deeply personal process that includes resilience, self-transcendence and growth.
Vu Bao Lien Hoa, a Year 2 student from the NUS Business School, who read the course, said, “The class discussions not only deepened my intellectual curiosity but also motivated me to communicate effectively, helping me express ideas more clearly while actively listening to others’ insights. I also became more open-minded, learning to navigate differing viewpoints with empathy and respect.”
Mr Sherman Ho, the co-founder of Happiness Initiative noted that the students’ project findings, which were shared at the course’s community engagement event, helped to illuminate the different well-being needs of various age groups in Singapore to the community participants. He appreciated how the dialogues opened up space for honest conversations about what it means to thrive today. Beyond surfacing key themes and generational shifts, many felt reassured knowing they were not alone in their challenges and aspirations—and were part of a larger, caring community.
Growing a community of learners and changemakers
With momentum building, Tembusu College is expanding its course offerings. A new seminar, Migrant Workers, Rhetoric, and Performance, marks the first NUS course centred on migrant workers. Students collaborate with Kaugnay, a migrant worker group under the auspices of the Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics, also known as HOME, to co-create inclusive and empowering activities and performances to engage migrant workers.
Associate Professor Ho Chee Kong, Tembusu College Master said, “Tembusu College’s C&E courses offer a diverse variety of channels for dialogue between the students and the communities they engage with. Arising from these dialogues are meaningful constructs for deeper understanding, compassion and gratitude towards one another in a more responsive societal development.”
By connecting classrooms with communities, Tembusu College is redefining what it means to teach and learn—where critical thinking meets meaningful action, and conversation becomes the heart of the curriculum.
Traditional large-scale power generators ensure a stable frequency of alternating current in the European power grid. Now, researchers from ETH Zurich have found a solution so that wind and solar power plants can take over – paving the way for the energy transition.
At any given time, about 100,000 people in the U.S. are waiting to become kidney transplant recipients. Roughly one-fifth of those get a new kidney each year, but others die while waiting. In short, the demand for kidneys makes it important to think about how we use the limited supply.
A study co-authored by an MIT economist brings new data to this issue, providing nuanced estimates of the lifespan-lengthening effect of kidney transplants. That can be hard to measure well, but the study is the first to account for some of the complexities involved, including the decisions patients make when accepting kidney transplants, and some of their pre-existing health factors.
The research concludes the system in use produces an additional 9.29 life-years from transplantation (LYFT) for kidney recipients. (LYFT is the difference in median survival for those with and without transplants.) If the organs were assigned randomly to patients, the study finds, that LYFT average would only be 7.54 overall. From that perspective, the current transplant system is a net positive for patients. However, the study also finds that the LYFT figure could potentially be raised as high as 14.08, depending on how the matching system is structured.
In any case, more precise estimates about the benefits of kidney transplants can help inform policymakers about the dynamics of the matching system in use.
“There’s always this question about how to take the scarce number of organs being donated and place them efficiently, and place them well,” says MIT economist Nikhil Agarwal, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s results. As he emphasizes, the point of the paper is to inform the ongoing refinement of the matching system, rather than advocate one viewpoint or another.
The paper, “Choices and Outcomes in Assignment Mechanisms: The Allocation of Deceased Donor Kidneys,” is published in the latest issue of Econometrica. The authors are Agarwal, who is a professor in MIT’s Department of Economics; Charles Hodgson, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University; and Paulo Somaini, an associate professor of economics in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
After people die, there is a period lasting up to 48 hours when they could be viable organ donors. Potential kidney recipients are prioritized by time spent on wait-lists as well as tissue-type similarity, and can accept or reject any given transplant offer.
Over the last decade-plus, Agarwal has conducted significant empirical research on matching systems for organ donations, especially kidney transplants. To conduct this study, the researchers used comprehensive data about patients on the kidney wait-list from 2000-2010, made available by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, the national U.S. registry. This allowed the scholars to analyze both the matching system and the health effects of transplants; they track patient survival until February 2020.
The work is the first quasiexperimental study of kidney transplants; by carefully examining the decision-making tendencies of kidney recipients, along with many other health factors, the scholars are able to evaluate the effects of a transplant, other things being equal. Recipients are more likely to select kidney offers from donors who are younger, lacked hypertension, died of head trauma (suggesting their internal organs were healthy), and with whom they have perfect tissue-type matches.
“The [previous] methodology of estimating what are the life-years benefits was not incorporating this selection issue,” Agarwal says.
Additionally, overall, a key empirical feature of kidney transplants is that recipients who are healthier overall tend to have the largest realized life-years benefits from a transplant, meaning that the greatest increase in LYFT is not found in the set of patients with the worst health.
“You might think people who are the sickest and who are most likely to die without an organ are going to benefit the most from it [in added life-years],” Agarwal says. “But there might be some other comorbidity or factor that made them sick, and their body’s going to take a toll on the new organ, so the benefits might not be as large.”
With this in mind, the maximal LYFT number of 14.08 in the study comes from, broadly, a hypothetical scenario in which an increased number of otherwise healthy people receive transplants. Again, the current system tends to prioritize time spent on a wait-list. And some observers might advocate for a system that prioritizes those who are sickest. With all that in mind, the policymaking process for kidney transplants may still involve recognition that the biggest gains in patient life-years are not necessarily aligned with other prioritization factors.
“Our results indicate … a dilemma rooted in the tension between these two goals,” the authors write in the paper.
To be clear, Agarwal is not advocating for any one system over another, but conducting data-driven research so that policy officials can make more fully informed decisions in the ongoing, long-term process of trying to refine valuable transplant networks.
“I don’t necessarily think it’s my comparative advantage to make the ethical decisions, but we can at least think about and quantify what some of the tradeoffs are,” Agarwal adds.
Support for the research was provided in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
In a newly-published study, MIT economist Nikhil Agarwal and co-authors evaluate different potential approaches to matching systems for kidney transplants in the U.S.
By Prof Johan Sulaeman, Director of the Sustainable and Green Finance Institute (SGFIN) at NUS, and Dean’s Chair and Professor at the Dept of Finance, NUS Business School; with Mr Desmond Tay, Research Associate, and Mr Michael Alexander, Research Analyst, at SGFIN
Princeton University professors Frances Lee (left) and Stephen Macedo share their findings.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
School closures, shutdowns caused lasting damage, and debate was shut down in favor of groupthink, public policy experts say
Social distancing, school closures, and stay-at-home orders became hotly disputed during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. How should these protocols be viewed today?
The new book “In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us” by a pair of Princeton University professors finds no evidence these “non-pharmaceutical interventions” actually reduced mortality rates. What the co-authors do find is that the measures did significant damage to U.S. society — with many mainstream scientists, journalists, and scholars reluctant to make a frank appraisal.
“We argue that, in the pandemic, disagreement was moralized prematurely, and dissent was treated intolerantly,” said co-author Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at the University Center for Human Values. “We see these as failures of educated elites to live up to some of our own deepest values of being open to criticism and divergent points of view.”
In a talk last week hosted by the Department of Government, Macedo and co-author Frances Lee, a professor of politics and public affairs, outlined the book’s thesis and took tough audience questions.
Macedo kicked things off with a survey of pandemic planning documents that predate COVID-19. Reading John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza” (2004) had piqued the interest of former President George W. Bush. His administration advanced a strategy of containment, influenced by mathematical modelers who said children would likely be primary carriers.
A National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan, released by the Centers for Disease Control in 2006, emphasized the promise of school closures. “They predicted that school closures, by themselves, could secure a 50 percent reduction in peak death rates,” Macedo said.
Over the next 13 years, severalexperts cautioned against what the American Civil Liberties Union characterized as “aggressive, coercive actions” in its own 2008 pandemic preparedness report. Frequently emphasized was the danger of disproportionately harming vulnerable populations, including kids from low-income families.
“But the policy flipped on a dime in March 2020,” Macedo said, citing a February 2020 World Health Organization-China report from Wuhan. “The joint mission report unequivocally urged every country in the world to embrace what was, in effect, a zero-COVID policy by the severe implementation of lockdown policies.”
There was some pushback from infectious disease experts in the early days of the pandemic. But, the authors say, the marketplace of ideas was experiencing its own lockdown by the October 2020 release of the Great Barrington Declaration, with its urgent call to relax restrictions for those at minimal risk. The statement, written by three epidemiologists with distinguished credentials, drew thousands of signatories. But it was quickly branded by critics in public health and government as “dangerous” and “fringe.”
“Part of it was that people settled on a wartime framing,” Macedo offered, citing the titles of two early pandemic memoirs — Deborah Birx’s “Silent Invasion” and Sanjay Gupta’s “World War C.”
Co-author Lee picked up the thread by examining pandemic outcomes across 50 states. At first, blue and red states implemented similar measures, she recalled. But the policymaking appeared deeply polarized by Labor Day.
“Across the South, the Plains, and the Mountain West, schools reopened in the fall of 2020,” Lee said. “But nearly half of public schools around the country were still closed in March 2021.”
By January 2023, states led by Republicans had suffered mortality rates nearly 30 percent higher than their Democratic-led counterparts, according to the co-authors’ assessment of CDC data. But they found no evidence that blue states benefited from longer school closures and stay-at-home orders.
“If you examine COVID mortality across the period before vaccines became available,” Lee said, “there’s not a statistically significant difference.” This was true even when controlling for the percentage of elderly, uninsured, or obese residents. A separate analysis, published in the Lancet in 2023, surfaced similar conclusions.
Yet these non-pharmaceutical measures came at a steep cost, with Lee quickly rattling off more than a dozen examples — from a spike in alcohol-related deaths to emptied downtown business districts and learning losses for schoolchildren.
The injury was also fiscal. Congress authorized more than $5 trillion in COVID relief spending, aimed mostly at helping Americans stay financially afloat during the shutdowns.
“In the first quarter of 2020, total debt held by the public leapt from 80 percent of gross GDP to more than 100 percent,” Lee explained. “This higher plateau persists post-pandemic — and that higher level of indebtedness also entails a higher cost for debt service that puts constraints on our ability to respond to the next economic crisis or address other priorities.”
Are educated elites, largely aligned with the Democratic Party, finally ready for an honest reckoning with the COVID era’s groupthink? Macedo has his doubts. He pointed to an August 2023 JAMA Network Open article outlining varieties of misinformation shared by physicians on social media, with the aim of helping governments and professional societies censor bad actors.
Included were the Wuhan lab leak theory, concerns about the harms of masking children, and suggestions that natural infection can contribute to herd immunity. “All of these matters, as of August 2023, were either true or at least arguable,” Macedo said.
In a lightning-round review of the book’s lessons, Macedo emphasized the need for open debate and viewpoint diversity in navigating future crises.
“We also need greater honesty on the part of public officials — especially in public health,” he concluded, noting the resulting hit to the field’s credibility. “There’s too much of a tendency to not tell the whole truth, because they see their role partly as messaging and trying to nudge people’s behavior. But I think we are owed honesty about the limits of their knowledge.”
During the Q&A session, one attendee pushed back on the authors’ call for prioritizing honesty in a public health emergency. Given the pandemic’s devastating loss of life, the comparison to wartime governments protecting national security was made.
In response, Macedo referred to previous scholarship on the Vietnam War, including Barbara W. Tuchman’s “The March of Folly” (1984). “We think this is another case where people are engaging in wishful thinking — trying to get the public to go along and not being transparent about the cost of these measures and the likelihood of success,” he said.
Anders Serj Hansen, Class of 1943 Career Development Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, has been named as the recipient of the 2024-25 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award.
The annual award was established in fall 1982 as a permanent tribute to Institute Professor Emeritus Harold E. Edgerton for his great and enduring support for younger faculty members over the years. The purpose of the award is to recognize exceptional distinction in teaching, in research, and in service.
Hansen is the principal investigator of the Hansen Lab, which develops new methods to resolve 3D genome structure at high spatiotemporal resolution to understand how DNA looping and 3D folding regulates gene expression in health and disease. His areas of research include cancer biology, computational systems biology, instrumentation and measurement, and synthetic biology.
“My research focuses on how the expression of our genes is regulated,” says Hansen. “All the cells in our body have the same DNA and the same genes. Thus, the software or applications to each cell are the same. What’s different between a neuron and a blood cell is what genes they choose to express. My research focuses on understanding how this regulation takes place.”
Those who nominated Anders for the award emphasized his remarkable productivity, mentioning his two “highly cited, paradigm-shifting research articles in Science and Nature Genetics,” and his research presentations at 50 invited talks, including two keynotes, at universities and conferences worldwide. They also highlighted his passion for mentorship and career development for the 20 current members of his laboratory.
“Anders is an outstanding role model and ambassador of biological engineering, combining a powerful research program, run as a caring mentor, and innovative undergraduate education,” says Christopher Voigt, the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor in Biological Engineering and head of the Department of Biological Engineering.
Adds Laurie Boyer, a professor of biology and biological engineering, “His work reveals new insights into how we think about the dynamics of gene regulation that would not otherwise be possible. The Hansen Lab’s work provides a unified framework rapidly adopted by the field to learn how conserved regulators provide exquisite spatial and temporal control of gene expression in the context of 3D genome architecture.”
During the nomination process, students praised Hansen’s passion for his work, along with his ability to prepare them to apply their education outside the classroom.
“He always strives to guide each lab member towards both short-term scientific success and long-term career planning through regular one-on-one meetings, facilitating collaborations and access to scientific resources, and sharing his own experiences,” says Jin Yang, a graduate student in biological engineering and member of the Hansen Lab.
“Dr. Hansen's infectious excitement for the course material made it very enjoyable to come to class and envision potential applications of the fundamental topics he taught,” adds another one of his students. “Excellent lecturer!”
Hansen obtained his undergraduate and master’s degree in chemistry at Oxford University. He received his PhD in chemistry and chemical biology from Harvard University, where he applied systems biology approaches to understand how cells can encode and transmit information in the dynamics of transcription factor activation. For his postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley, Hansen developed new imaging approaches for dissecting the dynamics of architectural proteins with single-molecule resolution in living cells. Hansen joined MIT as an assistant professor of biological engineering in early 2020.
His recognitions include an NIH K99 Pathway to Independence Award (2019), NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2020), a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research Award (2021), an NSF CAREER Award (2024), and an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (2024).
Hansen has served on several committees at MIT, including the MIT Biological Engineering Graduate Program Admissions Committee, the MIT Computational and Systems Biology Graduate Admissions Committee, and the MIT Biological Engineering Graduate Recruiting Committee, of which he has been chair since 2023.
“I have known about the Edgerton Award since I started at MIT, and I think the broad focus on both research, teaching, and service really captures what makes MIT such a unique and wonderful place,” says Hansen. “I was therefore absolutely thrilled to receive the news that I would receive the Edgerton Award this year, and I am very grateful to all the wonderful colleagues here at MIT who have supported me over the years, and all the exceptional people in my lab whose work is being recognized.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the German polymath whose life and work embodied the connections between the arts and sciences, is said to have described architecture as “frozen music.”
When the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building at MIT had its public opening earlier this year, the temperature outside may have been below freezing but the performances inside were a warm-up for the inaugural concert that took place in the evening. During the afternoon, visitors were invited to workshops in Balinese gamelan and Senegalese drumming, alongside performances by the MIT Chamber Music Society, MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, and the MIT Laptop Ensemble (FaMLE), demonstrating the synergy between global music traditions and contemporary innovation in music technology. The building was filled with visitors from the MIT community and the Boston area, keen to be among the first to enter the new building and discover what MIT Music had planned for the opening occasion.
The evening’s landmark concert, Sonic Jubilance, celebrated the building’s completion and the pivotal role of MIT Music and Theater Arts (MTA) at the center of life on campus. The program was distinguished by five world premieres by MIT composers: “Summit and Mates,” by assistant professor in jazz Miguel Zenón; “Grace,” by senior lecturer in music Charles Shadle; “Two Noble Kinsmen,” by professor emeritus in music John Harbison; and “Madrigal,” by Keeril Makan, the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor.
The premieres were interwoven through the program with performances by MIT ensembles demonstrating the breadth and depth of the conservatory-level music program — from the European classical tradition to Brazilian beats to Boston jazz (the full list of participating ensembles can be found below).
Each performance demonstrated the different ways the space could be used to create new relationships between musicians and audiences. Designed in the round by the architecture firm SANAA, the Thomas Tull Concert Hall allows sound to resonate from the circular stage or from the aisles above the tiered seating; performers might be positioned below, above, or even in the midst of the audience.
“Music has been a part of MIT's curriculum and culture from the beginning,” said Chancellor Melissa Nobles in her opening address. “Arriving at this magnificent space has taken the collective efforts of past presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, alumni, and students, all working to get us here this evening.”
Jay Scheib, the Class of 1949 Professor and MIT MTA section head, emphasized the vital role of Music at MIT as a source of cohesion and creativity for students, faculty, and the wider MIT community.
“The new building is an extraordinary home for us. As a destination to convene communities around world musics and cultures, to engage in emerging music technologies, and to experience concerts and premieres featuring our extraordinary students and our internationally renowned faculty — the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building is truly a transformational thing."
The concert was also the launch event of Artfinity, MIT’s largest public festival of the arts since 2011, featuring more than 80 free performing and visual arts events. The concert hall will host performances throughout the spring, ranging from classical to jazz to rap, and more.
Institute Professor Marcus Thompson — the faculty co-lead for Artfinity alongside Azra Akšamija, director and associate professor of the Art, Culture, and Technology Program (ACT) at MIT — shared thoughts on the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building as a point of orientation for the festival.
“Our building offers the opportunity to point to the presence and importance of other art forms, media, practices, and experiences that can bring us together as practitioners and audiences, lifting our spirits and our sights,” Thompson reflected. “An ensemble of any kind is a community as well as a metaphor for what connects us, applying different talents to create more than we can do alone.”
The new compositions by the four faculty members were a case in point. The program opened with “Summit,” a brass fanfare projected from the top of the hall with ceremonial zeal. “The piece was specifically written as an opener for the concert,” Zenón explained. “My aim was to compose something that would make a statement straight away, while also using the idea of the ‘groove’ as a driving force. The title has two meanings. The first is a mountaintop, or the top of a structure — which is where the ensemble will be placed for the performance. The second is a gathering of great minds and great leaders, which is what MIT feels like for me.” Later in the program, Zenón premiered a jazz contrafact, “Mates,” playing on Benny Golson’s Stablemates, a tribute to Herb Pomeroy, founder of MIT’s jazz program. “The idea here is to use something connected to the jazz tradition — and to Boston’s history — and approach it from a more personal perspective,” said Zenón.
“Two Noble Kinsmen,” by Harbison, was composed as a benediction for the new home of MIT Music. “In choosing to set Shakespeare’s final words in this new piece for choir and strings, I wanted to convey the sense of an invocation, an introduction, an address to unseen forces,” said Harbison. “In this case, I wanted to leave the musical structure as plain as possible so that we understand why these words are chosen. I hoped to capture the stoic balance of these lines — they are in themselves a kind of verbal music.”
In setting the words of the poem “Grace,” by the Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan, Shadle — a composer of Choctaw heritage — envisioned a “sonic extension” of the MIT Land Acknowledgement. “‘Grace’ intended to speak to the Indigenous presence at the Institute and to open the new building with a reminder of the balm music that can bring to a troubled world,” said Shadle. “I hope that I have composed music that links Indigenous and Western traditions in ways that are compelling and thoughtful and that, while recognizing the ‘pieces of hurt,’ still makes a place for grace.”
Before the concert’s euphoric finale — a performance by Rambax Senegalese Drum Ensemble directed by Lamine Touré — “Madrigal” (the evening’s fourth world premiere) served to demonstrate the spatial dimensions of sound made possible by the design of the concert hall.
Makan’s composition was performed by four student violinists positioned at the top of each aisle and a fifth, Professor Natalie Lin Douglas, at the center of the stage, simultaneously showcasing the geometry of the hall and referencing the ever-shifting perspectives of the sculpture that stands at the north entrance of the building — “Madrigal (2024),” by Sanford Biggers.
“My piece aims to capture the multifaceted quality of Sanford Biggers’ sculpture. From whichever vantage point we might look at it, we see the same patterns in new relationships with one another. In other words, there is no one point of view that is privileged over another.”
As faculty lead for the building project, Makan developed a friendship with Joyce Linde, who provided the principal gift that led to the building. “Joyce and I were on the selection committee to choose an artist to create a site-specific sculpture outside the building. She was very excited about the process, and very engaged with Sanford,” said Makan. “Joyce passed away before she was able to see the building’s completion, and I wanted to honor her legacy by writing an original piece of music in her memory.”
That sense of relationship, pattern-making, and new beginnings was articulated by Frederick Harris, director and senior lecturer in music and the co-producer of the concert, alongside Andy Wilds, program manager in music. “The hall is an instrument; we’re communing with this incredible space and getting to know it,” said Harris. “It’s a relationship. The circular form of the hall is very welcoming, not only to immersive experiences but also to shared experiences.”
The role of music in cultivating community will ensure that the building will become an integral part of MIT life. The work taking place in rehearsal rooms matches the innovation of the Institute’s labs — proving that the arts are a necessary counterpart to science and technology, continuous with the human instinct to express and invent. Sonic Jubilance sets the tone of what’s to come.
MIT Music ensembles (in order of concert appearance):
Performance in the new Thomas Tull Hall in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music building by Assistant Professor of MIT Music and Theater Arts and violinist Natalie Lin Douglas and four students. The musicians performed the new piece Madrigal composed by Keeril Makan, SHASS Associate Dean and Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor.
Researchers find way to confirm existence of axions, a leading dark matter candidate
Yahya Chaudry
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
No one has ever seen axions. But scientists have theorized their existence as a way to explain some of the biggest questions in particle physics, including the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most the mass of the cosmos. Confirming the existence of axions could lead to insights into the history and composition of the universe itself.
Now, in a groundbreaking experiment, a team of scientists led by Harvard and King’s College London have made a significant step toward using quasiparticles to hunt for axions, which are hypothesized to actually make up dark matter. The findings, recently published in Nature, open new realms for harnessing quasiparticles to search for dark matter and develop new quantum technologies.
“Axion quasiparticles are simulations of axion particles, which can be further used as a detector of actual particles,” said senior co-author Suyang Xu, assistant professor of chemistry. “If a dark matter axion hits our material, it excites the quasiparticle, and, by detecting this reaction, we can confirm the presence of the dark matter axion.”
Frank Wilczek, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who first proposed axions, credits these findings as a major breakthrough in the study of these particles.
“The jury is still out on the existence of axions as fundamental particles that beautify the basic equations of physics and provide the cosmological dark matter,” Wilczek said. “But now, thanks to these ingenious new experiments, we know for sure that the Nature makes use of the underlying ideas. Axions now join holes, phonons, plasmons, and a handful of other ‘quasiparticles’ we find emerging as ingredients of matter, available for new scientific and technological creations.”
The experimental work was led by Jian-Xiang Qiu, a Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the Xu lab. Researchers who assisted in the study include Yu-Fei Liu, Anyuan Gao, Christian Tzschaschel, Houchen Li, Damien Berube, Thao Dinh, Tianye Huang, as well as an international team of researchers from King’s College, UC Berkeley, Northeastern University, and several other institutions.
The researchers utilized manganese bismuth telluride, a material renowned for its unique electronic and magnetic properties. By crafting this material into a 2D crystal structure, they established a platform ideal for nurturing axion quasiparticles. This process involved precision nano-fabrication engineering, in which the material was meticulously layered to enhance its quantum characteristics.
“Our lab has been working on this kind of interesting material for almost five to six years, and it is both a very rich material platform and also it is very difficult to work with,” said first author Qiu. “Because it’s air-sensitive, we needed to exfoliate down to a few atomic layers to be able to tune its property properly.”
Operating in a highly controlled environment, the team coaxed the axion quasiparticles into revealing their dynamic nature in manganese bismuth telluride. To accomplish this delicate feat, the team utilized a series of sophisticated techniques including ultrafast laser optics. Innovative measurement tools allowed them to capture movements of axion quasiparticles with precision, turning an abstract theory into a clearly visible phenomenon.
By demonstrating the coherent behavior and intricate dynamics of axion quasiparticles, the researchers not only affirmed long-held theoretical ideas in the field of condensed-matter physics but also laid the groundwork for future technological developments. For example, the axion polariton is a new form of light-matter interaction that could lead to novel optical applications.
In the field of particle physics and cosmology, this new observation of the axion quasiparticle can be used as a dark-matter detector, which the researchers have described as a “cosmic car radio” that could become the most accurate dark-matter detector yet.
Dark matter remains one of the most profound mysteries in physics, constituting about 85 percent of the universe’s mass without detection. By tuning into specific radio frequencies emitted by axion particles, the team aims to capture dark-matter signals that have eluded previous technology. The researchers believe it could help discover dark matter in 15 years.
“This is a really exciting time to be a dark-matter researcher. There are as many papers being published now about axions as there were about the Higgs-Boson a year before it was found,” said senior co-author David Marsh, a lecturer at King’s College London. “Experiments proposed that axions emitted a frequency in 1983, and we now know we can tune in to it — we’re closing in on the axion and fast.”
Xu is confident that the team’s multifaceted approach enabled their pioneering success.
“Our work is made possible by a highly interdisciplinary approach involving condensed-matter physics, material chemistry, as well as high-energy physics,” Xu said. “It showcased the potential of quantum materials in the realm of particle physics and cosmology.”
Moving forward, the researchers plan to deepen their exploration of axion quasiparticles’ properties, while refining experimental conditions for greater precision.
“The goal for the future is obviously to have an experiment that probes axion dark matter, which would definitely be super beneficial for the whole-particle physics community that is interested in axions,” said senior co-author Jan Schütte Engel, a physicist at UC Berkeley.
This research was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation.
When Michael Benjamin, principal research scientist in the MIT Center for Ocean Engineering, arrived at MIT 25 years ago, only professors and postdocs were allowed to touch the department’s underwater vehicles. The vehicles were expensive, he explains, and required extensive training to operate.
“People were scared to death about losing or damaging them, [and] there was no education pipeline to teach students,” he says, adding that the introduction of class 2.680 (Marine Autonomy, Sensing, and Communication) changed this a lot, by creating a class where undergraduate and graduate students could learn to write autonomy code, and run their software on robots on the Charles River. The addition of class 2.S01 (Introduction to Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) last year took the hands-on learning opportunities even further.
“2.S01 is a return to our roots: underwater vehicles. We wanted to create a learning environment where every student handles a robot, and no one is afraid about losing one,” he says. Each student is sent home with an electronics kit, which Benjamin calls the heart of the robot. “They can experiment all they want in their dorm room, and we’ll give them another kit if they break it.”
The AUVs and student test kits in 2.S01 were designed and built by Supun Randeni, a research scientist in mechanical engineering and the primary lecturer and content creator of 2.S01, and Captain Michael Sacarny from MIT Sea Grant. “Dr. Randeni and Captain Sacarny are the geniuses behind the class,” says Benjamin. Together, Randeni and Sacarny run the hands-on lab instruction.
The goal is to expand education and research opportunities to include a larger and younger group of students. “It’s the exact opposite of 25 years ago, when only a privileged few people were allowed to get inside the robot,” says Benjamin. “Student growth and interest is directly related to the degree they have ‘ownership’ of their robot. Physical possession, but also responsibility for its safe operation and return.”
2.S01 provides students with an in-depth insight into autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), by introducing theoretical and practical aspects of the AUV design process. This includes fundamentals of naval architecture, electrical systems design, mechanical design, and software design. Students assemble their own AUVs by using a kit of parts and guidance from instructors, beginning with core electronics and building out a full vehicle for deployment in the Charles River on the MIT campus in the final weeks.
Among the activities, students engage in waterproofing vacuum tests, pre-launch sub-system tests, and dockside tests for ballasting, all followed by in-water low-level control tuning runs. Students also construct autonomy missions — first in simulation, followed by in-water autonomous missions to conduct an environmental survey in the Charles River. The course’s final labs include group competitions involving in-water challenges. For the second iteration of the course, which starts in late March, the instructors plan to add more labs that allow the students to explore the intricacies of the electronic, more simulations options, and more water time.
Adowyn Bryne, a second-year mechanical engineering (MechE) student, took the course last year as a member of the first cohort, but this wasn’t her first experience with underwater vehicles. She’d participated in a SeaPerch program in high school. “I chose 2.S01 because I wanted to learn about more complex underwater vehicles,” says Bryne. “I didn’t find out until later in the semester that SeaPerch was actually started at MIT Sea Grant!”
Benjamin says he hopes there are a few things that first-year students take away from participating in 2.S01: first, an understanding that marine robotics is a very cross-disciplinary effort, involving mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, control theory, computer science and ocean science; and, second, the opportunity to view the effort as a gateway to exploring and understanding the ocean. Students says it’s that, and so much more.
Isabella Yeung, a third-year Course 12 student, took the class during her sophomore year after participating in an MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) in the MIT Sea Grant Bio Lab with Carolina Bastidas. Bastidas is a research scientist in MIT Sea Grant's Marine Advisory Services group.
“While UROP-ing, I’d seen many AUVs and other projects being developed at MIT Sea Grant,” Yeung says. “I was curious to learn more and have a deeper insight into what they were doing. This class was a prime opportunity to jump into the world of marine robotics without having any background in Course 2.”
She called the course “easily one of the most hands-on (and downright fun) classes” she’s ever taken, adding that she appreciated having the opportunity to assemble and deploy the AUV.
“As someone who enjoys tinkering, I appreciated the opportunity to get my hands dirty — quite literally, with grease and Charles [River] water,” says Yeung. “I looked forward to all of the classes, especially the deployment sessions. Nothing quite matched the sheer rush of launching our program, rushing to drop the AUV into the Charles, and engaging in a boat chase, hoping it hadn’t gone rogue.”
Bryne advises students considering the course to not worry too much if the class lines up with a particular career path they’re considering. “Your first year is about exploring. If you’re interested in the class, take it! You might find a new area of interest. Regardless of whether you want to keep learning about AUVs, you’ll get valuable transferable skills and have a lot of fun.”
Bryne, herself, says the experience is helping to set the stage for exploring future interests and opportunities. “Every time I’ve gotten to do something with robots, I’ve loved it,” she says, “but I’m also very passionate about women’s health. I want to design medical technology specifically for women, but I definitely think there’s room to incorporate robotics into that. It’s great that MechE is such a broad field, and that the curriculum at MIT allows me to explore so many potential areas of study.”
Isabella Yeung (left), a third-year student in earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, and Adowyn Byrne, a second-year student in mechanical engineering, hold the AUV they constructed in Course 2.S01.
“A person of big ideas and an even bigger humanistic imagination," Obeyesekere joined Princeton’s faculty in 1980 and transferred to emeritus status in 2000. He chaired the anthropology department from 1983 to 1988.
As an NUS Presidential Young Professor and the only award recipient from Singapore, Asst Prof Wang is recognised for his impactful research in Efficient Machine Learning. His work focuses on developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) models that are more compact, faster, and less dependent on large datasets — a direction that promises to make AI more accessible, environmentally friendly, and widely applicable across industries.
Presented every two years by the IEEE Computer Society, the award honours rising stars who are making significant contributions to the field of AI. In addition to celebrating exceptional talent, it also highlights pioneering innovation and visionary thinking that are shaping the future of AI.
Like a job interview, the university admissions process is a two-way street. While the university is processing documents from prospective students and assessing them through interviews and auditions, applicants are also gathering information, often from their school seniors and the Internet, to make their final decisions.
Applicants to the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (YST) who are shortlisted for admission will now add first-hand experience to their considerations, after the school revamped its admissions process in 2024. Moving away from traditional auditions as the primary means of assessment, YST has created a full-day immersion experience to give prospective students a taste of life in NUS and YST while enabling faculty members to assess them holistically as they participate in lessons and collaborative sessions.
Candidates must first undergo a pre-screening process, with specific requirements varying based on the programme they are applying for. Screened candidates are then invited to take part in the immersion experience, where they will be further assessed before they are considered for an admissions offer.
“As our reputation climbs, so does our competition with top conservatories in the world to recruit the best music students internationally,” said Mr Tan Wei Boon, Deputy Director of Student Life at YST. The new immersion experience is designed to evaluate candidates more effectively and encourage higher acceptance of admissions offers so as to ensure a high-quality student cohort each year, he added.
Early results since the revamped process was implemented are promising. Students who were admitted through the first edition in 2024 thrived in their first semester of studies, achieving an unprecedented 100% pass rate in all their courses.
Said Professor Peter Tornquist, Dean of YST: “YST Immersion has truly been a game-changing initiative, energising and modernising our admissions process. It gives applicants a fuller reflection of our pedagogical approach, allows us to achieve a better student fit, and resonates with the multi-faceted capacities that young music professionals need in today’s industry.”
The second edition of the immersion experience was conducted from January to March this year and hosted 89 prospective students hailing from 12 countries including Singapore, China, Uzbekistan, Russia, Indonesia, and Australia. Since applicants may now need to travel farther than before to complete the in-person admissions process, financial aid is offered in special cases to ensure that deserving students are not excluded due to financial difficulties.
Enhanced interactions for better assessments
The old admissions process followed the approach used by most music schools, which assesses applicants primarily through auditions before a faculty panel. These auditions would take place at YST for applicants based in Singapore or at one of YST’s regional audition centres, usually in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or South Korea, for applicants based elsewhere.
This approach was not ideal as it did not leave much time for the students and the panel to interact on a deeper level beyond a 20 to 30-minute audition performance, said Mr Tan.
The new immersive experience enhances the assessment process by giving candidates a glimpse into a day in the life of a YST undergraduate. While the candidates learn about YST’s pedagogical approach and interact with their potential future classmates through various activities, the faculty members teaching and observing the sessions get to conduct a more holistic assessment of each prospective student across various areas and competencies.
Typical activities include individual and chamber music lessons with a faculty member from the relevant major, as well as a collaborative music-making session with peers. Activities are also tailored for the various majors. Applicants for performance majors such as strings, winds, and brass are given the opportunity to rehearse in groups with a chamber coach, while applicants for the Audio Arts & Sciences major complete a hands-on practicum where they learn the basics of setting up a recording session. Meanwhile, Composition applicants attend a seminar where they take part in discussions and debates on contemporary composers in the field.
Additional information sessions are incorporated throughout, such as a tour of YST’s state-of-the-art facilities and the NUS campus led by student ambassadors, and a dialogue with the YST Student Life Office where students can ask questions about topics ranging from scholarships and bursaries to campus housing and educational opportunities, such as pursuing minors or second majors in other NUS schools and faculties.
Sneak peek into YST life
Current YST students who were admitted through the revamped admissions process said it gave them an accurate preview of what YST classes would be like and enabled them to evaluate whether the school culture and teaching style would suit them.
First-year student Lucius Quek, who is majoring in Audio Arts & Sciences, said that going through the immersion experience and getting to engage in conversation with YST faculty and staff helped him to feel confident in his decision to accept YST’s offer when it was extended. The teaching methodology and materials used in the immersion matched his actual student experience, enabling him to quickly find his footing in YST.
Christian Daniel Ragay Borres, a first-year Percussion student from the Philippines, was pleased to learn that YST would not be putting him through the traditional audition process used by most conservatories, including the Australian music schools he applied to.
He appreciated the two-way exchange of information facilitated by the lesson format, noting: “It wasn’t just my skills being presented to them, but also their teaching styles and plans being experienced by me.”
The collaborative music-making session in the immersion experience for Music & Society / Music, Collaboration & Production (MS/MCP) candidates was especially memorable for first-year student Cervone Seah, who recalls working with musicians from diverse backgrounds to create a new piece based on improvisation. The exercise highlighted the importance of teamwork and creativity, both of which she has found to be integral to her MS/MCP studies.
“The immersion was an excellent preview of the dynamic and interdisciplinary approach that defines the MS/MCP programme,” Cervone said. “Experiencing YST’s culture first-hand reassured me that this was the right place for my musical and academic growth.”
The planned space missions to search for remote life will provide valuable insights even if they do not find any evidence of life, says astrophysicist Daniel Angerhausen.
When some commuter trains arrive at the end of the line, they must travel to a switching platform to be turned around so they can depart the station later, often from a different platform than the one at which they arrived.
Engineers use software programs called algorithmic solvers to plan these movements, but at a station with thousands of weekly arrivals and departures, the problem becomes too complex for a traditional solver to unravel all at once.
Using machine learning, MIT researchers have developed an improved planning system that reduces the solve time by up to 50 percent and produces a solution that better meets a user’s objective, such as on-time train departures. The new method could also be used for efficiently solving other complex logistical problems, such as scheduling hospital staff, assigning airline crews, or allotting tasks to factory machines.
Engineers often break these kinds of problems down into a sequence of overlapping subproblems that can each be solved in a feasible amount of time. But the overlaps cause many decisions to be needlessly recomputed, so it takes the solver much longer to reach an optimal solution.
The new, artificial intelligence-enhanced approach learns which parts of each subproblem should remain unchanged, freezing those variables to avoid redundant computations. Then a traditional algorithmic solver tackles the remaining variables.
“Often, a dedicated team could spend months or even years designing an algorithm to solve just one of these combinatorial problems. Modern deep learning gives us an opportunity to use new advances to help streamline the design of these algorithms. We can take what we know works well, and use AI to accelerate it,” says Cathy Wu, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT, and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).
She is joined on the paper by lead author Sirui Li, an IDSS graduate student; Wenbin Ouyang, a CEE graduate student; and Yining Ma, a LIDS postdoc. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Eliminating redundance
One motivation for this research is a practical problem identified by a master’s student Devin Camille Wilkins in Wu’s entry-level transportation course. The student wanted to apply reinforcement learning to a real train-dispatch problem at Boston’s North Station. The transit organization needs to assign many trains to a limited number of platforms where they can be turned around well in advance of their arrival at the station.
This turns out to be a very complex combinatorial scheduling problem — the exact type of problem Wu’s lab has spent the past few years working on.
When faced with a long-term problem that involves assigning a limited set of resources, like factory tasks, to a group of machines, planners often frame the problem as Flexible Job Shop Scheduling.
In Flexible Job Shop Scheduling, each task needs a different amount of time to complete, but tasks can be assigned to any machine. At the same time, each task is composed of operations that must be performed in the correct order.
Such problems quickly become too large and unwieldy for traditional solvers, so users can employ rolling horizon optimization (RHO) to break the problem into manageable chunks that can be solved faster.
With RHO, a user assigns an initial few tasks to machines in a fixed planning horizon, perhaps a four-hour time window. Then, they execute the first task in that sequence and shift the four-hour planning horizon forward to add the next task, repeating the process until the entire problem is solved and the final schedule of task-machine assignments is created.
A planning horizon should be longer than any one task’s duration, since the solution will be better if the algorithm also considers tasks that will be coming up.
But when the planning horizon advances, this creates some overlap with operations in the previous planning horizon. The algorithm already came up with preliminary solutions to these overlapping operations.
“Maybe these preliminary solutions are good and don’t need to be computed again, but maybe they aren’t good. This is where machine learning comes in,” Wu explains.
For their technique, which they call learning-guided rolling horizon optimization (L-RHO), the researchers teach a machine-learning model to predict which operations, or variables, should be recomputed when the planning horizon rolls forward.
L-RHO requires data to train the model, so the researchers solve a set of subproblems using a classical algorithmic solver. They took the best solutions — the ones with the most operations that don’t need to be recomputed — and used these as training data.
Once trained, the machine-learning model receives a new subproblem it hasn’t seen before and predicts which operations should not be recomputed. The remaining operations are fed back into the algorithmic solver, which executes the task, recomputes these operations, and moves the planning horizon forward. Then the loop starts all over again.
“If, in hindsight, we didn’t need to reoptimize them, then we can remove those variables from the problem. Because these problems grow exponentially in size, it can be quite advantageous if we can drop some of those variables,” she adds.
An adaptable, scalable approach
To test their approach, the researchers compared L-RHO to several base algorithmic solvers, specialized solvers, and approaches that only use machine learning. It outperformed them all, reducing solve time by 54 percent and improving solution quality by up to 21 percent.
In addition, their method continued to outperform all baselines when they tested it on more complex variants of the problem, such as when factory machines break down or when there is extra train congestion. It even outperformed additional baselines the researchers created to challenge their solver.
“Our approach can be applied without modification to all these different variants, which is really what we set out to do with this line of research,” she says.
L-RHO can also adapt if the objectives change, automatically generating a new algorithm to solve the problem — all it needs is a new training dataset.
In the future, the researchers want to better understand the logic behind their model’s decision to freeze some variables, but not others. They also want to integrate their approach into other types of complex optimization problems like inventory management or vehicle routing.
This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, MIT’s Research Support Committee, an Amazon Robotics PhD Fellowship, and MathWorks.
MIT researchers developed a machine-learning-guided technique to solve complex, long-horizon planning problems more efficiently than some traditional approaches.
The metals have previously been shown to damage the health of pollinators, which ingest them in nectar as they feed, leading to reduced population sizes and death. Even low nectar metal levels can have long-term effects, by affecting bees’ learning and memory - which impacts their foraging ability.
Researchers have found that common plants including white clover and bindweed, which are vital forage for pollinators in cities, can accumulate arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead from contaminated soils.
Metal contamination is an issue in the soils of cities worldwide, with the level of contamination usually increasing with the age of a city. The metals come from a huge range of sources including cement dust and mining.
The researchers say soils in cities should be tested for metals before sowing wildflowers and if necessary, polluted areas should be cleaned up before new wildflower habitats are established.
The study highlights the importance of growing the right species of wildflowers to suit the soil conditions.
Reducing the risk of metal exposure is critical for the success of urban pollinator conservation schemes. The researchers say it is important to manage wildflower species that self-seed on contaminated urban land, for example by frequent mowing to limit flowering - which reduces the transfer of metals from the soil to the bees.
Dr Sarah Scott in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and first author of the report, said: “It’s really important to have wildflowers as a food source for the bees, and our results should not discourage people from planting wildflowers in towns and cities.
“We hope this study will raise awareness that soil health is also important for bee health. Before planting wildflowers in urban areas to attract bees and other pollinators, it’s important to consider the history of the land and what might be in the soil – and if necessary find out whether there’s a local soil testing and cleanup service available first.”
The study was carried out in the post-industrial US city of Cleveland, Ohio, which has over 33,700 vacant lots left as people have moved away from the area. In the past, iron and steel production, oil refining and car manufacturing went on there. But any land that was previously the site of human activity may be contaminated with traces of metals.
To get their results, the researchers extracted nectar from a range of self-seeded flowering plants that commonly attract pollinating insects, found growing on disused land across the city. They tested this for the presence of arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead. Lead was consistently found at the highest concentrations, reflecting the state of the soils in the city.
The researchers found that different species of plant accumulate different amounts, and types, of the metals. Overall, the bright blue-flowered chicory plant (Cichorium intybus) accumulated the largest total metal concentration, followed by white clover (Trifolium repens), wild carrot (Daucus carota) and bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis). These plants are all vital forage for pollinators in cities - including cities in the UK - providing a consistent supply of nectar across locations and seasons.
There is growing evidence that wild pollinator populations have dropped by over 50% in the last 50 years, caused primarily by changes in land use and management across the globe. Climate change and pesticide use also play a role; overall the primary cause of decline is the loss of flower-rich habitat.
Pollinators play a vital role in food production: many plants, including apple and tomato, require pollination in order to develop fruit. Natural ‘pollination services’ are estimated to add billions of dollars to global crop productivity.
Scott said: “Climate change feels so overwhelming, but simply planting flowers in certain areas can help towards conserving pollinators, which is a realistic way for people to make a positive impact on the environment.”
The research was funded primarily by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Wildflowers growing on land previously used for buildings and factories can accumulate lead, arsenic and other metal contaminants from the soil, which are consumed by pollinators as they feed, a new study has found.
Our results should not discourage people from planting wildflowers in towns and cities. But.. it’s important to consider the history of the land and what might be in the soil."
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Scholars react to Trump administration actions against Harvard and other institutions
Harvard on Monday rejected demands by the Trump administration that link $9 billion in federal funding to compliance with changes to University governance and hiring practices, viewpoint “audits” of academic departments, students, and faculty, and other measures.
The funding, more than $2 billion of which was frozen hours after Harvard responded to the demands, supports research that “has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields,” according to a message President Alan Garber sent to the Harvard community Monday afternoon.
The government has cited concerns about campus antisemitism in explaining its decision to halt funding at Harvard and several other institutions of higher education.
On Tuesday, we sought reactions to the funding cuts in conversations across campus.
Amberly Xie
Third-year Ph.D. student in applied physics
“I feel like at some core level, it violates our rights as people and researchers and scientists — and as a university as well,” said Xie, whose research focuses in part on quantum computing.
Like many students and scholars, she worries that major funding cuts at institutions such as Harvard will slow or in some cases halt scientific progress.
“Universities play a major role because it’s where a lot of research takes place,” she said. “There are companies and startups that do this kind of work, but I feel like it’s truly in universities where a lot of the fundamental work is done, and a lot of the pioneering work in terms of allowing us to not only better understand the platforms like the ones I work with, but also help put them into real-world applications.”
Andrew Tyrie
Senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School; former member of the House of Commons in the British Parliament; current member of the House of Lords
“I think there’s a much bigger job to be done, and that is for all those who disagree with the dramatic and, in my view, dangerous decisions being taken by the new administration to speak up,” said Tyrie, who is studying regulatory reforms in advanced Western economies in his time at the Kennedy School.
Everyone engaged in academia and politics should be outraged by the Trump administration’s stance, he said.
“And of course, as a non-U.S. citizen, I am concerned about the wider effects on the world — both the prospects for growth and prosperity, but also for its security and stability,” he said. “What I’m not asking is for people to speak up in the interests of the world, but to speak up in the interests of the United States of America. This is weakening the United States and imperiling the prosperity and the security of millions of Americans.”
Joshua Cherniss
Visiting fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics; associate professor of government at Georgetown University
“I study, to some extent, authoritarian regimes, and I think that some of what we’re seeing — while it’s not equivalent to fully formed authoritarianism — is starting to approach it in terms of trying to have the government dictate the ideas that are taught, that can be expressed and that can’t be expressed,” said Cherniss. “I think that it’s important that Harvard and other universities not buckle under what I think is pretty clearly an assault on academic freedom and university self-governance.”
Cherniss studies political theory, particularly defenses and critiques of liberalism. He said he worries about the impact of funding freezes on fellow scholars inside and outside his field.
“We may have to cut a lot of the most socially useful work that we do in medical sciences and technology — things that have really benefited America and benefit the world in very practical ways,” he said.
Professor Michael Sandel (right) led a conversation for the “Food For Thought” event.
Photos by Grace DuVal
5 min read
‘Our Harvard’ brings students together to tackle tough issues
First they met for coffee. This month they came together for a full meal.
Spurred by the Gaza conflict, Nim Ravid ’25, an economics concentrator from Israel, wanted to find new ways to connect students across the College. Last summer, he co-founded “Our Harvard” with five of his peers, and one of their first efforts was pairing students for coffee chats meant to encourage conversations across differences.
On April 1 at Smith Campus Center, the group hosted a larger gathering: “Food For Thought: Our Harvard College,” an evening of conversation during which students offered their perspectives on a range of issues.
Following the event, students gathered in the lobby of the Smith Campus Center to share a meal.
Harvard University
Ravid was heartened by the results.
“It was the most vulnerable and honest I’ve ever heard Harvard students communicating with each other, which I think reflects our efforts to bring students from across campus together to this event and create an environment where students assume best intentions and say what they actually think,” he said.
The conversation, which was followed by a meal provided by Harvard University Dining Services, was moderated by Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government.
“There’s a risk with conversations like this, that everyone will think it’s much safer to just celebrate diversity, eat some food, and go home, but that would miss the learning and the struggling and the wrestling with the questions out of which friendships and genuine dialogue can be forged,” Sandel told the crowd.
One by one, members of Our Harvard and those in the audience spoke about feeling ostracized for their identity, national origin, or beliefs, and finding it difficult to establish friendships across differences. Frederico Araujo ’25, an Our Harvard founder from Portugal, discussed his struggles connecting with students from Brazil.
“Sometimes when I came to Annenberg and I initiated a conversation that I hoped would be about our shared language, our shared food, our shared music, and our many shared traditions between Brazilian and Portuguese culture, I would actually get the cold shoulder,” he said. “I don’t need to give a history lesson about the historical background between Portugal and Brazil, but I wasn’t aware that those historical ties would be sufficient for someone to ignore my friendship.”
In response, Sandel said, “Sometimes seeming similarities can be startling for their distance.”
The conversation covered the Israel-Palestine conflict, with Ravid and others expressing their fears about sharing personal experiences. Several participants with no direct connections to the war said they have found themselves uncomfortably in the middle of friends with different views.
Angie Gabeau ’25, another founding member of Our Harvard and a sociology concentrator, acknowledged being apprehensive when the conversation turned to the Middle East, but said that it was beneficial in the end.
“I’m actually glad that it was brought up,” she said. “If you are talking about the hottest topic on the market right now and are still able to make yourself vulnerable to discussing with people who might not agree with you, then other cases will be a lot less daunting.”
Angie Gabeau ’25 is a founding member of Our Harvard.
Harvard University
Gabeau, a Boston native, told the audience that she arrived at Harvard hoping to connect with other Black students after coming from a predominantly white high school. The Winthrop House resident joined the Black Students Association, the Kuumba Singers, and Omo Naija x The Wahala Boys, an African dance troupe.
“I was so happy to be able to find a community here,” she said. While emphasizing the importance of these groups, Gabeau also said that she believes it’s important to build relationships across differences. “This conversation wasn’t to shadow the importance of affinity organizations but seeing how we can both share our cultures, ideas, values, and morals with each other, while being able to feel safe here at Harvard,” she said after the event.
Harvard College Dean of Students Tom Dunne found it meaningful “that the core group of students who are organizing this are seniors in their last weeks on campus.”
Ravid expressed his hope that Food for Thought will help spark similar movements at Harvard. “I also hope this event will encourage others to not treat other students differently based on their identity, but rather for who they are,” he said. “I hope students will really take time to get to know each other before they judge.”
Gabeau noted that Our Harvard has set goals that do not ask too much of students.
“I don’t want this to come off as, ‘We can all be friends and everything’s going to be perfect,’ because that’s not really what we’re trying to do,” she said. “There’ll be people who have disagreements that won’t foster friendship. I wouldn’t want people walking around campus pretending to be friends.”
She continued: “It’s not supposed to be creating a perfect utopian universe but rather pushing people to go the extra mile in terms of seizing all the opportunity in the different pockets of joy and growth that there is on campus.”
In a 2014 essay on mentorship in The Chronicle of Higher Education, American scholar Leonard Cassuto wrote: “In Greek myth, Mentor was a wise man who earned the trust of Odysseus, who selected him to educate his son, Telemachus. The word has a legacy: ‘Mentor’ is a title that should be earned.”
Earlier this year, it was announced that two MIT affiliates — Kimberly “Kim” Benard, associate dean and director of distinguished fellowships and academic excellence at MIT Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD), and Leigh Estabrooks, longtime invention education officer with the Lemelson-MIT Program — had been honored by the Joe Biden administration with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). The award, administered by the National Science Foundation on behalf of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, celebrates those who’ve made “significant contributions to mentoring and thereby support the future productivity” of the nation’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce.
While this award marks Benard’s and Estabrooks’ decades of service and leadership at the Institute, it also spotlights the ways MIT staff and other community members provide essential mentorship.
“Too often, notions of good mentorship focus on faculty advisors and overlook the vital work done by others,” notes Anjali Tripathi ’09, one of Benard’s nominators. To her, the PAESMEM awards recognize the dedicated effort behind cultivating effective mentoring relationships across higher education, which can inspire other unsung heroes as they show up for their mentees.
Kim Benard: Growing a garden
When Tripathi, now a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, established a mentoring program while earning her advanced degrees at Harvard University, she took inspiration from a transformative mentoring experience from her senior year at MIT: working on graduate fellowship applications with Benard. Throughout the process, Benard’s power to motivate, listen, and give to her students left a mark on Tripathi, who later wrote, “I have had many ‘mentors’ in the form of advisers, but in my life only two mentors, as Cassuto would have it. Kim is one of them.”
In Benard’s 18 years at MIT, she has personally mentored over 2,000 students from all backgrounds as they tackle the question of what comes next after MIT and explore post-graduate opportunities such as the Rhodes, Marshall, and Fulbright scholarships. To help students through the competitive application process, Benard established MIT’s Distinguished Fellowships program, which sits within CAPD.
“Someone once said to me that mentoring is like growing a garden. You plant a seed and hope that it grows and bears fruit,” Benard notes. “Some produce fruit quickly, and others take a long time to finally see the result. Being nominated by a former student for this award, and seeing so many others celebrate it, means that I have hopefully allowed these students to bear fruit.”
As Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, sees it, “Kim is remarkable in so many ways.” Alongside one-on-one consultations and mock interviews, Benard gets to know dozens of applicants individually, then synthesizes their information into recommendation letters each summer. “She works extremely hard, accomplishing with her small team a job done by much larger teams at our competitor institutions.”
While her work has left a remarkable impact on students exploring fellowships, much of that garden-tending happens in the tasks described above — the quiet consistency that doesn’t regularly make the news. Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing and co-chair of the Distinguished Fellowships Committee, describes Benard as “one of the hidden heroes who sustain MIT.” He adds: “Every university needs someone like Kim. We’re very lucky to have the original.”
Benard sees this recognition as an opportunity to illuminate the tangible ways MIT community members can — and do — make an impact on the next generation. “Mentoring and advising is valuable work, but often unseen,” she explains. “This recognition demonstrates the effort MIT mentors and advisors put into budding scientists and demonstrates that these are important and vital tasks for the success of research.”
She designs her work around two main tenets of good mentoring: adaptive practices and deep, or active, listening. As Benard has noticed in her countless sessions, each person’s unique needs require a different kind of guided self-reflection. Throughout the process, she employs active listening. It’s not always an easy conversation, so a caring approach is essential.
“She has guided 20 years’ worth of students through an intense process of self-examination and reflection with her extraordinarily successful combination of tough, often existential questioning and unconditionally caring moral support every step of the way,” Will Broadhead, associate professor of history and MacVicar Faculty Fellow, says. “Her students love her, and it’s easy to see why!”
In fact, the cohort of Benard’s advisees — both fellowship winners and non-winners — who proudly call themselves “Kim’s kids” can speak to all the large and small ways that mentorship plays out. Years after they graduate, “Kim’s kids” are still in touch with her, and many volunteer their time to help current fellowship applicants. Keen to emulate Bernard’s mentorship and pay it forward, alumni such as Tripathi become a part of the MIT community “of people eager to help, support, and lift each other up.”
After all, Tripathi observes, “Kim is the human heart of MIT.”
Leigh Estabrooks: Inspiring mentees to pay it forward
As the Invention Education Officer for the Lemelson-MIT (LMIT) program for 18 years until her retirement from MIT last December, Leigh Estabrooks played a pivotal role in mentoring thousands of students and educators through LMIT’s High School InvenTeam grant initiative and other programs.
Stephanie Couch, LMIT’s executive director, notes, “Leigh created a network of exceptional educators devoted to helping students discover their full potential. Her research led to the development of new curriculum and program offerings for all ages and grade levels, fueling the growth of invention education across the U.S. We are so grateful for her time with the Lemelson-MIT program.”
“Receiving this award has been a humbling and emotional experience,” Estabrooks shares. “I never set out to be an honored mentor; I simply set out to help others build confidence in and understanding of what it means to invent technological solutions to improve the world. I will be forever grateful for the sustained mentoring opportunities with K-14 students and teachers while at LMIT.”
Michael Cima, MIT faculty director for LMIT, underscores the depth of Estabrooks’ impact: “Leigh is a tireless champion of the value of invention education. Her efforts have helped untold numbers of students and teachers over the years. We still cross paths with students from decades ago who tell us about the difference Dr. Estabrooks made in their lives.”
Estabrooks emphasizes that mentoring is a long-term commitment rather than a one-time event. For students, it can begin in middle or high school and continue into college and professional careers. For teachers, mentoring starts even before they apply for grants and remains integral throughout their careers and educational advancements. “[Mentoring] doesn’t take place within one school year; it is informal with no end date,” Estabrooks says. “The ongoing act of mentoring forges strong bonds and builds relationships that endure for decades.”
“Leigh has been able to alter the trajectory of students’ lives through invention education,” Cima adds. “Many students who had never even considered college, let alone engineering or science as a career path, ended up attending college — some even at MIT.”
Believing that every student and teacher deserves a caring mentor, Estabrooks encourages others to take on mentorship roles, noting how vital mentors were in shaping her own personal and professional journey. “Students and teachers may not directly ask, ‘Will you be my mentor?’ However, you can become a mentor simply by being available,” She says.
One former student shared that Estabrooks naturally assumed a mentor role during their time working together. As a 10th grader, this student wouldn’t have thought to ask, yet Estabrooks became a mentor and has remained one for over half of the student’s life.
One of the most remarkable aspects of mentorship, according to Estabrooks, is its ripple effect. Many of Estabrooks’ mentees have gone on to become mentors themselves, fostering a culture of support and guidance that spans generations. As one mentee put it, “One hallmark of a great mentor is their ability to inspire their mentees to pay it forward, increasing their impact exponentially.” Katelyn Sweeney ’18, for example, whom Estabrooks has mentored since Sweeney was in 10th grade, now mentors middle and high school inventors and roboticists and serves as an educational counselor for MIT.
Doug Scott, an LMIT Invention Education Fellow who nominated Estabrooks for the PAESMEM award, affirms her influence: “Leigh is the genuine article and a mentor in every sense of the word. She has developed inventors both young and old through her knowledge and kindness. Over the years, I have seen her help every person she has encountered.”
Instilling the importance of mentorship in her mentees, Estabrooks encourages them to reflect on how guidance has helped them navigate key decision points in their schooling and careers. She hopes they will extend this generosity of spirit to others who may not initially see themselves in STEM or know how to pursue college and career opportunities.
Today, Estabrooks continues to collaborate with LMIT. “Mentoring, to me, includes the gift of time to listen, provide opportunities, make connections, and offer gentle guidance — all while genuinely caring about mentees,” she says.
The legacies of both Estabrooks and Benard will continue to shape future generations of scientists, engineers, inventors, educators, and more, ensuring that the cycle of mentorship remains unbroken.
This year’s faculty and arts fellow recipients are Maria Chudnovsky, Thomas Conlan, yuniya edi kwon, Rhodri Lewis, Carolyn Rouse, and Peter S. Shin. Five graduate and four undergraduate alumni received Guggenheims.
When making positive change, sometimes you ‘break things’
Key is to avoid hurting people in process, Gina Raimondo says
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
If you want to make things better, says Gina Raimondo, that means things are going to have to change — and sometimes that means you “break things.”
For example, the former U.S. Commerce secretary and Rhode Island governor said that when she was leading the Ocean State, she cut taxes every year, raised the state minimum wage, and made community college tuition free. She also cut 30 percent of the state’s regulations.
“I don’t think we should just accept things because they’re the way things have been done,” Raimondo ’93 said last week during an Institute of Politics forum on “The Future of U.S. Competitiveness.”
This willingness to make changes, she acknowledged, may sound similar to the tactics of Elon Musk’s DOGE. The difference? “Execution matters,” she said. “You can’t hurt people in the process.”
That focus on ensuring fairness and opportunity for regular Americans came early and has remained with her throughout her political career.
The granddaughter of immigrants who stressed hard work, Raimondo, who was instrumental in shaping the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, credited her large Italian family with getting her into politics. When Ronald Reagan was elected president, she recalled, “My dad kept saying ‘What about the little guy who gets up in the morning and goes to work? Who’s sticking up for us?’
“As I got older and I saw that American Dream being out of reach,” she said. “It motivated me to get involved in politics.”
The IOP discussion with Jeff Liebman, director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy, turned to Raimondo’s tenure as Commerce secretary. The two first focused on the early days when supply chains slowed as COVID raged. “The first thing we had to do was understand the complexity of supply chains,” she said.
In response to endless calls about various essentials that were suddenly not available, “We built spreadsheets for critical supply chains, like pharmaceuticals — and then, under President Biden’s leadership, we got to work making friends with other countries,” she said.
Citing Biden’s belief, she said, “America can’t and shouldn’t go it alone. America is best when we make friends; he sent us to Southeast Asia to build relationships with Indonesia, with the Philippines,” and beyond.
In addition to forging or strengthening those relationships, the Biden administration responded with the CHIPs and Science Act, aimed at making scientific essentials domestically. Liebman asked her how that played out.
“Most semiconductors are a commodity, and many of them are made overseas — a lot in China,” Raimondo responded. “It wouldn’t be a national security disaster if there was a backlog of iPhones. But artificial intelligence — all AI — runs on leading-edge chips. So much of our intelligence-gathering capacity depends on leading-edge chips. That directly affects our national security, and we make zero” of the chips in question.
“By 2030, we’ll be making a quarter of those chips. That’s a success,” she said.
She also defended the legislation’s fiscal responsibility. “We insisted that for every dollar we put out there, $10 of private-sector dollars come in,” she said. “When we left, we had about 13 private-sector dollars for every dollar that we put in.”
Such self-reliance is essential, she said. Citing China’s BYD electric cars, which are heavily subsidized by the Chinese government and then sold inexpensively around the world, she said, “Free trade is great if everyone plays by the rules. China does not play by the rules. I think having more reciprocity is reasonable.”
Looking back on her time with the Biden administration, she acknowledged mistakes, including — perhaps — too many compromises.
“Politics is not perfect,” she acknowledged. “We did get a lot done, though. People who make those critiques may not know how hard it is to get things done in a 50-50 Senate and a tiny margin in the House.”
Raimondo also defended Biden’s stimulus act, which some blame for inflation. “I was the governor of Rhode Island during COVID,” she said. “In the couple of months after COVID broke out, in a state of about a million people, I had 110,000 file for unemployment insurance.”
Recalling the “pit in my stomach,” she worried, “How am I going to get these people back to work?
“It was really scary,” she said. “It’s easy to say the stimulus shouldn’t have been so big it led to inflation. But nobody says if it wasn’t big enough that unemployment would have continued.”
She also defending tacking so-called social programs onto economic ones. “Companies that wanted our money needed to find workers,” she said. “They’re not going to have enough workers without women, and they’re not going to get women without a childcare plan.
“They weren’t social programs. They were labor market programs designed to be a steward of taxpayer money.”
On board Intuitive Machines’ Athena spacecraft, which made a moon landing on March 6, were cutting-edge MIT payloads: a depth-mapping camera and a mini-rover called “AstroAnt.” Also on that craft were the words and voices of people from around the world speaking in dozens of languages. These were etched on a 2-inch silicon wafer computationally designed by Professor Craig Carter of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering and mounted on the mission’s Lunar Outpost MAPP Rover.
Dubbed the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space (HUMANS), the project is a collaboration of art and science, bringing together experts from across MIT — with technical expertise from the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; nano-etching and testing from MIT.nano; audio processing from the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future and the Music and Theater Arts Section; and lunar mission support from the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative.
While a 6-inch HUMANS wafer flew on the Axiom-2 mission to the International Space Station in 2023, the 2-inch wafer was a part of the IM-2 mission to the lunar south polar region, linked to the MIT Media Lab’s To the Moon to Stay program, which reimagines humankind’s return to the moon. IM-2 ended prematurely after the Athena spacecraft tipped onto its side shortly after landing in March, but the HUMANS wafer fulfilled its mission by successfully reaching the lunar surface.
“If you ask a person on the street: ‘What does MIT do?’ Well, that person might say they’re a bunch of STEM nerds who make devices and create apps. But that’s not the entire MIT. It’s more multifaceted than that,” Carter says. “This project embodies that. It says, ‘We’re not just one-trick ponies.’”
A message etched in silicon
The HUMANS project, initially conceived of by MIT students, was inspired by the Golden Record, a pair of gold-plated phonograph records launched in 1977 aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, with human voices, music, and images. Designed to explore the outer solar system, the Voyagers have since traveled into interstellar space, beyond the sun’s heliosphere. But while the earlier project was intended to introduce humanity to an extraterrestrial audience, the HUMANS message is directed at fellow human beings — reminding us that space belongs to all.
Maya Nasr PhD ’23, now a researcher at Harvard University, has led the project since 2020, when she was a graduate student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She co-founded it with Lihui Zhang SM ’21, from the MIT Technology and Policy Program. The team invited people to share what space means to them, in writing or audio, to create a “symbol of unity that promotes global representation in space.”
When Nasr and Zhang sought an expert to translate their vision into a physical artifact, they turned to Carter, who had previously created the designs and algorithms for many art projects and, most recently, for One.MIT, a series of mosaics composed of the names of MIT faculty, students, and staff. Carter quickly agreed.
“I love figuring out how to turn equations into code, into artifacts,” Carter says. “Whether they’re art or not is a difficult question. They’re definitely artful. They’re definitely artisanal.”
Carter played a pivotal role in the computational design and fabrication of the silicon wafer now on the surface of the moon. He first translated the submitted phrases, in 64 languages, into numerical representations that could be turned into fonts. He also reverse-engineered a typesetting language to “kern” the text — adjusting the spacing between letters for visual clarity.
“Kerning is important for the aesthetics of written text. You’d want a Y to be not-too-close to a neighboring T, but farther from a W,” Carter said. “All of the phrases were sequences of words like D-O-G, and it’s not as simple as, put a D, put an O, put a G. It’s put a D, figure out where the O should be, put the O, figure out where the G should be, put the G.”
After refining the text placement, Carter designed an algorithm that geometrically transformed both the text and the audio messages’ digital waveforms — graphical representations of sound — into spirals on the wafer. The design pays homage to the Voyagers’ Golden Records, which featured spiral grooves, much like a vinyl record.
In the center of the disc is an image of a globe, or map projection — Carter found publicly available geospatial coordinates and mapped them into the design.
“I took those coordinates and then created something like an image from the coordinates. It had to be geometry, not pixels,” he says.
Once the spirals and globe imagery were in place, Carter handed the data for the design to MIT.nano, which has specialized instruments for high-precision etching and fabrication.
Human voices, lunar surface
“I hope people on Earth feel a deep sense of connection and belonging — that their voices, stories, and dreams are now part of this new chapter in lunar exploration,” Nasr says. “When we look at the moon, we can feel an even deeper connection, knowing that our words — in all their diversity — are now part of its surface, carrying the spirit of humanity forward.”
For Carter, the project conveys the human capacity for wonder and a shared sense of what’s possible. “In many cases, looking outward forces you to look inward at the same time to put the wonder in some kind of personal context,” Carter says. “So if this project somehow conveys that we are all wondering about this marvelous universe together in all of our languages, I would consider that a victory.”
The project’s link to the Golden Record — an artifact launched nearly 50 years ago and now traveling beyond the solar system — strikes another chord with Carter.
“It’s unimaginably far away, and so the notion that we can connect to something in time and space, to something that’s out there, I think it is just a wonderful connection.”
The 2-inch Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space (HUMANS) wafer (left) landed on the moon March 6 aboard the Athena spacecraft. It is seen alongside its 6-inch counterpart, which flew to the International Space Station in 2023.
At the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, students try their hand at Boston Line Type, developed in 1835. Braille didn’t make its way to the U.S. until almost 20 years later.
Course on tactile reading shows students ‘Why Braille Matters’
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
In his “Literature and Disability” course taught last spring, Professor Marc Shell noticed Katie Sevier ’25 taking notes on her HIMS QBraille XL display, a device that connects to her laptop and allows her to type in braille.
A discussion between Shell and Sevier on the importance of the history, theory, and practice of tactile writing systems used by the visually impaired led the pair to create a course not seen at peer institutions. Now the professor and the student are both the teachers. Their class is called “Why Braille Matters.”
“For me, braille is a sign of access, of freedom, of independence,” Sevier said. “Having this course come to life means so much. It is a course affirming a component of the blind experience — braille — which is so integral to many blind people’s experiences.”
On Thursday afternoons, Sevier can be found preparing for a class as fellow students and two trained guide dogs fill a small room at Dana Palmer House on Harvard’s campus. Throughout the semester, Sevier and Shell have prioritized highlighting different experiences by inviting guest speakers from the blind community or those who work with the blind community.
“This is and is not a course about disability,” Shell said. “It is really a course about reading and writing systems, and that is the main linkage with Comparative Literature.
Katie Sevier ’25 (left) and Marc Shell brought students to Perkins School for the Blind as part of their class, “Why Braille Matters.”
“The history of reading and writing goes back thousands of years to tactile forms. These forms might be called ‘pre-braille.’ As our research is now revealing, blind people had many methods of reading and writing,” he added.
Sevier and Shell take an integrative dual approach to teaching “Why Braille Matters.” She instructs students on braille code and blindness education, while he leads discussions on the literary, philosophical, and neurological aspects of the raised-dots writing system. For Sevier, the course is deeply personal. The 23-year-old lost her vision at 6 years old due to intracranial hypertension and began learning braille the summer after kindergarten.
During a recent class, students — who come from across the University — discussed the 1980 film “To Race the Wind,” the story of blind lawyer, activist, and author Harold Krents ’67, J.D. ’70. The film documents Krents’ experience navigating Harvard’s complex campus as an undergraduate. Sevier and other visually impaired students also shared their own stories about learning to move through the Yard.
Amy Ojeaburu ’25 examines a large tactile globe that was once used by Helen Keller.
A student looks at a braille bingo card.
The first brailler was produced at Perkins in 1951. The braille typewriter has changed little over the years.
“What was really validating and empowering to see was the way Katie had written out the directions that she used to teach another blind student how to navigate a specific route to the Yard,” said Emma Vrabel ’25, a former white-cane user who now has a guide dog. From this, she said, sighted students were better able to understand “how exhausting” it can be to have to memorize various routes across campus.
“Harvard is a hard place to navigate,” said Vrabel, who is still able to see faces, gestures, and large print. “At the beginning of every semester, I teach my guide dog, Holly, how to find our different class buildings and landmarks. Holly has been super helpful in making that a faster, more efficient process, but it’s still a lot of labor.”
Following class discussion, students break into small groups to attempt to decode different film and literature titles in braille.
“The course started out with tactile sensitivity training, where you’re building up your ability to tactilely distinguish between small differences,” said Sevier, who went on to explain that braille characters include six dots placed in two columns of three dots. Letters of the alphabet, known as “Grade One Braille,” are determined by the number and arrangement of dots. “Grade Two Braille,” or contractions, are characters that stand for parts of words or even whole words.
Alex Waysand ’27, an international student from France with an interest in languages, noted the challenge of learning to read braille.
“This is a commonly shared experience among students in the class, but I was struck to discover how insensitive the tips of my fingers were and how hard it was to decipher braille characters,” he said.
Beyond animated, philosophical classroom examination on the writing system and Sevier’s lessons on reading braille, students visited Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. There they were given a tour of the library and museum and had the opportunity to use a giant tactile globe that was favored by Helen Keller, Radcliffe College Class of 1904. The globe, which was built in 1837 and stands 13 feet in circumference, was the first thing that Keller touched when she arrived at Perkins as a student at the age of 8.
Vrabel, who is writing her thesis on Perkins’ outreach program and lived there last summer, was glad her Harvard classmates had the chance to acquaint themselves with the extraordinary world at Perkins. “It was really cool to come back with the class and experience all the exhibits and see people who probably would not have been in the space otherwise,” she said.
Now, more than halfway through the semester, Sevier said she’s happy with how the course has manifested. “I am very impressed with everyone’s ability to put themselves out of their comfort zones to learn more about the braille code,” she said, adding that she hopes students will take with them “the pride and joy blind people have within their community … and that students will be able to see this in other spaces.”
Shell and Sevier plan to teach another iteration of this course next academic year.
In 1949, the U.S. Air Force called upon MIT with an urgent need. Soviet aircraft carrying atomic bombs were capable of reaching the U.S. homeland, and the nation was defenseless. A dedicated center — MIT Lincoln Laboratory — was established. The brightest minds from MIT came together in service to the nation, making scientific and engineering leaps to prototype the first real-time air defense system. The commercial sector and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) then produced and deployed the system, called SAGE, continent-wide.
The SAGE story still describes MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s approach to national security innovation today. The laboratory works with DoD agencies to identify challenging national security gaps, determines if technology can contribute to a solution, and then executes an R&D program to advance critical technologies. The principal products of these programs are advanced technology prototypes, which are often rapidly fabricated and demonstrated through test and evaluation.
Throughout this process, the laboratory closely coordinates with the DoD and other federal agency sponsors, and then transfers the technology in many forms to industry for manufacturing at scale to meet national needs. For nearly 75 years, these technologies have saved lives, responded to emergencies, fueled the nation’s economy, and impacted the daily life of Americans and our allies.
"Lincoln Laboratory accelerates the pace of national security technology development, in partnership with the government, private industry, and the broader national security ecosystem," says Melissa Choi, director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory. "We integrate high-performance teams with advanced facilities and the best technology available to bring novel prototypes to life, providing lasting benefits to the United States."
The Air Force and MIT recently renewed their contract for the continued operation of Lincoln Laboratory. The contract was awarded by the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center Strategic Services Division on Hanscom Air Force Base for a term of five years, with an option for an additional five years. Since Lincoln Laboratory’s founding, MIT has operated the laboratory in the national interest for no fee and strictly on a cost-reimbursement basis. The contract award is indicative of the DoD’s continuing recognition of the long-term value of, and necessity for, cutting-edge R&D in service of national security.
Critical contributions to national security
MIT Lincoln Laboratory is the DoD’s largest federally funded research and development center R&D laboratory. Sponsored by the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, it contributes to a broad range of national security missions and domains.
Among the most critical domains are air and missile defense. Laboratory researchers pioneer advanced radar systems and algorithms crucial for detecting, tracking, and targeting ballistic missiles and aircraft, and serve as scientific advisors to the Reagan Test Site. They also conduct comprehensive studies on missile defense needs, such as the recent National Defense Authorization Act–directed study on the defense of Guam, and provide actionable insights to Congress.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory is also at the forefront of space systems and technologies, enabling the military to monitor space activities and communicate at very high bandwidths. Laboratory engineers developed the innovatively curved detector within the Space Surveillance Telescope that allows the U.S. Space Force to track tiny space objects. It also operates the world's highest-resolution long-range radar for imaging satellites. Recently, the laboratory worked closely with NASA to demonstrate laser communications systems in space, setting a record for the fastest satellite downlink and farthest lasercom link ever achieved. These breakthroughs are heralding a new era in satellite communications for defense and civil missions.
Perhaps most importantly, MIT Lincoln Laboratory is asked to rapidly prototype solutions to urgent and emerging threats. These solutions are both transferred to industry for production and fielded directly to war-fighters, saving lives. To combat improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, the laboratory quickly and iteratively developed several novel systems to detect and defeat explosive devices and insurgent networks. When insurgents were attacking forward-operating bases at night, the laboratory developed an advanced infrared camera system to prevent the attacks. Like other multi-use technologies developed at the laboratory, that system led to a successful commercial startup, which was recently acquired by Anduril.
Responding to domestic crises is also a key part of the laboratory’s mission. After the attacks of 9/11/2001, the laboratory quickly integrated a system to defend the airspace around critical locations in the capital region. More recently, the laboratory’s application of AI to video forensics and physical screening has resulted in commercialized systems deployed in airports and mass transit settings. Over the last decade, the laboratory has adapted its technology for many other homeland security needs, including responses to natural disasters. As one example, researchers repurposed a world-class lidar system first used by the military for terrain mapping to quickly quantify damage after hurricanes.
For all of these efforts, the laboratory exercises responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds, identifying multiple uses for the technologies it develops and introducing disruptive approaches to reduce costs for the government. Sometimes, the system architecture or design results in cost savings, as is the case with the U.S. Air Force's SensorSat; the laboratory’s unique sensor design enabled a satellite 10 times smaller and cheaper than those typically used for space surveillance. Another approach is by creating novel systems from low-cost components. For instance, laboratory researchers discovered a way to make phased-array radars using cell phone electronics instead of traditional expensive components, greatly reducing the cost of deploying the radars for weather and aircraft surveillance.
The laboratory also pursues emerging technology to bring about transformative solutions. In the 1960s, such vision brought semiconductor lasers into the world, and in the 1990s shrunk transistors more than industry imagined possible. Today, laboratory staff are pursuing other new realms: making imagers reconfigurable at the pixel level, designing quantum sensors to transform navigation technology, and developing superconducting electronics to improve computing efficiency.
A long, beneficial relationship between MIT and the DoD
"Lincoln Laboratory has created a deep understanding and knowledge base in core national security missions and associated technologies. We look forward to continuing to work closely with government sponsors, industry, and academia through our trusted, collaborative relationships to address current and future national security challenges and ensure technological superiority," says Scott Anderson, assistant director for operations at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
"MIT has always been proud to support the nation through its operation of Lincoln Laboratory. The long-standing relationship between MIT and the Department of Defense through this storied laboratory has been a difference-maker for the safety, economy, and industrial power of the United States, and we look forward to seeing the innovations ahead of us," notes Ian Waitz, MIT vice president for research.
Under the terms of the renewed contract, MIT will ensure that Lincoln Laboratory remains ready to meet R&D challenges that are critical to national security.
The Air Force and MIT recently renewed their contract for the continued operation of Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded Department of Defense research and development center.
The book uses history and philosophy to explore how to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Members of the incoming Class of 2029 will read it this summer as part of their introduction to the liberal arts tradition that awaits them.
ETH Zurich is expanding its activities in the field of artificial intelligence, boosting Switzerland’s status as an AI hub. The university is also addressing the country’s skilled labour shortage through its education and training programmes. However, ETH Zurich fears that an impending paradigm shift in tuition fees could pose a challenge to its model of success.
When visual information enters the brain, it travels through two pathways that process different aspects of the input. For decades, scientists have hypothesized that one of these pathways, the ventral visual stream, is responsible for recognizing objects, and that it might have been optimized by evolution to do just that.
Consistent with this, in the past decade, MIT scientists have found that when computational models of the anatomy of the ventral stream are optimized to solve the task of object recognition, they are remarkably good predictors of the neural activities in the ventral stream.
However, in a new study, MIT researchers have shown that when they train these types of models on spatial tasks instead, the resulting models are also quite good predictors of the ventral stream’s neural activities. This suggests that the ventral stream may not be exclusively optimized for object recognition.
“This leaves wide open the question about what the ventral stream is being optimized for. I think the dominant perspective a lot of people in our field believe is that the ventral stream is optimized for object recognition, but this study provides a new perspective that the ventral stream could be optimized for spatial tasks as well,” says MIT graduate student Yudi Xie.
Xie is the lead author of the study, which will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations. Other authors of the paper include Weichen Huang, a visiting student through MIT’s Research Science Institute program; Esther Alter, a software engineer at the MIT Quest for Intelligence; Jeremy Schwartz, a sponsored research technical staff member; Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences; and James DiCarlo, the Peter de Florez Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, director of the Quest for Intelligence, and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.
Beyond object recognition
When we look at an object, our visual system can not only identify the object, but also determine other features such as its location, its distance from us, and its orientation in space. Since the early 1980s, neuroscientists have hypothesized that the primate visual system is divided into two pathways: the ventral stream, which performs object-recognition tasks, and the dorsal stream, which processes features related to spatial location.
Over the past decade, researchers have worked to model the ventral stream using a type of deep-learning model known as a convolutional neural network (CNN). Researchers can train these models to perform object-recognition tasks by feeding them datasets containing thousands of images along with category labels describing the images.
The state-of-the-art versions of these CNNs have high success rates at categorizing images. Additionally, researchers have found that the internal activations of the models are very similar to the activities of neurons that process visual information in the ventral stream. Furthermore, the more similar these models are to the ventral stream, the better they perform at object-recognition tasks. This has led many researchers to hypothesize that the dominant function of the ventral stream is recognizing objects.
However, experimental studies, especially a study from the DiCarlo lab in 2016, have found that the ventral stream appears to encode spatial features as well. These features include the object’s size, its orientation (how much it is rotated), and its location within the field of view. Based on these studies, the MIT team aimed to investigate whether the ventral stream might serve additional functions beyond object recognition.
“Our central question in this project was, is it possible that we can think about the ventral stream as being optimized for doing these spatial tasks instead of just categorization tasks?” Xie says.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers set out to train a CNN to identify one or more spatial features of an object, including rotation, location, and distance. To train the models, they created a new dataset of synthetic images. These images show objects such as tea kettles or calculators superimposed on different backgrounds, in locations and orientations that are labeled to help the model learn them.
The researchers found that CNNs that were trained on just one of these spatial tasks showed a high level of “neuro-alignment” with the ventral stream — very similar to the levels seen in CNN models trained on object recognition.
The researchers measure neuro-alignment using a technique that DiCarlo’s lab has developed, which involves asking the models, once trained, to predict the neural activity that a particular image would generate in the brain. The researchers found that the better the models performed on the spatial task they had been trained on, the more neuro-alignment they showed.
“I think we cannot assume that the ventral stream is just doing object categorization, because many of these other functions, such as spatial tasks, also can lead to this strong correlation between models’ neuro-alignment and their performance,” Xie says. “Our conclusion is that you can optimize either through categorization or doing these spatial tasks, and they both give you a ventral-stream-like model, based on our current metrics to evaluate neuro-alignment.”
Comparing models
The researchers then investigated why these two approaches — training for object recognition and training for spatial features — led to similar degrees of neuro-alignment. To do that, they performed an analysis known as centered kernel alignment (CKA), which allows them to measure the degree of similarity between representations in different CNNs. This analysis showed that in the early to middle layers of the models, the representations that the models learn are nearly indistinguishable.
“In these early layers, essentially you cannot tell these models apart by just looking at their representations,” Xie says. “It seems like they learn some very similar or unified representation in the early to middle layers, and in the later stages they diverge to support different tasks.”
The researchers hypothesize that even when models are trained to analyze just one feature, they also take into account “non-target” features — those that they are not trained on. When objects have greater variability in non-target features, the models tend to learn representations more similar to those learned by models trained on other tasks. This suggests that the models are using all of the information available to them, which may result in different models coming up with similar representations, the researchers say.
“More non-target variability actually helps the model learn a better representation, instead of learning a representation that’s ignorant of them,” Xie says. “It’s possible that the models, although they’re trained on one target, are simultaneously learning other things due to the variability of these non-target features.”
In future work, the researchers hope to develop new ways to compare different models, in hopes of learning more about how each one develops internal representations of objects based on differences in training tasks and training data.
“There could be still slight differences between these models, even though our current way of measuring how similar these models are to the brain tells us they’re on a very similar level. That suggests maybe there’s still some work to be done to improve upon how we can compare the model to the brain, so that we can better understand what exactly the ventral stream is optimized for,” Xie says.
The research was funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The models were trained on a dataset of synthetic images like the ones pictured, with objects such as tea kettles or calculators superimposed on different backgrounds. Researchers trained the model to identify one or more spatial features of an object, including rotation, location, and distance.
Harvard won’t comply with demands from Trump administration
Harvard University.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Changes pushed by government ‘unmoored from the law,’ Garber says. ‘The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.’
Harvard on Monday rejected demands from the Trump administration that threaten $9 billion in research funding, arguing that the changes pushed by the government exceed its lawful authority and infringe on both the University’s independence and its constitutional rights.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the community. He added: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Garber’s message was a response to a letter sent late Friday by the Trump administration outlining demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands include “audits” of academic programs and departments, along with the viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, and changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices.
The $9 billion under review by the government includes $256 million in research support for Harvard plus $8.7 billion in future commitments to the University and several renowned hospitals, among them Mass General, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Boston Children’s. Late Monday, the Trump administration announced that it was moving to freeze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard.
The Trump administration has been critical of Harvard’s handling of student protests related to the Gaza war. It has accused the University of failing to adequately protect Jewish students on campus from antisemitic discrimination and harassment, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Garber emphasized that Harvard remains committed to fighting antisemitism, including through a series of campus measures implemented over the past 15 months. In addition, he said, the University has complied with the Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious admissions and has worked to broaden intellectual and viewpoint diversity at Harvard.
The University’s objectives in fighting antisemitism will “not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate,” Garber said. “The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community.”
Harvard is just one of dozens of schools targeted by the Trump administration in recent weeks. Last month, the Department of Education sent letters to 60 universities, including Columbia, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, and Tufts, threatening enforcement actions for noncompliance with anti-discrimination provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The administration has taken the additional step of freezing research funding at several institutions.
Robust research and innovation partnerships among universities, the federal government, and private industry date to World War II. Government-backed research conducted at schools across the nation has led to countless discoveries, devices, treatments, and other advances that have helped shape the modern world. Computers, robotics, artificial intelligence, vaccines, and treatments for devastating diseases have all stemmed from government-financed research that crosses from labs and libraries into industry, creating new products, companies, and jobs.
In March, a report from the nonprofit United for Medical Research showed that every dollar of research funded by the National Institutes of Health — the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research — generates $2.56 in economic activity. In 2024 alone, the NIH awarded $36.9 billion in research grants, generating $94.5 billion in economic activity and supporting 408,000 jobs, according to the report.
In an interview on Monday, Daniel P. Gross, an associate professor of business administration at Duke University and co-author of a recent NBER working paper on the decades-long partnership between the U.S. government and higher ed, said the withdrawal of research funding from universities would be “catastrophic” to American innovation.
“Universities are such an integral part of the modern U.S. innovation system that it wouldn’t stand without them,” said Gross, who taught at Harvard Business School before moving to Duke.
George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, said that biomedicine has long depended on a strong partnership with the federal government, one that has paid off for Americans in life-saving advances. Just this month, he noted, the Medical School’s Joel Habener was recognized with a Breakthrough Prize for his work on GLP-1, which has led to diabetes and anti-obesity drugs. Daley also cited transformative work in cardiovascular health, cancer immunotherapy, and a host of other conditions.
“As we look back over the 70 years of that partnership, it has returned brilliantly on the investments the government has made,” he said. “The fact that we have Harvard, MIT, and all these extraordinary hospitals, that has been a magnet for venture capital investment and now we have the pharmaceutical research infrastructure being brought into our community. All of this is a jewel in the crown of American bioscience.”
The threat to that science is an even bigger issue in an era of stepped-up competition with China, he added.
“It seems self-defeating and injurious to the economy and to U.S. leadership in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals,” Daley said. “It feels like the hammer has come down in a way that threatens something that is intrinsic to U.S. leadership and ultimately to our economic competitiveness with places like China, which are investing very, very heavily in biotechnology.”
In his message to the community, Garber stressed the contributions of university research to scientific and medical progress while underlining the importance of independent thought and scholarship.
“Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he said. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom.”
As we mature from childhood, our vocabulary — as well as the ways we use it — grows, and our experiences become richer, allowing us to think, reason, and interact with others with specificity and intention. Accordingly, our word choices evolve to align with our personal values, ethics, cultural norms, and views. Over time, most of us develop an internal “guide” that enables us to learn context behind conversation; it also frequently directs us away from sharing information and sentiments that are, or could be, harmful or inappropriate. As it turns out, large language models (LLMs) — which are trained on extensive, public datasets and therefore often have biases and toxic language baked in — can gain a similar capacity to moderate their own language.
A new method from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and IBM Research, called self-disciplined autoregressive sampling (SASA), allows LLMs to detoxify their own outputs, without sacrificing fluency.
Unlike other detoxifying methods, this decoding algorithm learns a boundary between toxic/nontoxic subspaces within the LLM’s own internal representation, without altering the parameters of the model, the need for retraining, or an external reward model. Then, during inference, the algorithm assesses the toxicity value of the partially generated phrase: tokens (words) already generated and accepted, along with each potential new token that could reasonably be chosen for proximity to the classifier boundary. Next, it selects a word option that places the phrase in the nontoxic space, ultimately offering a fast and efficient way to generate less-toxic language.
“We wanted to find out a way with any existing language model [that], during the generation process, the decoding can be subject to some human values; the example here we are taking is toxicity,” says the study’s lead author Ching-Yun “Irene” Ko PhD ’24, a former graduate intern with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and a current research scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.
Ko’s co-authors include Luca Daniel, professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and Ko’s graduate advisor; and several members of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and/or IBM Research — Pin-Yu Chen, Payel Das, Youssef Mroueh, Soham Dan, Georgios Kollias, Subhajit Chaudhury, and Tejaswini Pedapati. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Finding the “guardrails”
The training resources behind LLMs almost always include content collected from public spaces like the internet and other readily available datasets. As such, curse words and bullying/unpalatable language is a component, although some of it is in the context of literary works. It then follows that LLMs can innately produce — or be tricked into generating — dangerous and/or biased content, which often contains disagreeable words or hateful language, even from innocuous prompts. Further, it’s been found that they can learn and amplify language that’s not preferred or even detrimental for many applications and downstream tasks — leading to the need for mitigation or correction strategies.
There are many ways to achieve robust language generation that’s fair and value-aligned. Some methods use LLM retraining with a sanitized dataset, which is costly, takes time, and may alter the LLM’s performance; others employ decoding external reward models, like sampling or beam search, which take longer to run and require more memory. In the case of SASA, Ko, Daniel, and the IBM Research team developed a method that leverages the autoregressive nature of LLMs, and using a decoding-based strategy during the LLM’s inference, gradually steers the generation — one token at a time — away from unsavory or undesired outputs and toward better language.
The research group achieved this by building a linear classifier that operates on the learned subspace from the LLM’s embedding. When LLMs are trained, words with similar meanings are placed closely together in vector space and further away from dissimilar words; the researchers hypothesized that an LLM’s embedding would therefore also capture contextual information, which could be used for detoxification. The researchers used datasets that contained sets of a prompt (first half of a sentence or thought), a response (the completion of that sentence), and human-attributed annotation, like toxic or nontoxic, preferred or not preferred, with continuous labels from 0-1, denoting increasing toxicity. A Bayes-optimal classifier was then applied to learn and figuratively draw a line between the binary subspaces within the sentence embeddings, represented by positive values (nontoxic space) and negative numbers (toxic space).
The SASA system then works by re-weighting the sampling probabilities of newest potential token based on the value of it and the generated phrase’s distance to the classifier, with the goal of remaining close to the original sampling distribution.
To illustrate, if a user is generating a potential token #12 in a sentence, the LLM will look over its full vocabulary for a reasonable word, based on the 11 words that came before it, and using top-k, top-p, it will filter and produce roughly 10 tokens to select from. SASA then evaluates each of those tokens in the partially completed sentence for its proximity to the classifier (i.e., the value of tokens 1-11, plus each potential token 12). Tokens that produce sentences in the positive space are encouraged, while those in the negative space are penalized. Additionally, the further away from the classifier, the stronger the impact.
“The goal is to change the autoregressive sampling process by re-weighting the probability of good tokens. If the next token is likely to be toxic given the context, then we are going to reduce the sampling probability for those prone to be toxic tokens,” says Ko. The researchers chose to do it this way “because the things we say, whether it’s benign or not, is subject to the context.”
Tamping down toxicity for value matching
The researchers evaluated their method against several baseline interventions with three LLMs of increasing size; all were transformers and autoregressive-based: GPT2-Large, Llama2-7b, and Llama 3.1-8b-Instruct, with 762 million, 7 billion, and 8 billion parameters respectively. For each prompt, the LLM was tasked with completing the sentence/phrase 25 times, and PerspectiveAPI scored them from 0 to 1, with anything over 0.5 being toxic. The team looked at two metrics: the average maximum toxicity score over the 25 generations for all the prompts, and the toxic rate, which was the probability of producing at least one toxic phrase over 25 generations. Reduced fluency (and therefore increased perplexity) were also analyzed. SASA was tested to complete RealToxicityPrompts (RPT), BOLD, and AttaQ datasets, which contained naturally occurring, English sentence prompts.
The researchers ramped up the complexity of their trials for detoxification by SASA, beginning with nontoxic prompts from the RPT dataset, looking for harmful sentence completions. Then, they escalated it to more challenging prompts from RPT that were more likely to produce concerning results, and as well applied SASA to the instruction-tuned model to assess if their technique could further reduce unwanted ouputs. They also used the BOLD and AttaQ benchmarks to examine the general applicability of SASA in detoxification. With the BOLD dataset, the researchers further looked for gender bias in language generations and tried to achieve a balanced toxic rate between the genders. Lastly, the team looked at runtime, memory usage, and how SASA could be combined with word filtering to achieve healthy and/or helpful language generation.
“If we think about how human beings think and react in the world, we do see bad things, so it’s not about allowing the language model to see only the good things. It’s about understanding the full spectrum — both good and bad,” says Ko, “and choosing to uphold our values when we speak and act.”
Overall, SASA achieved significant toxic language generation reductions, performing on par with RAD, a state-of-the-art external reward model technique. However, it was universally observed that stronger detoxification accompanied a decrease in fluency. Before intervention, the LLMs produced more toxic responses for female labeled prompts than male; however, SASA was able to also significantly cut down harmful responses, making them more equalized. Similarly, word filtering on top of SASA did markedly lower toxicity levels, but it also hindered the ability of the LLM to respond coherently.
A great aspect of this work is that it’s a well-defined, constrained optimization problem, says Ko, meaning that balance between open language generation that sounds natural and the need to reduce unwanted language can be achieved and tuned.
Further, Ko says, SASA could work well for multiple attributes in the future: “For human beings, we have multiple human values. We don’t want to say toxic things, but we also want to be truthful, helpful, and loyal … If you were to fine-tune a model for all of these values, it would require more computational resources and, of course, additional training.” On account of the lightweight manner of SASA, it could easily be applied in these circumstances: “If you want to work with multiple values, it’s simply checking the generation’s position in multiple subspaces. It only adds marginal overhead in terms of the compute and parameters,” says Ko, leading to more positive, fair, and principle-aligned language.
This work was supported, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the National Science Foundation.
Large language models naturally contain biases and can generate toxic language, but a new technique from MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers helps them to produce less-harmful outputs while retaining fluency.
As we mature from childhood, our vocabulary — as well as the ways we use it — grows, and our experiences become richer, allowing us to think, reason, and interact with others with specificity and intention. Accordingly, our word choices evolve to align with our personal values, ethics, cultural norms, and views. Over time, most of us develop an internal “guide” that enables us to learn context behind conversation; it also frequently directs us away from sharing information and sentiments that are, or could be, harmful or inappropriate. As it turns out, large language models (LLMs) — which are trained on extensive, public datasets and therefore often have biases and toxic language baked in — can gain a similar capacity to moderate their own language.
A new method from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and IBM Research, called self-disciplined autoregressive sampling (SASA), allows LLMs to detoxify their own outputs, without sacrificing fluency.
Unlike other detoxifying methods, this decoding algorithm learns a boundary between toxic/nontoxic subspaces within the LLM’s own internal representation, without altering the parameters of the model, the need for retraining, or an external reward model. Then, during inference, the algorithm assesses the toxicity value of the partially generated phrase: tokens (words) already generated and accepted, along with each potential new token that could reasonably be chosen for proximity to the classifier boundary. Next, it selects a word option that places the phrase in the nontoxic space, ultimately offering a fast and efficient way to generate less-toxic language.
“We wanted to find out a way with any existing language model [that], during the generation process, the decoding can be subject to some human values; the example here we are taking is toxicity,” says the study’s lead author Ching-Yun “Irene” Ko PhD ’24, a former graduate intern with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and a current research scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.
Ko’s co-authors include Luca Daniel, professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and Ko’s graduate advisor; and several members of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and/or IBM Research — Pin-Yu Chen, Payel Das, Youssef Mroueh, Soham Dan, Georgios Kollias, Subhajit Chaudhury, and Tejaswini Pedapati. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Finding the “guardrails”
The training resources behind LLMs almost always include content collected from public spaces like the internet and other readily available datasets. As such, curse words and bullying/unpalatable language is a component, although some of it is in the context of literary works. It then follows that LLMs can innately produce — or be tricked into generating — dangerous and/or biased content, which often contains disagreeable words or hateful language, even from innocuous prompts. Further, it’s been found that they can learn and amplify language that’s not preferred or even detrimental for many applications and downstream tasks — leading to the need for mitigation or correction strategies.
There are many ways to achieve robust language generation that’s fair and value-aligned. Some methods use LLM retraining with a sanitized dataset, which is costly, takes time, and may alter the LLM’s performance; others employ decoding external reward models, like sampling or beam search, which take longer to run and require more memory. In the case of SASA, Ko, Daniel, and the IBM Research team developed a method that leverages the autoregressive nature of LLMs, and using a decoding-based strategy during the LLM’s inference, gradually steers the generation — one token at a time — away from unsavory or undesired outputs and toward better language.
The research group achieved this by building a linear classifier that operates on the learned subspace from the LLM’s embedding. When LLMs are trained, words with similar meanings are placed closely together in vector space and further away from dissimilar words; the researchers hypothesized that an LLM’s embedding would therefore also capture contextual information, which could be used for detoxification. The researchers used datasets that contained sets of a prompt (first half of a sentence or thought), a response (the completion of that sentence), and human-attributed annotation, like toxic or nontoxic, preferred or not preferred, with continuous labels from 0-1, denoting increasing toxicity. A Bayes-optimal classifier was then applied to learn and figuratively draw a line between the binary subspaces within the sentence embeddings, represented by positive values (nontoxic space) and negative numbers (toxic space).
The SASA system then works by re-weighting the sampling probabilities of newest potential token based on the value of it and the generated phrase’s distance to the classifier, with the goal of remaining close to the original sampling distribution.
To illustrate, if a user is generating a potential token #12 in a sentence, the LLM will look over its full vocabulary for a reasonable word, based on the 11 words that came before it, and using top-k, top-p, it will filter and produce roughly 10 tokens to select from. SASA then evaluates each of those tokens in the partially completed sentence for its proximity to the classifier (i.e., the value of tokens 1-11, plus each potential token 12). Tokens that produce sentences in the positive space are encouraged, while those in the negative space are penalized. Additionally, the further away from the classifier, the stronger the impact.
“The goal is to change the autoregressive sampling process by re-weighting the probability of good tokens. If the next token is likely to be toxic given the context, then we are going to reduce the sampling probability for those prone to be toxic tokens,” says Ko. The researchers chose to do it this way “because the things we say, whether it’s benign or not, is subject to the context.”
Tamping down toxicity for value matching
The researchers evaluated their method against several baseline interventions with three LLMs of increasing size; all were transformers and autoregressive-based: GPT2-Large, Llama2-7b, and Llama 3.1-8b-Instruct, with 762 million, 7 billion, and 8 billion parameters respectively. For each prompt, the LLM was tasked with completing the sentence/phrase 25 times, and PerspectiveAPI scored them from 0 to 1, with anything over 0.5 being toxic. The team looked at two metrics: the average maximum toxicity score over the 25 generations for all the prompts, and the toxic rate, which was the probability of producing at least one toxic phrase over 25 generations. Reduced fluency (and therefore increased perplexity) were also analyzed. SASA was tested to complete RealToxicityPrompts (RPT), BOLD, and AttaQ datasets, which contained naturally occurring, English sentence prompts.
The researchers ramped up the complexity of their trials for detoxification by SASA, beginning with nontoxic prompts from the RPT dataset, looking for harmful sentence completions. Then, they escalated it to more challenging prompts from RPT that were more likely to produce concerning results, and as well applied SASA to the instruction-tuned model to assess if their technique could further reduce unwanted ouputs. They also used the BOLD and AttaQ benchmarks to examine the general applicability of SASA in detoxification. With the BOLD dataset, the researchers further looked for gender bias in language generations and tried to achieve a balanced toxic rate between the genders. Lastly, the team looked at runtime, memory usage, and how SASA could be combined with word filtering to achieve healthy and/or helpful language generation.
“If we think about how human beings think and react in the world, we do see bad things, so it’s not about allowing the language model to see only the good things. It’s about understanding the full spectrum — both good and bad,” says Ko, “and choosing to uphold our values when we speak and act.”
Overall, SASA achieved significant toxic language generation reductions, performing on par with RAD, a state-of-the-art external reward model technique. However, it was universally observed that stronger detoxification accompanied a decrease in fluency. Before intervention, the LLMs produced more toxic responses for female labeled prompts than male; however, SASA was able to also significantly cut down harmful responses, making them more equalized. Similarly, word filtering on top of SASA did markedly lower toxicity levels, but it also hindered the ability of the LLM to respond coherently.
A great aspect of this work is that it’s a well-defined, constrained optimization problem, says Ko, meaning that balance between open language generation that sounds natural and the need to reduce unwanted language can be achieved and tuned.
Further, Ko says, SASA could work well for multiple attributes in the future: “For human beings, we have multiple human values. We don’t want to say toxic things, but we also want to be truthful, helpful, and loyal … If you were to fine-tune a model for all of these values, it would require more computational resources and, of course, additional training.” On account of the lightweight manner of SASA, it could easily be applied in these circumstances: “If you want to work with multiple values, it’s simply checking the generation’s position in multiple subspaces. It only adds marginal overhead in terms of the compute and parameters,” says Ko, leading to more positive, fair, and principle-aligned language.
This work was supported, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the National Science Foundation.
Large language models naturally contain biases and can generate toxic language, but a new technique from MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers helps them to produce less-harmful outputs while retaining fluency.
RAZA Ballet Folklórico performs at Sanders Theatre.
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Artist of the Year applauds student performers for ‘leaning into authenticity’
Dance dominated the 39th annual Cultural Rhythms festival as students showcased impressive footwork from around the world.
“It just feels right to be surrounded by so many young individuals who are dedicating themselves to representation and to leaning into authenticity,” said five-time Latin Grammy nominee Becky G, honored as Artist of the Year at the April 5 production.
Since 1986, Cultural Rhythms has united the Harvard community for a celebration of the cultural and ethnic diversity of its student body. The tradition has grown into a weeklong series, including a fashion show and food fair. The grand finale, hosted by the Harvard Foundation, is a student-led performing arts showcase and Artist of the Year ceremony at Sanders Theatre.
Becky G acknowledges the audience after receiving her award.
Harvard University
The award’s past recipients include musical performers Lady Gaga and Rubén Blades as well as actors Courtney B. Vance, Angela Bassett, Eva Longoria, and Viola Davis.
“It’s a heavy-hitting list of incredible individuals who’ve accomplished so many things,” Becky G, 28, told the Gazette. “I feel like I’m just getting started.”
This year’s around-the-world tour featured Harvard Dankira Dance Troupe, with its Ethiopian- and Eritrean-inspired folk dances, and Bhangra, which pumped up the crowd with electric Punjabi moves. Audience members were pulled to their feet by Omo Naija x The Wahala Boys, who put on a Vegas-worthy dance skit. Becky G was seen cheering from her seat as Bryant Valenzuela ’25 and Mariachi Veritas x RAZA Ballet Folklórico performed Mexico’s varied movement and musical traditions.
The 2½-hour program, titled “Global Encounters,” included musical performances by 10 student groups. A highlight came when the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College offered their powerful rendition of “Can’t Give Up Now” by the duo Mary Mary. The song includes an adapted chorus from the Black gospel classic “I Don’t Feel Noways Tired.”
The Harvard Asian American Dance Troupe.
Harvard University
Omo Naija x The Wahala Boys.
Harvard University
Sebastian Feune (center right) rehearses with other members of Mariachi Véritas.
Harvard University
Habiba Braimah, senior director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, offered her thoughts on the impact of these sets. “We are reminded that art is powerful,” she told the audience. “Dance, storytelling and music is healing, and culture — all cultures, your culture — matters in a world that makes you feel divided, where our identities might be misunderstood or even challenged.”
Becky G was honored for artistic excellence and other positive contributions. At the end of the evening, the singer, songwriter, actress, and activist took the stage with festival co-directors Anapaula Barba ’25 and Hayat Hassan ’25 for a conversation covering everything from career to mental health and philanthropy.
Becky G, whose real name is Rebecca Marie Gomez, has been open in the past about her anxiety. At Sanders, she encouraged those in the midst of mental health struggles to ask for help, no matter what cultural taboos they face.
“I realized as I got older that my responsibility isn’t necessarily to be a role model but to be a real model,” Becky G said in an interview. “That means speaking to the fact that I am imperfect and that I make mistakes.”
With more than 28 billion career streams and high-profile roles in the films “Power Rangers” (2017) and DC’s “Blue Beetle” (2023), along with her hit songs “Shower” and “Mayores,” performed with Bad Bunny, Becky G uses her position to raise awareness for vulnerable communities.
“One thing that comes to mind is that there’s no lack of talent and there’s no lack of passionate individuals who are willing to do what it takes to do the work, but there is a lack of opportunity,” she said.
She is active with Altadena Girls, an organization supporting girls who lost their homes in this year’s Eaton Canyon fire.
A big fan of the late Selena Quintanilla — aka the Queen of Tejano Music — as well as contemporary reggaeton artists, she celebrated the fact that Latinx artists no longer need to “cross over.” Breaking into the U.S. market may have required performing in English for past generations. But Spanish-speaking singers today can stick to their roots.
“When we open the door for ourselves, we’re holding it open for the next generations and we’re making things better brick by brick,” said Becky G, the first Latina to receive Artist of the Year in a decade.
Helping the U.S. fight addiction, cancer, other afflictions
4 min read
A snapshot of research backed by partnership between government agencies and higher ed
Examples of how Harvard scholars are tackling real-world problems — through critical research supported by federal funding — appear daily in the Gazette. The following is a snapshot of recent coverage.
The fentanyl crisis hits close to home for Harvard-trained researcher Travis Donahoe, whose research probes the forces driving opioid deaths and the best ways to intervene. “Ending this epidemic is one of the most important changes we can make to improve the health — and dignity — of all Americans.”
A stem cell therapy developed at Mass Eye and Ear safely restored the cornea’s surface for 14 patients in a clinical trial. When a person suffers a cornea injury, it can deplete the limbal epithelial cells, which can never regenerate. People with these injuries often experience persistent pain and visual difficulties.
Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham developed olfactory tests — in which participants sniff odor labels that have been placed on a card — to assess people’s ability to discriminate, identify, and remember odors.
“We saw a critical gap in prenatal care and an opportunity to define the genetic disorders that are treatable during this time,” said the study’s senior author. “These conditions are actionable — meaning that, empowered with diagnostic information, we can intervene early and improve outcomes.”
Chemist and Ph.D. candidate Brandon Campbell sees in silver an opportunity to lower the cost of medicine in the U.S., where consumers pay nearly three times more than 33 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
A Harvard startup has developed a “third way” of pulling moisture from the air that works like a coffee filter. It uses much less energy than traditional air conditioners and dehumidifiers and is more stable than desiccant systems.
The fate of the universe hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy, which is the force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. New research suggesting that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be weakening suggests the standard model of how the universe works may need an update.
New insights on how inflammation sparked by the body’s immune response alters mood and behavior could lead to alternatives to traditional psychiatric drugs that act directly on the brain. These treatments would work indirectly by altering immune chemicals outside the brain.
“Studies have previously investigated dietary patterns in the context of specific diseases or how long people live,” said one of the researchers. “Ours takes a multifaceted view, asking, how does diet impact people’s ability to live independently and enjoy a good quality of life as they age?”
Over the course of his Harvard doctoral studies, Rob Devlin must have made 100 of a new kind of mini-lens, experimenting with materials and prototyping new designs to bend light like a traditional camera only using a series of tiny pillars on a millimeter-thin wafer.
For the first time, scientists succeeded in trapping molecules to perform quantum operations. The technology promises speeds exponentially faster than classical computers, which could enable game-changing advances in fields including medicine, science, and finance.
Garber message: ‘The Promise of American Higher Education’
Photo by Grace DuVal
1 min read
President shares University’s response to Trump administration's demands
President Alan Garber on Monday sent a letter to the Harvard community with an update on the University’s response to recent demands by the Trump administration tied to federal support for research. Read his message, titled “The Promise of American Higher Education,” here.
Ostriker is responsible for groundbreaking discoveries that forever changed the way astronomers think about what the universe is made of, including the existence of dark matter.
Teams from eLab, the Runway Startup Postdocs Program and BioVenture eLab pitched their business ideas at the annual Cornell Silicon Valley: Student Startup Showcase at San Francisco’s Autodesk Gallery on March 27.
Leveraging social capital to defend worthy causes, people in need of representation
Legal scholar and Law School grad returns for student panel
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Margaret Montoya, J.D. ’78.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Law school provides job security with high earning potential, legal scholar Margaret Montoya, J.D. ’78, said during a March 27 student panel at Harvard Law School. But it also gives students cross-functional skills, social capital, and the chance to work for the greater good.
Montoya, the first Latina to be accepted to Harvard Law School, urged the students to give back by engaging with communities in need of legal representation, finding worthy causes to defend, and advocating for democracy.
“I was asked a question just a moment ago, ‘Why would you return to Harvard?’” said Montoya. “I return for you … I would hope that you go out and change the world. You can use the social capital offered by a Harvard degree … It is a certificate that’s worth a lot. Use it. Come back here. And help others.”
“You can use the social capital offered by a Harvard degree … It is a certificate that’s worth a lot. Use it. Come back here. And help others.”
Margaret Montoya, J.D. ’78,
A native New Mexican, Montoya, now professor emerita, has been at the University of New Mexico Law School since 1992. She has taught courses in constitutional rights, torts, contracts, clinical law, and employment law, and has written about race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and language.
After graduating from HLS, Montoya was awarded Harvard University’s Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, which allowed her to travel through Europe and Asia. Over the years, she has often returned to campus to meet and talk with students about how to make the most of their legal educations.
During her talk, Montoya compared her experience as a law student in the 1970s, when she was the only Latina student in the HLS classrooms, to that of students today.
“When I look at you, the demography, the social geography is very different,” said Montoya. “I arrived as a child from a low-income family … This is a place that teaches you about power. That is something that is worth experiencing because in order to change the society we have to understand power.”
Montoya asked student panelists what they felt were the biggest gaps in their legal education. Many responded that their courses sometimes lacked perspective on how the law affects the lives of average Americans, skipping over issues of race, social class, politics, and history.
“There’s a lot missing in the education of law students. First and foremost, it’s how the law impacts real people,” said Liz Ross, J.D. ’21 and a Ph.D. candidate in history. “That was probably the biggest gap that I saw when I was here … I think empathy is missing in legal education.”
When asked by Montoya how they enhanced their legal education, panelists underscored the importance of working with like-minded people by forming study or reading groups, getting involved with student organizations, and bringing new voices and perspectives to classrooms.
Montoya asked students to use their law degrees to help vulnerable communities, defend social and racial progress, and protect democracy when it’s threatened by authoritarian forces. A law degree offers tools to become guardians of democracy, she said.
“Harvard transfers social capital to those of us who are here and who graduate,” Montoya said during an interview after her talk. “We can turn that social capital to become stewards of democracy. We can name ourselves as being on the side of justice. Harvard Law School gives us the social capital to be able use different tools to change the status quo.”
The Salata Institute series, “Harvard Voices on Climate Change,” featured Harvard Law School’s Carrie Jenks and Richard Lazarus with Salata Director Jim Stock moderating.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Environmental law experts say rollbacks will reverse advances in recent decades
A Harvard expert in environmental law said a recent set of Trump administration regulatory changes targeting initiatives in the climate change battle will reverse progress made over decades.
Richard Lazarus, Harvard Law School’s Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law, said the late U.S. Sen. John McCain described the first Trump administration’s approach to cutting government programs as using a “meat cleaver” rather than a scalpel.
“I would say that Trump 2.0 in the first 71 days has been more akin to a nuclear explosion, with a bull’s eye on programs related to climate change,” Lazarus said on April 1, during an online discussion of the administration’s new goals for the Environmental Protection Agency disclosed last month.
Regulatory whipsawing is common, Lazarus said, as administrations undo what they see as predecessors’ harmful actions and overreach. Efforts in Washington D.C. today, however, go far beyond disagreement over how to regulate, questioning whether to regulate at all.
Carrie Jenks, executive director of HLS’ Environmental and Energy Law Program, agreed, saying that in mid-March the EPA laid out a roadmap of 31 steps it would take, targeting issues including climate change-related regulation, power plant and greenhouse gas reporting requirements, and support for electric vehicles. The steps also included reconsidering restrictions on the oil and gas industry, mercury standards that affect coal power plants, wastewater regulations for oil and gas development, air quality standards, and others.
Lazarus and Jenks’ assessments were part of a conversation hosted by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The hourlong event, part of its “Harvard Voices on Climate Change” series, was moderated by Salata Institute Director James Stock, Harvard’s vice provost for climate and sustainability and the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy.
A key administration initiative, they said, is the launch of a formal reconsideration of the 2009 “endangerment finding.”
That finding, ordered by the Supreme Court in 2007, concluded that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers human health. It provided the legal foundation under the Clean Air Act for government regulation of climate warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
Jenks described the finding as “a trigger” for subsequent regulation, so an attractive target for those seeking to undermine federal action on climate change. Attacking the decision on the basis of scientific fact, however, may be difficult, since the science is well-established.
Instead, Jenks said the administration might try to argue that the EPA doesn’t have the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases or has the discretion to choose not to.
“I think they’re going for more legally risky strategies that have more damaging outcomes if they’re successful,” Jenks said. “Each action taken by the EPA under [Barack] Obama, [Joe] Biden, and even in some cases, the first Trump administration, recognized climate change, and the debate was about how to regulate, not whether to regulate. Now, I think, it’s very different from what we’ve seen in the past.”
Whatever approach they take, Jenks said, they will have to go through a process of proposing regulatory change, taking public comments, and finalizing the rule, which takes time and allows environmental groups and others who disagree to voice their opinions.
“I’m sure those actions will then be litigated, and any regulatory action should need to be grounded in the statutory criteria that Congress has required EPA to consider, which generally has at least one component connected to emissions or pollution reduction,” Jenks said.
Jenks said she expects the EPA to move quickly, but that could become difficult if staff cuts deplete the agency’s expertise on these matters, as the underlying rationale for regulatory change has to have supporting data.
Another option, Lazarus said, is the GOP-dominated Congress could decide to use the Congressional Review Act as a weapon against environmental regulation. The law would allow the House and Senate, by majority vote, to overturn a rule by any federal agency and then prohibit that agency from reissuing the rule or creating a similar rule unless authorized by Congress.
That strategy was in full view in February when Congress overturned EPA’s rule implementing the “waste emissions charge” on methane emissions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act. The result, Lazarus said, is that though the IRA requires companies emitting methane to pay the charge, there are no regulations in place for that to happen, leaving the companies and the fee in limbo.
Congress might employ the same strategy to remove California’s ability to exceed federal regulations on vehicle emissions standards, which has not only allowed California to create the strictest standards in the country, but, once set, can be followed by other states.
The IRA itself is under attack as the administration tries to claw back funding in an array of programs intended to provide incentives for climate-friendly action. Like the moves that gutted USAID, choosing not to spend funds on congressionally approved IRA programs on climate change is illegal, Lazarus said. But the administration appears to be unconcerned with running afoul of the law and is pushing hard to bring change quickly.
“They don’t mind forcing the courts to act and litigation takes time,” Lazarus said. “The practical effect of a freeze and a contract violation is it takes time to undo it. In the meantime, money isn’t being spent. The contractors aren’t getting it. People’s salaries aren’t being paid. People have leases that aren’t being paid. Right now, it’s chaos among all those recipients around the country. And the Trump administration will keep changing the legal rationale, making it very elusive and just saying, ‘We’re pausing it,’ or ‘We have to study it more carefully.’ The practical effect is quite serious.”
In the end, Jenks and Lazarus agreed, it may be the effect on individual lives that does the greatest harm. Regulatory changes can be undone or rewritten and new regulations passed, but layoffs, reassignments, and hostile working conditions threaten to rob the agency of the scientific and legal expertise that has ensured continuity from administration to administration.
While some of the firings and other personnel steps undertaken by the new administration may be halted or reversed by the courts, people are leaving voluntarily because they are demoralized and have bills to pay.
“Many are leaving,” Lazarus said. “To lose not just the regulations, but potentially lose that career expertise, and the funding of the IRA, is potentially devastating.”
A new, error-corrected method for detecting cancer from blood samples is much more sensitive and accurate than prior methods and may be useful for monitoring disease status in patients following treatment.
Thousands of spectators lined the banks of the River Thames on 13 April to witness a dramatic afternoon of action, with millions more following live on the BBC.
Cambridge Women secured their eighth consecutive win in the 79th Women’s Boat Race, extending their overall record to 49 victories to Oxford’s 30. The Men’s crew, too, were victorious in defending their title in the 170th edition of the event, notching up their 88th win, with Oxford sitting on 81.
Goldie, the Cambridge Men’s Reserve Crew, won the Men’s Reserve Race, while Blondie, the Cambridge Women’s Reserve Crew, won the Women’s Reserve Race. And the day before, the 2025 Lightweight Boat Race also saw two wins for Cambridge.
Cambridge’s Claire Collins said it was an incredible feeling to win the race.
“This is so cool, it’s really an incredible honour to share this with the whole club,” she said.
The Women’s Race was stopped initially after an oar clash, but Umpire Sir Matthew Pinsent allowed the race to resume after a restart. Claire said that the crew had prepared for eventualities such as a restart and so were able to lean on their training when it happened.
“I had total confidence in the crew to regroup. Our focus was to get back on pace and get going as soon as possible and that’s what we did.”
For Cambridge Men’s President Luca Ferraro, it was his final Boat Roat campaign, having raced in the Blue Boat for the last three years, winning the last two.
He said: “It was a great race. The guys really stepped up. That’s something that our Coach Rob Baker said to us before we went out there, that each of us had to step up individually and come together and play our part in what we were about to do. I couldn’t be prouder of the guys, they really delivered today.”
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, congratulated all the crews following the wins.
“I am in awe of these students and what they have achieved, and what Cambridge University Boat Club has been able to create,” she said.
“These students are out in the early hours of the morning training and then trying to make it to 9am lectures. It’s so inspiring. And a complete clean sweep – this was an incredibly impressive showing by Cambridge, I am so proud of them.”
The Cambridge Blue Boats featured student athletes drawn from Christ’s College, Downing College, Emmanuel College, Gonville & Caius, Hughes Hall, Jesus College, Pembroke College, Peterhouse, St Edmund’s, and St John’s.
Cambridge is celebrating a complete clean sweep at The Boat Race 2025, with victories in all 4 openweight races and also both lightweight races.
MIT Professors Andrew Vanderburg and Ariel White have been honored as Committed to Caring for their attentiveness to student needs and for creating a welcoming and inclusive culture. For MIT graduate students, the Committed to Caring program recognizes those who go above and beyond.
Professor Vanderburg “is incredibly generous with his time, resources, and passion for mentoring the next generation of astronomers,” praised one of his students.
“Professor Ariel White has made my experience at MIT immeasurably better and I hope that one day I will be in a position to pay her kindness forward,” another student credited.
Andrew Vanderburg: Investing in student growth and development
Vanderburg is the Bruno B. Rossi Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics and is affiliated with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His research focuses on studying exoplanets. Vanderburg is interested in developing cutting-edge techniques and methods to discover new planets outside of our solar system, and studying these planets to learn their detailed properties.
Ever respectful of students’ boundaries between their research and personal life, Vanderburg leads by example in striking a healthy balance. A nominator commented that he has recently been working on his wildlife photography skills, and has even shared some of his photos at the group’s meetings.
Balancing personal and work life is something that almost everyone Vanderburg knows struggles with, from undergraduate students to faculty. “I encourage my group members to spend free time doing things they enjoy outside of work,” Vanderburg says, “and I try to model that balanced behavior myself.”
Vanderburg also understands and accepts that sometimes personal lives can completely overwhelm everything else and affect work and studies. He offers, “when times like these inevitably happen, I just have to acknowledge that life is unpredictable, family comes first, and that the astronomy can wait.”
In addition, Vanderburg organizes group outings, such as hiking, apple picking, and Red Sox games, and occasionally hosts group gatherings at his home. An advisee noted that “these efforts make our group feel incredibly welcoming, and fosters friendship between all our team members.”
Vanderburg has provided individualized guidance and support to over a dozen students in his first two years as faculty at MIT. His students credit him with “meeting them where they are,” and say that he candidly addresses themes like imposter syndrome and student feelings of belonging in astronomy. Vanderburg is always ready to offer his fresh perspective and unwavering support to his students.
“I try to treat everyone in my group with kindness and support,” Vanderburg says, allowing his students to trust that he has their best interest at heart. Students feel this way as well; another nominator exclaimed that Vanderburg “genuinely and truly is one of the kindest humans I know.”
Vanderburg went above and beyond in offering his students support and insisting that his advisees will accomplish their goals. One nominator said, “his support meant the world to me at a time where I doubted my own abilities and potential.”
The Committed to Caring honor recognizes Vanderburg’s seemingly endless capacity to share his knowledge, support his students through difficult times, and invest in his mentees’ personal growth and development.
Ariel White: Student well-being and advocacy
White is an associate professor of political science who studies voting and voting rights, race, the criminal legal system, and bureaucratic behavior. Her research uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people's everyday interactions with government. Her recent work investigates how potential voters react to experiences with punitive government policies, such as incarceration and immigration enforcement, and how people can make their way back into political life after these experiences.
She cares deeply about student well-being and departmental culture. One of her nominators shared a personal story describing that they were frequently belittled and insulted early in their graduate school journey. They had battled with whether this hurtful treatment was part of a typical grad school journey. The experience was negatively impacting their academic performance and feeling of belonging in the department.
When she learned of it, White immediately expressed concern and reinforced that the student deserved an environment that was conducive to learning and well-being, and then quickly took steps to talk to the peer to ensure their interactions improved.
“She wants me to feel valued, and is dedicated to both my growth as a scholar and my well-being as a person,” the nominator expressed. “This has been especially valuable as I found the adjustment to the department difficult and isolating.”
Another student commended, “I am constantly in awe of the time and effort that Ariel puts into leading by example, actively fostering an inclusive learning environment, and ensuring students feel heard and empowered.”
White is a radiant example of a professor who can have an outstanding publishing record while still treating graduate students with kindness and respect. She shows compassion and support to students, even those she does not advise. In the words of one nominator, “Ariel is the most caring person in this department.”
White has consistently expressed her desire to support her students and advocate for them. “I think one of the hardest transitions to make is the one from being a consumer of research to a producer of it.” Students work on the rather daunting prospect of developing an idea on their own for a solo project, and it can be hard to know where to start or how to keep going.
To address this, White says that she talks with advisees about what she’s seen work for her and for other students. She also encourages them to talk with their peers for advice and try out different ways of structuring their time or plan out goals.
“I try to help by explicitly highlighting these challenges and validating them: These are difficult things for nearly everyone who goes through the PhD program,” White adds.
One student reflected, “Ariel is the type of advisor that everyone should aspire to be, and that anyone would be lucky to have.”
Former national security official Fiona Hill says that much will depend on whether other European nations step up
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Don’t expect U.S.-brokered talks that began last month to end the war between Russia and Ukraine soon, analysts said during a discussion Tuesday hosted by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.
Though Ukraine agreed to an unconditional ceasefire, Russia ramped up missile and drone attacks on Kyiv this week.
“We’re so far from a peace plan or a peace process,” said Fiona Hill, A.M. ’91, Ph.D. ’98.
Hill served from 2017 to 2019 as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian Affairs at the National Security Council during President Trump’s first term. And she testified before Congress during Trump’s impeachment trial in 2019.
Russia President Vladimir Putin has no incentives to end the war, but plenty to engage in talks in hopes of normalizing relations with the U.S., agreed Hill and panelist Lucian Kim, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. The conversation was moderated by Evgenia Albats, Ph.D. ’04, a Russian political scientist and journalist who is currently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center.
Putin’s vision for a Russia reunited in some form with Ukraine and his willingness to let casualties mount make getting a lasting deal very limited, she said, as does a relatively inexperienced U.S. negotiating team.
Both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky know that Trump’s primary goal is to broker a peace deal, even if it doesn’t last or harms Ukraine, said Hill, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe and a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.
“Trump is trying to force a peace deal [that] seems to be on Putin’s terms,” so that he can reset U.S.-Russia relations, something he tried to accomplish in his first term, she added.
Without intelligence and military support from the U.S., the “most likely” outcome for Ukraine is that it will have to cede territory to Russia. At this juncture, the notion that Ukraine could somehow retake Crimea and Donetsk is “almost hard to imagine,” said Kim, a former Moscow-based correspondent for NPR and Bloomberg.
But even a negotiated shift of territorial borders won’t be enough to satisfy Russia, he added. “Putin is not going to rest until Ukraine is subordinated to the Kremlin.”
The conflict in Ukraine has long been seen by Russia and its allies, China, Iran, and North Korea, as a proxy war with the U.S. How they react if the U.S. walks away from the conflict entirely is now the most important question, particularly for Europe, Hill said.
“This is now a European war, very clearly,” one that will test the region’s security and unity, she said.
Analysts agreed that Europe has more defensive capacity than it gets credit for. Many countries understand Russia poses a threat to their own individual security and have upped defense spending in recent years.
Others have been newly energized to beef up their fighting forces since Trump returned to office. But getting a coalition of individual European armies coordinated, trained, and fully prepared to step in to assist Ukraine if necessary will take time, perhaps more than the besieged nation has.
“The only hope that the Ukrainians have now is the Europeans somehow getting their act together,” said Kim.
Ukraine had the firm backing of President Joe Biden, Kim said, but even then the relationship between the two nations was far from perfect.
The Ukrainians had a very “high level of frustration” with the limits the administration put on what weaponry it shared and how it was to be used and the slow pace of deliveries. It was an overly cautious approach, they felt, driven by the fact that Biden and his team did not see the war as an existential threat to the U.S.
Also shaping the U.S. approach to military assistance in Ukraine, Hill said, was that the Biden administration’s first priority from the war’s earliest days was avoiding a nuclear World War III rather than doing whatever necessary to ensure that Ukraine defeated Russia.
During a recent trip to Ukraine, Kim said he never once heard Biden’s name mentioned and got the sense that few missed his administration. As early as last summer, there were signs Ukraine held out “a naive hope” about what might be possible in a second Trump term.
“People thought Trump, despite his record already in Ukraine during his first term, would somehow be able to rattle up the situation enough that there would be a better outcome than if the war simply continued in its present direction,” said Kim. But, he said, the Ukrainians have since been “disabused of those illusions.”
Bridget Kondrat (from left), Maggie Chiappetta-Uberti, Brooke Stanford, and Andrew Athanasian train along the Charles River for the 2025 Boston Marathon.
Heartbreak Hill? These marathoners have seen worse.
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
Loved ones inspire College runners to go the distance against disease
For two years, grief left her body feeling like a pressure-cooker.
“It wasn’t until my junior year that I discovered something that really helped with the release of my emotions,” said Brooke Stanford ’25, who lost her mother, Andrea, to pancreatic cancer two weeks before arriving on campus as a first-year in 2021.
“The one thing that really helped was running.”
Now Stanford is using the sport to honor her mother and lift other families facing the disease. She’s been training for this year’s Boston Marathon while soliciting donations for Project Purple, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting pancreatic cancer and supporting patients. Every year, the Boston Athletic Association partners with a set of charities, which in turn recruit marathoners to raise money ahead of race day.
Stanford won’t be the only College runner hitting the 26.2-mile course for a loved one on April 21. Each of these students is vying for a strong finish — and a fundraising haul for a cause close to the heart.
‘I was just so excited I got to do this’
Stanford with her mother, Andrea.
Stanford discovered Project Purple last summer while browsing a list of approved charities for the marathon.
“I knew I would want to run for some sort of cancer research organization, but I didn’t think that there would be one so fitting to what I had been through,” she said. “After that, I made it my No. 1 mission to get a spot on the Project Purple team.”
The trouble was, the odds were on par with getting into Harvard.
“I had just under 150 applications for five spots,” said Project Purple program director Vin Kampf.
Stanford, a Dunster House resident and applied math concentrator, soon found herself swept into phone calls and interviews with Kampf and the nonprofit’s other top brass.
“You would think I was applying for a job at an investment bank,” she said. “A lot of people think the hardest part about running for a charity is raising the money. But the hardest part is 100 percent getting a spot on the team.”
The final step was a formal presentation of her fundraising plans to Project Purple last fall. “I spent a full week putting together this very detailed PowerPoint and Excel,” recalled Stanford, who vowed to raise $50,000 by soliciting individual donations and hosting special events. “I spent way longer doing that than on any assignment Harvard has ever given me.”
A week later, she received the good news in a tearful call with Kampf. “I was just so excited that I got to do this — and do it for my mom,” she said.
The first-time marathoner, who dons purple leggings for every training run, has continued giving it her all. She surpassed her $50,000 pledge nearly two months ago and currently ranks in the Top 10 of Boston Marathon fundraisers this year. According to Kampf, she also ranks among Project Purple’s most successful charity runners ever.
“In some ways, I feel like I found my life’s purpose,” Stanford said. “I want to work more with Project Purple. I want to do more to make a difference. I want to help end pancreatic cancer.”
‘Just imagine if this was the Boston Marathon’
Athanasian with friends including Grace Taylor (right).
At first, Grace Taylor ’25 didn’t tell her friends about her cancer diagnosis. She was too busy working as a peer adviser for incoming first-years.
“I wanted to be the best peer adviser I could be,” said Taylor, a rising sophomore at the time. “I knew that if I let my own stuff in, I wouldn’t be able to serve the entryway very well.”
When she texted her pal Andrew Athanasian ’25 a few days later, he too was a bit occupied.
“I was walking across the river to go work out when Grace texted, ‘Hey, can we talk?’” Athanasian recalled. “I was like, ‘Is it important?’ And she replied, ‘No, not really.’”
Taylor broke the news later that day. Athanasian immediately stepped up, becoming a pillar during his friend’s treatment for an aggressive form of thyroid cancer. Not least, he and Taylor’s Quincy House roommate, Amy Wotovich, made countless runs to BerryLine for (among other things) throat-soothing ice cream. With the help of them and her parents, Taylor said, she persevered without dropping out for the semester.
Athanasian, an econ concentrator who lives in Lowell House, joined Taylor and her family last fall at the Mass General Brigham Eversource Cancer 5k, a benefit for the oncology practice that saw Taylor through two surgeries and radioactive iodine treatment.
“Seeing how Grace and her family responded to that 5k,” Athanasian recalled, “I found myself saying: ‘Just imagine if this was the Boston Marathon.’”
After nabbing a spot on the Mass General Marathon Team, the first-time marathoner has made that vision a reality. Athanasian aims to raise $10,000 for the hospital’s pediatric oncology unit, with part of the proceeds earmarked for the adolescents and young adults cancer program that saw Taylor through treatment into remission.
“I’m running for Grace but I’m also running for everyone who didn’t make it,” emphasized Athanasian, remembering a friend from his Long Island hometown killed by brain cancer at age 17. Athanasian, a committed Catholic, has inscribed his Asics with references to scripture as a reminder of his inspiration. (Hebrews 12:1, on his right, feels tailor-made for the modern charity runner.)
On race day, Taylor hopes to glimpse her friend from the celebration hosted by Mass General, a long-standing fixture at Mile 20 — just before the course crests Heartbreak Hill.
“That’s the darkest part of the course,” Athanasian said. “But they’re bringing out all the pediatric oncology patients to cheer us on. How can you not become Usain Bolt after seeing those kids?”
‘The opportunity to call upon her strength’
Kondrat with her grandmother Cleida Buckley.
Every Sunday, Cohasset, Mass., native Bridget Kondrat ’26 would attend Mass with her large extended family. Then everyone would head over to her grandparents’ place and spend the day together.
“We have always been so close,” said Kondrat, who counts three siblings and 18 cousins. “And my Nana was really the heart of that.”
For 14 years, Kondrat’s maternal grandmother, Cleida Buckley, fought multiple myeloma with the help of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Through it all, the 5-foot-2 powerhouse maintained her status as the family’s hostess and connector.
“She just kept showing up for us,” Kondrat said.
Watching the marathon became another family tradition after Kondrat’s mom, Liz, ran in 2000, and Buckley proved a memorable presence from her perch on Heartbreak Hill.
“She was so freaking cute, just sitting there in Newton Centre with her little beach chair,” Liz said.
That’s why training for the 2025 event with the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team struck Kondrat as the perfect way to honor her grandmother, who died in 2022.
“Running with Dana-Farber gives me the opportunity to call upon her strength,” said Kondrat, who hopes to raise $10,000.
The Harvard-Radcliffe rower and Eliot House resident has ambitious goals for her second marathon. Charity runners can run Boston without meeting the race’s strict qualifying times. But the economics concentrator hopes to best the event’s official 3 hour and 25-minute cutoff (with an average pace of 7:49 per mile) for women ages 34 and younger.
Kondrat, who started running with her mom in fourth grade, has been following an ambitious training program complete with speed workouts, intervals, and long runs at her target marathon pace.
“I biked next to her last week when she ran 12 miles,” Liz said. “She was doing 7:30s the whole time!”
Keeping up the regimen has been a challenge for a full-time student-athlete and part-time fundraiser, Kondrat said. But it’s nothing compared with the marathon battle Buckley endured.
“Whenever I start to complain or lose motivation,” Kondrat said, “I just think about everything I watched my Nana go through.”
‘She started showing me her medals’
Chiappetta-Uberti with her mother, Lainee.
In seventh grade, Maggie Chiappetta-Uberti ’26 came home feeling discouraged after her first track practice. She was exhausted. She was sore. All she wanted to do was quit.
“My mom Lainee sat me down and right away started instilling me with confidence,” Chiappetta-Uberti recalled. “She started telling me about the records she set in middle school and high school. She started showing me her medals.”
That inspired Chiapetta-Uberti to stick with it. “I’m so grateful to her for pushing me to continue,” said the Kirkland House resident, who competed in cross-country and track through high school.
Her mom, Lainee Uberti, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at 58. “She immediately started walking four miles every day,” recalled Chiappetta-Uberti, who was in ninth grade at the time.
More than six years later, Uberti is still religious about her daily jaunt. “Getting out there and running or walking,” she said in an interview, “that’s what keeps us going.”
Once again, that strength has inspired her daughter to tackle a big challenge. Chiappetta-Uberti is training for her first marathon while raising funds for the Alzheimer’s Association. Each member of Team End ALZ is supposed to bring in a minimum of $10,000. But the neuroscience concentrator set the loftier goal of $26,200 — or $1,000 per mile.
As part of her efforts, she’s also populating a TikTok feed with training videos, Alzheimer’s awareness, and tributes to Uberti.
“It’s so special that Maggie is going the extra mile — no pun intended — to raise awareness, raise money, and put her heart into representing our family,” said Chiappetta-Uberti’s other mom, Laura Chiappetta. Both parents will travel from their home in Los Angeles to cheer their daughter’s 26.2-mile debut.
The punishing race feels like an appropriate gesture when her mom is dealing with an incurable disease like Alzheimer’s, Chiappetta-Uberti said. “I want her to know there’s support for her — she’s not facing this alone.”
Cutting drug costs, embracing aging, demystifying AI — and more research ideas
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
8 graduate students pitch their work in Harvard Horizons talks
At Harvard, thousands of scholars are working to advance knowledge on a wide array of topics. Eight students are selected each year to workshop ways to bring that knowledge from the University to the wider world through Harvard Horizons.
Now in its 12th year, the program invites doctoral candidates to share their work in a one-night academic symposium. Students receive one-on-one mentoring to hone their presentation skills and research ideas.
“It is crucial that both faculty and students are able to communicate and connect with the broader world,” said Karen Thornber, the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. “These multimodal skills are foundational, both for engaging students in the classroom and for ensuring that research which has the potential to contribute significantly to the well-being of all is both accessible and impactful to a wider audience.”
Ancient structures are not as set in stone as we once thought. Alarcón Robledo is trying to better understand the histories of tombs in North Saqqara, Egypt, using 3D modeling and a process called photogrammetry — mapping structures onto archaeological sites with archival photography and software. He’s found that tombs changed over time, with additions and reconstructions, from places purely for funeral services to sites of ritual practices and community gatherings.
“Buildings are like people, and writing about their history is very much like writing their biography,” he said. “In our lives, there may be many moments which are representative of our identities … but even freezing one moment of everyday of our lives would not be representative.”
Getting older can be beautiful, says Braslavsky. Her talk centered around what scholars can learn from older female poets, including how to embrace aging instead of succumbing to the narrative of decay and decline.
“While the cultural zeitgeist tells us to fear aging, aging is more a part of the human experience than ever before,” she said.
Her work in particular focuses on three Slavic poets — Elizabeta Mnatsakanova, Bohumila Grögerová, and Krystyna Miłobędzka — who wrote and created into their later years.
“These women show us through their work that time can be filtered through our perceptions, that time can be measured as much emotionally as it can be empirically,” Braslavsky said.
Silver, according to Campbell, may be good for more than jewelry. His work is attempting to use silver in a chemical process that would make the production of pharmaceuticals a fraction of the current cost. Using photochemistry, Campbell has been working to isolate trifluoroacetate — a compound notoriously hard to manufacture, and essential to many modern drugs.
To do this, he’s utilizing a special type of silver (Ag²⁺) — a highly reactive form of the metal that can be recycled and reused to not only cut costs but potentially also make strides in sustainability.
“At the outset of my Ph.D., very few Ag²⁺ compounds had ever been made before. But in this absence of knowledge, in this lack of precedence, I saw opportunity, and I seized it by devising a new synthetic strategy toward isolating large quantities of silver compounds,” Campbell said.
Before there were spreadsheets, there were khipus. Twisted twine with series of knots, khipus were the ancient Inca’s alternative to written script. They were used to record data, including census counts, taxes, and maybe intricate narratives and songs.
FitzPatrick has been studying a collection of 33 khipus from cliffside tombs at Laguna de los Cóndores in Peru to better understand the people who made them.
“I decided to put the process on its head, working backwards to understand how khipus were made, who made them, and what this can tell us about their use,” FitzPatrick said.
Part of this process, he said, has been to become a khipu-maker himself. During his presentation, FitzPatrick distributed a homemade khipu to each member of the audience.
The ancient Greek poet Sappho has long been considered by scholars to have been lost to time, only to be rediscovered in the late 19th century when fragments of papyrus containing her poetry were unearthed in Egypt. But Horgan says she was never really lost.
“She has been continually present in poems and plays, in sculptures and statues, and in the minds of the readers who have imagined her again and again and again, regardless of the presence or absence of her poetry,” Horgan said.
Horgan’s work is focused on dispelling the myth that the work of Sappho — a famously queer poet — was purposely oppressed. In reality, she said, Sappho and her queerness have been present in countless works of scholarship and art since her life in the time before Christ.
“My hope is that this work provides not only narratives of queer suppression, but queer survival. Sappho did not survive in spite of her queerness, but in fact, because of queerness,” she said.
Courts, key institutions in democratic societies, can both help and hurt democracy, according to O’Donahue. The Ph.D. student, who witnessed a military coup attempt while working for the U.S. State Department in Istanbul, said in his talk that this is particularly apparent in places like Turkey, as well as Israel and even the U.S. Israel and Turkey, according to O’Donahue, exemplify opposite ends of the “judicial power-sharing” spectrum — or the ability of opposing parties to appoint judges to the country’s highest courts.
“I came to Harvard because I had this problem I needed to solve,” he said. “Why do courts defend or undermine democracy in particular by upholding legal constraints of powerful political leaders?”
Are we using AI wrong? Raux says we are. According to his research, humans project their own thinking onto artificial intelligence, leading us to miss out on what the tech can really do for us.
“We need to make sure that as humans, we can fully harness the potential of AI,” Raux said.
Conducting experiments using chatbots, Raux had the AI answer questions about parenting advice. His aim was to show that human intelligence is vastly different than artificial intelligence, and that what makes something difficult for humans may be different from AI and vice versa.
“But do people realize this when interacting with AI?” he asked.
Ultimately, Raux hopes that his work will help both researchers and users better harness the technology’s power.
Venturo-Conerly has a lofty goal: to bring mental healthcare to every young person across the world. She’s starting in Kenya. Building on work she started as an undergrad with fellow Harvard alumni Tom Osborn, Venturo-Conerly has been programming mental health services for Kenyan youth through the Shamiri Institute. Named for the Kiswahili word meaning “thrive,” Shamiri uses a tiered system of laypeople, supervised by mental health professionals and experts, to deliver counseling and academic support to Kenyan students. Along with mental health, their work focuses on academic, financial, and social well-being.
“Instead of focusing on psychopathology, it circumvents stigma by focusing on positive concepts, growth mindset, gratitude and values, affirmations, all of which are research-backed interventions theorized to produce an upward spiral of change in beliefs and behaviors,” Venturo-Conerly said.
Shamiri is in its sixth year of operation, and Venturo-Conerly and Osborn continue to study its impacts.
Tropical cyclones are hurricanes that brew over the tropical ocean and can travel over land, inundating coastal regions. The most extreme cyclones can generate devastating storm tides — seawater that is heightened by the tides and swells onto land, causing catastrophic flood events in coastal regions. A new study by MIT scientists finds that, as the planet warms, the recurrence of destructive storm tides will increase tenfold for one of the hardest-hit regions of the world.
In a study appearing today in One Earth, the scientists report that, for the highly populated coastal country of Bangladesh, what was once a 100-year event could now strike every 10 years — or more often — by the end of the century.
In a future where fossil fuels continue to burn as they do today, what was once considered a catastrophic, once-in-a-century storm tide will hit Bangladesh, on average, once per decade. And the kind of storm tides that have occurred every decade or so will likely batter the country’s coast more frequently, every few years.
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with more than 171 million people living in a region roughly the size of New York state. The country has been historically vulnerable to tropical cyclones, as it is a low-lying delta that is easily flooded by storms and experiences a seasonal monsoon. Some of the most destructive floods in the world have occurred in Bangladesh, where it’s been increasingly difficult for agricultural economies to recover.
The study also finds that Bangladesh will likely experience tropical cyclones that overlap with the months-long monsoon season. Until now, cyclones and the monsoon have occurred at separate times during the year. But as the planet warms, the scientists’ modeling shows that cyclones will push into the monsoon season, causing back-to-back flooding events across the country.
“Bangladesh is very active in preparing for climate hazards and risks, but the problem is, everything they’re doing is more or less based on what they’re seeing in the present climate,” says study co-author Sai Ravela, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “We are now seeing an almost tenfold rise in the recurrence of destructive storm tides almost anywhere you look in Bangladesh. This cannot be ignored. So, we think this is timely, to say they have to pause and revisit how they protect against these storms.”
Ravela’s co-authors are Jiangchao Qiu, a postdoc in EAPS, and Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT.
Height of tides
In recent years, Bangladesh has invested significantly in storm preparedness, for instance in improving its early-warning system, fortifying village embankments, and increasing access to community shelters. But such preparations have generally been based on the current frequency of storms.
In this new study, the MIT team aimed to provide detailed projections of extreme storm tide hazards, which are flooding events where tidal effects amplify cyclone-induced storm surge, in Bangladesh under various climate-warming scenarios and sea-level rise projections.
“A lot of these events happen at night, so tides play a really strong role in how much additional water you might get, depending on what the tide is,” Ravela explains.
To evaluate the risk of storm tide, the team first applied a method of physics-based downscaling, which Emanuel’s group first developed over 20 years ago and has been using since to study hurricane activity in different parts of the world. The technique involves a low-resolution model of the global ocean and atmosphere that is embedded with a finer-resolution model that simulates weather patterns as detailed as a single hurricane. The researchers then scatter hurricane “seeds” in a region of interest and run the model forward to observe which seeds grow and make landfall over time.
To the downscaled model, the researchers incorporated a hydrodynamical model, which simulates the height of a storm surge, given the pattern and strength of winds at the time of a given storm. For any given simulated storm, the team also tracked the tides, as well as effects of sea level rise, and incorporated this information into a numerical model that calculated the storm tide, or the height of the water, with tidal effects as a storm makes landfall.
Extreme overlap
With this framework, the scientists simulated tens of thousands of potential tropical cyclones near Bangladesh, under several future climate scenarios, ranging from one that resembles the current day to one in which the world experiences further warming as a result of continued fossil fuel burning. For each simulation, they recorded the maximum storm tides along the coast of Bangladesh and noted the frequency of storm tides of various heights in a given climate scenario.
“We can look at the entire bucket of simulations and see, for this storm tide of say, 3 meters, we saw this many storms, and from that you can figure out the relative frequency of that kind of storm,” Qiu says. “You can then invert that number to a return period.”
A return period is the time it takes for a storm of a particular type to make landfall again. A storm that is considered a “100-year event” is typically more powerful and destructive, and in this case, creates more extreme storm tides, and therefore more catastrophic flooding, compared to a 10-year event.
From their modeling, Ravela and his colleagues found that under a scenario of increased global warming, the storms that previously were considered 100-year events, producing the highest storm tide values, can recur every decade or less by late-century. They also observed that, toward the end of this century, tropical cyclones in Bangladesh will occur across a broader seasonal window, potentially overlapping in certain years with the seasonal monsoon season.
“If the monsoon rain has come in and saturated the soil, a cyclone then comes in and it makes the problem much worse,” Ravela says. “People won’t have any reprieve between the extreme storm and the monsoon. There are so many compound and cascading effects between the two. And this only emerges because warming happens.”
Ravela and his colleagues are using their modeling to help experts in Bangladesh better evaluate and prepare for a future of increasing storm risk. And he says that the climate future for Bangladesh is in some ways not unique to this part of the world.
“This climate change story that is playing out in Bangladesh in a certain way will be playing out in a different way elsewhere,” Ravela notes. “Maybe where you are, the story is about heat stress, or amplifying droughts, or wildfires. The peril is different. But the underlying catastrophe story is not that different.”
This research is supported in part by the MIT Climate Resilience Early Warning Systems Climate Grand Challenges project, the Jameel Observatory JO-CREWSNet project; MIT Weather and Climate Extremes Climate Grand Challenges project; and Schmidt Sciences, LLC.
For the coastal country of Bangladesh, once-in-a-century storm tides could strike every 10 years — or more often — by the end of the century, scientists report. In this photo, a Bangladeshi woman and child walk over the top of a sandbag embankment in Khulna on May 4, 2019.
The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) has announced the establishment of the Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub, an ambitious effort designed to drive cutting-edge innovation in children’s health care. Launched in collaboration with the Charles H. Hood Foundation, the hub will focus on addressing unmet needs in pediatric medicine by developing technologies and treatments tailored specifically for children.
Leveraging the Institute’s strengths in the life sciences, the hub will provide seed funding and strategic support for bold, high-impact research projects with the potential to transform health care for children. It will also act as a springboard for emerging scientific leaders, empowering them to help shape the future of pediatric health.
“The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub represents an extraordinary opportunity to create meaningful and lasting change in the lives of children,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, and head of MIT HEALS. “By collaborating with the Charles H. Hood Foundation, we’re harnessing MIT’s interdisciplinary strengths to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in pediatric health care.”
Addressing critical gaps in pediatric health care
Despite making up a significant portion of the global population, children have been largely underserved when it comes to medical innovation, leaving immense gaps in care. Pediatric conditions that shape a lifetime of health and well-being often lack dedicated solutions — forcing reliance on repurposed adult treatments or no solution at all. From 2008 to 2018, only 10 percent of U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals were designated for individuals under the age of 18.
There is a massive opportunity to prioritize innovation for people during their formative years and drive breakthroughs that not only improve individual lives but also elevate health outcomes for generations to come. The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub seeks to lead this transformation by creating a dedicated community for advancing technologies and research.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with MIT to launch the hub, a bold initiative that will drive groundbreaking science and technology for children. MIT’s unparalleled expertise in engineering and life sciences, combined with our deep commitment to pediatric innovation, creates a powerful force for change,” says Hood Foundation President Neil Smiley, on behalf of the foundation’s board of trustees. “We look forward to this catalytic gift igniting transformative programs that will shape the future of children’s health and well-being for generations to come.”
The Hood Foundation, based in Massachusetts, has committed $15 million over five years to support the creation and development of the hub, reinforcing its long-standing dedication to advancing groundbreaking pediatric research. Since its establishment in 1942, the Charles H. Hood Foundation has sought to fill gaps in the pediatric health care system by awarding research grants and supporting the development of pediatric related tools and treatments.
In addition to its established grant programs, over the course of the past decade the Hood Foundation has served as a pioneer in supporting young companies trying to bring pediatric innovations to the patients who need them, by way of program-related investments made via its venture arm, CH Innovations LLC.
“The Hood Foundation’s longstanding dedication to improving child health has led to the formation of an extensive and robust network of researchers, clinician-scientists, entrepreneurs, and other leaders in science and business who stand well-positioned to engage with and contribute to the hub’s efforts,” adds Smiley.
A central role in the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative
The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub, which will be administered in the MIT School of Engineering, will serve as a cornerstone of MIT HEALS, an Institute-wide initiative to address society’s most urgent health challenges. The hub’s cross-disciplinary approach underscores MIT’s commitment to inspiring, accelerating, and delivering solutions at scale to some of society’s most urgent and intractable health challenges.
Elazer R. Edelman will serve as faculty lead, with Joseph J. Frassica as the executive director of the hub. Edelman is the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and director of MIT’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research. He also serves as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s cardiac intensive care unit in Boston. Frassica serves as professor of the practice in IMES at MIT. He is also a member of the teaching and research staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital (pediatric critical care) and serves as pediatric editor for the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine.
“As scientists, engineers, and clinicians, we are obliged to ensure that what we learn and what we invent is available to all. Ironically, those most in need of innovation are least able to access and benefit from it — children especially. The support of the Hood Foundation and collaboration with our MIT and extended community can help address this gap and fill this vital void,” says Edelman.
"The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub will serve as a catalyst, mentor, and advocate for pediatric innovation, harnessing MIT’s world-class expertise and Hood’s extensive network of pediatric innovators to tackle the most pressing challenges in pediatric care. Thanks to the generous support of the Hood Foundation, we plan to build the infrastructure and programs needed to transform groundbreaking ideas into real-world solutions that improve the lives of children and the providers who care for them," Frassica adds.
Driving research, advocacy, and education
Beyond supporting research, the hub seeks to bolster the broader pediatric research community through outreach, education, and advocacy. By working closely with key collaborators and leveraging relationships with other stakeholders such as hospitals, industry, patient advocates, and funders, the hub will identify, develop, and advance efforts to find economically viable pathways to bring treatments to young patients.
The hub will also create the infrastructure to seamlessly share deep organizational understanding of the regulatory processes governing innovation for children with researchers and innovators in the hub community.
The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) has announced the establishment of the Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub, an ambitious effort designed to drive cutting-edge innovation in children’s health care. Launched in collaboration with the Charles H. Hood Foundation, the hub will focus on addressing unmet needs in pediatric medicine by developing technologies and treatments tailored specifically for children.
Leveraging the Institute’s strengths in the life sciences, the hub will provide seed funding and strategic support for bold, high-impact research projects with the potential to transform health care for children. It will also act as a springboard for emerging scientific leaders, empowering them to help shape the future of pediatric health.
“The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub represents an extraordinary opportunity to create meaningful and lasting change in the lives of children,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, and head of MIT HEALS. “By collaborating with the Charles H. Hood Foundation, we’re harnessing MIT’s interdisciplinary strengths to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in pediatric health care.”
Addressing critical gaps in pediatric health care
Despite making up a significant portion of the global population, children have been largely underserved when it comes to medical innovation, leaving immense gaps in care. Pediatric conditions that shape a lifetime of health and well-being often lack dedicated solutions — forcing reliance on repurposed adult treatments or no solution at all. From 2008 to 2018, only 10 percent of U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals were designated for individuals under the age of 18.
There is a massive opportunity to prioritize innovation for people during their formative years and drive breakthroughs that not only improve individual lives but also elevate health outcomes for generations to come. The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub seeks to lead this transformation by creating a dedicated community for advancing technologies and research.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with MIT to launch the hub, a bold initiative that will drive groundbreaking science and technology for children. MIT’s unparalleled expertise in engineering and life sciences, combined with our deep commitment to pediatric innovation, creates a powerful force for change,” says Hood Foundation President Neil Smiley, on behalf of the foundation’s board of trustees. “We look forward to this catalytic gift igniting transformative programs that will shape the future of children’s health and well-being for generations to come.”
The Hood Foundation, based in Massachusetts, has committed $15 million over five years to support the creation and development of the hub, reinforcing its long-standing dedication to advancing groundbreaking pediatric research. Since its establishment in 1942, the Charles H. Hood Foundation has sought to fill gaps in the pediatric health care system by awarding research grants and supporting the development of pediatric related tools and treatments.
In addition to its established grant programs, over the course of the past decade the Hood Foundation has served as a pioneer in supporting young companies trying to bring pediatric innovations to the patients who need them, by way of program-related investments made via its venture arm, CH Innovations LLC.
“The Hood Foundation’s longstanding dedication to improving child health has led to the formation of an extensive and robust network of researchers, clinician-scientists, entrepreneurs, and other leaders in science and business who stand well-positioned to engage with and contribute to the hub’s efforts,” adds Smiley.
A central role in the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative
The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub, which will be administered in the MIT School of Engineering, will serve as a cornerstone of MIT HEALS, an Institute-wide initiative to address society’s most urgent health challenges. The hub’s cross-disciplinary approach underscores MIT’s commitment to inspiring, accelerating, and delivering solutions at scale to some of society’s most urgent and intractable health challenges.
Elazer R. Edelman will serve as faculty lead, with Joseph J. Frassica as the executive director of the hub. Edelman is the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and director of MIT’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research. He also serves as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s cardiac intensive care unit in Boston. Frassica serves as professor of the practice in IMES at MIT. He is also a member of the teaching and research staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital (pediatric critical care) and serves as pediatric editor for the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine.
“As scientists, engineers, and clinicians, we are obliged to ensure that what we learn and what we invent is available to all. Ironically, those most in need of innovation are least able to access and benefit from it — children especially. The support of the Hood Foundation and collaboration with our MIT and extended community can help address this gap and fill this vital void,” says Edelman.
"The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub will serve as a catalyst, mentor, and advocate for pediatric innovation, harnessing MIT’s world-class expertise and Hood’s extensive network of pediatric innovators to tackle the most pressing challenges in pediatric care. Thanks to the generous support of the Hood Foundation, we plan to build the infrastructure and programs needed to transform groundbreaking ideas into real-world solutions that improve the lives of children and the providers who care for them," Frassica adds.
Driving research, advocacy, and education
Beyond supporting research, the hub seeks to bolster the broader pediatric research community through outreach, education, and advocacy. By working closely with key collaborators and leveraging relationships with other stakeholders such as hospitals, industry, patient advocates, and funders, the hub will identify, develop, and advance efforts to find economically viable pathways to bring treatments to young patients.
The hub will also create the infrastructure to seamlessly share deep organizational understanding of the regulatory processes governing innovation for children with researchers and innovators in the hub community.
This is a critical – and hugely challenging – moment for climate action. Legal and political pressures have paralysed asset managers and other financial service providers, leading to a recent wave of actors leaving investor climate coalitions. However, asset owners are increasingly seeing the need to take a leadership role in addressing climate change, which threatens the long-term future of their portfolios and the wider economy.
That’s why we are delighted to announce that Cambridge researchers based at the Department for Land Economy have selected index provider Bloomberg Index Services Limited to launch the first global corporate bond index to cover fossil fuel producers, utilities, insurance, and financing, with the aim of driving investment to reduce real-economy emissions.
“We are delighted that this project has reached such a key milestone," said Professor Martin Dixon, Head of the Department of Land Economy. "As a multidisciplinary department with a focus on outstanding academic publication and teaching, this project has the potential to serve as a ‘systems demonstrator’ for ongoing research in this important area.”
Why a bond index?
The launch of the bond index by an 816-year-old institution is an unusual process and a tale worth telling. It began with a peer-reviewed paper by Dr Ellen Quigley, Principal Research Associate at Land Economy, exploring the case for evidence-based climate impact by institutional investors. This was followed by an internal feasibility study based at Jesus College, Cambridge (which continues to co-host the project), and supported by several other parts of the University.
With feasibility assessed, the team went out to global index providers to explore their interest. All of the leading players were interested in building this index, yet all grappled with a lack of access to data and the complexity of assessing companies based on their activities (e.g., whether they were building new fossil fuel infrastructure), not their business classification. An extensive Request for Proposals process resulted in naming Bloomberg Index Services Limited as our provider. The project aims to provide a genuine solution for asset owners looking to align their corporate debt instruments with their climate targets and to avoid both ineffective blanket interventions and greenwashing.
The central problem, on which the industry has faltered for decades, is how to manage the risk presented by a fossil fuel industry that continues to grow. Leading climate scenarios such as the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario are clear that fossil fuel expansion is inconsistent with the transition to a decarbonised economy. With approximately 90% of new financing for fossil fuel expansion coming from bonds and bank loans, debt markets must be the focus of investor efforts to transition away from fossil fuel expansionism. Bonds offer a larger pool of capital than equities, and a greater proportion are purchased in the primary market, where companies gain access to new capital.
The past decade has seen a significant rise in passive investment strategies and therefore an increase in financial flows into index funds, which have as a consequence become significant ‘auto-allocators’ of capital. This research project aims to study the extent to which the new bond index influences cost, volume, and access to capital among companies who are seeking to build new fossil fuel infrastructure and delaying the phase-down of their operations. Bond markets are not just a key part of investor action on climate change: they are the very coalface of fossil fuel expansion, i.e. new gas, oil, and coal extraction and infrastructure.
“This is an enormously impactful project which showcases the high-quality research undertaken at Cambridge," University of Cambridge Chief Financial Officer Anthony Odgers said. "The index is a game-changer for the growing number of asset owners who invest in corporate debt and understand its impact on fossil fuel expansion, particularly the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure such as coal- and gas-fired power plants which risk locking in fossil fuel usage for decades."
“Once the index launches, Cambridge expects to invest some of its own money against financial products referencing it. This will enable us to align our fixed income holdings with our institution-wide objectives,” Odgers said.
There are currently no off-the-shelf products that allow for passive investments in global corporate bond markets without financing fossil fuel expansion, through fossil fuel production, utilities building new coal- and gas-fired power plants, and through the banks and insurers that continue to finance and underwrite these activities. By supporting the development of this ‘systems demonstrator’, we will be able to conduct essential research on the efficacy of such a lever.
“Instead of linear year-on-year reductions or blanket bans by business classification, the index methodology identifies companies that present the greatest systemic risks to investors, while ensuring that those companies that meet the criteria can rejoin the bond index,” said project leader Lily Tomson, a Senior Research Associate at Jesus College, Cambridge.
Several years of close collaboration with leading global asset owners such as California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), Swiss Federal Pension Fund PUBLICA and the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund (UNJSPF) provided input and technical market expertise that underpins the index. Alongside the University of Cambridge, the index will be used at launch by investments from the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund.
“Finally, large asset owners around the world have an index for this market that aims to discourage the expansion of fossil fuels,” said Pedro Guazo, Representative of the Secretary-General (RSG) for the investment of the UNJSPF assets.
Rules-based engagement: a lever for behaviour change
Debt benchmarks have a key role to play in any real efforts to tackle the expansion of fossil fuels. This project is innovative because it focuses on exclusions and weightings of companies based on their current corporate activity, instead of using an approach that relies on blanket exclusions by business classification (which does not generate incentives to change behaviour). For example, a company might be classed as a fossil fuel company, but if it stops expanding new fossil fuel operations and aligns to an appropriate phase-down pathway, the company has an opportunity to be included in the index and gain access to capital via funds which use the index, as a result.
Across the project, we are using data sources that have never previously been used to build an index – for example, the Global Coal Exit List (GCEL) and Global Oil and Gas Exit List (GOGEL) from Urgewald. We are taking a novel approach that focuses investor attention on those actors that our framework considers ‘edge cases’: companies close to reaching, or moving away from, alignment with the index. Companies have the option of being (re-)included in the index if they change their behaviour to align with the rules of the index. Academic literature suggests this is a lever for behaviour change in equities, but as an approach it is new to debt market indices. This is one of many key hypotheses that this project tests. We are convening a community of leading global academics who will support the creation of this new form of rules-based bondholder engagement.
This bond index project is one of a suite of actions rooted in academic research and collaboration that have been developed by the collegiate University. Alongside 74 other higher education institutions, Cambridge is delivering a parallel project focused on cash deposits and money market funds. We will continue to conduct research as the associated new products begin to operate through 2025.
At a time when climate damage is growing rapidly and is visible in news stories around the world, many actors across investment markets are looking for a clear path to take necessary action. As an academic institution and a long-term investor, the University of Cambridge is committed to supporting evidence-based research and action on climate change.
The bond index will be launched later this year. If you are interested in finding out more about the project or the team’s research, contact us here: bondindex@landecon.cam.ac.uk.
University of Cambridge researchers based at the Department for Land Economy have selected index provider Bloomberg Index Services Limited to launch the first global corporate bond index to cover fossil fuel producers, utilities, insurance, and financing, with the aim of driving investment to reduce real-economy emissions.
This is an enormously impactful project which showcases the high-quality research undertaken at Cambridge
Anthony Odgers, University of Cambridge Chief Financial Officer
Bacteria can be engineered to sense a variety of molecules, such as pollutants or soil nutrients. In most cases, however, these signals can only be detected by looking at the cells under a microscope, making them impractical for large-scale use.
Using a new method that triggers cells to produce molecules that generate unique combinations of color, MIT engineers have shown that they can read out these bacterial signals from as far as 90 meters away. Their work could lead to the development of bacterial sensors for agricultural and other applications, which could be monitored by drones or satellites.
“It’s a new way of getting information out of the cell. If you’re standing next to it, you can’t see anything by eye, but from hundreds of meters away, using specific cameras, you can get the information when it turns on,” says Christopher Voigt, head of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and the senior author of the new study.
In a paper appearing today in Nature Biotechnology, the researchers showed that they could engineer two different types of bacteria to produce molecules that give off distinctive wavelengths of light across the visible and infrared spectra of light, which can be imaged with hyperspectral cameras. These reporting molecules were linked to genetic circuits that detect nearby bacteria, but this approach could also be combined with any existing sensor, such as those for arsenic or other contaminants, the researchers say.
“The nice thing about this technology is that you can plug and play whichever sensor you want,” says Yonatan Chemla, an MIT postdoc who is one of the lead authors of the paper. “There is no reason that any sensor would not be compatible with this technology.”
Itai Levin PhD ’24 is also a lead author of the paper. Other authors include former undergraduate students Yueyang Fan ’23 and Anna Johnson ’22, and Connor Coley, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT.
Hyperspectral imaging
There are many ways to engineer bacterial cells so that they can sense a particular chemical. Most of these work by connecting detection of a molecule to an output such as green fluorescent protein (GFP). These work well for lab studies, but such sensors can’t be measured from long distances.
For long-distance sensing, the MIT team came up with the idea to engineer cells to produce hyperspectral reporter molecules, which can be detected using hyperspectral cameras. These cameras, which were first invented in the 1970s, can determine how much of each color wavelength is present in any given pixel. Instead of showing up as simply red or green, each pixel contains information on hundreds different wavelengths of light.
Currently, hyperspectral cameras are used for applications such as detecting the presence of radiation. In the areas around Chernobyl, these cameras have been used to measure slight color changes that radioactive metals produce in the chlorophyll of plant cells. Hyperspectral cameras are also used to look for signs of malnutrition or pathogen invasion in plants.
That work inspired the MIT team to explore whether they could engineer bacterial cells to produce hyperspectral reporters when they detect a target molecule.
For a hyperspectral reporter to be most useful, it should have a spectral signature with peaks in multiple wavelengths of light, making it easier to detect. The researchers performed quantum calculations to predict the hyperspectral signatures of about 20,000 naturally occurring cell molecules, allowing them to identify those with the most unique patterns of light emission. Another key feature is the number of enzymes that would need to be engineered into a cell to get it to produce the reporter — a trait that will vary for different types of cells.
“The ideal molecule is one that’s really different from everything else, making it detectable, and requires the fewest number of enzymes to produce it in the cell,” Voigt says.
In this study, the researchers identified two different molecules that were best suited for two types of bacteria. For a soil bacterium called Pseudomonas putida, they used a reporter called biliverdin — a pigment that results from the breakdown of heme. For an aquatic bacterium called Rubrivivax gelatinosus, they used a type of bacteriochlorophyll. For each bacterium, the researchers engineered the enzymes necessary to produce the reporter into the host cell, then linked them to genetically engineered sensor circuits.
“You could add one of these reporters to a bacterium or any cell that has a genetically encoded sensor in its genome. So, it might respond to metals or radiation or toxins in the soil, or nutrients in the soil, or whatever it is you want it to respond to. Then the output of that would be the production of this molecule that can then be sensed from far away,” Voigt says.
Long-distance sensing
In this study, the researchers linked the hyperspectral reporters to circuits designed for quorum sensing, which allow cells to detect other nearby bacteria. They have also shown, in work done after this paper, that these reporting molecules can be linked to sensors for chemicals including arsenic.
When testing their sensors, the researchers deployed them in boxes so they would remain contained. The boxes were placed in fields, deserts, or on the roofs of buildings, and the cells produced signals that could be detected using hyperspectral cameras mounted on drones. The cameras take about 20 to 30 seconds to scan the field of view, and computer algorithms then analyze the signals to reveal whether the hyperspectral reporters are present.
In this paper, the researchers reported imaging from a maximum distance of 90 meters, but they are now working on extending those distances.
They envision that these sensors could be deployed for agricultural purposes such as sensing nitrogen or nutrient levels in soil. For those applications, the sensors could also be designed to work in plant cells. Detecting landmines is another potential application for this type of sensing.
Before being deployed, the sensors would need to undergo regulatory approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture if used for agriculture. Voigt and Chemla have been working with both agencies, the scientific community, and other stakeholders to determine what kinds of questions need to be answered before these technologies could be approved.
“We’ve been very busy in the past three years working to understand what are the regulatory landscapes and what are the safety concerns, what are the risks, what are the benefits of this kind of technology?” Chemla says.
The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense; the Army Research Office, a directorate of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory (the funding supported engineering of environmental strains and optimization of genetically-encoded sensors and hyperspectral reporter biosynthetic pathways); and the Ministry of Defense of Israel.
MIT engineers engineered bacteria to produce hyperspectral signals that can be detected as far as 90 meters away. Their work could lead to the development of bacterial sensors for agricultural to monitor crop health, for example.
A book titled “The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia” by historian Dr Faizah Zakaria has claimed the prestigious annual “Harry J. Benda Prize (First book on Southeast Asian Studies)” by the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. Established in 1977, the Prize honours books that make exceptional contributions to the understanding of Southeast Asia, specifically to authors publishing their first major work on the topic. One of the most esteemed awards in the field, receiving this prize is considered a major milestone for early-career scholars.
Published in February 2023 by University of Washington Press, Dr Zakaria’s book explores how religious beliefs and practices have influenced the way people in the region interact with their environment, specifically with respect to the natural world. She traces the conversion of the Batak people in upland Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula to Islam and Christianity during the 19th century, and finds that the process helped shape social structures that voided the natural world of enchantment, ushered in a cash economy, and placed the power to remake local landscapes into the hands of elites.
Dr Zakaria shared how she felt honoured to receive the distinction in the company of many wonderful scholars whose field-shaping books in Southeast Asian studies have been recognised through this award.
She added, “More importantly, I hope that my book will spark new conversations about environmental history and ethics as well as the role of religious communities in co-creating a sustainable world. Area studies, with its phenomenological approaches to understanding the region's communities, continues to offer grounded views to the pressing issues of our time and I hope that more students will be interested to explore the region on their own terms."
Dr Zakaria holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research interests focus on religion and ecology, environmental justice and indigenous movements in Southeast Asia. She is currently working on a research project on the role of religion and science in disaster responses, focusing on volcanic eruptions, and she also co-coordinates a digital humanities project comparing Malay and Chinese heritage medicine.
Duke-NUSMedical School has appointed Professor Patrick Tan as its next and fourth Dean, effective 1 January 2026, marking a new chapter for the School as it builds on its legacy of medical education, research and innovation. Prof Tan will serve as Dean-designate from 1 July 2025, succeeding Professor Thomas Coffman, the School’s longest-serving Dean since 2015. This leadership transition coincides with the School’s 20th anniversary, underscoring Duke-NUS’ commitment to advancing the future of healthcare in Singapore and the region.
An internationally recognised cancer geneticist and clinician-scientist, Prof Tan is currently Senior Vice-Dean for Research at Duke-NUS, where he leads transformative research initiatives in genomics, precision medicine and biomedical innovation. He was one of the School’s pioneer faculty members and has been involved in advancing its research strategy.
Prof Tan has also been an active contributor in Singapore’s research landscape, taking on roles including Executive Director of Precision Health Research Singapore (PRECISE), Senior Scientific Advisor at SingHealth, and former Executive Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore. His leadership in integrating cutting-edge science with clinical applications has placed him at the forefront of Singapore’s biomedical ecosystem.
A firm believer in team science, Prof Tan is passionate about fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to solve Singapore’s most pressing healthcare challenges. His ability to drive impactful change was recognised with the Exemplary Leader Award at the 2023 Public Sector Transformation Award Ceremony. Other awards include the President’s Science Award (Team), American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Team Science Award, and election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians.
A strong endorsement from Duke and NUS leadership
Professor Tan Eng Chye, President of the National University of Singapore (NUS), said:
“After a rigorous search within the University and globally, Patrick has been identified as the best candidate to lead Duke-NUS into its next chapter of growth as a key pillar in Singapore’s healthcare and biomedical ecosystem. Patrick brings remarkable visionary leadership and profound expertise through years of dedicated service and contributions as researcher, scientist and educator. I am confident that his leadership and wealth of knowledge will bring the School towards higher levels of excellence, ensuring that our next generation of doctors, researchers and healthcare leaders are well-prepared to meet the challenges of tomorrow.”
Mr Goh Yew Lin, Chairman of the Duke-NUS Governing Board, said:
“Patrick is first and foremost a world-class researcher, but what sets him apart is his deep understanding of how discovery and education must go hand in hand. As a graduate-entry medical school, Duke-NUS trains future clinicians who are not only skilled in patient care but also capable of asking bold questions and driving innovation. As Dean, he will ensure that the School’s research priorities remain aligned with our national Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) strategy, while strengthening translation and partnerships that attract industry collaborators and nurture a culture of innovation among our students.”
Professor Mary Klotman, MD, Executive Vice President for Health Affairs at Duke University, Dean of Duke University School of Medicine, and Chief Academic Officer of Duke Health, welcomed Prof Tan’s appointment:
“We are excited to work with Patrick as he takes on the mantle of the next Dean of Duke-NUS. A distinguished scientist and strategic leader, he brings a clear vision for how cutting-edge research and meaningful education can converge to improve lives. His commitment to collaboration and academic excellence makes him well-positioned to lead Duke-NUS into its next phase—strengthening our global partnership and expanding the School’s contributions to advance health for all.”
The joint search committee to identify the successor for the role of Dean was chaired by Professor Aaron Thean, Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost of the National University of Singapore, as well as Deputy Chairman of Duke-NUS Governing Board; and included faculty members from Duke-NUS, NUS, Duke University, SingHealth and the Duke-NUS Governing Board.
“The healthcare landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by shifting demographics, intensifying demands on healthcare, and technological innovations. These are major challenges, but they also create huge opportunities. As Dean, I look forward to enhancing our long-standing Academic Medicine partnership with SingHealth and harnessing the collective strengths of Duke University and NUS, our parent institutions, to deepen our understanding of diseases and advancing medical solutions that will make a real difference to patients.
“By combining the power of cutting-edge research, medical education and translational innovation, Duke-NUS is uniquely positioned to shape the future of medicine. Together with our valued partners, I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to work with our faculty, students, alumni and stakeholders to build on this strong foundation and drive the School’s next stage of development in Singapore and the world.”
Duke-NUS also expresses deep gratitude to Professor Thomas Coffman for his exceptional leadership over the past decade.
A renowned physician-scientist in nephrology and cardiovascular research, Prof Coffman strengthened Duke-NUS’ education and research landscape, ensuring that its training programmes remain rigorous and responsive to Singapore’s evolving healthcare needs. He founded and built up the School’s Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders Signature Research Programme as Director. Under his leadership, Duke-NUS also secured strategic funding to advance key research initiatives and played a critical role in Singapore’s COVID-19 response, contributing to innovations such as rapid immune response testing.
Prof Klotman expressed her appreciation for outgoing Dean, Prof Coffman, adding:
“Tom has been an extraordinary bridge between Duke and Duke-NUS, deepening the ties between our institutions and reinforcing the values we share—academic excellence, collaboration and impact. Under his steady and visionary leadership, Duke-NUS has flourished as a beacon of innovation in education, research and clinical care. His legacy is not only reflected in the School’s achievements but in the strength of our transcontinental partnership and global contributions to biomedical science.”
Mr Goh also expressed appreciation to outgoing Dean, Prof Coffman, saying:
“Tom has led Duke-NUS through a defining decade with wisdom, vigour and steady resolve. He has not only guided the School’s academic and research growth, but also shaped a culture that prizes excellence, collaboration and innovation. We are deeply grateful for his contributions and leadership, which have laid a strong foundation for the next chapter.”
Even as he steps down from his role as Dean, Prof Coffman will continue to lead key research initiatives, including DYNAMO, a multi-institutional study focussed on reducing the prevalence of diabetic kidney disease in Singapore and around the world.
Note: For detailed biographies of Professor Patrick Tan and Professor Thomas Coffman, please refer to the Annexe.
Data privacy comes with a cost. There are security techniques that protect sensitive user data, like customer addresses, from attackers who may attempt to extract them from AI models — but they often make those models less accurate.
MIT researchers recently developed a framework, based on a new privacy metric called PAC Privacy, that could maintain the performance of an AI model while ensuring sensitive data, such as medical images or financial records, remain safe from attackers. Now, they’ve taken this work a step further by making their technique more computationally efficient, improving the tradeoff between accuracy and privacy, and creating a formal template that can be used to privatize virtually any algorithm without needing access to that algorithm’s inner workings.
The team utilized their new version of PAC Privacy to privatize several classic algorithms for data analysis and machine-learning tasks.
They also demonstrated that more “stable” algorithms are easier to privatize with their method. A stable algorithm’s predictions remain consistent even when its training data are slightly modified. Greater stability helps an algorithm make more accurate predictions on previously unseen data.
The researchers say the increased efficiency of the new PAC Privacy framework, and the four-step template one can follow to implement it, would make the technique easier to deploy in real-world situations.
“We tend to consider robustness and privacy as unrelated to, or perhaps even in conflict with, constructing a high-performance algorithm. First, we make a working algorithm, then we make it robust, and then private. We’ve shown that is not always the right framing. If you make your algorithm perform better in a variety of settings, you can essentially get privacy for free,” says Mayuri Sridhar, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this privacy framework.
She is joined in the paper by Hanshen Xiao PhD ’24, who will start as an assistant professor at Purdue University in the fall; and senior author Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. The research will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Estimating noise
To protect sensitive data that were used to train an AI model, engineers often add noise, or generic randomness, to the model so it becomes harder for an adversary to guess the original training data. This noise reduces a model’s accuracy, so the less noise one can add, the better.
PAC Privacy automatically estimates the smallest amount of noise one needs to add to an algorithm to achieve a desired level of privacy.
The original PAC Privacy algorithm runs a user’s AI model many times on different samples of a dataset. It measures the variance as well as correlations among these many outputs and uses this information to estimate how much noise needs to be added to protect the data.
This new variant of PAC Privacy works the same way but does not need to represent the entire matrix of data correlations across the outputs; it just needs the output variances.
“Because the thing you are estimating is much, much smaller than the entire covariance matrix, you can do it much, much faster,” Sridhar explains. This means that one can scale up to much larger datasets.
Adding noise can hurt the utility of the results, and it is important to minimize utility loss. Due to computational cost, the original PAC Privacy algorithm was limited to adding isotropic noise, which is added uniformly in all directions. Because the new variant estimates anisotropic noise, which is tailored to specific characteristics of the training data, a user could add less overall noise to achieve the same level of privacy, boosting the accuracy of the privatized algorithm.
Privacy and stability
As she studied PAC Privacy, Sridhar hypothesized that more stable algorithms would be easier to privatize with this technique. She used the more efficient variant of PAC Privacy to test this theory on several classical algorithms.
Algorithms that are more stable have less variance in their outputs when their training data change slightly. PAC Privacy breaks a dataset into chunks, runs the algorithm on each chunk of data, and measures the variance among outputs. The greater the variance, the more noise must be added to privatize the algorithm.
Employing stability techniques to decrease the variance in an algorithm’s outputs would also reduce the amount of noise that needs to be added to privatize it, she explains.
“In the best cases, we can get these win-win scenarios,” she says.
The team showed that these privacy guarantees remained strong despite the algorithm they tested, and that the new variant of PAC Privacy required an order of magnitude fewer trials to estimate the noise. They also tested the method in attack simulations, demonstrating that its privacy guarantees could withstand state-of-the-art attacks.
“We want to explore how algorithms could be co-designed with PAC Privacy, so the algorithm is more stable, secure, and robust from the beginning,” Devadas says. The researchers also want to test their method with more complex algorithms and further explore the privacy-utility tradeoff.
“The question now is: When do these win-win situations happen, and how can we make them happen more often?” Sridhar says.
“I think the key advantage PAC Privacy has in this setting over other privacy definitions is that it is a black box — you don’t need to manually analyze each individual query to privatize the results. It can be done completely automatically. We are actively building a PAC-enabled database by extending existing SQL engines to support practical, automated, and efficient private data analytics,” says Xiangyao Yu, an assistant professor in the computer sciences department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not involved with this study.
This research is supported, in part, by Cisco Systems, Capital One, the U.S. Department of Defense, and a MathWorks Fellowship.
MIT researchers enhanced a data privacy technique so it is more computationally efficient and increases the accuracy of the AI algorithms to which it is applied.
“No cash prizes. But our friends in Kyiv are calling in, and they’ll probably say thanks,” was the the tagline that drew students and tech professionals to join MIT-Ukraine’s first-ever hackathon this past January.
The hackathon was co-sponsored by MIT-Ukraine and Mission Innovation X and was shaped by the efforts of MIT alumni from across the world. It was led by Hosea Siu ’14, SM ’15, PhD ’18, a seasoned hackathon organizer and AI researcher, in collaboration with Phil Tinn MCP ’16, a research engineer now based at SINTEF [Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research] in Norway. The program was designed to prioritize tangible impact:
“In a typical hackathon, you might get a weekend of sleepless nights and some flashy but mostly useless prototypes. Here, we stretched it out over four weeks, and we’re expecting real, meaningful outcomes,” says Siu, the hackathon director.
One week of training, three weeks of project development
In the first week, participants attended lectures with leading experts on key challenges Ukraine currently faces, from a talk on mine contamination with Andrew Heafitz PhD ’05 to a briefing on disinformation with Nina Lutz SM ’21, William Brannon SM ’20, and Yara Kyrychenko (Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab). Then, participants formed teams to develop projects addressing these challenges, with mentorship from top MIT specialists including Phil Tinn (AI & defense), Svetlana Boriskina (energy resilience), and Gene Keselman (defense innovation and dual-use technology).
“I really liked the solid structure they gave us — walking us through exactly what’s happening in Ukraine, and potential solutions,” says Timur Gray, a first-year in engineering at Olin College.
The five final projects spanned demining, drone technology, AI and disinformation, education for Ukraine, and energy resilience.
Supporting demining efforts
With current levels of technology, it is estimated that it will take 757 years to fully de-mine Ukraine. Students Timur Gray and Misha Donchenko, who is a sophomore mathematics major at MIT, came together to research the latest developments in demining technology and strategize how students could most effectively support innovations.
The team has made connections with the Ukrainian Association of Humanitarian Demining and the HALO Trust to explore opportunities for MIT students to directly support demining efforts in Ukraine. They also explored project ideas to work on tools for civilians to report on mine locations, and the team created a demo web page рішучість757, which includes an interactive database mapping mine locations.
“Being able to apply my skills to something that has a real-world impact — that’s been the best part of this hackathon,” says Donchenko.
Innovating drone production
Drone technology has been one of Ukraine’s most critical advantages on the battlefield — but government bureaucracy threatens to slow innovation, according to Oleh Deineka, who made this challenge the focus of his hackathon project.
Joining remotely from Ukraine, where he studies post-war recovery at the Kyiv School of Economics, Deineka brought invaluable firsthand insight from living and working on the ground, enriching the experience for all participants. Prior to the hackathon, he had already begun developing UxS.AGENCY, a secure digital platform to connect drone developers with independent funders, with the aim of ensuring that the speed of innovations in drone technology is not curbed.
He notes that Ukrainian arms manufacturers have the capacity to produce three times more weapons and military equipment than the Ukrainian government can afford to purchase. Promoting private sector development of drone production could help solve this. The platform Deineka is working on also aims to reduce the risk of corruption, allowing developers to work directly with funders, bypassing any bureaucratic interference.
Deineka is also working with MIT’s Keselman, who gave a talk during the hackathon on dual-use technology — the idea that military innovations should also have civilian applications. Deineka emphasized that developing such dual-use technology in Ukraine could help not only to win the war, but also to create sustainable civilian applications, ensuring that Ukraine’s 10,000 trained drone operators have jobs after it ends. He pointed to future applications such as drone-based urban infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, and even personal security — like a small drone following a child with asthma, allowing parents to monitor their well-being in real time.
“This hackathon has connected me with MIT’s top minds in innovation and security. Being invited to collaborate with Gene Keselman and others has been an incredible opportunity," says Deineka.
Disinformation dynamics on Wikipedia
Wikipedia has long been a battleground for Russian disinformation, from the profiling of artists like Kazimir Malevich to the framing of historical events. The hackathon’s disinformation team worked together on a machine learning-based tool to detect biased edits.
They found that Wikipedia’s moderation system is susceptible to reinforcing systemic bias, particularly when it comes to history. Their project laid the groundwork for a potential student-led initiative to track disinformation, propose corrections, and develop tools to improve fact-checking on Wikipedia.
Education for Ukraine’s future
Russia’s war against Ukraine is having a detrimental impact on education, with constant air raid sirens disrupting classes, and over 2,000 Ukrainian schools damaged or destroyed. The STEM education team focused on what they could do to support Ukrainian students. They developed a plan for adapting MIT’s Beaver Works Summer Institute in STEM for students still living in Ukraine, or potentially for Ukrainians currently displaced to neighboring countries.
“I didn’t realize how many schools had been destroyed and how deeply that could impact kids’ futures. You hear about the war, but the hackathon made it real in a way I hadn’t thought about before,” says Catherine Tang, a senior in electrical engineering and computer science.
Vlad Duda, founder of Nomad AI, also contributed to the education track of the hackathon with a focus on language accessibility and learning support. One of the prototypes he presented, MOVA, is a Chrome extension that uses AI to translate online resources into Ukrainian — an especially valuable tool for high school students in Ukraine, who often lack the English proficiency needed to engage with complex academic content. Duda also developed OpenBookLM, an AI-powered tool that helps students turn notes into audio and personalized study guides, similar in concept to Google’s NotebookLM but designed to be open-source and adaptable to different languages and educational contexts.
Energy resilience
The energy resilience team worked on exploring cheaper, more reliable heating and cooling technologies so Ukrainian homes can be less dependent on traditional energy grids that are susceptible to Russian attacks.
The team tested polymer filaments that generate heat when stretched and cool when released, which could potentially offer low-cost, durable home heating solutions in Ukraine. Their work focused on finding the most effective braid structure to enhance durability and efficiency.
From hackathon to reality
Unlike most hackathons, where projects end when the event does, MIT-Ukraine’s goal is to ensure these ideas don’t stop here. All the projects developed during the hackathon will be considered as potential avenues for MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and MISTI Ukraine summer internship programs. Last year, 15 students worked on UROP and MISTI projects for Ukraine, contributing in areas such as STEM education and reconstruction in Ukraine. With the many ideas generated during the hackathon, MIT-Ukraine is committed to expanding opportunities for student-led projects and collaborations in the coming year.
"The MIT-Ukraine program is about learning by doing, and making an impact beyond MIT’s campus. This hackathon proved that students, researchers, and professionals can work together to develop solutions that matter — and Ukraine’s urgent challenges demand nothing less," says Elizabeth Wood, Ford International Professor of History at MIT and the faculty director of the MIT-Ukraine Program at the Center for International Studies.
"The MIT-Ukraine program is about learning by doing, and making an impact beyond MIT’s campus. This hackathon proved that students, researchers, and professionals can work together to develop solutions that matter — and Ukraine’s urgent challenges demand nothing less," said Elizabeth Wood, Ford International Professor of History at MIT and the faculty director of the MIT-Ukraine Program at the Center for International Studies.
As the world moves to reduce carbon emissions, solar and wind power will play an increasing role on electricity grids. But those renewable sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy. So to ensure a reliable power grid — one that can deliver electricity 24/7 — it’s crucial to have a means of storing electricity when supplies are abundant and delivering it later, when they’re not. And sometimes large amounts of electricity will need to be stored not just for hours, but for days, or even longer.
Some methods of achieving “long-duration energy storage” are promising. For example, with pumped hydro energy storage, water is pumped from a lake to another, higher lake when there’s extra electricity and released back down through power-generating turbines when more electricity is needed. But that approach is limited by geography, and most potential sites in the United States have already been used. Lithium-ion batteries could provide grid-scale storage, but only for about four hours. Longer than that and battery systems get prohibitively expensive.
A team of researchers from MIT and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has been investigating a less-familiar option based on an unlikely-sounding concept: liquid air, or air that is drawn in from the surroundings, cleaned and dried, and then cooled to the point that it liquefies.
“Liquid air energy storage” (LAES) systems have been built, so the technology is technically feasible. Moreover, LAES systems are totally clean and can be sited nearly anywhere, storing vast amounts of electricity for days or longer and delivering it when it’s needed. But there haven’t been conclusive studies of its economic viability. Would the income over time warrant the initial investment and ongoing costs? With funding from the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center, the researchers developed a model that takes detailed information on LAES systems and calculates when and where those systems would be economically viable, assuming future scenarios in line with selected decarbonization targets as well as other conditions that may prevail on future energy grids.
They found that under some of the scenarios they modeled, LAES could be economically viable in certain locations. Sensitivity analyses showed that policies providing a subsidy on capital expenses could make LAES systems economically viable in many locations. Further calculations showed that the cost of storing a given amount of electricity with LAES would be lower than with more familiar systems such as pumped hydro and lithium-ion batteries. They conclude that LAES holds promise as a means of providing critically needed long-duration storage when future power grids are decarbonized and dominated by intermittent renewable sources of electricity.
The researchers — Shaylin A. Cetegen, a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE); Professor Emeritus Truls Gundersen of the NTNU Department of Energy and Process Engineering; and MIT Professor Emeritus Paul I. Barton of ChemE — describe their model and their findings in a new paper published in the journal Energy.
The LAES technology and its benefits
LAES systems consists of three steps: charging, storing, and discharging. When supply on the grid exceeds demand and prices are low, the LAES system is charged. Air is then drawn in and liquefied. A large amount of electricity is consumed to cool and liquefy the air in the LAES process. The liquid air is then sent to highly insulated storage tanks, where it’s held at a very low temperature and atmospheric pressure. When the power grid needs added electricity to meet demand, the liquid air is first pumped to a higher pressure and then heated, and it turns back into a gas. This high-pressure, high-temperature, vapor-phase air expands in a turbine that generates electricity to be sent back to the grid.
According to Cetegen, a primary advantage of LAES is that it’s clean. “There are no contaminants involved,” she says. “It takes in and releases only ambient air and electricity, so it’s as clean as the electricity that’s used to run it.” In addition, a LAES system can be built largely from commercially available components and does not rely on expensive or rare materials. And the system can be sited almost anywhere, including near other industrial processes that produce waste heat or cold that can be used by the LAES system to increase its energy efficiency.
Economic viability
In considering the potential role of LAES on future power grids, the first question is: Will LAES systems be attractive to investors? Answering that question requires calculating the technology’s net present value (NPV), which represents the sum of all discounted cash flows — including revenues, capital expenditures, operating costs, and other financial factors — over the project's lifetime. (The study assumed a cash flow discount rate of 7 percent.)
To calculate the NPV, the researchers needed to determine how LAES systems will perform in future energy markets. In those markets, various sources of electricity are brought online to meet the current demand, typically following a process called “economic dispatch:” The lowest-cost source that’s available is always deployed next. Determining the NPV of liquid air storage therefore requires predicting how that technology will fare in future markets competing with other sources of electricity when demand exceeds supply — and also accounting for prices when supply exceeds demand, so excess electricity is available to recharge the LAES systems.
For their study, the MIT and NTNU researchers designed a model that starts with a description of an LAES system, including details such as the sizes of the units where the air is liquefied and the power is recovered, and also capital expenses based on estimates reported in the literature. The model then draws on state-of-the-art pricing data that’s released every year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and is widely used by energy modelers worldwide. The NREL dataset forecasts prices, construction and retirement of specific types of electricity generation and storage facilities, and more, assuming eight decarbonization scenarios for 18 regions of the United States out to 2050.
The new model then tracks buying and selling in energy markets for every hour of every day in a year, repeating the same schedule for five-year intervals. Based on the NREL dataset and details of the LAES system — plus constraints such as the system’s physical storage capacity and how often it can switch between charging and discharging — the model calculates how much money LAES operators would make selling power to the grid when it’s needed and how much they would spend buying electricity when it’s available to recharge their LAES system. In line with the NREL dataset, the model generates results for 18 U.S. regions and eight decarbonization scenarios, including 100 percent decarbonization by 2035 and 95 percent decarbonization by 2050, and other assumptions about future energy grids, including high-demand growth plus high and low costs for renewable energy and for natural gas.
Cetegen describes some of their results: “Assuming a 100-megawatt (MW) system — a standard sort of size — we saw economic viability pop up under the decarbonization scenario calling for 100 percent decarbonization by 2035.” So, positive NPVs (indicating economic viability) occurred only under the most aggressive — therefore the least realistic — scenario, and they occurred in only a few southern states, including Texas and Florida, likely because of how those energy markets are structured and operate.
The researchers also tested the sensitivity of NPVs to different storage capacities, that is, how long the system could continuously deliver power to the grid. They calculated the NPVs of a 100 MW system that could provide electricity supply for one day, one week, and one month. “That analysis showed that under aggressive decarbonization, weekly storage is more economically viable than monthly storage, because [in the latter case] we’re paying for more storage capacity than we need,” explains Cetegen.
Improving the NPV of the LAES system
The researchers next analyzed two possible ways to improve the NPV of liquid air storage: by increasing the system’s energy efficiency and by providing financial incentives. Their analyses showed that increasing the energy efficiency, even up to the theoretical limit of the process, would not change the economic viability of LAES under the most realistic decarbonization scenarios. On the other hand, a major improvement resulted when they assumed policies providing subsidies on capital expenditures on new installations. Indeed, assuming subsidies of between 40 percent and 60 percent made the NPVs for a 100 MW system become positive under all the realistic scenarios.
Thus, their analysis showed that financial incentives could be far more effective than technical improvements in making LAES economically viable. While engineers may find that outcome disappointing, Cetegen notes that from a broader perspective, it’s good news. “You could spend your whole life trying to optimize the efficiency of this process, and it wouldn’t translate to securing the investment needed to scale the technology,” she says. “Policies can take a long time to implement as well. But theoretically you could do it overnight. So if storage is needed [on a future decarbonized grid], then this is one way to encourage adoption of LAES right away.”
Cost comparison with other energy storage technologies
Calculating the economic viability of a storage technology is highly dependent on the assumptions used. As a result, a different measure — the “levelized cost of storage” (LCOS) — is typically used to compare the costs of different storage technologies. In simple terms, the LCOS is the cost of storing each unit of energy over the lifetime of a project, not accounting for any income that results.
On that measure, the LAES technology excels. The researchers’ model yielded an LCOS for liquid air storage of about $60 per megawatt-hour, regardless of the decarbonization scenario. That LCOS is about a third that of lithium-ion battery storage and half that of pumped hydro. Cetegen cites another interesting finding: the LCOS of their assumed LAES system varied depending on where it’s being used. The standard practice of reporting a single LCOS for a given energy storage technology may not provide the full picture.
Cetegen has adapted the model and is now calculating the NPV and LCOS for energy storage using lithium-ion batteries. But she’s already encouraged by the LCOS of liquid air storage. “While LAES systems may not be economically viable from an investment perspective today, that doesn’t mean they won’t be implemented in the future,” she concludes. “With limited options for grid-scale storage expansion and the growing need for storage technologies to ensure energy security, if we can't find economically viable alternatives, we’ll likely have to turn to least-cost solutions to meet storage needs. This is why the story of liquid air storage is far from over. We believe our findings justify the continued exploration of LAES as a key energy storage solution for the future.”
MIT PhD candidate Shaylin Cetegen (pictured) and her colleagues, Professor Emeritus Truls Gundersen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Professor Emeritus Paul Barton of MIT, have developed a comprehensive assessment of the potential role of “liquid air energy storage” for large-scale, long-duration storage on electric power grids of the future.
As the world moves to reduce carbon emissions, solar and wind power will play an increasing role on electricity grids. But those renewable sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy. So to ensure a reliable power grid — one that can deliver electricity 24/7 — it’s crucial to have a means of storing electricity when supplies are abundant and delivering it later, when they’re not. And sometimes large amounts of electricity will need to be stored not just for hours, but for days, or even longer.
Some methods of achieving “long-duration energy storage” are promising. For example, with pumped hydro energy storage, water is pumped from a lake to another, higher lake when there’s extra electricity and released back down through power-generating turbines when more electricity is needed. But that approach is limited by geography, and most potential sites in the United States have already been used. Lithium-ion batteries could provide grid-scale storage, but only for about four hours. Longer than that and battery systems get prohibitively expensive.
A team of researchers from MIT and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has been investigating a less-familiar option based on an unlikely-sounding concept: liquid air, or air that is drawn in from the surroundings, cleaned and dried, and then cooled to the point that it liquefies.
“Liquid air energy storage” (LAES) systems have been built, so the technology is technically feasible. Moreover, LAES systems are totally clean and can be sited nearly anywhere, storing vast amounts of electricity for days or longer and delivering it when it’s needed. But there haven’t been conclusive studies of its economic viability. Would the income over time warrant the initial investment and ongoing costs? With funding from the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center, the researchers developed a model that takes detailed information on LAES systems and calculates when and where those systems would be economically viable, assuming future scenarios in line with selected decarbonization targets as well as other conditions that may prevail on future energy grids.
They found that under some of the scenarios they modeled, LAES could be economically viable in certain locations. Sensitivity analyses showed that policies providing a subsidy on capital expenses could make LAES systems economically viable in many locations. Further calculations showed that the cost of storing a given amount of electricity with LAES would be lower than with more familiar systems such as pumped hydro and lithium-ion batteries. They conclude that LAES holds promise as a means of providing critically needed long-duration storage when future power grids are decarbonized and dominated by intermittent renewable sources of electricity.
The researchers — Shaylin A. Cetegen, a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE); Professor Emeritus Truls Gundersen of the NTNU Department of Energy and Process Engineering; and MIT Professor Emeritus Paul I. Barton of ChemE — describe their model and their findings in a new paper published in the journal Energy.
The LAES technology and its benefits
LAES systems consists of three steps: charging, storing, and discharging. When supply on the grid exceeds demand and prices are low, the LAES system is charged. Air is then drawn in and liquefied. A large amount of electricity is consumed to cool and liquefy the air in the LAES process. The liquid air is then sent to highly insulated storage tanks, where it’s held at a very low temperature and atmospheric pressure. When the power grid needs added electricity to meet demand, the liquid air is first pumped to a higher pressure and then heated, and it turns back into a gas. This high-pressure, high-temperature, vapor-phase air expands in a turbine that generates electricity to be sent back to the grid.
According to Cetegen, a primary advantage of LAES is that it’s clean. “There are no contaminants involved,” she says. “It takes in and releases only ambient air and electricity, so it’s as clean as the electricity that’s used to run it.” In addition, a LAES system can be built largely from commercially available components and does not rely on expensive or rare materials. And the system can be sited almost anywhere, including near other industrial processes that produce waste heat or cold that can be used by the LAES system to increase its energy efficiency.
Economic viability
In considering the potential role of LAES on future power grids, the first question is: Will LAES systems be attractive to investors? Answering that question requires calculating the technology’s net present value (NPV), which represents the sum of all discounted cash flows — including revenues, capital expenditures, operating costs, and other financial factors — over the project's lifetime. (The study assumed a cash flow discount rate of 7 percent.)
To calculate the NPV, the researchers needed to determine how LAES systems will perform in future energy markets. In those markets, various sources of electricity are brought online to meet the current demand, typically following a process called “economic dispatch:” The lowest-cost source that’s available is always deployed next. Determining the NPV of liquid air storage therefore requires predicting how that technology will fare in future markets competing with other sources of electricity when demand exceeds supply — and also accounting for prices when supply exceeds demand, so excess electricity is available to recharge the LAES systems.
For their study, the MIT and NTNU researchers designed a model that starts with a description of an LAES system, including details such as the sizes of the units where the air is liquefied and the power is recovered, and also capital expenses based on estimates reported in the literature. The model then draws on state-of-the-art pricing data that’s released every year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and is widely used by energy modelers worldwide. The NREL dataset forecasts prices, construction and retirement of specific types of electricity generation and storage facilities, and more, assuming eight decarbonization scenarios for 18 regions of the United States out to 2050.
The new model then tracks buying and selling in energy markets for every hour of every day in a year, repeating the same schedule for five-year intervals. Based on the NREL dataset and details of the LAES system — plus constraints such as the system’s physical storage capacity and how often it can switch between charging and discharging — the model calculates how much money LAES operators would make selling power to the grid when it’s needed and how much they would spend buying electricity when it’s available to recharge their LAES system. In line with the NREL dataset, the model generates results for 18 U.S. regions and eight decarbonization scenarios, including 100 percent decarbonization by 2035 and 95 percent decarbonization by 2050, and other assumptions about future energy grids, including high-demand growth plus high and low costs for renewable energy and for natural gas.
Cetegen describes some of their results: “Assuming a 100-megawatt (MW) system — a standard sort of size — we saw economic viability pop up under the decarbonization scenario calling for 100 percent decarbonization by 2035.” So, positive NPVs (indicating economic viability) occurred only under the most aggressive — therefore the least realistic — scenario, and they occurred in only a few southern states, including Texas and Florida, likely because of how those energy markets are structured and operate.
The researchers also tested the sensitivity of NPVs to different storage capacities, that is, how long the system could continuously deliver power to the grid. They calculated the NPVs of a 100 MW system that could provide electricity supply for one day, one week, and one month. “That analysis showed that under aggressive decarbonization, weekly storage is more economically viable than monthly storage, because [in the latter case] we’re paying for more storage capacity than we need,” explains Cetegen.
Improving the NPV of the LAES system
The researchers next analyzed two possible ways to improve the NPV of liquid air storage: by increasing the system’s energy efficiency and by providing financial incentives. Their analyses showed that increasing the energy efficiency, even up to the theoretical limit of the process, would not change the economic viability of LAES under the most realistic decarbonization scenarios. On the other hand, a major improvement resulted when they assumed policies providing subsidies on capital expenditures on new installations. Indeed, assuming subsidies of between 40 percent and 60 percent made the NPVs for a 100 MW system become positive under all the realistic scenarios.
Thus, their analysis showed that financial incentives could be far more effective than technical improvements in making LAES economically viable. While engineers may find that outcome disappointing, Cetegen notes that from a broader perspective, it’s good news. “You could spend your whole life trying to optimize the efficiency of this process, and it wouldn’t translate to securing the investment needed to scale the technology,” she says. “Policies can take a long time to implement as well. But theoretically you could do it overnight. So if storage is needed [on a future decarbonized grid], then this is one way to encourage adoption of LAES right away.”
Cost comparison with other energy storage technologies
Calculating the economic viability of a storage technology is highly dependent on the assumptions used. As a result, a different measure — the “levelized cost of storage” (LCOS) — is typically used to compare the costs of different storage technologies. In simple terms, the LCOS is the cost of storing each unit of energy over the lifetime of a project, not accounting for any income that results.
On that measure, the LAES technology excels. The researchers’ model yielded an LCOS for liquid air storage of about $60 per megawatt-hour, regardless of the decarbonization scenario. That LCOS is about a third that of lithium-ion battery storage and half that of pumped hydro. Cetegen cites another interesting finding: the LCOS of their assumed LAES system varied depending on where it’s being used. The standard practice of reporting a single LCOS for a given energy storage technology may not provide the full picture.
Cetegen has adapted the model and is now calculating the NPV and LCOS for energy storage using lithium-ion batteries. But she’s already encouraged by the LCOS of liquid air storage. “While LAES systems may not be economically viable from an investment perspective today, that doesn’t mean they won’t be implemented in the future,” she concludes. “With limited options for grid-scale storage expansion and the growing need for storage technologies to ensure energy security, if we can't find economically viable alternatives, we’ll likely have to turn to least-cost solutions to meet storage needs. This is why the story of liquid air storage is far from over. We believe our findings justify the continued exploration of LAES as a key energy storage solution for the future.”
MIT PhD candidate Shaylin Cetegen (pictured) and her colleagues, Professor Emeritus Truls Gundersen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Professor Emeritus Paul Barton of MIT, have developed a comprehensive assessment of the potential role of “liquid air energy storage” for large-scale, long-duration storage on electric power grids of the future.
For the past decade, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has been instrumental in promoting student engagement across the Institute to help solve the world’s most pressing water and food system challenges. As part of J-WAFS’ central mission of securing the world’s water and food supply, J-WAFS aims to cultivate the next generation of leaders in the water and food sectors by encouraging MIT student involvement through a variety of programs and mechanisms that provide research funding, mentorship, and other types of support.
J-WAFS offers a range of opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students to engage in the advancement of water and food systems research. These include graduate student fellowships, travel grants for participation in conferences, funding for research projects in India, video competitions highlighting students’ water and food research, and support for student-led organizations and initiatives focused on critical areas in water and food.
As J-WAFS enters its second decade, it continues to expose students across the Institute to experiential hands-on water and food research, career and other networking opportunities, and a platform to develop their innovative and collaborative solutions.
Graduate student fellowships
In 2017, J-WAFS inaugurated two graduate student fellowships: the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions and the J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship Program. The Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions is a doctoral fellowship for students pursuing research related to water for human need at MIT. The fellowship is made possible by Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. Each year, up to two outstanding students are selected to receive fellowship support for one academic semester. Through it, J-WAFS seeks to support distinguished MIT students who are pursuing solutions to the pressing global water supply challenges of our time. The J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions is funded by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program, which offers companies the opportunity to collaborate with MIT on water and food research. A portion of each research affiliate’s fees supports this fellowship.
Aditya Avinash Ghodgaonkar, a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), reflects on how receiving a J-WAFS graduate student fellowship positively impacted his research on the design of low-cost emitters for affordable, resilient drip irrigation for farmers: “My J-WAFS fellowship gave me the flexibility and financial support needed to explore new directions in the area of clog-resistant drip irrigation that had a higher risk element that might not have been feasible to manage on an industrially sponsored project,” Ghodgaonkar explains. Emitters, which control the volume and flow rate of water used during irrigation, often clog due to small particles like sand. Ghodgaonkar worked with Professor Amos Winter, and with farmers in resource-constrained communities in countries like Jordan and Morocco, to develop an emitter that is mechanically more resistant to clogging. Ghodgaonkar reports that their energy-efficient, compact, clog-resistant drip emitters are being commercialized by Toro and may be available for retail in the next few years. The opportunities and funding support Ghodgaonkar has received from J-WAFS contributed greatly to his entrepreneurial success and the advancement of the water and agricultural sectors.
Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang, a PhD student advised by Professor Robert Langer and Principal Research Scientist Ana Jaklenec of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was a 2022 J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellow. With the fellowship, Zhang was able to focus on her innovative research on a novel micronutrient delivery platform that fortifies food with essential vitamins and nutrients. “We intake micronutrients from basically all the healthy food that we eat; however, around the world there are about 2 billion people currently suffering from micronutrient deficiency because they do not have access to very healthy, very fresh food,” Zhang says. Her research involves the development of biodegradable polymers that can deliver these micronutrients in harsh environments in underserved regions of the world. “Vitamin A is not very stable, for example; we have vitamin A in different vegetables but when we cook them, the vitamin can easily degrade,” Zhang explains. However, when vitamin A is encapsulated in the microparticle platform, simulation of boiling and of the stomach environment shows that vitamin A was stabilized. “The meaningful factors behind this experiment are real,” says Zhang. The J-WAFS Fellowship helped position Zhang to win the 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition for this work.
J-WAFS grant for water and food projects in India
J-WAFS India Grants are intended to further the work being pursued by MIT individuals as a part of their research, innovation, entrepreneurship, coursework, or related activities. Faculty, research staff, and undergraduate and graduate students are eligible to apply. The program aims to support projects that will benefit low-income communities in India, and facilitates travel and other expenses related to directly engaging with those communities.
Gokul Sampath, a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Jonathan Bessette, a PhD student in MechE, initially met through J-WAFS-sponsored conference travel, and discovered their mutual interest in the problem of arsenic in water in India. Together, they developed a cross-disciplinary proposal that received a J-WAFS India Grant. Their project is studying how women in rural India make decisions about where they fetch water for their families, and how these decisions impact exposure to groundwater contaminants like naturally-occurring arsenic. Specifically, they are developing low-cost remote sensors to better understand water-fetching practices. The grant is enabling Sampath and Bessette to equip Indian households with sensor-enabled water collection devices (“smart buckets”) that will provide them data about fetching practices in arsenic-affected villages. By demonstrating the efficacy of a sensor-based approach, the team hopes to address a major data gap in international development. “It is due to programs like the Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab that I was able to obtain the support for interdisciplinary work on connecting water security, public health, and regional planning in India,” says Sampath.
J-WAFS travel grants for water conferences
In addition to funding graduate student research, J-WAFS also provides grants for graduate students to attend water conferences worldwide. Typically, students will only receive travel funding to attend conferences where they are presenting their research. However, the J-WAFS travel grants support learning, networking, and career exploration opportunities for exceptional MIT graduate students who are interested in a career in the water sector, whether in academia, nonprofits, government, or industry.
Catherine Lu ’23, MNG ’24 was awarded a 2023 Travel Grant to attend the UNC Water and Health Conference in North Carolina. The conference serves as a curated space for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to convene and assess data, scrutinize scientific findings, and enhance new and existing strategies for expanding access to and provision of services for water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Lu, who studied civil and environmental engineering, worked with Professor Dara Entekhabi on modeling and predicting droughts in Africa using satellite Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) data. As she evaluated her research trajectory and career options in the water sector, Lu found the conference to be informative and enlightening. “I was able to expand my knowledge on all the sectors and issues that are related to water and the implications they have on my research topic.” Furthermore, she notes: “I was really impressed by the diverse range of people that were able to attend the conference. The global perspective offered at the conference provided a valuable context for understanding the challenges and successes of different regions around the world — from WASH education in schools in Zimbabwe and India to rural water access disparities in the United States … Being able to engage with such passionate and dedicated people has motivated me to continue progress in this sector.” Following graduation, Lu secured a position as a water resources engineer at CDM Smith, an engineering and construction firm.
Daniela Morales, a master’s student in city planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, was a 2024 J-WAFS Travel Grant recipient who attended World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden. The annual global conference is organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute and convenes leading experts, decision-makers, and professionals in the water sector to actively engage in discussions and developments addressing critical water-related challenges. Morales’ research interests involve drinking water quality and access in rural and peri-urban areas affected by climate change impacts, the effects of municipal water shutoffs on marginalized communities, and the relationship between regional water management and public health outcomes. When reflecting on her experience at the conference, Morales writes: “Being part of this event has given me so much motivation to continue my professional and academic journey in water management as it relates to public health and city planning … There was so much energy that was collectively generated in the conference, and so many new ideas that I was able to process around my own career interests and my role as a future planner in water management, that the last day of the conference felt less like an ending and more of the beginning of a new chapter. I am excited to take all the information I learned to work towards my own research, and continue to build relationships with all the new contacts I made.” Morales also notes that without the support of the J-WAFS grant, “I would not have had the opportunity to make it to Stockholm and participate in such a unique week of water wisdom.”
Seed grants and Solutions grants
J-WAFS offers seed grants for early-stage research and Solutions Grants for later-stage research that is ready to move from the lab to the commercial world. Proposals for both types of grants must be submitted and led by an MIT principal investigator, but graduate students, and sometimes undergraduates, are often supported by these grants.
Arjav Shah, a PhD-MBA student in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management, is currently pursuing the commercialization of a water treatment technology that was first supported through a 2019 J-WAFS seed grant and then a 2022 J-WAFS Solutions Grant with Professor Patrick Doyle. The technology uses hydrogels to remove a broad range of micropollutants from water. The Solutions funding enables entrepreneurial students and postdocs to lay the groundwork to commercialize a technology by assessing use scenarios and exploring business needs with actual potential customers. “With J-WAFS’ support, we were not only able to scale up the technology, but also gain a deeper understanding of market needs and develop a strong business case,” says Shah. Shah and the Solutions team have discovered that the hydrogels could be used in several real-world contexts, ranging from large-scale industrial use to small-scale, portable, off-grid applications. “We are incredibly grateful to J-WAFS for their support, particularly in fostering industry connections and facilitating introductions to investors, potential customers, and experts,” Shah adds.
Shah was also a 2023 J-WAFS Travel Grant awardee who attended Stockholm World Water Week that year. He says, “J-WAFS has played a pivotal role in both my academic journey at MIT and my entrepreneurial pursuits. J-WAFS support has helped me grow both as a scientist and an aspiring entrepreneur. The exposure and opportunities provided have allowed me to develop critical skills such as customer discovery, financial modeling, business development, fundraising, and storytelling — all essential for translating technology into real-world impact. These experiences provided invaluable insights into what it takes to bring a technology from the lab to market.”
Shah is currently leading efforts to spin out a company to commercialize the hydrogel research. Since receiving J-WAFS support, the team has made major strides toward launching a startup company, including winning the Pillar VC Moonshot Prize, Cleantech Open National Grand Prize, MassCEC Catalyst Award, and participation in the NSF I-Corps National Program.
J-WAFS student video competitions
J-WAFS has hosted two video competitions: MIT Research for a Water Secure Future and MIT Research for a Food Secure Future, in honor of World Water Day and Word Food Day, respectively. In these competitions, students are tasked with creating original videos showcasing their innovative water and food research conducted at MIT. The opportunity is open to MIT students, postdocs, and recent alumni.
Following a review by a distinguished panel of judges, Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22 won first place in the 2022 J-WAFS World Food Day Student Video Competition for his video focused on eliminating pesticide pollution and waste. Jayaprakash delved into the science behind AgZen-Cloak, a new generation of agricultural sprays that prevents pesticides from bouncing off of plants and seeping into the ground, thus causing harmful runoff. The J-WAFS competition provided Jayaprakash with a platform to highlight the universal, low-cost, and environmentally sustainable benefits of AgZen-Cloak. Jayaprakash worked on similar technology as a funded student on a J-WAFS Solutions grant with Professor Kripa Varanasi. The Solutions grant, in fact, helped Jayaprakash and Varanasi to launch AgZen, a company that deploys AgZen-Cloak and other products and technologies to control the interactions of droplets and sprays with crop surfaces. AgZen is currently helping farmers sustainably tend to their agricultural plots while also protecting the environment.
In 2021, Hilary Johnson SM ’18, PhD ’22, won first place in the J-WAFS World Water Day video competition. Her video highlighted her work on a novel pump that uses adaptive hydraulics for improved pump efficiency. The pump was part of a sponsored research project with Xylem Inc., a J-WAFS Research Affiliate company, and Professor Alex Slocum of MechE. At the time, Johnson was a PhD student in Slocum’s lab. She was instrumental in the development of the pump by engineering the volute to expand and contract to meet changing system flow rates. Johnson went on to later become a 2021-22 J-WAFS Fellow, and is now a full-time mechanical engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
J-WAFS-supported student clubs
J-WAFS-supported student clubs provide members of the MIT student community the opportunity for networking and professional advancement through events focused on water and food systems topics.
J-WAFS is a sponsor of the MIT Water Club, a student-led group that supports and promotes the engagement of the MIT community in water-sector-related activism, dissemination of information, and research innovation. The club allows students to spearhead the organization of conferences, lectures, outreach events, research showcases, and entrepreneurship competitions including the former MIT Water Innovation Prize and MIT Water Summit. J-WAFS not only sponsors the MIT Water Club financially, but offers mentorship and guidance to the leadership team.
The MIT Food and Agriculture Club is also supported by J-WAFS. The club’s mission is to promote the engagement of the MIT community in food and agriculture-related topics. In doing so, the students lead initiatives to share the innovative technology and business solutions researchers are developing in food and agriculture systems. J-WAFS assists in the connection of passionate MIT students with those who are actively working in the food and agriculture industry beyond the Institute. From 2015 to 2022, J-WAFS also helped the club co-produce the Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize — a student business plan competition for food and agricultural startups.
From 2023 onward, the MIT Water Club and the MIT Food and Ag Club have been joining forces to organize a combined prize competition: The MIT Water, Food and Agriculture (WFA) Innovation Prize. The WFA Innovation Prize is a business plan competition for student-led startups focused on any region or market. The teams present business plans involving a technology, product, service, or process that is aimed at solving a problem related to water, food, or agriculture. The competition encourages all approaches to innovation, from engineering and product design to policy and data analytics. The goal of the competition is to help emerging entrepreneurs translate research and ideas into businesses, access mentors and resources, and build networks in the water, food, and agriculture industries. J-WAFS offers financial and in-kind support, working with student leaders to plan, organize, and implement the stages of the competition through to the final pitch event. This year, J-WAFS is continuing to support the WFA team, which is led by Ali Decker, an MBA student at MIT Sloan, and Sam Jakshtis, a master’s student in MIT’s science in real estate development program. The final pitch event will take place on April 30 in the MIT Media Lab.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with Renee Robins, executive director of J-WAFS, on MIT’s Water, Food and Agriculture Innovation Prize for the past two years, and it has been both immensely valuable and a delight to have her support,” says Decker. “Renee has helped us in all areas of prize planning: brainstorming new ideas, thinking through startup finalist selection, connecting to potential sponsors and partners, and more. Above all, she supports us with passion and joy; each time we meet, I look forward to our discussion,” Decker adds.
J-WAFS events
Throughout the year, J-WAFS aims to offer events that will engage any in the MIT student community who are working in water or food systems. For example, on April 19, 2023, J-WAFS teamed up with the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) to co-host an MIT student poster session for Earth Month. The theme of the poster session was “MIT research for a changing planet,” and it featured work from 11 MIT students with projects in water, food, energy, and the environment. The students, who represented a range of MIT departments, labs, and centers, were on hand to discuss their projects and engage with those attending the event. Attendees could vote for their favorite poster after being asked to consider which poster most clearly communicated the research problem and the potential solution. At the end of the night, votes were tallied and the winner of the “People’s Choice Award” for best poster was Elaine Liu ’24, an undergraduate in mathematics at the time of the event. Liu’s poster featured her work on managing failure cascades in systems with wind power.
J-WAFS also hosts less-structured student networking events. For instance, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2024, J-WAFS hosted an ice cream social for student networking. The informal event was an opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students from across the Institute to meet and mingle with like-minded peers working in, or interested in, water and food systems. Students were able to explain their current and future research, interests, and projects and ask questions while exchanging ideas, engaging with one another, and potentially forming collaborations, or at the very least sharing insights.
Looking ahead to 10 more years of student impact
Over the past decade, J-WAFS has demonstrated a strong commitment to empowering students in the water and food sectors, fostering an environment where they can confidently drive meaningful change and innovation. PhD student Jonathan Bessette sums up the J-WAFS community as a “one-of-a-kind community that enables essential research in water and food that otherwise would not be pursued. It’s this type of research that is not often the focus of major funding, yet has such a strong impact in sustainable development.”
J-WAFS aims to provide students with the support and tools they need to conduct authentic and meaningful water and food-related research that will benefit communities around the world. This support, coupled with an MIT education, enables students to become leaders in sustainable water and food systems. As the second decade of J-WAFS programming begins, the J-WAFS team remains committed to fostering student collaboration across the Institute, driving innovative solutions to revitalize the world’s water and food systems while empowering the next generation of pioneers in these critical fields.
The MIT Press announced today the inception of its new Faculty and Alumni Book Awards program, along with the inaugural winners.The new awards are made possible by an anonymous donor and are intended to honor the enduring importance of books and their authors within the MIT community.
“We are deeply grateful to have the opportunity to publish so many distinguished MIT faculty and alumni voices — books that enrich our collective understanding and inspire new perspectives,” says Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press. “In establishing the MIT Press Faculty and Alumni Book Awards program, we aim to acknowledge these scholars and the incredible contributions they make towards the progress of knowledge within the MIT community and beyond.”
Awards in the two author categories (faculty and alumni) will be selected each year from a shortlist of nominated MIT Press titles published in the three preceding years. The winning books, selected by a dedicated committee, will be those that most successfully provide a clear cultural, professional, and publishing contribution to the academic community or reading public; advance scholarship in their disciplines, pioneer a new field of inquiry, or effectively engage the public; and represent the prestige and quality for which the MIT Press is widely recognized.
The winner of the 2025 MIT Press Faculty Book Award is “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines” (2023), by David Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow; David Mindell, professor of aerospace engineering and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing; and Elisabeth Reynolds, professor of the practice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. In an era of rapid technological advancement and shifting labor markets, “The Work of the Future” stands as an essential, insightful, and profoundly timely contribution to one of the most pressing issues of our time.
The winner of the 2025 MIT Press Alumni Book Award is “The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World”(2023), by Michael D. Smith PhD ’99, who earned his MIT doctorate in management science and is now the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. “The Abundant University” is a wake-up call for elite institutions and a visionary roadmap for the future of higher education.
MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart will present the awards at a campus celebration on April 17.
Established in 1962, the MIT Press’ mission is to lead by pushing the boundaries of scholarly publishing in active partnership with the MIT community and aligned with MIT’s mission to advance knowledge in science, technology, the arts, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.
The new Faculty and Alumni Book Awards are made possible by an anonymous donor and are intended to honor the enduring importance of books and their authors within the MIT community.
Scientific research on the harms of digital technology is stuck in a ‘failing cycle’ that moves too slowly to allow governments and society to hold tech companies to account, according to two leading researchers in a new report published in the journal Science.
Dr Amy Orben from the University of Cambridge and Dr J Nathan Matias from Cornell University say the pace at which new technology is deployed to billions of people has put unbearable strain on the scientific systems trying to evaluate its effects.
They argue that big tech companies effectively outsource research on the safety of their products to independent scientists at universities and charities who work with a fraction of the resources – while firms also obstruct access to essential data and information. This is in contrast to other industries where safety testing is largely done ‘in house’.
Orben and Matias call for an overhaul of ‘evidence production’ assessing the impact of technology on everything from mental health to discrimination.
Their recommendations include accelerating the research process, so that policy interventions and safer designs are tested in parallel with initial evidence gathering, and creating registries of tech-related harms informed by the public.
“Big technology companies increasingly act with perceived impunity, while trust in their regard for public safety is fading,” said Orben, of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. “Policymakers and the public are turning to independent scientists as arbiters of technology safety.”
“Scientists like ourselves are committed to the public good, but we are asked to hold to account a billion-dollar industry without appropriate support for our research or the basic tools to produce good quality evidence quickly.”
“We must urgently fix this science and policy ecosystem so we can better understand and manage the potential risks posed by our evolving digital society,” said Orben.
'Negative feedback cycle'
In the latest Science paper, the researchers point out that technology companies often follow policies of rapidly deploying products first and then looking to ‘debug’ potential harms afterwards. This includes distributing generative AI products to millions before completing basic safety tests, for example.
When tasked with understanding potential harms of new technologies, researchers rely on ‘routine science’ which – having driven societal progress for decades – now lags the rate of technological change to the extent that it is becoming at times ‘unusable’.
With many citizens pressuring politicians to act on digital safety, Orben and Matias argue that technology companies use the slow pace of science and lack of hard evidence to resist policy interventions and “minimize their own responsibility”.
Even if research gets appropriately resourced, they note that researchers will be faced with understanding products that evolve at an unprecedented rate.
“Technology products change on a daily or weekly basis, and adapt to individuals. Even company staff may not fully understand the product at any one time, and scientific research can be out of date by the time it is completed, let alone published,” said Matias, who leads Cornell’s Citizens and Technology (CAT) Lab.
“At the same time, claims about the inadequacy of science can become a source of delay in technology safety when science plays the role of gatekeeper to policy interventions,” Matias said.
“Just as oil and chemical industries have leveraged the slow pace of science to deflect the evidence that informs responsibility, executives in technology companies have followed a similar pattern. Some have even allegedly refused to commit substantial resources to safety research without certain kinds of causal evidence, which they also decline to fund.”
The researchers lay out the current ‘negative feedback cycle’:
Tech companies do not adequately resource safety research, shifting the burden to independent scientists who lack data and funding. This means high-quality causal evidence is not produced in required timeframes, which weakens government’s ability to regulate – further disincentivising safety research, as companies are let off the hook.
Orben and Matias argue that this cycle must be redesigned, and offer ways to do it.
Reporting digital harms
To speed up the identification of harms caused by online technologies, policymakers or civil society could construct registries for incident reporting, and encourage the public to contribute evidence when they experience harms.
Similar methods are already used in fields such as environmental toxicology where the public reports on polluted waterways, or vehicle crash reporting programs that inform automotive safety, for example.
“We gain nothing when people are told to mistrust their lived experience due to an absence of evidence when that evidence is not being compiled,” said Matias.
Existing registries, from mortality records to domestic violence databases, could also be augmented to include information on the involvement of digital technologies such as AI.
The paper’s authors also outline a ‘minimum viable evidence’ system, in which policymakers and researchers adjust the ‘evidence threshold’ required to show potential technological harms before starting to test interventions.
These evidence thresholds could be set by panels made up of affected communities, the public, or ‘science courts’: expert groups assembled to make rapid assessments.
“Causal evidence of technological harms is often required before designers and scientists are allowed to test interventions to build a safer digital society,” said Orben.
“Yet intervention testing can be used to scope ways to help individuals and society, and pinpoint potential harms in the process. We need to move from a sequential system to an agile, parallelised one.”
Under a minimum viable evidence system, if a company obstructs or fails to support independent research, and is not transparent about their own internal safety testing, the amount of evidence needed to start testing potential interventions would be decreased.
Orben and Matias also suggest learning from the success of ‘Green Chemistry’, which sees an independent body hold lists of chemical products ranked by potential for harm, to help incentivise markets to develop safer alternatives.
“The scientific methods and resources we have for evidence creation at the moment simply cannot deal with the pace of digital technology development,” Orben said.
“Scientists and policymakers must acknowledge the failures of this system and help craft a better one before the age of AI further exposes society to the risks of unchecked technological change.”
Added Matias: “When science about the impacts of new technologies is too slow, everyone loses.”
From social media to AI, online technologies are changing too fast for the scientific infrastructure used to gauge their public health harms, say two leaders in the field.
The scientific methods and resources we have for evidence creation at the moment simply cannot deal with the pace of digital technology development
Mayors from U.S., Mexican cities flanking divide compare notes on immigration, national leadership, tariffs
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
From afar, the 2,000-mile U.S. border with Mexico appears as a hard economic, political, and cultural boundary. But mayors of cities that flank the divide have a different view.
“We’re a binational community,” said Mayor Carlos Peña Ortiz, HKS ’20 of Reynosa, Mexico, which mirrors McAllen, Texas, across the Rio Grande. “We share values; we share businesses; we share religion; we share families; and we’re basically just divided by a river.”
Three borderland mayors appeared at a recent symposium on U.S./Mexico relations, hosted by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. These leaders, currently focused on protecting their local economies, spoke to issues related to immigration, tariffs, and recent presidential transitions in both countries. They also testified to their interconnected fortunes.
“Historically, Brownsville has been very affected by the Mexican peso,” said Mayor John Cowen Jr., who leads the city of 190,000 at Texas’ southernmost tip. “If there’s a big devaluation, our local economy just crashes.”
Moderator Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, kicked off the event by asking how things have changed in light of federal transitions of power. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October, just three months before President Trump returned to the White House in the U.S.
All three mayors described dramatic decreases in migrant flows, with those from Mexico also noting reduced crime. Peña Ortiz estimated a “95 percent” decrease in migrant traffic over the past two months. The second-term mayor couldn’t be physically present at the session as he had to rush home due to flash flooding in the area. Instead he sent a video of himself answering Davis’ questions.
“We’ve seen a very significant drop in most migrant groups,” said Peña Ortiz, who highlighted the appearance of Russian and Ukrainian passports until recently. “Our migrant camps were full for the last eight, nine years. We usually had around 16,000 to 20,000 migrants in our community, and nowadays we have close to 700. … And for the last month, we have not seen a lot of gunfights. Violent crime has dropped significantly.”
“We share values; we share businesses; we share religion; we share families; and we’re basically just divided by a river.”
Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar of Ciudad Juárez, across the river from El Paso, Texas, praised the Sheinbaum administration for helping his city of 1.6 million bolster shelter capacity ahead of promised deportations by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“For the first time since I was born in Juárez,” he said, “I see a federal government that is concerned about what is going to happen.”
Cowen, elected in 2023 for the nonpartisan position, observed the very opposite. More than 50,000 migrants from 31 different countries passed through the city’s port of entry during his first month in office, he said. “We were able to manage that through a combination of relationships with our federal government, with our NGOs.”
But now he worries about a future influx given the currently shifting state of federal funding. He voiced particular concern over the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program, which helps support local efforts to house migrants.
“But other than that type of funding, we’re looking at cuts to our health programs, our ability to respond to infectious disease,” he added, noting that Brownsville has dealt in the past with Zika and other mosquito-borne illnesses. Also key to the city’s budget, he said, is federal transit funding.
Tariffs proved a top concern, with the Mexican mayors braced for negative impacts. Peña Ortiz worried what border taxes portend for the future of cross-border cooperation on everything from workforce training to preserving water quality.
“Historically, we’ve been working together with programs like NADBank,” he said, referring to a program established by the U.S. and Mexican governments in 1994 to finance critical environmental infrastructure. “But if there’s no collaboration from the U.S., what will happen long-term with water resources here in the border communities?”
Ciudad Juárez investors are waiting for U.S. tariff policy to stabilize, said Pérez Cuéllar, who just visited Taiwan to bolster relations with business leaders there. “The big problem is that huge companies are waiting,” he said. “I talk to them a lot, and they say, ‘Well, we want to keep investing but we have to wait.’”
On the U.S. side, Cowen acknowledged tariffs as a “headwind” for new business ventures. But the city is still benefiting from initiatives launched in recent years. Currently underway at the Port of Brownsville is a massive gas liquification and export terminal, due for completion by decade’s end. New SpaceX facilities are also under construction in the area.
“That’s $40 billion in investments” for a city currently worth $10 billion, emphasized Cowen, a sixth-generation resident intent on lowering the city’s historically high rates of poverty. He was proud to cite a recent Harvard study ranking Brownsville as the top U.S. city for improving intergenerational mobility.
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Jeffrey L. Page is an opera and theater director of both classical and contemporary works and a lecturer in Harvard’s Theater, Dance & Media program. He was the co-director of the revival of the musical “1776” and has won an MTV Video Music Award for his work with Beyoncé.
We all want to be seen.
Ralph Ellison wrote this book, “Invisible Man,” which was essentially about Black people. As I walk through my life, many a time, if I’m not already invisible, I have to make myself invisible so that I’m not disrupting a process or shaking the boat. I have to become invisible in order to adhere to respectability politics. But dance is all about being seen. How can the narrative that I’m putting into space, with my body, be read like a book? I believe dancing can do that. Dance as if we’re all watching. What do you want us to see?
It’s as if I’m accessing a reservoir of information that has been locked away.
Imagine you’re writing an essay. You’re working on this sentence for maybe eight hours. You’re trying to put the words together. The moment you find that sentence, it’s like, ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the sentence. That’s the paragraph. That’s the story.’ That’s what it feels like to go from a non-dancing body to a dancing body. It’s cathartic. It’s as if I’m accessing a reservoir of information that has been locked away.
In Mali in West Africa, they have a practice known as djine foly. I’m sure people have heard of djinn, the Islamic mystic or spiritual guides; we might also know them as genies. Those djinn exist in Malian culture, too. Djine foly means the dancing space of the djinn. The dancers dance themselves into a trance-like state. When they have achieved this trance-like state, they become happy. An explosion of feeling comes upon them. In the Black community, we call it catching the holy ghost. It’s a spiritual thing. The way we unabashedly dance with abandonment and intention, it’s a spiritual phenomenon.
Students who take my class enjoy the class because I scream and I holler and I get them to release all of the stuff that’s sitting on their shoulders and sitting on their heads. Sometimes you just gotta shout to get the thing off of you in order to relax! Ain’t nobody concerned if you look good! Just dance!
Sometimes our logical mind is so strict and unmoving that, baby, it just needs to be a shout to get the logical mind to release itself so I can find that trance and attain my djinn.
Library staff pick objects that tell story of both University, America for ‘Inside Out’ exhibit
A handwritten note from former President John F. Kennedy to his Harvard College classmates. A 1905 letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to his mentor, Albert Bushnell Hart, discussing race relations in America. A screen capture of The Harvard Crimson from March 2020 with the headline: Harvard President Bacow Tests Positive for Coronavirus.
Drawn from the Harvard University Archives, these items — on display through April 30 in the “Archives Inside Out” exhibit — tell a story of Harvard that is also a story of America. They also showhow items enter the archival record and become part of Harvard, and American, history.
“We wanted to demystify the work that we do and make it more accessible to the public,” University Archivist Virginia Hunt said of the goal of the exhibit. “The items on display celebrate Harvard’s institutional and community history while showcasing the unique expertise of our dedicated staff.”
Exhibit curators invited their colleagues to submit their favorite items, with an eye to surfacing pieces of history that shed a light on the nature of archival work. Staff were asked: What stands out to you and why? When you go home to your family and you talk about your day, what are you excited to talk about? What is your special find from the collections?
“This was a unique exhibition model and we wanted to get input from all our staff,” said Sarah Martin, Associate University Archivist for Community Engagement. “From the submissions, we selected items that not only tell compelling stories but also best represent the form and function of the University Archives.”
Below are select items from the exhibit, with accompanying text from the archivist who chose it. The full exhibit is open to the public and on display in Pusey Library’s Lammot du Pont Copeland Gallery through the end of the month.
In fall 2013, I was an enthusiastic and fresh-faced new archivist on the hunt to answer a reference question about a member of the Harvard College Class of 1940. Coming up short, I cast my net wider and reviewed materials related to the class’s “correspondence, photographs, questionnaires.” While this broader search did not answer the question, I found instead a previously unknown letter — a draft, really — from John F. Kennedy to his class on this colorful letterhead.
It was my first professional “find” but more than that — it offers a light-hearted, warm, and amusing insider’s view on a complex historical figure.
— Pam Hopkins, Head of University Archives Reference Services
This image depicts “women astronomical computers” who were tasked with cataloging stars, studying stellar spectra, and counting galaxies, among other responsibilities, using the observatory’s glass plate negative collection. I find it compelling as it illustrates the invisible labor that continues to be done by women in the workplace. The description of the women as “computers” is both accurate in this context and foretelling of the invisible labor that supports much online content and activity today.
My own work takes place mainly in the faceless digital environment of email, databases, and spreadsheets, and I sometimes think of how close the “women computers” are to our world in both time and practice.
This letter comes from the personal archive of Albert Bushnell Hart, professor of history and government at Harvard from 1886 to 1924. This collection was recently fully digitized, and it was my responsibility to prepare it for digitization.
The first folder in the first box I opened when I began this work contained letters Hart received in reaction to his study of race relations in the U.S. South, including this letter. These letters provide an example of the wide range of individuals who interacted with Hart’s ideas, and the diversity of ideas among them. It contains correspondence from prominent figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, as well as members of the public who wanted to share with Hart their thoughts on his work.
Thomas Hill (1818-1891) was president of Harvard University from 1862 to 1868. He was also a Unitarian minister, mathematician, scientist, educator, and Harvard lecturer. Throughout his life, Hill retained an interest in discovery and improvement. Hill’s perpetual calendar, a paper instrument with a rotating wheel chart, features calculations to look up any New Year’s Day from 1583 to 1996, illustrating his talents as an inventor and a devisor of scientific instruments.
I chose this item because it illustrates a Harvard president delving deeper into scientific pursuits rather than just education. When processing this collection, I was fascinated by its intricate design and historical significance. I often encounter materials outside of traditional paper records in my work, such as 3D artifacts, which provide unique storage and description challenges.
Here is a screen capture of one of our online collections documenting Harvard’s initial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. I used digital tools to capture (or “crawl”) this online issue of the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson in March 2020 as part of my regular support of the Harvard University Archives’ robust web archiving program. It provides a snapshot of an uncertain and unprecedented time for the Harvard community and the world.
— Sean Crawford, Collection Development and Records Management Coordinator
Sketches from the Harvard Lampoonwas the first donation that I personally accepted into the Harvard University Archives. As the Collection Development Archivist, part of my role is to recommend what donations should be accepted into the Archives, especially when it comes to Harvard student groups. The other part of my role is to prepare accepted donations to be added to our collection. The Harvard Lampoon is one of the oldest student groups and student publications in Harvard’s history. This special edition of the publication perfectly represents the intersection of the different parts of my role at the Archives.
I happen upon wonderful things as I go through newly acquired collections — such as this letter from the poet Seamus Heaney to Harvard English Professor Helen Vendler (who recently died just before her 91st birthday), part of a recent accession of Vendler’s personal archive in fall 2023. As a collection development archivist, I prepare new collections for research use, inventorying the contents and housing materials safely for long-term storage.
This letter was tucked inside a folder of “first day handouts” for Vendler’s freshman poetry seminar on Walt Whitman. In it, Heaney lightheartedly describes a medical emergency he experienced while visiting the Irish playwright Brian Friel, ending with reassurance to his friend, and frustration at being told not to “do” anything.
— Heidi Horner, Collection Development & Records Management Services Assistant
I became an archivist to ensure that archives are reflective of the world’s diverse history, people, and cultures. To that end, I primarily process collections related to under-represented or marginalized communities for Harvard Library’s Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Antiracism Digitization Program. The resulting digitized collections are made publicly available online.
My favorite collections are the mundane ones. Personal letter collections, like the one this letter comes from, offer a little window into someone’s life at a certain time. This letter was written by African American Harvard student Ragan Henry ’56 to his Jewish friend and roommate, Joseph Levow Steinberg ’56, during summer break. The letter touches on racial discrimination at work, dating, and the difficulties of living in a “hick town.” But really, this letter between friends in the 1950s is not so different from text messages you’d see between college friends today.
This volume contains personal accounts of nearly 20 Harvard students circa 1942 who wanted to document the reasoning behind their opposition to military service in World War II. Working with then-University Archivist Clifford K. Shipton, they deliberately and permanently placed this volume within the Harvard University Archives’ collections. They wanted their experiences, which ran counter to many of their peers’, not to be forgotten.
My daily work is to connect researchers to primary sources vital for their academic pursuits. This manuscript came to my attention as pacifism during World War II has been a longtime personal interest. It is also a vivid reminder that archives act as a place of memory.
“Archives Inside Out” was curated by Emily Atkins, Ed Copenhagen, Hannah Hack, Virginia Hunt, Juliana Kuipers, Sarah Martin, Jehan Sinclair, and Caroline Tanski of the Harvard University Archives.
Shared meals may be a more reliable indicator of well-being than income, Kennedy School researcher says
People who eat more meals with others tend to be more satisfied with their lives and are more likely to express positive emotions, according to a study published in the annual World Happiness Report. According to the finding’s authors, sharing meals is as predictive of happiness as income or employment status — across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and religions.
It may be a problem, then, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey found that Americans are spending more and more time dining apart, numbers the authors cite in their study. “In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day,” the study said, “an average increase of 53 percent since 2003.” This trend holds across all age groups, with the most dramatic drop among young people.
“It’s just surprising to me that this increase would be so clear and so severe,” said Micah Kaats, a doctoral student in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School who co-wrote the report.
While the study shows a strong correlation between the number of shared meals and happiness, it does not state whether sharing meals causes happiness or whether happy people tend to share more meals. “In all likelihood, I would be willing to put money on both being true,” Kaats said, “but which of those factors is stronger is definitely a task for future research.”
The correlation itself is an important development for the field, according to Kaats, in part because happiness is hard to measure. When researchers ask someone to rate themselves from one to 10 on a happiness scale, Kaats says, it’s hard to pinpoint what a one or 10 might mean for any given person on a single day.
Though these subjective measures can be valuable to social scientists and policymakers, researchers often use income, insurance rates, and other factors that have shown strong correlational links to well-being as proxies. But these factors themselves are often hard to measure. “A lot of people don’t want to report their income,” Kaats said. “Those who do want to report their income are a select group.” From there, it’s difficult to tell the accuracy of what’s being reported, the exact type of income one might report (Pretax? Household? Posttax?), and how incomes can be compared between countries and over time.
Compared to these often-used variables, the number of shared meals is relatively clear-cut: “Yesterday, did you eat lunch or dinner with someone you know?” Kaats hopes that the question will find a use among other objective indicators linked to social connection — such as density of civic organizations or the number of political groups per county — that are used to gauge amorphous concepts like happiness and social trust.
In future research, Kaats hopes to tease out whether people become happier when they share more meals. But regardless, Kaats believes that the correlation between shared meals and happiness is important on its own. “If I want to know about your well-being, it’s much more informative for me to know how many meals you ate with other people in the last week than how much money you make,” he said, “so whatever the causal dynamics are, that seems important and interesting and worth further study.”
As researchers and policymakers contend with worsening mental health and increasing social isolation, shared meals could be both an important indicator of well-being and a source of policy intervention.
“We can’t solve every problem at once,” Kaats said, “but if we can get people to share more meals with each other, and that would improve people’s well-being, it’s a good place to start.”
MIT graduate students Sreekar Mantena and Arjun Ramani, and recent MIT alumni Rupert Li ’24 and Jupneet Singh ’23, have been named 2025 P.D. Soros Fellows. In addition, Soros Fellow Andre Ye will begin a PhD in computer science at MIT this fall.
Each year, the P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans awards 30 outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants $90,000 in graduate school financial support over a two-year period. The merit-based program selects fellows based on their achievements, potential to make meaningful contributions to their fields and communities, and dedication to the ideals of the United States represented in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. This year’s fellows were selected from a competitive pool of more than 2,600 applicants nationwide.
Rupert Li ’24
The son of Chinese immigrants, Rupert Li was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from MIT in 2024 with a double major in mathematics and computer science, economics, and data science, and earned an MEng in the latter subject.
Li was named a Marshall Scholar in 2023 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the Part III mathematics program at Cambridge University. His P.D. Soros Fellowship will support his pursuit of a PhD in mathematics at Stanford University.
Li’s first experience with mathematics research was as a high school student participant in the MIT PRIMES-USA program. He continued research in mathematics as an undergraduate at MIT, where he worked with professors Henry Cohn, Nike Sun, and Elchanan Mossel in the Department of Mathematics. Li also spent two summers at the Duluth REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program with Professor Joe Gallian.
Li’s research in probability, discrete geometry, and combinatorics culminated in him receiving the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, an honorable mention for the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student, the Marshall Scholarship, and the Hertz Fellowship.
Beyond research, Li finds fulfillment in opportunities to give back to the math community that has supported him throughout his mathematical journey. This year marks the second time he has served as a graduate student mentor for the PRIMES-USA program, which sparked his mathematical career, and his first year as an advisor for the Duluth REU program.
Sreekar Mantena
Sreekar Mantena graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College with a degree in statistics and molecular biology. He is currently an MD student in biomedical informatics in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), where he works under Professor Soumya Raychaudhuri of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is also pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics and integrative genomics at Harvard Medical School. In the future, Mantena hopes to blend compassion with computation as a physician-scientist who harnesses the power of machine learning and statistics to advance equitable health care delivery.
The son of Indian-American immigrants, Mantena was raised in North Carolina, where he grew up as fond of cheese grits as of his mother’s chana masala. Every summer of his childhood, he lived with his grandparents in Southern India, who instilled in him the importance of investing in one’s community and a love of learning.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Mantena was inspired by the potential of statistics and data science to address gaps in health-care delivery. He founded the Global Alliance for Medical Innovation, a nonprofit organization that has partnered with physicians in six countries to develop data-driven medical technologies for underserved communities, including devices to detect corneal disease.
Mantena also pursued research in Professor Pardis Sabeti’s lab at the Broad Institute, where he built new algorithms to design diagnostic assays that improve the detection of infectious pathogens in resource-limited settings. He has co-authored over 20 scientific publications, and his lead-author work has been published in many journals, including Nature Biotechnology, The Lancet Digital Health, and the Journal of Pediatrics.
Arjun Ramani
Arjun Ramani, from West Lafayette, Indiana, is the son of immigrants from Tamil Nadu, India. He is currently pursuing a PhD in economics at MIT, where he studies technological change and innovation. Also the Carl Shapiro (1976) Fellow in the Department of Economics, Ramani hopes his research can inform policies and business practices that generate broadly shared economic growth.
Ramani’s dual interests in technology and the world led him to Stanford University, where he studied economics as an undergraduate and pursued a master’s in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence. As data editor of the university’s newspaper, he started the Stanford Open Data Project to improve campus data transparency. During college, Ramani also spent time at the White House working on economic policy, in Ghana helping startups scale, and at Citadel in financial markets — all of which cultivated a broad interest in the economic world.
After graduating from Stanford, Ramani became TheEconomist’s global business and economics correspondent. He first covered technology and finance and later shifted to covering artificial intelligence after the technology took the world by storm in 2022.
In 2023, Ramani moved to India to cover the Indian economy in the lead-up to its election. There, he gained a much deeper appreciation for the social and institutional barriers that slowed technology adoption and catch-up growth. Ramani wrote or co-wrote six cover stories, was shortlisted for U.K. financial journalist of the year in 2024 for his AI and economics reporting, and co-authored a six-part special report on India’s economy.
Jupneet Singh ’23
Jupneet Singh, the daughter of Indian immigrants, is a Sikh-American who grew up deeply connected to her Punjabi and Sikh heritage in Somis, California. The Soros Fellowship will support her MD studies at Harvard Medical School’s HST program under the U.S. Air Force Health Professions Scholarship Program.
Singh plans to complete her medical residency as an active-duty U.S. Air Force captain, and after serving as a surgeon in the USAF she hopes to enter the United States Public Health Commissioned Corps. While Singh is the first in her family to serve in the U.S. armed services, she is proud to be carrying on a long Sikh military legacy.
Singh graduated from MIT in 2023 with a degree in chemistry and a concentration in history and won a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue two degrees at the University of Oxford: a master’s in public policy and a master’s in translational health sciences. At MIT, she served as the commander (highest-ranked cadet) of the Air Force ROTC Detachment and is now commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant. She is the first woman Air Force ROTC Rhodes Scholar.
Singh has worked in de-addiction centers in Punjab, India. She also worked at the Ventura County Family Justice Center and Ventura County Medical Center Trauma Center, and published a first-author paper in The American Surgeon. She founded Pathways to Promise, a program to support the health of children affected by domestic violence. She has conducted research on fatty liver disease under Professor Alex Shalek at MIT and on maternal health inequalities at the National Perinatal Epidemiological Unit at Oxford.
New research from Weill Cornell Medicine has uncovered a surprising culprit underlying cardiovascular diseases in obesity and diabetes – not the presence of certain fats, but their suppression.
In a paper published today in Nature Genetics, scientists at the University of Cambridge and NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre analysed the full DNA sequence of 4,775 tumours from seven types of cancer. They used that data from Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project to create an algorithm capable of identifying tumours with faults in their DNA that makes them easier to treat.
The algorithm, called PRRDetect, could one day help doctors work out which patients are more likely to have successful treatment. That could pave the way for more personalised treatment plans that increase people’s chances of survival.
The research was funded by Cancer Research UK and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
Professor Serena Nik-Zainal from the Early Cancer Institute at the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study, said: “Genomic sequencing is now far faster and cheaper than ever before. We are getting closer to the point where getting your tumour sequenced will be as routine as a scan or blood test.
“To use genomics most effectively in the clinic, we need tools which give us meaningful information about how a person’s tumour might respond to treatment. This is especially important in cancers where survival is poorer, like lung cancer and brain tumours.
“Cancers with faulty DNA repair are more likely to be treated successfully. PRRDetect helps us better identify those cancers and, as we sequence more and more cancers routinely in the clinic, it could ultimately help doctors better tailor treatments to individual patients.”
The research team looked for patterns in DNA created by so-called ‘indel’ mutations, in which letters are inserted or deleted from the normal DNA sequence.
They found unusual patterns of indel mutations in cancers that had faulty DNA repair mechanisms – known as ‘post-replicative repair dysfunction’ or PRRd. Using this information, the scientists developed PRRDetect to allow them to identify tumours with this fault from a full DNA sequence.
PRRd tumours are more sensitive to immunotherapy, a type of cancer treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. The scientists hope that the PRRd algorithm could act like a ‘metal detector’ to allow them to identify patients who are more likely to have successful treatment with immunotherapy.
The study follows from a previous ‘archaeological dig’ of cancer genomes carried out by Professor Nik-Zainal, which examined the genomes of tens of thousands of people and revealed previously unseen patterns of mutations which are linked to cancer.
This time, Professor Nik-Zainal and her team looked at cancers which have a higher proportion of tumours with PRRd. These include bowel, brain, endometrial, skin, lung, bladder and stomach cancers. Whole genome sequences of these cancers were provided by the 100,000 Genomes Project - a pioneering study led by Genomics England and NHS England which sequenced 100,000 genomes from around 85,000 NHS patients affected by rare diseases or cancer.
The study identified 37 different patterns of indel mutations across the seven cancer types included in this study. Ten of these patterns were already linked to known causes of cancer, such as smoking and exposure to UV light. Eight of these patterns were linked to PRRd. The remaining 19 patterns were new and could be linked to causes of cancer that are not fully understood yet or mechanisms within cells that can go wrong when a cell becomes cancerous.
Executive Director of Research and Innovation at Cancer Research UK, Dr Iain Foulkes, said: “Genomic medicine will revolutionise how we approach cancer treatment. We can now get full readouts of tumour DNA much more easily, and with that comes a wealth of information about how an individual’s cancer can start, grow and spread.
“Tools like PRRDetect are going to make personalised treatment for cancer a reality for many more patients in the future. Personalising treatment is much more likely to be successful, ensuring more people can live longer, better lives free from the fear of cancer.”
NIHR Scientific Director, Mike Lewis, said: “Cancer is a leading cause of death in the UK so it's impressive to see our research lead to the creation of a tool to determine which therapy will lead to a higher likelihood of successful cancer treatment.”
Chief Scientific Officer at Genomics England, Professor Matt Brown, said: “Genomics is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare and these findings show how genomic data can be used to drive more predictive, preventative care leading to better outcomes for patients with cancer.
“The creation of this algorithm showcases the immense value of whole genome sequencing not only in research but also in the clinic across multiple diverse cancer types in advancing cancer care.”
The University of Cambridge is fundraising for a new hospital that will transform how we diagnose and treat cancer. Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, a partnership with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, will treat patients across the East of England, but the research that takes place there promises to change the lives of cancer patients across the UK and beyond. Find out more here.
Adapted from a press release from Cancer Research UK
Cambridge researchers have created a ‘metal detector’ algorithm that can hunt down vulnerable tumours, in a development that could one day revolutionise the treatment of cancer.
Genomic sequencing is now far faster and cheaper than ever before. We are getting closer to the point where getting your tumour sequenced will be as routine as a scan or blood test
By Dr Ong Xin Rui from the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum at NUS and the Tropical Ecology and Entomology Lab (TEE Lab) at NTU’s Asian School of the Environment, and Assoc Prof Eleanor Slade, Principal Investigator at the TEE Lab
In celebration of its 45th anniversary, Kent Ridge Hall (KRH) hosted a gala dinner on 28 March 2025, recognising the achievements of its student community in sports, culture and service, and featuring a vibrant line-up of alumni performances.
Held at the Gardens by the Bay’s Flower Field Hall, the dinner was attended by more than 300 residents, alumni and guests, including the Guest of Honour, Deputy Dean of Students and Associate Professor Adeline Seow.
A total of 28 awards in eight categories celebrating sports, culture and service were presented to honour the outstanding residents and interest groups within the community.
Individuals who exceeded expectations in their respective fields were recognised, with the Excellence, Sportsman / Cultural Artist of the Year and Service Champion Awards presented to those who demonstrated exceptional dedication to Kent Ridge Hall and excelled in their respective areas of specialisation.
The most prestigious accolade, the Outstanding Resident of the Year Award, honoured outstanding residents who have made significant contributions to the Hall in three key areas – culture, community, and sports – with notable accomplishments in at least two of these areas.
The winner of this year’s Outstanding Resident Award was Phua Zhuo Jun, a final-year student from the College of Design and Engineering, who was recognised for cultural and service excellence.
“Kent Ridge Hall has been a huge part of my university life. It’s where I continued to grow my passion for dance, while also stepping out of my comfort zone to explore new experiences through committees and sports. Along the way, I met some of the most genuine, inspiring friends who’ve walked alongside me through it all,” said Zhao Jun.
“As I prepare to graduate, I know I’ll deeply miss the little things like the late-night suppers, spontaneous block chats, the energy of practices and meetings, and the warmth of this community I’ve called home.”
Guests were treated to a lively line-up of musical acts, including the four-piece band KR Rockers – comprising Reynold Pereira (Law, ‘89), Nizam Ismail (Law, ‘91), Jasmine Liew and Eel Keat Chiew (Arts and Social Sciences, ‘90) – who performed a set of songs from the 80s and beyond.
Mr Vincent Gan (Engineering, ’05), a KRH non-Resident Fellow for the past seven years, said both the Hall and the University have been pivotal in shaping his leadership skills, teamwork, and resilience. “[KRH]’s dynamic environment, filled with passionate individuals from diverse backgrounds, challenged me to grow beyond academics,” said Mr Gan, who is also Senior Executive Director of Financial Services at Great Eastern Financial Advisers. “Whether it was taking on leadership roles, participating in hall events, or engaging in late-night discussions, I developed the ability to connect with people, navigate challenges, and lead with purpose—skills that continue to serve me well in my career and personal endeavours.”
Meanwhile, Mr Goh Wee Ping (Engineering, ‘11), Chief Executive Officer of Wee Hur Capital Pte Ltd and Chief Investment Officer of Wee Hur Holdings Ltd, shared that his time in KRH fostered in him a strong commitment to giving back to the community. “I made lots of lifelong friends in KRH and am grateful for the experiences that have made me the person I am today. I have learnt the importance of having a good network, and that humility is a virtue that everyone appreciates, no matter where someone comes from or who they interact with.”
KRH’s legacy extends beyond its alumni and the roles they played while in the Hall. In Dr Ivan Low’s case (Science, ’08), he met his wife Ms Hui Ting Chng (Science, ‘08) at the Hall and the couple welcomed their daughter, Fennalyn, during his term as the Hall’s Residential Fellow. Dr Low joined KRH as a Residential Fellow in 2012, spending more than eight years in the role.
Dr Low will soon be the founding Master of Valour House, NUS’ first sports-themed hostel. Having juggled seven sports as an undergraduate, his first four years at KRH enabled him to learn how to manage residential life and academic pursuits, navigate challenges, and lead by example. Even as he embarks on his next chapter leading a new hostel, KRH will remain deeply ingrained in his identity. “Valour House’s colour is purple – and that’s because my blood is a mixture of blue and red. Part of me still bleeds blue!” he said, referencing the blue of Kent Ridge Hall’s colours.
A new study conducted by researchers from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore) at the National University of Singapore has uncovered a key mechanism behind lenalidomide resistance in multiple myeloma (MM), offering new insights into potential strategies for improving treatment outcomes and overcoming drug resistance.
The team, led by Dr Teoh Phaik Ju and Dr Koh Mun Yee, together with Professor Chng Wee Joo and Associate Professor Polly Chen, identified a gene called ADAR1, which encodes an RNA editing enzyme, as a key factor in suppressing the immune response triggered by lenalidomide—an immune-stimulating drug, essential to kill MM cells. The findings were published in the high-impact scientific journal Blood on 13 March 2025.
ADAR1’s role in lenalidomide resistance in MM
MM is a type of cancer that affects plasma cells in the bone marrow. While standard-of-care treatments like lenalidomide, an immunomodulatory drug (IMiD), have improved survival rates for many MM patients, a significant number still experience relapse due to the development of drug resistance.
Lenalidomide works by binding to a protein called cereblon (CRBN), which breaks down several proteins that are essential for MM cell survival and growth. However, many patients eventually stop responding to the drug, leading to disease relapse. While 20 to 30 per cent of the resistance cases have been linked to defects in CRBN and its associated factors, the underlying mechanisms in most resistance cases have remained poorly understood. This study reports new findings demonstrating that ADAR1 abnormalities lead to a suppressed immune system in IMiD-resistant MM cases.
Overcoming drug resistance
ADAR1 inhibits lenalidomide’s activity by editing double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), thus hindering the immune response and reducing the effectiveness of the drug in combating MM growth and proliferation. The researchers discovered that by reducing the levels of ADAR1 and increasing dsRNA accumulation in MM cells, they could increase the sensitivity of the cells to lenalidomide. This would, in turn, lead to the activation of the immune responses and kill the MM cells. The discovery adds a new layer to the understanding of how MM patients may become resistant to IMiD, highlighting the role of dsRNA pathways beyond the previously understood CRBN pathway.
The findings also suggest that targeting ADAR1 and the dsRNA pathway could offer promising strategies to overcome resistance to lenalidomide in MM. As clinical trials continue to explore the potential of new IMiD analogues, such as CRBN-E3 ligase modulators (CELMoDs) and other drugs with similar pharmacological profile, combining these treatments with ADAR1 inhibitors may provide a more effective approach to tackle drug resistance and improve patient outcomes.
With ADAR1 inhibitors currently in preclinical development, this strategy holds great promise for advancing treatment options for MM. In addition, the research team plans to further investigate ADAR1’s role in alternative splicing, a post-transcriptional gene regulatory mechanism, in MM, which could uncover even more opportunities for treatments.
Researchers ID genetic disorders that can be treated before birth
Timely detection could reduce morbidity, offers opportunities for early intervention
Mass General Brigham Communications
3 min read
A new study identifies nearly 300 genetic disorders that can be treated during pregnancy or in the first week of life, forming the basis for a “treatable fetal findings list” that could be offered to pregnant patients.
The findings could improve the diagnosis of genetic conditions in pregnancy and enhance the treatment options available for fetuses that have these conditions, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School, Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham, and Duke University School of Medicine. The study’s results are published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
“These conditions are actionable — meaning that, empowered with diagnostic information, we can intervene early and improve outcomes.”
Nina Gold, Harvard Medical School
“We saw a critical gap in prenatal care and an opportunity to define the genetic disorders that are treatable during this time,” said senior author Nina Gold, director of Prenatal Medical Genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics at HMS. “These conditions are actionable — meaning that, empowered with diagnostic information, we can intervene early and improve outcomes.”
Over the past decade, genomic sequencing has become a vital tool to help inform prenatal diagnoses. Genomic sequencing tests, combined with family history, can help identify genes responsible for ultrasound abnormalities. They can also uncover incidental findings that may predispose a fetus or newborn to serious but treatable conditions, such as a heart condition that can be treated with medications or a gastrointestinal disorder that can be managed with fluid and electrolyte therapies. The research team set out to develop a list of these treatable conditions so that patients can be offered the choice of receiving this kind of information.
Through a literature review, the authors identified a total of 296 genetic conditions, ranging from disorders with emerging fetal therapies to those where immediate postnatal treatment can prevent irreversible harm. The authors emphasize that timely detection of these conditions could reduce morbidity and mortality, offering families unprecedented opportunities for early intervention.
“One of our goals is to expand the options that a family has during pregnancy,” said Jennifer Cohen, the lead author on the study and a medical geneticist at Duke University Hospital. “These lists of genes are meant to provide the possibility of early intervention, which in some cases may change the natural history of the disease.”
Despite its potential, this initiative comes with challenges. The researchers outline ethical considerations and acknowledge that patients may feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they are offered. They also highlight the importance of engaging medical geneticists, obstetricians, and ethicists to address these complexities.
“Our goal in creating this targeted list of treatable fetal findings is to improve care, but we are sensitive to the challenges for physicians, genetic counselors, and patients when it comes to navigating new health information during pregnancy or immediately after the birth of a child. This is why it’s so important to work as a care team to empower our patients and provide them with the clearest information possible,” said Gold.
The research described in this story received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently elected Schiffer, the dean for research at Princeton University, to be one of its 471 new lifetime fellows. Also elected were 17 undergraduate and graduate Princeton alumni.
Soros fellows receive funding to support their graduate studies and are recognized for their achievements and their potential to make meaningful contributions to the United States across many disciplines.
Insect-scale robots can squeeze into places their larger counterparts can’t, like deep into a collapsed building to search for survivors after an earthquake.
However, as they move through the rubble, tiny crawling robots might encounter tall obstacles they can’t climb over or slanted surfaces they will slide down. While aerial robots could avoid these hazards, the amount of energy required for flight would severely limit how far the robot can travel into the wreckage before it needs to return to base and recharge.
To get the best of both locomotion methods, MIT researchers developed a hopping robot that can leap over tall obstacles and jump across slanted or uneven surfaces, while using far less energy than an aerial robot.
The hopping robot, which is smaller than a human thumb and weighs less than a paperclip, has a springy leg that propels it off the ground, and four flapping-wing modules that give it lift and control its orientation.
The robot can jump about 20 centimeters into the air, or four times its height, at a lateral speed of about 30 centimeters per second, and has no trouble hopping across ice, wet surfaces, and uneven soil, or even onto a hovering drone. All the while, the hopping robot consumes about 60 percent less energy than its flying cousin.
Due to its light weight and durability, and the energy efficiency of the hopping process, the robot could carry about 10 times more payload than a similar-sized aerial robot, opening the door to many new applications.
“Being able to put batteries, circuits, and sensors on board has become much more feasible with a hopping robot than a flying one. Our hope is that one day this robot could go out of the lab and be useful in real-world scenarios,” says Yi-Hsuan (Nemo) Hsiao, an MIT graduate student and co-lead author of a paper on the hopping robot.
Hsiao is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Songnan Bai, a research assistant professor at The University of Hong Kong; and Zhongtao Guan, an incoming MIT graduate student who completed this work as a visiting undergraduate; as well as Suhan Kim and Zhijian Ren of MIT; and senior authors Pakpong Chirarattananon, an associate professor of the City University of Hong Kong; and Kevin Chen, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and head of the Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory within the Research Laboratory of Electronics. The research appears today in Science Advances.
Maximizing efficiency
Jumping is common among insects, from fleas that leap onto new hosts to grasshoppers that bound around a meadow. While jumping is less common among insect-scale robots, which usually fly or crawl, hopping affords many advantages for energy efficiency.
When a robot hops, it transforms potential energy, which comes from its height off the ground, into kinetic energy as it falls. This kinetic energy transforms back to potential energy when it hits the ground, then back to kinetic as it rises, and so on.
To maximize efficiency of this process, the MIT robot is fitted with an elastic leg made from a compression spring, which is akin to the spring on a click-top pen. This spring converts the robot’s downward velocity to upward velocity when it strikes the ground.
“If you have an ideal spring, your robot can just hop along without losing any energy. But since our spring is not quite ideal, we use the flapping modules to compensate for the small amount of energy it loses when it makes contact with the ground,” Hsiao explains.
As the robot bounces back up into the air, the flapping wings provide lift, while ensuring the robot remains upright and has the correct orientation for its next jump. Its four flapping-wing mechanisms are powered by soft actuators, or artificial muscles, that are durable enough to endure repeated impacts with the ground without being damaged.
“We have been using the same robot for this entire series of experiments, and we never needed to stop and fix it,” Hsiao adds.
Key to the robot’s performance is a fast control mechanism that determines how the robot should be oriented for its next jump. Sensing is performed using an external motion-tracking system, and an observer algorithm computes the necessary control information using sensor measurements.
As the robot hops, it follows a ballistic trajectory, arcing through the air. At the peak of that trajectory, it estimates its landing position. Then, based on its target landing point, the controller calculates the desired takeoff velocity for the next jump. While airborne, the robot flaps its wings to adjust its orientation so it strikes the ground with the correct angle and axis to move in the proper direction and at the right speed.
Durability and flexibility
The researchers put the hopping robot, and its control mechanism, to the test on a variety of surfaces, including grass, ice, wet glass, and uneven soil — it successfully traversed all surfaces. The robot could even hop on a surface that was dynamically tilting.
“The robot doesn’t really care about the angle of the surface it is landing on. As long as it doesn’t slip when it strikes the ground, it will be fine,” Hsiao says.
Since the controller can handle multiple terrains, the robot can easily transition from one surface to another without missing a beat.
For instance, hopping across grass requires more thrust than hopping across glass, since blades of grass cause a damping effect that reduces its jump height. The controller can pump more energy to the robot’s wings during its aerial phase to compensate.
Due to its small size and light weight, the robot has an even smaller moment of inertia, which makes it more agile than a larger robot and better able to withstand collisions.
The researchers showcased its agility by demonstrating acrobatic flips. The featherweight robot could also hop onto an airborne drone without damaging either device, which could be useful in collaborative tasks.
In addition, while the team demonstrated a hopping robot that carried twice its weight, the maximum payload may be much higher. Adding more weight doesn’t hurt the robot’s efficiency. Rather, the efficiency of the spring is the most significant factor that limits how much the robot can carry.
Moving forward, the researchers plan to leverage its ability to carry heavy loads by installing batteries, sensors, and other circuits onto the robot, in the hopes of enabling it to hop autonomously outside the lab.
“Multimodal robots (those combining multiple movement strategies) are generally challenging and particularly impressive at such a tiny scale. The versatility of this tiny multimodal robot — flipping, jumping on rough or moving terrain, and even another robot — makes it even more impressive,” says Justin Yim, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, who was not involved with this work. “Continuous hopping shown in this research enables agile and efficient locomotion in environments with many large obstacles.”
This research is funded, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the MIT MISTI program. Chirarattananon was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China. Hsiao is supported by a MathWorks Fellowship, and Kim is supported by a Zakhartchenko Fellowship.
MIT researchers developed a hopping robot that can leap over tall obstacles and jump across slanted or uneven surfaces, while using far less energy than an aerial robot.
Like having a personal healthcare coach in your pocket
New apps for cancer patients, cannabis users, others make use of algorithms that continually customize support
Anne J. Manning
SEAS Communications
5 min read
Cancer patients who undergo stem cell transplantation face a long recovery, requiring medications with debilitating side effects and support around the clock. It’s a difficult experience, with studies showing that more than 70 percent of patients don’t adhere to drug regimens.
Statistician Susan Murphy spends her days trying to help people suffering from such challenging maladies. The Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and Computer Science and associate faculty at the Kempner Institute and her team address healthcare needs not through medicine, but by mobile apps.
Murphy’s lab specializes in creating sophisticated computational instructions known as reinforcement learning algorithms, which form the technical backbone of next-generation programs to help people stick to a medication protocol, for instance, or regular tooth brushing, or reducing cannabis use.
And if this sounds like one of those ubiquitous apps that tracks steps or counts calories, think again.
“If you’ve ever downloaded a health app, those tend to be pretty dumb,” Murphy said. “For example, you’ll get a physical activity app, you’ll sprain your ankle, and it’ll continue to tell you to go for a walk.”
“If you’ve ever downloaded a health app, those tend to be pretty dumb.”
Susan Murphy
Using advancements in artificial intelligence and sensing technologies to move beyond one-size-fits-all interventions, the lab’s apps are capable of real-time personalization, meting out psychological rewards, and in some cases, leveraging social networks to help users stick to goals.
This approach is called “just-in-time adaptive intervention” because it aims to provide support at just the right time by registering changing needs and contexts.
Currently the Murphy lab is working with software engineers, cancer clinicians, and behavioral scientists to develop an app for stem-cell transplant patients and their primary caregivers, usually parents.
Health management, especially for the sickest, typically requires involvement of others. For instance, up to 73 percent of family-care partners have primary responsibility for managing cancer-related medications.
The researchers are in the early stages of developing the algorithm, to be deployed in a first-round clinical trial this year by collaborators at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. The trial, called ADAPTS HCT, will focus on adolescent and young adult patients who’ve had stem-cell transplants in the 14 weeks post-surgery.
The algorithm will inform sequential decisions, including when and whether to send motivational prompts to the patient, and whether to send messages and reminders to both patient and caregiver. The application includes a word-guessing game that fosters social support and collaboration between patient and caregiver.
“We hypothesize that in improving the relationship between patients and their caregivers, patients can function and manage their medications better,” said Harvard postdoctoral fellow Ziping Xu, who is leading the ADAPTS HCT algorithm development.
The app will employ reinforcement machine learning, in which the software will “learn” from previous interactions. For example, rather than simply sending preset reminders about medications, the algorithm will tailor timing and content according to when they have been most useful to patients. That way there is less chance the notifications will be deemed irrelevant or ill-timed and eventually habitually ignored.
“We use the algorithm to learn what is the best way to interact with each patient,” Xu said.
“We use the algorithm to learn what is the best way to interact with each patient.”
Ziping Xu
The Murphy lab is deploying its algorithmic expertise across other domains. With their University of Michigan collaborators, they’ve recently pilot-tested a program called MiWaves aimed at young adults who are abusing cannabis.
Like the ADAPTS HCT app, MiWaves continually learns and adapts from interactions with each patient to improve its decision rules, with the goal of helping them reduce their daily intake.
The lab is also several years into a project called Oralytics, which recently wrapped up a 10-week randomized trial to help refine the delivery of push notifications to help patients adhere to a tooth-brushing protocol: two sessions of two-minute duration daily, covering all four mouth quadrants.
The first Oralytics clinical trial included some 70 participants who all received the mobile app with a wireless-enabled toothbrush that sent data to the team’s collaborators at Proctor and Gamble.
Graduate student Anna Li Trella, who led the Oralytics project through the first trial, said the recently collected data will help the team develop methods to better handle messy problems like missing data and software errors.
“There are many constraints to running an algorithm in real life,” Trella said. “Now that we’ve conducted the first trial, we can make improvements to help the algorithm collect better data and learn better.”
Murphy thinks of her lab as creating practical pocket coacheswho can help people get where they want to go.
“Very, very few people can afford a human coach. And in fact, some people may not want such intensive human interaction,” Murphy said. “That’s where the idea for these digital supports comes in.”
Gibbs is a sixth-year graduate student in Princeton's Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology. His interdisciplinary research explores biological pathogens that affect human health and agricultural production, among other critical concerns.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have unravelled the complex network that cells use to repair their genetic material. By examining thousands upon thousands of genetic interactions, the team has discovered new vulnerabilities in cancer cells that could be exploited therapeutically in the future.
At a ceremony in Los Angeles on 5 April, the four major experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – were awarded the prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
ETH Zurich and Zühlke have conducted a study on how companies use AI technologies. A total of 633 companies from the fields of production, technology, healthcare and finance from the DACH region, the UK and the US were surveyed. Stefano Brusoni, Professor of Technology and Innovation Management, explains in an interview where the greatest potential lies and where Europe needs to catch up.
Named the world’s sixth Blue Zone 2.0 in August 2023, Singapore has been cited as one of the globe’s healthiest, happiest, and longest-living populations. Blue Zones are places where people live longer and enjoy better health well into old age.
Indeed, with Singapore set to attain “super-aged” status in 2026 – when one in five citizens will be aged 65 and above – the question of how people can thrive in a 100-year life with longer health spans while leading purposeful lives has become more urgent. This concept stems from a 2016 book by two London Business School professors who challenged people to rethink the traditional life stages of study, work, and retirement. The Distinguished Senior Fellowship Programme (DSFP) offered by the NUS School of Continuing and Lifelong Education (SCALE), is a newly launched programme designed specifically to address this question. The programme will welcome its first cohort in August 2025.
Recognising that senior leaders seek purposeful engagement beyond their career pinnacle, the DSFP ― billed as the first of its kind in Asia ― provides a platform for interdisciplinary learning, personal reflection, and societal contribution, demonstrating how universities such as NUS can innovate to serve learners across the life spectrum.
“In Singapore, longevity is no longer a question but an expectation. People are living well into their 80s. Yet, socially and economically, we are still expected to retire in our mid-60s,” said Professor Virginia Cha, DSFP’s Academic Director. “In fact, we should avoid using the label ‘seniors’, and address this emergent, dominant force as ‘thrivers’.”
“More has to be done to engage this growing group of ‘thrivers’ who have accumulated a lifetime of experiences, wisdom, resources, connections; and deploy this hard-earned equity in new, meaningful ways so that our communities can benefit from this longevity dividend,” she added.
Built on the idea of “Thriving in the 100-Year Life”, which reframes ageing as a period of growth rather than decline, DSFP’s focus is not on chalking up credentials for career advancement. Instead, it seeks to help participants (known as Fellows) build a post-professional identity and make a meaningful impact on the community through group work.
“When we think of retirement, we think of people diminishing or slowing down. With the DSFP, we want to change that narrative to one of high growth and learning,” said Prof Cha. “The programme is a call for ‘thrivers’ to ‘come back to school’ and connect with their peers, forge a new identity, and gain new knowledge together.”
Rethinking the role of universities
With its focus on enriching senior leaders, the DSFP also highlights the evolving role of universities.
"Universities push the boundaries of knowledge for society and are a beacon for the love of learning," said Professor Susanna Leong, Vice Provost (Masters' Programmes & Lifelong Education) and Dean of SCALE. "As our societies grow healthier and live longer, it is befitting for universities to welcome older learners back to our campus. In an institute of learning, we are all students; it is the spirit of open-minded learning and curiosity that keeps us forever young.”
The DSFP aims to achieve this through a series of modules structured around five pillars – Purpose, Exploration, Action, Community, and Health.
The Core course focuses on developing a purpose project, where Fellows work in teams to make meaningful contributions in areas such as youth development, sustainability, longevity, healthcare, the arts, and entrepreneurship. These are complemented by a Signature course comprising eight seminars that expound on various dimensions of thriving in the “100-Year Life”.
One of the Signature course seminars, titled “Elixir of Life: Manufacturing Cells as Medicine”, will teach Fellows the science behind immune cell therapy.
“It’s a privilege to engage Fellows who are experienced in their respective fields and share with them recent developments in cell therapy and the impact it can make on healthcare,” saidDr Andy Tay Kah Ping from the NUS College of Design and Engineering, who will be conducting the seminar.
“The use of immune cells is one of the most effective treatments for cancer and I am excited to share with the Fellows about my research and inspire them to use their respective expertise and networks to grow this sector,” added Dr Tay, who is also the Assistant Professor and Presidential Young Professor at the NUS Department of Biomedical Engineering.
There are also Elective seminars, which consist of Master’s-level seminars in history, culture, religion, philosophy, and contemporary affairs. Executive seminars on such subjects are not common, said Prof Cha. “But we want to give our Fellows a wider range of topics in areas they might not have been able to study before.”
Building people to build a better world
While the DSFP is new to Asia, top universities in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States have been running similar courses. Harvard University launched the Advanced Leadership Initiative in 2008, while Stanford University unveiled its Distinguished Careers Institute in 2015.
Prof Cha has a grand vision for DSFP. “In five to 10 years, when the world thinks about a best-in-class programme for ‘thrivers’ in their Third Transition, NUS and the DSFP should be top of mind, along with Harvard and Stanford.”
Universities have established degree programmes to help with the first transition (workforce entry) and second transition (career advancement). The Third Transition refers to the life stage after a successful career.
What sets DSFP apart is how it measures value – by the impact its Fellows create. “While other education programmes use conventional measures of value, such as how much salary is earned after programme completion, or how much funding is raised through a project, we want to go one step further,” Prof Cha said. “We want to measure how many people are impacted by our Fellows after they complete the programme.”
DSFP includes a week-long experiential learning trip to a Southeast Asian country. The first cohort will travel to Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, where Fellows will visit Smiling Gecko, a non-profit which runs a sustainable resort that funds a farm and a 500-student school for underprivileged children.
“The trip will forge a strong community and encourage deep reflection as the Fellows eat, converse, and explore purpose projects together,” Prof Cha said. “This trip will bring the concepts of Problem, People, and Place to a concrete form, so they can visualise, and by extension, be inspired on the impact they want to make with their purpose project.”
For Ms Vicky Lim-Tan, an Independent Director of Maya Bank Philippines and Fellow from the programme’s inaugural cohort, the trip will be a special one. “I find it extra meaningful that the Programme’s impact experience trip will take place in Cambodia, a country I had helped support with the Asian Development Bank’s Commune Council Development Project some 20 years ago,” she said. “Life indeed comes full circle.”
The programme’s emphasis on meaningful impact is rooted in its five pillars, which emerged from interviews and surveys with NUS alumni who fit its target audience.
“We asked what they were looking for post-retirement, and most said things like taking care of grandchildren or playing golf,” Prof Cha said. “Most people don’t realise that continual education and meaningful purpose project activities are options. We want to give ‘thrivers’ these options.”
She added: “We do not want to be just another executive programme. Our greater vision is to build deep humans to benefit society.”
The process of discovering molecules that have the properties needed to create new medicines and materials is cumbersome and expensive, consuming vast computational resources and months of human labor to narrow down the enormous space of potential candidates.
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT could streamline this process, but enabling an LLM to understand and reason about the atoms and bonds that form a molecule, the same way it does with words that form sentences, has presented a scientific stumbling block.
Researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab created a promising approach that augments an LLM with other machine-learning models known as graph-based models, which are specifically designed for generating and predicting molecular structures.
Their method employs a base LLM to interpret natural language queries specifying desired molecular properties. It automatically switches between the base LLM and graph-based AI modules to design the molecule, explain the rationale, and generate a step-by-step plan to synthesize it. It interleaves text, graph, and synthesis step generation, combining words, graphs, and reactions into a common vocabulary for the LLM to consume.
When compared to existing LLM-based approaches, this multimodal technique generated molecules that better matched user specifications and were more likely to have a valid synthesis plan, improving the success ratio from 5 percent to 35 percent.
It also outperformed LLMs that are more than 10 times its size and that design molecules and synthesis routes only with text-based representations, suggesting multimodality is key to the new system’s success.
“This could hopefully be an end-to-end solution where, from start to finish, we would automate the entire process of designing and making a molecule. If an LLM could just give you the answer in a few seconds, it would be a huge time-saver for pharmaceutical companies,” says Michael Sun, an MIT graduate student and co-author of a paper on this technique.
Sun’s co-authors include lead author Gang Liu, a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame; Wojciech Matusik, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who leads the Computational Design and Fabrication Group within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Meng Jiang, associate professor at the University of Notre Dame; and senior author Jie Chen, a senior research scientist and manager in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Best of both worlds
Large language models aren’t built to understand the nuances of chemistry, which is one reason they struggle with inverse molecular design, a process of identifying molecular structures that have certain functions or properties.
LLMs convert text into representations called tokens, which they use to sequentially predict the next word in a sentence. But molecules are “graph structures,” composed of atoms and bonds with no particular ordering, making them difficult to encode as sequential text.
On the other hand, powerful graph-based AI models represent atoms and molecular bonds as interconnected nodes and edges in a graph. While these models are popular for inverse molecular design, they require complex inputs, can’t understand natural language, and yield results that can be difficult to interpret.
The MIT researchers combined an LLM with graph-based AI models into a unified framework that gets the best of both worlds.
Llamole, which stands for large language model for molecular discovery, uses a base LLM as a gatekeeper to understand a user’s query — a plain-language request for a molecule with certain properties.
For instance, perhaps a user seeks a molecule that can penetrate the blood-brain barrier and inhibit HIV, given that it has a molecular weight of 209 and certain bond characteristics.
As the LLM predicts text in response to the query, it switches between graph modules.
One module uses a graph diffusion model to generate the molecular structure conditioned on input requirements. A second module uses a graph neural network to encode the generated molecular structure back into tokens for the LLMs to consume. The final graph module is a graph reaction predictor which takes as input an intermediate molecular structure and predicts a reaction step, searching for the exact set of steps to make the molecule from basic building blocks.
The researchers created a new type of trigger token that tells the LLM when to activate each module. When the LLM predicts a “design” trigger token, it switches to the module that sketches a molecular structure, and when it predicts a “retro” trigger token, it switches to the retrosynthetic planning module that predicts the next reaction step.
“The beauty of this is that everything the LLM generates before activating a particular module gets fed into that module itself. The module is learning to operate in a way that is consistent with what came before,” Sun says.
In the same manner, the output of each module is encoded and fed back into the generation process of the LLM, so it understands what each module did and will continue predicting tokens based on those data.
Better, simpler molecular structures
In the end, Llamole outputs an image of the molecular structure, a textual description of the molecule, and a step-by-step synthesis plan that provides the details of how to make it, down to individual chemical reactions.
In experiments involving designing molecules that matched user specifications, Llamole outperformed 10 standard LLMs, four fine-tuned LLMs, and a state-of-the-art domain-specific method. At the same time, it boosted the retrosynthetic planning success rate from 5 percent to 35 percent by generating molecules that are higher-quality, which means they had simpler structures and lower-cost building blocks.
“On their own, LLMs struggle to figure out how to synthesize molecules because it requires a lot of multistep planning. Our method can generate better molecular structures that are also easier to synthesize,” Liu says.
To train and evaluate Llamole, the researchers built two datasets from scratch since existing datasets of molecular structures didn’t contain enough details. They augmented hundreds of thousands of patented molecules with AI-generated natural language descriptions and customized description templates.
The dataset they built to fine-tune the LLM includes templates related to 10 molecular properties, so one limitation of Llamole is that it is trained to design molecules considering only those 10 numerical properties.
In future work, the researchers want to generalize Llamole so it can incorporate any molecular property. In addition, they plan to improve the graph modules to boost Llamole’s retrosynthesis success rate.
And in the long run, they hope to use this approach to go beyond molecules, creating multimodal LLMs that can handle other types of graph-based data, such as interconnected sensors in a power grid or transactions in a financial market.
“Llamole demonstrates the feasibility of using large language models as an interface to complex data beyond textual description, and we anticipate them to be a foundation that interacts with other AI algorithms to solve any graph problems,” says Chen.
This research is funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.
Researchers developed a multimodal tool that combines a large language model with powerful graph-based AI models to efficiently find new, synthesizable molecules with desired properties based on a user’s queries in plain language.
A team of researchers has demonstrated possibly the first practical application of quantum computing using commercially available hardware — a milestone that unlocks the long-term promise and potential of quantum technologies. The major breakthrough, published in Nature on 25 March 2025, shows that quantum computers could be used to generate certified random numbers that are mathematically proven to be unpredictable — a foundational capability for secure banking, cryptography and digital services.
Associate Professor Charles Lim, who is on leave from the National University of Singapore (NUS), introduced the idea of certified quantum randomness to the bank, where a research team collaborated with US national laboratories and universities to bring the idea to reality. A quantum cryptography expert from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) at NUS, Assoc Prof Lim is currently leading networking and security research at JPMorganChase.
Two other NUS-affiliated researchers also made significant contributions to the paper: Dr. Kon Wen Yu, a PhD graduate from NUS CDE, and Enrique Cervero-Martín, a PhD student at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at NUS, both of whom were mentored by Assoc Prof Lim at JPMorgan.
Realising certified randomness
The research addresses a long-standing challenge in quantum computing: demonstrating a useful task that near-term quantum computers can perform beyond the reach of even the most powerful classical supercomputers. Random number generation — essential for encryption, secure authentication, digital lotteries and e-games — has long been seen as a promising application. However, proving the quality and freshness of such randomness has remained difficult to achieve.
To solve this, the team implemented a protocol known as certified randomness, based on a method called random circuit sampling. The protocol involves sending quantum “challenge” circuits to a remote quantum computer, analysing its responses and then using classical supercomputers to certify that the results could not have been feasibly simulated by any classical means. The experiment was performed using the 56-qubit Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion quantum processor, accessed remotely over the internet.
In addition to verifying the authenticity of the output, the researchers also demonstrated randomness expansion, in which more certified random bits than the initial randomness used to initiate the process are produced. Combining quantum processing with exascale classical computing, the researchers successfully certified over 71,000 bits of entropy, producing what is known to be the first experimental realisation of certified randomness using existing quantum hardware.
The breakthrough comes at a time when expectations around, and investments in, quantum computing are high. While a fully functional general-purpose quantum computer is only expected in five to seven years, this study provides a proof point for what today’s intermediate-scale quantum devices can achieve — with immediate relevance to secure key generation and cryptographic protocols that require trusted randomness.
From academia to industry and back
Assoc Prof Lim’s key involvement in the project reflects the practicality of close academia-industry collaboration in advancing critical areas of research. In 2022, Assoc Prof Lim took no-pay leave from NUS to lead JPMorgan’s global quantum research team, which enables him to apply his research in real-world contexts while maintaining his academic roots and contributing to national and international initiatives to forge new frontiers in quantum computing.
At NUS, Assoc Prof Lim has built a strong research portfolio in quantum cybersecurity and quantum integrated photonics, particular in quantum key distribution (QKD) and quantum random number generation (QRNG). His work includes landmark demonstrations such as one of the world’s first device-independent QKD systems (Nature, 2022) and a proposal for chip-based QRNG with certified randomness (Nature Communications, 2023). He is also a National Research Foundation Fellow, a recipient of Singapore’s Young Scientist Award (2019) and an active contributor to international standardisation efforts for quantum cryptography.
When arguing cases before Supreme Court is your job
Elizabeth Prelogar (from left), Noel Francisco, and Neal Katyal offered an insider’s look at the job.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Former solicitors general recall what it’s like representing U.S. government amid shifts on bench
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made the bench “hot.”
Noel Francisco said lawyers used to be able to present arguments at their own pace before facing justices’ questions. But “Scalia changed that dynamic because he was the first one who was an active questioner.” Since then, other justices have taken up Scalia’s style, leaving lawyers less opportunity to shape the exchange.
Francisco should know, having worked on both sides of the bench. He clerked for Scalia from 1997 to 1998 and later served as U.S. solicitor general during the first Trump administration, arguing cases before the Supreme Court on the government’s behalf.
Last Friday, Francisco was joined by Elizabeth Prelogar, J.D. ’08, and Neal Katyal, who served as solicitors general during the Biden and Obama administrations, respectively. During a conversation with Richard Lazarus, the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law, the three offered an insider’s look at the job and how it has changed since 2017 with the addition of four new justices.
Katyal credited Harvard Law School Professor Richard Lazarus’ counsel to get past his anxiety early in the job.
Changes to the court’s composition over the last two decades have affected the tone and the dynamic between the justices and advocates, and between the justices themselves, the trio noted.
There can be a “learning curve” for everyone, even the other justices, whenever a new justice gets seated, they noted. Sometimes, even a single justice, like the influential conservative Scalia or centrist Anthony Kennedy, often a “swing” vote, can have an impact on how lawyers argue cases.
Recalling one of his first appearances before the court, Katyal said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor “cared a lot about the facts of the case.” But after she stepped down, factual questions became “just one part” of the court dynamic at oral argument until Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s arrival in 2009.
The justices typically “didn’t have their minds made up as often as I feel like they do now,” Katyal said. Kennedy, in particular, “really didn’t know what he was going to do at the time of oral arguments in a lot of the big cases,” which gave the lawyers on both sides a greater opportunity to persuade the court.
Prelogar credits Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a former law school professor, with asking some of the toughest questions.
“She has this incredible ability to go multiple layers deep in unpacking an issue, always in a very fair way, a way that’s totally within bounds, and a way that’s very driven by a genuine desire to fully understand the ramifications of the government’s position in a particular case,” said Prelogar.
Kagan, the former HLS dean, is by far the toughest, say Francisco and Katyal, because she “dissects your case” and tests the very outer limits of one’s argument.
No question, they said, it can be terrifying, especially the first few cases before the court.
Francisco recalled referring to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Justice O’Connor, to gales of laughter from the gallery. They each sought advice from experienced colleagues or trusted law professors on how to manage their nerves and use their time at the podium wisely.
Katyal credited Lazarus’ counsel to get past his anxiety early in the job by viewing the back-and-forth with the justices at oral argument not as a battle to be won, but as a collaboration of ideas.
Win or lose, whatever you do, remember who the client is and don’t say something you later have to walk back.
“When you represent the United States and you’re standing at the podium in the Supreme Court, you’re committing the United States to a particular view of the law. You’re speaking this with the authority of the federal government, and you have to take some care, not ad hoc, making determination about what the positions of the United States will be,” Prelogar said.
To Vanessa Chan PhD ’00, effective engineers don’t just solve technical problems. To make an impact with a new product or technology, they need to bring it to market, deploy it, and make it mainstream. Yet this is precisely what they aren’t trained to do.
In fact, 97 percent of patents fail to make it over the “commercialization wall.”
“Only 3 percent of patents succeed, and one of the biggest challenges is we are not training our PhDs, our undergrads, our faculty, to commercialize technologies,” said Chan, vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. She delivered the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE)’s spring 2025 Wulff Lecture at MIT on March 10. “Instead, we’re focused on the really hard technical issues that we have to overcome, versus everything that needs to be addressed for something to make it to market.”
Chan spoke from deep experience, having led McKinsey & Co.’s innovation practice, helping Fortune 100 companies commercialize technologies. She also invented the tangle-free headphones Loopit at re.design, the firm she founded, and served as the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)’s chief commercialization officer and director of the Office of Technology Transitions during the Biden administration.
From invention to impact
A DMSE alumna, Chan addressed a near-capacity crowd about the importance of materials innovation. She highlighted how new materials — or existing materials used in new ways — could solve key challenges, from energy sustainability to health care delivery. For example, carbon fiber composites have replaced aluminum in the airline industry, leading to reduced fuel consumption, lower emissions, and enhanced safety. Modern lithium-ion and solid-state batteries use optimized electrode materials for higher efficiency and faster charging. And biodegradable polymer stents, which dissolve over time, have replaced traditional metallic stents that remain in arteries and can cause complications.
The Wulff Lecture is a twice-yearly talk aimed at educating students, especially first-years, about materials science and engineering and its impact on society.
Inventing a groundbreaking technology is just the beginning, Chan said. She gave the example of Thomas Edison, often thought of as the father of the electric light bulb. But Edison didn’t invent the carbonized filament — that was Joseph Swan.
“Thomas Edison was the father of the deployed light bulb,” Chan said. “He took Swan’s patents and figured out, how do we actually pull a vacuum on this? How do we manufacture this at scale?”
For an invention to make an impact, it needs to successfully traverse the commercialization journey from research to development, demonstration, and deployment in the market. “An invention without deployment is a tragedy, because you’ve invented something where you may have a lot of paper publications, but it is not making a difference at all in the real world.”
Materials commercialization is difficult, Chan explained, because new materials are at the very beginning of a value chain — the full range of activities in producing a product or service. To make it to market, the materials invention must be adopted by others along the chain, and in some cases, companies must navigate how each part of the chain gets paid. A new material for hip replacements, for example, designed to reduce the risk of infection and rehospitalization, might be a materials breakthrough, but getting it to market is complicated by the way insurance works.
“They will not pay more to avoid hospitalization,” Chan said. “If your material is more expensive than what is currently being used today, the providers will not reimburse for that.”
Beyond technology
But engineers can increase their odds in commercialization if they know the right language. “Adoption readiness levels” (ARLs), developed in Chan’s Office of Technology Transitions, help assess the nontechnical risks technologies face on their journey to commercialization. These risks cover value proposition — whether a technology can perform at a price customers will pay — market acceptance, and other potential barriers, such as infrastructure and regulations.
In 2022, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act allocated $370 billion toward clean energy deployment — 10 times the Department of Energy’s annual budget — to advance clean energy technologies such as carbon management, clean hydrogen, and geothermal heating and cooling. But Chan emphasized that the real prize was unlocking an estimated $23 trillion from private-sector investors.
“Those are the ones who are going to bring the technologies to market. So, how do we do that? How do we convince them to actually commercialize these technologies which aren’t quite there?” Chan asked.
Chan’s team spearheaded “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff,” a roadmap to bridge the gap between innovation and commercial adoption, helping identify scaling requirements, key players, and the acceptable risk levels for early adoption.
She shared an example from the DoE initiative, which received $8 billion from Congress to create a market for clean hydrogen technologies. She tied the money to specific pathways, explaining, “the private sector will start listening because they want the money.”
Her team also gathered data on where the industry was headed, identifying sectors that would likely adopt hydrogen, the infrastructure needed to support it, and what policies or funding could accelerate commercialization.
“There’s also community perception, because when we talk to people about hydrogen, what's the first thing people think about? The Hindenburg,” Chan said, referencing the 1937 dirigible explosion. “So these are the kinds of things that we had to grapple with if we’re actually going to create a hydrogen economy.”
“What do you love?”
Chan concluded her talk by offering students professional advice. She encouraged them to do what they love. On a slide, she shared a Venn diagram of her passions for technology, business, and making things — she recently started a pottery studio called Rebel Potters — illustrating the motivations behind her career journey.
“So I need you to ask yourself, What is your Venn diagram? What is it that you love?” Chan asked. “And you may say, ‘I don’t know. I’m 18 right now, and I just need to figure out what classes I want to take.’ Well, guess what? Get outside your comfort zone. Go do something new. Go try new things.”
Attendee Delia Harms, a DMSE junior, found the exercise particularly useful. “I think I’m definitely lacking a little bit of direction in where I want to go after undergrad and what I want my career path to look like,” Harms said. “So I’ll definitely try that exercise later — thinking about what my circles are, and how they come together.”
Jeannie She, a junior majoring in artificial intelligence and bioengineering, found inspiration in Chan’s public sector experience.
“I have always seen government as bureaucracy, red tape, slow — but I’m also really interested in policy and policy change,” She said. “So learning from her and the things that she’s accomplished during her time as an appointee has been really inspiring, and makes me see that there are careers in policy where things can actually get done.”
Vanessa Chan PhD ’00, vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, delivered the spring 2025 Wulff Lecture on March 10. Chan discussed the critical role of materials in modern industries and the challenges of bringing new materials to market.
Enabling and sustaining a clean energy transition depends not only on groundbreaking technology to redefine the world’s energy systems, but also on that innovation happening at scale. As a part of an ongoing speaker series, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) hosted Emily Knight, the president and CEO of The Engine, a nonprofit incubator and accelerator dedicated to nurturing technology solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. She explained how her organization is bridging the gap between research breakthroughs and scalable commercial impact.
“Our mission from the very beginning was to support and accelerate what we call ‘tough tech’ companies — [companies] who had this vision to solve some of the world’s biggest problems,” Knight said.
The Engine, a spinout of MIT, coined the term “tough tech” to represent not only the durability of the technology, but also the complexity and scale of the problems it will solve. “We are an incubator and accelerator focused on building a platform and creating what I believe is an open community for people who want to build tough tech, who want to fund tough tech, who want to work in a tough tech company, and ultimately be a part of this community,” said Knight.
According to Knight, The Engine creates “an innovation orchard” where early-stage research teams have access to the infrastructure and resources needed to take their ideas from lab to market while maximizing impact. “We use this pathway — from idea to investment, then investment to impact — in a lot of the work that we do,” explained Knight.
She said that tough tech exists at the intersection of several risk factors: technology, market and customer, regulatory, and scaling. Knight highlighted MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) — one of many MIT spinouts within The Engine’s ecosystem that focus on energy — as an example of how The Engine encourages teams to work through these risks.
In the early days, the CFS team was told to assume their novel fusion technology would work. “If you’re only ever worried that your technology won’t work, you won’t pick your head up and have the right people on your team who are building the public affairs relationships so that, when you need it, you can get your first fusion reactor sited and done,” explained Knight. “You don’t know where to go for the next round of funding, and you don’t know who in government is going to be your advocates when you need them to be.”
“I think [CFS’s] eighth employee was a public affairs person,” Knight said. With the significant regulatory, scaling, and customer risks associated with fusion energy, building their team wisely was essential. Bringing on a public affairs person helped CFS build awareness and excitement around fusion energy in the local community and build the community programs necessary for grant funding.
The Engine’s growing ecosystem of entrepreneurs, researchers, institutions, and government agencies is a key component of the support offered to early-stage researchers. The ecosystem creates a space for sharing knowledge and resources, which Knight believes is critical for navigating the unique challenges associated with Tough Tech.
This support can be especially important for new entrepreneurs: “This leader that is going from PhD student to CEO — that is a really, really big journey that happens the minute you get funding,” said Knight. “Knowing that you’re in a community of people who are on that same journey is really important.”
The Engine also extends this support to the broader community through educational programs that walk participants through the process of translating their research from lab to market. Knight highlighted two climate and energy startups that joined The Engine through one such program geared toward graduate students and postdocs: Lithios, which is producing sustainable, low-cost lithium, and Lydian, which is developing sustainable aviation fuels.
The Engine also offers access to capital from investors with an intimate understanding of tough tech ventures. She said that government agency partners can offer additional support through public funding opportunities and highlighted that grants from the U.S. Department of Energy were key in the early funding of another MIT spinout within their ecosystem, Sublime Systems.
In response to the current political shift away from climate investments, as well as uncertainty surrounding government funding, Knight believes that the connections within their ecosystem are more important than ever as startups explore alternative funding. “We’re out there thinking about funding mechanisms that could be more reliable. That’s our role as an incubator.”
Being able to convene the right people to address a problem is something that Knight attributes to her education at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “My ethos across all of this is about service,” stated Knight. “We’re constantly evolving our resources and how we help our teams based on the gaps they’re facing.”
MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition is an MIT Energy Initiative speaker series highlighting energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. The next seminar in this series will be April 30 with Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Visit MITEI’s Events page for more information on this and additional events.
The Class Day speaker is selected by members of the senior class. This year's event will be held on May 26, which is the day before the University's Commencement.
Pulitzer-winning historian speaks to country’s past and future in conversation with Faust
The nation faces “a moral crisis” over whether we allow our best or worst impulses to prevail in a battle for the soul of America, historian Jon Meacham told Harvard President Emerita Drew Faust during a conversation about history and U.S. democracy Wednesday at the Kennedy School.
Author of the 2018 book, “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” Meacham said, “We either will decide that we can live in a country where we defer our immediate gratification in order to enter into a covenant where the rule of law prevails” — or we won’t.
Meacham believes an important political shift has taken place in recent years. In past presidential elections, like Richard Nixon’s narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Americans could count on candidates to accept defeat regardless of how close or controversial the contest. That is no longer the case, he said.
“My central worry at the moment is that there’s an autocratic trend in the country that will be deepened and accelerated,” said Meacham, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book on Andrew Jackson, “American Lion.”
His fascination with presidents is not to build up Great Man-style mythology, but to reveal their inherent humanity, Meacham said.
“If history has any moral utility — and I think it does — I hope it is not to intimidate people with the grandeur and glory of someone’s life, but to show that flawed and broken people can do great things.”
Meacham served as an informal adviser and speechwriter to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and was sometimes called Biden’s “muse” for their closely shared views of American democracy. When Faust, a Civil War historian, asked how he was able to go from writing about history to becoming part of that history, Meacham answered with a vivid memory.
“It was the moment I had been waiting for since I was 6 years old,” Meacham said. “It’s the Oval Office. The president of the United States is sitting behind the Resolute Desk, the sunlight streaming in. I can smell FDR’s cigarette smoke; I can see RFK reaching out to the Soviets. And I sit down next to the president’s desk, and the president of the United States asked me a question, and I start talking, and I didn’t make a goddamn bit of sense,” he said. “It was horrible.”
Meacham said that if he were president, he would not hold a serious meeting in the Oval Office because of how the past can overwhelm the present.
“I think it distorts things, and I think it’s really hard for presidents to get honest advice, particularly in that room,” he said.
Asked by a student how the legacy of slavery informs the current political climate, Meacham answered: “I think that we have not dealt with it, and we live in the extraordinarily long shadow not just of Appomattox, but of Reconstruction.”
Referencing Edward Alfred Pollard, the Richmond newspaper editor who coined the term “The Lost Cause” in his 1866 history of the war, Meacham noted, “He says explicitly that ‘Though we have lost the war, we have not lost the fight for the principle, which was the principle of white supremacy.’ And I think we live with that tension now.”
Conversations with palliative care specialist Susan Block (second from left) were instrumental to the development of “Night Side Songs” by Daniel Lazour and Patrick Lazour (far left and far right), seen here with Amanda Moment, a social worker from Dana-Farber and BWH.
But palliative care specialist who advised on ‘Night Side Songs’ says new musical about cancer patient is rich, moving
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Susan Block, founding chair of the department of psychosocial oncology and palliative care at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has been seeing dying patients for more than three decades. She had trouble imagining how Daniel and Patrick Lazour, who approached her for advice, were going to be able to build a musical around her sobering area of specialty.
“I had some skepticism about the idea of a musical about death and dying,” said Block, who is also founding director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Palliative Care. “And I mean, I love any kind of theatrical performance. And I like musicals. But I just couldn’t quite juxtapose this.”
But, she said, her doubts dissipated after seeing the first run-through of “Night Side Songs.”
“There was a feeling by the end, that we had all been through something together,” Block said.
“When I was a medical student and an intern, I didn’t like the way people who were dying were treated in the hospital. I thought that they were infantilized …”
Susan Block
“Night Side Songs,” inspired by writer and cultural critic Susan Sontag’s observation that “illness is the night side of life,” is told through the voices of doctors, patients, researchers, and caregivers. It was commissioned by Harvard’s American Repertory Theater and is being staged at the Cambridge Masonic Temple through Sunday and Hibernian Hall in Roxbury April 9-20.
The story revolves around Yasmine, a young cancer patient played by Brooke Ishibashi. The Lazour brothers conducted years of research into end-of-life care and experiences, and they asked Block to review drafts and attend read-throughs to give notes on accuracy.
“I felt that they captured essential elements of the experience from the point of view of patients, of caregivers, of other family members going through it, and of the clinicians in a really very emotionally evocative, intense, beautiful way,” said Block, who has seen the show multiple times since its inception.
Block went to medical school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She said back then there was no such thing as palliative care. She has been a pioneer in studying the psychology of dying and getting palliative care into hospitals across the country. Now, a musical is inviting people to think and speak candidly about the end of life.
“When I was a medical student and an intern, I didn’t like the way people who were dying were treated in the hospital,” she said. “I thought that they were infantilized in ways — that was a period where people weren’t told the truth about their illness, where pain was not well treated, where there was not good recognition of people’s emotional suffering about and grief about the idea of leaving, that families were kind of left to figure it out on their own.”
Since then, palliative care has become a recognized area of specialization involving thousands of doctors across the country. Still, Block said, we don’t talk enough about death and dying.
“I think giving people the opportunity to speak about this lets people play around with it, because most of us do a lot of our deeper understanding and processing by talking with somebody else in community,” she said. “And for people who are seriously ill and dying, there’s this feeling that if I tell my wife how upset I am about my illness, it’s going to make her sad and make things worse for her. And then the wife is saying, ‘Well, I want to protect my husband from knowing how sad I am.’ There’s this conspiracy of silence about it, and it also creates enormous isolation for both people.”
Jonathan Raviv in A.R.T.’s world premiere production of “Night Side Songs.”
Credit: Nile Scott Studios
Notably, “Night Side Songs” is not being performed at the A.R.T.’s Loeb Theater, which accommodates audiences more than twice the size of either Masonic Temple or Hibernian Hall. Both venues also allow for theater in the round, with audience members seated in a circle around the performers.
According to A.R.T. Artistic Director Diane Paulus, the show is being performed in these more intimate venues to inspire audiences to connect with both the actors and each other.
“Getting out of the proscenium arch, the strict auditorium, breaking that into a circle, reducing the audience to make it intimate, and audience size really matters,” she said. “And our mission is to expand the boundaries of theater. So we are always looking for shows like ‘Night Side Songs’ that are pushing the boundaries of what we think the form of theater is.”
The other unifying element, Paulus said, is the invitation for the audience to sing along.
“The way they do it is so inviting and graceful. And you can sing along, and you can listen … It’s really an invitation for the audience to experience the material in a very deep way,” she said.
Block says “Night Side Songs” will resonate with anyone who’s been touched by serious illness.
“When you’re sick, you want to believe that science and medicine know what to do, and everything is going to work out OK,” she said. “But then unexpected things happen, and I thought that the play dealt with the uncertainty and expectation of unexpected outcomes in a very real, very poignant way.”
Mikhail Zygar, exiled founder of Russias only independent television news channel, and winner of the CPJ International Press Freedom Award, spoke about the evolution of his career and his hopes for generational change in Russia at last nights annual University of Melbourne A N Smith Lecture.
The NUS Asia Research Institute (ARI) announced today the establishment of the Nalanda Endowed Professorship in India-China Studies. The Professorship seeks to promote research and education on India-China relations – specifically, the political, economic, historical and cultural interactions between India and China – with the overarching goal to shape policy and deepen societal understanding in the interdisciplinary field.
The Professorship is made possible through a generous S$3 million gift from the Nalanda Library Fund Limited (NLFL) which was presented by Former Minister Mr George Yeo as NLFL Trustee to Director of ARI, Professor Tim Bunnell in a ceremony witnessed by NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye at NUS this afternoon.
The NLFL was established to collect donations for the Nalanda University Library in India, providing facilities for study, research, and teaching. Its trustees includeMr Yeo, Ho Bee Land Executive Chairman Mr Chua Thian Poh and NUS University Professor Wang Gungwu. Donors from Singapore had agreed to gift up to S$10 million for the construction of the library to be designed by Singapore architects. After plans were shelved, the Trustees decided, with the approval of all donors, that the remaining amount of S$3 million be donated to NUS for the establishment of the Nalanda Endowed Professorship in India-China Studies.
Prof Tan said, “NUS is delighted to be partnering with the Nalanda Library Fund Limited to establish the Nalanda Endowed Professorship in India-China Studies at ARI. This collaboration underscores our shared commitment to illuminating the deep history and contemporary significance of India-China relations and advancing this field of research.”
He added, “By promoting study of the many ways in which India and China have influenced each other over long centuries, this Nalanda Endowed Professorship will contribute to advancing understanding between the two countries in ways that serve as ballast for regional stability and prosperity today and into the future.”
The Professorship will be awarded to leading scholars in the domain for a fixed term. The appointed professor (otherwise known as the Chair) will spearhead original research through a long-term project on India-China relations, lead archival initiatives to collect, digitise and preserve original materials related to historical research on India-China ties and their regional influence, mentor graduate students, as well as contribute to the broader discourse in the field through engagements with the academic and policymaking communities and the public in the form of workshops, public lectures and an annual conference. The global search for the first Chair has already begun.
Prof Bunnell said, “Trans-Asian research has been part of ARI’s DNA for some time, the Nalanda Endowed Professorship in India-China Studies builds on this legacy of trans-regional research. We look forward to the new professorship complimenting the important work provided by ARI’s Asian Peace Programme on India and China by situating contemporary geo-politics as one form among many forms of relations between these two historically consequential Asian countries.”
Mr Yeo, who is also a current visiting scholar at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS added, “The prospect for peace and development in our region this century depends much on good relations between China and India. I hope the professorship can, in a small way, contribute to greater understanding between these two great civilizations. Southeast Asia is where the mandalas of India and China overlap. We provide a natural platform for the convening of discussions on their contact with each other over the centuries in different domains and their contribution to Southeast Asia.”
About ARI
ARI was established in 2001 to provide a focal point and resource for world-class research on the Asian region at NUS. ARI engages the humanities and social sciences broadly defined, and especially interdisciplinary frontiers between and beyond disciplines. As a university-level institute, ARI brings together scholars from different departments, faculties and colleges across campus for seminars, conferences and collaborative research projects. Located at one of Asia’s communication hubs, the Institute is also an important place for scholarly encounters between Singapore, the region and wider worlds.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, developed a device that makes it easy for people with or without medical training to record heart sounds accurately. Unlike a stethoscope, the device works well even if it’s not placed precisely on the chest: its larger, flexible sensing area helps capture clearer heart sounds than traditional stethoscopes.
The device can also be used over clothing, making it more comfortable for patients – especially women – during routine check-ups or community heart health screening programmes.
The heart sound recordings can be saved on the device, which can then be used to detect signs of heart valve disease. The researchers are also developing a machine learning algorithm which can detect signs of valve disease automatically. The results are reported in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.
Heart valve disease (valvular heart disease or VHD) has been called the ‘next cardiac epidemic,’ with a prognosis worse than many forms of cancer. Up to 50% of patients with significant VHD remain undiagnosed, and many patients only see their doctor when the disease has advanced and they are experiencing significant complications.
In the UK, the NHS and NICE have identified early detection of heart valve disease as a key goal, both to improve quality of life for patients, and to decrease costs.
An examination with a stethoscope, or auscultation, is the way that most diagnoses of heart valve disease are made. However, just 38% of patients who present to their GP with symptoms of valve disease receive an examination with a stethoscope.
“The symptoms of VHD can be easily confused with certain respiratory conditions, which is why so many patients don’t receive a stethoscope examination,” said Professor Anurag Agarwal from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “However, the accuracy of stethoscope examination for diagnosing heart valve disease is fairly poor, and it requires a GP to conduct the examination.”
In addition, a stethoscope examination requires patients to partially undress, which is both time consuming in short GP appointments, and can be uncomfortable for patients, particularly for female patients in routine screening programmes.
The ‘gold standard’ for diagnosing heart valve disease is an echocardiogram, but this can only be done in a hospital and NHS waiting lists are extremely long – between six to nine months at many hospitals.
“To help get waiting lists down, and to make sure we’re diagnosing heart valve disease early enough that simple interventions can improve quality of life, we wanted to develop an alternative to a stethoscope that is easy to use as a screening tool,” said Agarwal.
Agarwal and his colleagues have developed a handheld device, about the diameter of a drinks coaster, that could be a solution. Their device can be used by any health professional to accurately record heart sounds, and can be used over clothes.
While a regular or electronic stethoscope has a single sensor, the Cambridge-developed device has six, meaning it is easier for the doctor or nurse – or even someone without any medical training – to get an accurate reading, simply because the surface area is so much bigger.
The device contains materials that can transmit vibration so that it can be used over clothes, which is particularly important when conducting community screening programmes to protect patient privacy. Between each of the six sensors is a gel that absorbs vibration, so the sensors don’t interfere with each other.
The researchers tested the device on healthy participants with different body shapes and sizes and recorded their heart sounds. Their next steps will be to test the device in a clinical setting on a variety of patients, against results from an echocardiogram.
In parallel with the development of the device, the researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm that can use the recorded heart sounds to detect signs of valve disease automatically. Early tests of the algorithm suggest that it outperforms GPs in detecting heart valve disease.
“If successful, this device could become an affordable and scalable solution for heart health screening, especially in areas with limited medical resources,” said Agarwal.
The researchers say that the device could be a useful tool to triage patients who are waiting for an echocardiogram, so that those with signs of valve disease can be seen in a hospital sooner.
A patent has been filed on the device by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm. Anurag Agarwal is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Well into the late 19th century, the U.S. retail sector was overwhelmingly local, consisting of small, independent merchants throughout the country. That started changing after Sears and Roebuck’s famous catalog became popular, allowing the firm to grow, while a rival, Montgomery Ward, also expanded. By the 1930s, the U.S. had 130,000 chain stores, topped by Atlantic and Pacific supermarkets (the A&P), with over 15,000 stores.
A century onward, the U.S. retail landscape is dominated by retail giants. Today, 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart, while five of the country’s 10 biggest employers — Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Kroger, and Target— are retailers. Two others in the top 10, UPS and FedEx, are a major part of the retail economy.
The ubiquity of these big retailers, and the sheer extent of the U.S. shopping economy as a whole, is unusual compared to the country’s European counterparts. Domestic consumption plays an outsized role in driving growth in the United States, and credit plays a much larger role in supporting that consumption than in Europe. The U.S. has five times as much retail space per capita as Japan and the U.K., and 10 times as much as Germany. Unlike in Europe, shopping hours are largely unregulated.
How did this happen? To be sure, Walmart, Amazon, Target, and other massive chains have plenty of business acumen. But the full story involves a century or more of political tectonics and legal debates, which helped shape the size of U.S. retailing and the prominence of its large discount chains.
“The markets that we take as given, that we think of as the natural outcome of supply and demand, are heavily shaped by policy and by politics,” says MIT political scientist Kathleen Thelen.
While a great deal has been written about specific American companies, Thelen’s book has some distinctive features. One is a comparison to the economies of Europe, where she has focused much of her scholarship. Another is her historical lens, extending back to the start of chain retailing.
“It seems like every time I set out to explain something in the present, I’m thrown back to the 19th century,” Thelen says.
For instance, as both Sears and Montgomery Ward grew, producers and consumers were still experimenting with alternate commercial arrangements, like cooperatives, which pooled suppliers together, but they ultimately ran into economic and legal headwinds. Especially, at the time, legal headwinds.
“Antitrust laws in the United States were very forbearing toward big multidivisional corporations and very punitive toward alternative types of arrangements like cooperatives, so big retailers got a real boost in that period,” Thelen says. Separately, the U.S. Postal Service was also crucial, since big mail order houses like Sears relied on not just on its delivery services but also its money order system, to sell goods to the company’s many customers who lacked bank accounts.
Smaller retailers fought large chains during the Depression, especially in the South and the West, which forms another phase of the story. But low-cost discounters worked around some laws through regulatory arbitrage, finding friendlier regulations in some states — and sometimes though outright rule-breaking. Ultimately, larger retailers have thrived again in the last half century, especially as antitrust law increasingly prioritized consumer prices as its leading measuring stick.
Most antitrust theorizing since the 1960s “valorizes consumer welfare, which is basically defined as price, so anything that delivers the lowest price to consumers is A-OK,” Thelen says. “We’re in this world where the large, low-cost retailers are delivering consumer welfare in the way the courts are defining it.”
That emphasis on prices, she notes, then spills over into other areas of the economy, especially wages and labor relations.
“If you prioritize prices, one of the main ways to reduce prices is to reduce labor costs,” Thelen says. “It’s no coincidence that low-cost discounters are often low-wage employers. Indeed, they often squeeze their vendors to deliver goods at ever-lower prices, and by extension they’re pressing down on wages in their supplier networks as well.”
As Thelen’s book explains, legal views supporting large chains were also common during the first U.S. wave of chain-retail growth. She writes, “large, low-cost retailers have almost always enjoyed a privileged position in the American antitrust regime.”
In the “deep equilibrium”
“Attention, Shoppers!” makes clear that this tendency toward lower prices, lower employee pay, and high consumer convenience is particularly pronounced in the U.S., where 22.6 percent of employees count as low-wage workers (making two-thirds or less of the country’s median wage). In the other countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 13.9 percent of workers fit that description. About three-quarters of U.S. retail workers are in the low-wage category.
In other OECD countries, on aggregate, manufacturers and producers make up bigger chunks of the economy and, correspondingly, often have legal frameworks more friendly to manufacturers and to labor. But in the U.S., large retailers have gained more leverage, if anything, in the last half-century, Thelen notes.
“You might think mass retailers and manufacturers would have a symbiotic relationship, but historically there has been great tension between them, especially on price,” Thelen says. “In the postwar period, the balance of power became tilted toward retailers, and away from manufacturers and labor. Retailers also had consumers on their side, and had more power over data to dictate the terms on which their vendors would supply goods to them.”
Currently, as Thelen writes in the book, the U.S. is in a “deep equilibrium” on this front, in that many low-wage workers now rely on these low-cost retailers to make ends meet — and because Americans as a whole now find it normal to have their purchases delivered at lightning speed. Things might be different, Thelen suggests, if there are changes to U.S. antitrust enforcement, or, especially, major reforms to labor law, such as allowing workers to organize for higher wages across companies, not just at individual stores. Short of that, the equilibrium is likely to hold.
“Attention, Shoppers!” has received praise from other scholars. Louis Hyman, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, has called it a “pathbreaking study that provides insight into not only the past but also the future of online retail.”
For her part, Thelen hopes readers will learn more about an economic landscape we might take for granted, even while we shop at big chains, around us and online.
“The triumph of these types of retailers was not inevitable,” Thelen says. “It was a function of politics and political choice.”
The team, from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, created the network, which uses standard fibreoptic infrastructure, but relies on a variety of quantum phenomena to enable ultra-secure data transfer.
The network uses two types of quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes: ‘unhackable’ encryption keys hidden inside particles of light; and distributed entanglement: a phenomenon that causes quantum particles to be intrinsically linked.
The researchers demonstrated the capabilities of the network via a live, quantum-secure video conference link, the transfer of encrypted medical data, and secure remote access to a distributed data centre. The data was successfully transmitted between Bristol and Cambridge – a fibre distance of over 410 kilometres.
This is the first time that a long-distance network, encompassing different quantum-secure technologies such as entanglement distribution, has been successfully demonstrated. The researchers presented their results at the 2025 Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) in San Francisco.
Quantum communications offer unparalleled security advantages compared to classical telecommunications solutions. These technologies are immune against future cyber-attacks, even with quantum computers, which – once fully developed – will have the potential to break through even the strongest cryptographic methods currently in use.
In the past few years, researchers have been working to build and use quantum communication networks. China recently set up a massive network that covers 4,600 kilometres by connecting five cities using both fibreoptics and satellites. In Madrid, researchers created a smaller network with nine connection points that use different types of QKD to securely share information.
In 2019, researchers at Cambridge and Toshiba demonstrated a metro-scale quantum network operating at record key rates of millions of key bits per second. And in 2020, researchers in Bristol built a network that could share entanglement between multiple users. Similar quantum network trials have been demonstrated in Singapore, Italy and the USA.
Despite this progress, no one has built a large, long-distance network that can handle both types of QKD, entanglement distribution, and regular data transmission all at once, until now.
The experiment demonstrates the potential of quantum networks to accommodate different quantum-secure approaches simultaneously with classical communications infrastructure. It was carried out using the UK’s Quantum Network (UKQN), established over the last decade by the same team, supported by funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and as part of the Quantum Communications Hub project.
“This is a crucial step toward building a quantum-secured future for our communities and society,” said co-author Dr Rui Wang, Lecturer for Future Optical Networks in the Smart Internet Lab's High Performance Network Research Group at the University of Bristol. “More importantly, it lays the foundation for a large-scale quantum internet—connecting quantum nodes and devices through entanglement and teleportation on a global scale.”
“This marks the culmination of more than ten years of work to design and build the UK Quantum Network,” said co-author Adrian Wonfor from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Not only does it demonstrate the use of multiple quantum communications technologies, but also the secure key management systems required to allow seamless end-to-end encryption between us.”
“This is a significant step in delivering quantum security for the communications we all rely upon in our daily lives at a national scale,” said co-author Professor Richard Penty, also from Cambridge and who headed the Quantum Networks work package in the Quantum Communications Hub. “It would not have been possible without the close collaboration of the two teams at Cambridge and Bristol, the support of our industrial partners Toshiba, BT, Adtran and Cisco, and our funders at UKRI.”
“This is an extraordinary achievement which highlights the UK’s world-class strengths in quantum networking technology,” said Gerald Buller, Director of the IQN Hub, based at Heriot-Watt University. “This exciting demonstration is precisely the kind of work the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub will support over the coming years, developing the technologies, protocols and standards which will establish a resilient, future-proof, national quantum communications infrastructure.”
The current UKQN covers two metropolitan quantum networks around Bristol and Cambridge, which are connected via a ‘backbone’ of four long-distance optical fibre links spanning 410 kilometres with three intermediate nodes.
The network uses single-mode fibre over the EPSRC National Dark Fibre Facility (which provides dedicated fibre for research purposes), and low-loss optical switches allowing network reconfiguration of both classical and quantum signal traffic.
The team will pursue this work further through a newly funded EPSRC project, the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub, whose vision is to establish quantum networks at all distance scales, from local networking of quantum processors to national-scale entanglement networks for quantum-safe communication, distributed computing and sensing, all the way to intercontinental networking via low-earth orbit satellites.
Reference:
R. Yang et al. ‘A UK Nationwide Heterogeneous Quantum Network.’ Paper presented at the 2025 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC): https://www.ofcconference.org/en-us/home/schedule/
Researchers have successfully demonstrated the UK’s first long-distance ultra-secure transfer of data over a quantum communications network, including the UK’s first long-distance quantum-secured video call.
The gene in question, FLCN, is linked to a condition known as Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, symptoms of which include benign skin tumours, lung cysts, and an increased risk of kidney cancer.
In a study published today in the journal Thorax, a team from the University of Cambridge examined data from UK Biobank, the 100,000 Genomes Project, and East London Genes & Health – three large genomic datasets encompassing more than 550,000 people.
They discovered that between one in 2,710 and one in 4,190 individuals carries the particular variant of FLCN that underlies Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome. But curiously, whereas patients with a diagnosis of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome have a lifetime risk of punctured lung of 37%, in the wider cohort of carriers of the genetic mutation this was lower at 28%. Even more striking, while patients with Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome have a 32% of developing kidney cancer, in the wider cohort this was only 1%.
Punctured lung – known as pneumothorax – is caused by an air leak in the lung, resulting in painful lung deflation and shortness of breath. Not every case of punctured lung is caused by a fault in the FLCN gene, however. Around one in 200 tall, thin young men in their teens or early twenties will experience a punctured lung, and for many of them the condition will resolve itself, or doctors will remove air or fluid from their lungs while treating the individual as an outpatient; many will not even know they have the condition.
If an individual experiences a punctured lung and doesn’t fit the common characteristics – for example, if they are in their forties – doctors will look for tell-tale cysts in the lower lungs, visible on an MRI scan. If these are present, then the individual is likely to have Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome.
Professor Marciniak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and an honorary consultant at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. He co-leads the UK’s first Familial Pneumothorax Rare Disease Collaborative Network, together with Professor Kevin Blyth at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and University of Glasgow. The aim of the Network is to optimise the care and treatment of patients with rare, inherited forms of familial pneumothorax, and to support research into this condition.
Professor Marciniak said: “If an individual has Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, then it’s very important that we’re able to diagnose it, because they and their family members may also be at risk of kidney cancer.
“The good news is that the punctured lung usually happens 10 to 20 years before the individual shows symptoms of kidney cancer, so we can keep an eye on them, screen them every year, and if we see the tumour it should still be early enough to cure it.”
Professor Marciniak says he was surprised to discover that the risk of kidney cancer was so much lower in carriers of the faulty FLCN gene who have not been diagnosed with Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome.
“Even though we’ve always thought of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome as being caused by a single faulty gene, there’s clearly something else going on,” Professor Marciniak said. “The Birt-Hogg-Dubé patients that we've been caring for and studying for the past couple of decades are not representative of when this gene is broken in the wider population. There must be something else about their genetic background that’s interacting with the gene to cause the additional symptoms.”
The finding raises the question of whether, if an individual is found to have a fault FLCN gene, they should be offered screening for kidney cancer. However, Professor Marciniak does not believe this will be necessary.
“With increasing use of genetic testing, we will undoubtedly find more people with these mutations,” he said, “but unless we see the other tell-tale signs of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, our study shows there's no reason to believe they’ll have the same elevated cancer risk.”
The research was funded by the Myrovlytis Trust, with additional support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.
Katie Honeywood, CEO of the Myrovlytis Trust, said: "The Myrovlytis Trust are delighted to have funded such an important project. We have long believed that the prevalence of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome is far higher than previously reported. It highlights the importance of genetic testing for anyone who has any of the main symptoms associated with BHD including a collapsed lung. And even more so the importance of the medical world being aware of this condition for anyone who presents at an emergency department or clinic with these symptoms. We look forward to seeing the impact this projects outcome has on the Birt-Hogg-Dubé and wider community."
As many as one in 3,000 people could be carrying a faulty gene that significantly increases their risk of a punctured lung, according to new estimates from Cambridge researchers. Previous estimates had put this risk closer to one in 200,000 people.
If an individual has Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, then it’s very important that we’re able to diagnose it, because they and their family members may also be at risk of kidney cancer
Think of your most prized belongings. In an increasingly virtual world, wouldn’t it be great to save a copy of that precious item and all the memories it holds?
In mixed-reality settings, you can create a digital twin of a physical item, such as an old doll. But it’s hard to replicate interactive elements, like the way it moves or the sounds it makes — the sorts of unique interactive features that made the toy distinct in the first place.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) sought to change that, and they have a potential solution. Their “InteRecon” program enables users to recapture real-world objects in a mobile app, and then animate them in mixed-reality environments.
This prototype could recreate the interaction functions in the physical world, such as the head motions of your favorite bobblehead, or playing a classic video on a digital version of your vintage TV. It creates more lifelike and personal digital surroundings while preserving a memory.
InteRecon’s ability to reconstruct the interactive experience of different items could make it a useful tool for teachers explaining important concepts, like demonstrating how gravity pulls an object down. It could also add a new visual component to museum exhibits, such as animating a painting or bringing a historical mannequin to life (without the scares of characters from “Night at the Museum”). Eventually, InteRecon may be able to teach a doctor’s apprentice organ surgery or a cosmetic procedure by visualizing each motion needed to complete the task.
The exciting potential of InteRecon comes from its ability to add motions or interactive functions to many different objects, according to CSAIL visiting researcher Zisu Li, lead author of a paper introducing the tool.
“While taking a picture or video is a great way to preserve a memory, those digital copies are static,” says Li, who is also a PhD student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “We found that users wanted to reconstruct personal items while preserving their interactivity to enrich their memories. With the power of mixed reality, InteRecon can make these memories live longer in virtual settings as interactive digital items.”
Li and her colleagues will present InteRecon at the 2025 ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Making a virtual world more realistic
To make digital interactivity possible, the team first developed an iPhone app. Using your camera, you scan the item all the way around three times to ensure it’s fully captured. The 3D model can then be imported into the InteRecon mixed reality interface, where you can mark (“segment”) individual areas to select which parts of the model will be interactive (like a doll’s arms, head, torso, and legs). Alternatively, you can use the function provided by InteRecon for automatic segmentation.
The InteRecon interface can be accessed via the mixed reality headset (such as Hololens 2 and Quest). It allows you to choose a programmable motion for the part of the item you want to animate after your model is segmented.
Movement options are presented as motion demonstrations, allowing you to play around with them before deciding on one — say, a flopping motion that emulates how a bunny doll’s ears move. You can even pinch a specific part and explore different ways to animate it, like sliding, dangling, and pendulum-like turns.
Your old iPod, digitized
The team showed that InteRecon can also recapture the interface of physical electronic devices, like a vintage TV. After making a digital copy of the item, you can customize the 3D model with different interfaces.
Users can play with example widgets from different interfaces before choosing a motion: a screen (either a TV display or camera’s viewfinder), a rotating knob (for, say, adjusting the volume), an “on/off”-style button, and a slider (for changing settings on something like a DJ booth).
Li and colleagues presented an application that recreates the interactivity of a vintage TV by incorporating virtual widgets such as an “on/off” button, a screen, and a channel switch on a TV model, along with embedding old videos into it. This makes the TV model come to life. You could also upload MP3 files and add a “play button” to a 3D model of an iPod to listen to your favorite songs in mixed reality.
The researchers believe InteRecon opens up intriguing new avenues in designing lifelike virtual environments. A user study confirmed that people from different fields share this enthusiasm, viewing it as easy to learn and diverse in its ability to express the richness of users’ memories.
“One thing I really appreciate is that the items that users remember are imperfect,” says Faraz Faruqi SM ’22, another author on the paper who is also a CSAIL affiliate and MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science. “InteRecon brings those imperfections into mixed reality, accurately recreating what made a personal item like a teddy bear missing a few buttons so special.”
In a related study, users imagined how this technology could be applied to professional scenarios, from teaching medical students how to perform surgeries to helping travelers and researchers log their trips, and even assisting fashion designers in experimenting with materials.
Before InteRecon is used in more advanced settings, though, the team would like to upgrade their physical simulation engine to something more precise. This would enable applications such as helping a doctor’s apprentice to learn the pinpoint accuracy needed to do certain surgical maneuvers.
Li and Faruqi may also incorporate large language models and generative models that can recreate lost personal items into 3D models via language descriptions, as well as explain the interface’s features.
As for the researchers’ next steps, Li is working toward a more automatic and powerful pipeline that can make interactivity-preserved digital twins of larger physical environments in mixed reality for end users, such as a virtual office space. Faruqi is looking to build an approach that can physically recreate lost items via 3D printers.
“InteRecon represents an exciting new frontier in the field of mixed reality, going beyond mere visual replication to capture the unique interactivity of physical objects,” says Hanwang Zhang, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University's College of Computing and Data Science, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This technology has the potential to revolutionize education, health care, and cultural exhibitions by bringing a new level of immersion and personal connection to virtual environments.”
Li and Faruqi wrote the paper with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) master’s student Jiawei Li, PhD student Shumeng Zhang, Associate Professor Xiaojuan Ma, and assistant professors Mingming Fan and Chen Liang from HKUST; ETH Zurich PhD student Zeyu Xiong; and Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and leader of the HCI Engineering Group. Their work was supported by the APEX Lab of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) in collaboration with the HCI Engineering Group.
InteRecon can recreate the interaction functions in the physical world, such as the head motions of your favorite bobblehead, the music on your old iPod, and the way your doll moves.
Watching and listening to a pianist’s performance is an immersive and enjoyable experience. The pianist and the instrument, with a blend of skill, training, and presence, create a series of memorable moments for themselves and the audience. But is there a way to improve the performance and our understanding of how the performer and their instrument work together to create this magic, while also minimizing performance-related injuries?
Mi-Eun Kim, director of keyboard studies in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Section, and Praneeth Namburi PhD ’16, a research scientist in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, are investigating how the body works when pianists play. Their joint project, The Biomechanics of Assimilating a New Piano Skill, aims to develop mechanistic insights that could transform how we understand and teach piano technique, reduce performance-related injuries, and bridge the gap between artistic expression and biomechanical efficiency.
Their project is among those recently selected for a SHASS+ Connectivity Fund grant through the MIT Human Insight Collaborative.
“The project emerged from a convergence of interests and personal experiences,” Namburi says. “Mi-Eun witnessed widespread injuries among fellow pianists and saw how these injuries could derail careers.”
Kim is a renowned pianist who has performed on stages throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. She earned the Liszt-Garrison Competition’s Liszt Award and the Corpus Christi solo prize, among other honors. She teaches piano and chamber music through MIT Music’s Emerson/Harris Program and chamber music through MIT’s Chamber Music Society. She earned advanced degrees from the University of Michigan and holds a bachelor of arts degree in history from Columbia University.
Namburi’s work focuses on the biomechanics of efficient, expressive, and coordinated movement. He draws inspiration from artists and athletes in specialized movement disciplines, such as dancing and fencing, to investigate skilled movement. He earned a PhD in experimental neuroscience from MIT and a bachelor of engineering degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
Pursuing the project
Kim and Namburi arrived at their project by taking different roads into the arts. While Kim was completing her studies at the University of Michigan, Namburi was taking dance lessons as a hobby in Boston. He learned that both expressive and sustainable movements might share a common denominator. “A key insight was that elastic tissues play a crucial role in coordinated, expressive, and sustainable movements in dance — a principle that could extend beyond dancing,” he notes.
“We recognized that studying elastic tissues could shed light on reducing injury risk, as well as understanding musical expression and embodiment in the context of piano playing,” Kim says.
Kim and Namburi began collaborating on what would become their project in October 2023, though the groundwork was in place months before. “A visiting student working with me on a research project studying pianists in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab reached out to Mi-Eun in summer 2023,” Namburi recalls. A shared Instagram video showing their setup with motion capture sensors and a pianist playing Chopin on a digital keyboard sparked Kim’s interest. The Immersion Lab is an open-access, shared facility for MIT and beyond dedicated to visualizing, understanding, and interacting with large, multidimensional data.
“I couldn't make sense of all the sensors, but immediately noticed they were using a digital keyboard,” she says.
Kim wanted to elevate these studies’ quality by pairing the musicians with the proper equipment and instrument. While the digital pianos they’d previously used are portable and provide musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) data, they don’t offer the same experience as a real piano. “Pianists dream of playing on an ideal instrument — a 9-foot concert grand with perfectly regulated 24-inch keys that responds to every musical intention without resistance,” Kim says.
The researchers brought both Steinway Spirio D|r and Yamaha DCFX grand pianos to the Immersion Lab and observed that the instruments player piano technology could both capture pianists’ hammer strike velocities and reproduce them to play back the performance. Monitoring Kim’s performance on the concert grand piano, for example, both noted marked differences in her playing style.
“Despite all the sensors, lighting, and observers, playing felt so natural that I forgot I was in a lab,” she says. “I could focus purely on the music, without worrying about adapting to a smaller keyboard or digital sound.”
This setup allowed them to observe pianists’ natural movements, which was exactly what Kim wanted to study.
During Independent Activities Period 2025, Kim and Namburi hosted a new course, Biomechanics of Piano Playing, in the Immersion Lab. Students and faculty from MIT, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and the University of Hartford took part. Participants learned how to use motion capture, accelerometers, and ultrasound imaging to visualize signals from the body during piano playing.
Observations and outcomes
If the efficiency and perceived fluency of an expert pianist’s movements comes from harnessing the body’s inherent elastic mechanisms, Kim and Namburi believe, it’s possible to redesign how piano playing is taught. Each wants to reduce occurrences of playing-related injuries and improve how musicians learn their craft.
“I want us to bridge the gap between artistic expression and biomechanical efficiency,” Namburi says.
Through their exploratory sessions at the Immersion Lab, Kim and Namburi found common ground, gathering information about their observations of and experiences in piano and dance through sensor technology, including ultrasound.
Beyond these, Kim saw potential for transforming piano pedagogy. “Traditional teaching relies heavily on subjective descriptions and metaphors passed down through generations,” she says. “While valuable, these approaches could be enhanced with objective, scientific understanding of the physical mechanisms behind skilled piano performance — evidence-driven piano pedagogy, if you will.”
Professor Jose Ramos Santana, chair of keyboard at the University of Hartford Hartt School of Music, performs an excerpt from Enrique Granados Goyescas' "Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor," while wearing motion capture, ultrasound, and accelerometers.
Watching and listening to a pianist’s performance is an immersive and enjoyable experience. The pianist and the instrument, with a blend of skill, training, and presence, create a series of memorable moments for themselves and the audience. But is there a way to improve the performance and our understanding of how the performer and their instrument work together to create this magic, while also minimizing performance-related injuries?
Mi-Eun Kim, director of keyboard studies in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Section, and Praneeth Namburi PhD ’16, a research scientist in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, are investigating how the body works when pianists play. Their joint project, The Biomechanics of Assimilating a New Piano Skill, aims to develop mechanistic insights that could transform how we understand and teach piano technique, reduce performance-related injuries, and bridge the gap between artistic expression and biomechanical efficiency.
Their project is among those recently selected for a SHASS+ Connectivity Fund grant through the MIT Human Insight Collaborative.
“The project emerged from a convergence of interests and personal experiences,” Namburi says. “Mi-Eun witnessed widespread injuries among fellow pianists and saw how these injuries could derail careers.”
Kim is a renowned pianist who has performed on stages throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. She earned the Liszt-Garrison Competition’s Liszt Award and the Corpus Christi solo prize, among other honors. She teaches piano and chamber music through MIT Music’s Emerson/Harris Program and chamber music through MIT’s Chamber Music Society. She earned advanced degrees from the University of Michigan and holds a bachelor of arts degree in history from Columbia University.
Namburi’s work focuses on the biomechanics of efficient, expressive, and coordinated movement. He draws inspiration from artists and athletes in specialized movement disciplines, such as dancing and fencing, to investigate skilled movement. He earned a PhD in experimental neuroscience from MIT and a bachelor of engineering degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
Pursuing the project
Kim and Namburi arrived at their project by taking different roads into the arts. While Kim was completing her studies at the University of Michigan, Namburi was taking dance lessons as a hobby in Boston. He learned that both expressive and sustainable movements might share a common denominator. “A key insight was that elastic tissues play a crucial role in coordinated, expressive, and sustainable movements in dance — a principle that could extend beyond dancing,” he notes.
“We recognized that studying elastic tissues could shed light on reducing injury risk, as well as understanding musical expression and embodiment in the context of piano playing,” Kim says.
Kim and Namburi began collaborating on what would become their project in October 2023, though the groundwork was in place months before. “A visiting student working with me on a research project studying pianists in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab reached out to Mi-Eun in summer 2023,” Namburi recalls. A shared Instagram video showing their setup with motion capture sensors and a pianist playing Chopin on a digital keyboard sparked Kim’s interest. The Immersion Lab is an open-access, shared facility for MIT and beyond dedicated to visualizing, understanding, and interacting with large, multidimensional data.
“I couldn't make sense of all the sensors, but immediately noticed they were using a digital keyboard,” she says.
Kim wanted to elevate these studies’ quality by pairing the musicians with the proper equipment and instrument. While the digital pianos they’d previously used are portable and provide musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) data, they don’t offer the same experience as a real piano. “Pianists dream of playing on an ideal instrument — a 9-foot concert grand with perfectly regulated 24-inch keys that responds to every musical intention without resistance,” Kim says.
The researchers brought both Steinway Spirio D|r and Yamaha DCFX grand pianos to the Immersion Lab and observed that the instruments player piano technology could both capture pianists’ hammer strike velocities and reproduce them to play back the performance. Monitoring Kim’s performance on the concert grand piano, for example, both noted marked differences in her playing style.
“Despite all the sensors, lighting, and observers, playing felt so natural that I forgot I was in a lab,” she says. “I could focus purely on the music, without worrying about adapting to a smaller keyboard or digital sound.”
This setup allowed them to observe pianists’ natural movements, which was exactly what Kim wanted to study.
During Independent Activities Period 2025, Kim and Namburi hosted a new course, Biomechanics of Piano Playing, in the Immersion Lab. Students and faculty from MIT, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and the University of Hartford took part. Participants learned how to use motion capture, accelerometers, and ultrasound imaging to visualize signals from the body during piano playing.
Observations and outcomes
If the efficiency and perceived fluency of an expert pianist’s movements comes from harnessing the body’s inherent elastic mechanisms, Kim and Namburi believe, it’s possible to redesign how piano playing is taught. Each wants to reduce occurrences of playing-related injuries and improve how musicians learn their craft.
“I want us to bridge the gap between artistic expression and biomechanical efficiency,” Namburi says.
Through their exploratory sessions at the Immersion Lab, Kim and Namburi found common ground, gathering information about their observations of and experiences in piano and dance through sensor technology, including ultrasound.
Beyond these, Kim saw potential for transforming piano pedagogy. “Traditional teaching relies heavily on subjective descriptions and metaphors passed down through generations,” she says. “While valuable, these approaches could be enhanced with objective, scientific understanding of the physical mechanisms behind skilled piano performance — evidence-driven piano pedagogy, if you will.”
Professor Jose Ramos Santana, chair of keyboard at the University of Hartford Hartt School of Music, performs an excerpt from Enrique Granados Goyescas' "Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor," while wearing motion capture, ultrasound, and accelerometers.
Psychology professor Athena Aktipis (right) brought a lighter note to her lecture, “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse,” when she was joined by guitarist Forest Thurman. Audience members raise their hands in response to a survey about bluegrass music.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Psychologist says scrutinizing risk factors, embracing community, adventure are key in age of angst over climate, AI, pandemics
Cooperation, community, and a sense of adventure may be the keys to our survival, even in these violently divided times.
We seem to be living in an extraordinarily tumultuous moment of global outbreaks of deadly viruses, a dangerously warming planet, and coming economic and social displacement of technologies, including AI. But, Akiptis said, crises are nothing new to the human race. In fact, we are constantly managing risk. The dilemma is that often the solution isn’t clear-cut.
Akiptis presented the hypothetical case of the “goosile.” A suspicious blob appears on the radar of a mission control professional assessing attack threats. It could be a missile, which should be shot down. Or it could be a harmless goose (hence the mash-up neologism). What do you do?
“The problem is that the world is filled with ambiguity,” explained Aktipis. “Either you correctly identify more missiles but have more goose false alarms, or you correctly reject more geese, but miss some missiles.”
“The bottom line in managing our stress in these apocalyptic times … is gathering information so you can figure out what you actually do and don’t need to be stressed about,” said Aktipis.
In other words, there may be no “right” answer, and that means more stress.
“The bottom line in managing our stress in these apocalyptic times … is gathering information so you can figure out what you actually do and don’t need to be stressed about,” said Aktipis, co-director of the Human Generosity Project and the Cooperation Science Network.
Taking principles from psychology and evolutionary biology, Aktipis has created an accessible and actionable framework. The first step is to look “at a potential threat from multiple perspectives.” Then, “attend to all of your senses when assessing a threat.” Third, reach outside yourself: “Find as many dimensions of information as you can.” That leads to her next suggested action: “Talk to people who have different knowledge than you do.” And finally, “Know when to stop gathering information.” You may need to move on — or take action. “Don’t get stuck in a risk-assessment loop,” she said.
Instead, she stressed, we must learn to live with risk.
“Thanks to the recent pandemic, many of us are likely accustomed to being miserable a considerable amount of time, even when we’re not facing the red-hot heat of an active apocalypse,” said Aktipis. “We put up with having a life that is often painful, boring, or some combination of the two.”
Changing this mindset can actually make us better prepared, letting us build up “apocalyptic sustenance.”
It may help to change priorities.
“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work hard, just that we should work hard on things that we’re actively deciding to do because they are important. And ideally also what would be kind of fun,” she continued. “We should reawaken that childlike part of us that is curious and likes amusement and then work hard on something that feeds that inner child with something delightfully playful.”
“A Field Guide to the Apocalypse” contains multiple outlines and suggestions for how to make this possible. One example is CHESS, an acronym for incorporating “Curiosity, Humor, Entertaining, Storytelling, and Socializing” into our lives.
Emphasizing the last S, Aktipis said: “The connections that we’ve forged through these social events can form the basis of mutual aid relationships that can come in handy during real catastrophes.”
Apocalypses come in many forms. Drawing on the original Greek definition, an apocalypse was “revelation of the underlying risk in the world and in our lives,” she said: “Rather than thinking of it as the end of the world, it’s an opportunity for us to learn and understand what the world really is like, and that can help us be better prepared and adapt as things are changing.”
Another key is not seeing survival or success as a zero-sum game. That thinking leads to the belief that “we all have to fight over the pie.” Instead, she suggested, “We can work together to make a bigger pie and share it.”
Utilizing game and cooperation theories, she laid out the work of the transdisciplinary Human Generosity Project, beginning with the Maasai people in Kenya, who have a traditional system called Osotua.
Literally translating to “invisible umbilical cord” (according to the Osotua Foundation),this social system assumes members of a group will give when asked, as long as long as they can help “without going below what they themselves need,” with no expectation of return, Aktipis explained.
“The only expectation is that they would be recipients of the same kind of help if they needed it in the future.”
This, she said, is similar to many of our own friendship and family bonds. Indeed, research in Fiji, Mongolia, and ranchers in the Southwest confirmed the universality of such “social insurance” bonds.
“Across all of these societies, people are managing risk through their social interactions, often through these need-based transfers.
“There is a lot of potential to change the way we handle risk collectively,” said Aktipis.
To drive home her points — and, perhaps, to build a little community among the crowd in Science Center A — she invited bluegrass guitarist Forest Thurman to join her as she brought out her ukelele to lead the audience in simple, tuneful singalongs with lines like “Life ain’t a prison/it’s a pie.”
Team hits milestone toward prion disease treatment. For them, it’s personal.
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Patient-scientist, husband among researchers who developed promising gene-editing therapy for rare, fatal condition
New research provides hope that prion disease — a handful of rare, invariably fatal disorders caused by misfolded proteins in the brain — may, in the not-too-distant future, have a treatment if not a cure.
The work, published early this year in the journal Nature Medicine, showed that altering a single base in the gene that produces the killer proteins can reduce by half the amount of that protein in the brains of laboratory mice, a step that extended their lifespans 52 percent.
Authors of the work, at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, caution that several potentially lengthy steps remain before human trials of the technique can be undertaken. Still, they agreed that the results indicate the pathway that they embarked upon nine years ago toward effective treatment in humans appears promising.
“I think it’s a milestone for sure,” said David Liu, senior author of the paper, in whose lab the base editing technology was developed. “One has to be careful to recognize that the path to an actual clinical trial has many such milestones that have to be traversed.”
Prion disease includes several conditions that lead to brain damage and dementia, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease, and fatal familial insomnia. About 15 percent of cases are due to an inherited mutation in the prion protein gene, while 85 percent are “sporadic,” occurring when these proteins spontaneously fold into abnormal, toxic shapes.
‘Personal’ mission for scientist who is also a patient
While laboratory work is often remote from the patients it is intended to help, these experiments are part of a personal mission for several of the papers’ authors. That’s because one of them, HMS Assistant Professor of Neurology Sonia Vallabh, has tested positive for an inherited form of prion disease called fatal familial insomnia.
In late 2010, Vallabh’s mother died of a mysterious, degenerative condition that subsequent tests would confirm as fatal familial insomnia. Not long after, Vallabh herself tested positive for the disease-causing mutation. That prompted Vallabh, who had graduated from Harvard Law School, and her husband, Eric Minikel, who holds a planning degree from MIT, to retrain for careers centered on understanding and developing a treatment for prion disease. Today, the pair run their own lab at the Broad, employing 14 researchers. In a relatively short time, Liu said, they have become experts on the therapeutically relevant aspects of the condition.
“It’s an incredible privilege to be able to work with them,” said Liu, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a core institute member at the Broad. “Their personal connection to the disease provides extraordinary motivation for everybody to try to make as much progress as we can — carefully, but as efficiently as possible.”
David Liu.
The encouraging results build on discoveries in Liu’s lab, which pioneered the single base editing technique used in the experiments. That technique has been used in 13 clinical trials, Liu said, and has benefited patients suffering from hypercholesterolemia, sickle cell disease, T-cell leukemia, and beta thalassemia.
“David took us seriously long before anyone had much reason to, so we’ve had a collaboration with him for a good while,” said Minikel, who is also assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “It’s been a perfect collaboration in the sense that Sonia and I have always felt like we care a lot about this disease, but we’re not technology development people. We’ll say, ‘Here’s the models and assays and the tools needed to develop a drug for this disease,’ but we’re probably not the ones who are going to make the drug.”
In the current work, researchers used a mouse model of human prion disease, which increases the chance the work will successfully translate to humans. The research — funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Broad, the Prion Alliance, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — involved inserting a genetic base editor developed in Liu’s lab into adeno-associated virus, which acts as a vector that homes in on cells and inserts its DNA cargo into their genomes. That rewrites the cellular instructions for producing the protein, in this case halting production.
“Having a friend, a collaborator, who could benefit from this treatment really does a lot on the personal motivation side.”
Meirui An
Meirui An, a graduate student in Liu’s lab and one of the paper’s first authors, said that sometimes the vector itself can cause illness, so to improve safety researchers tweaked that part of the process, ultimately seeing a 63 percent reduction in prion protein production despite using a significantly lower dose of the vector virus.
The prion’s dangerous, infectious nature may make this research among the last conducted with human prion protein, Liu said. Such research was restricted after an accidental exposure in a French lab led to a researchers’ death from prion disease.
Human trials of any therapy that might emerge from the work remain several years away, Liu said. Whatever the needed intervening steps turn out to be, researchers said they will likely include refinement of the base editor — which is so large that it has to be transported into cells in two separate viral capsules — improved targeting to reduce its integration into the cells of other tissue types, and improved efficiency in reducing production of prion protein.
An and others praised the collaborative process between the labs involved, which included that of the Broad’s Benjamin Deverman, who specializes in vector engineering.
“Our exchanges have been really frequent and to me, personally, it’s extremely inspiring to work with patient-scientists,” An said. “I don’t need to find any external source of motivation to work on this project because just having a friend, a collaborator, who could benefit from this treatment really does a lot on the personal motivation side.”
Jell-O-like substance could be key to treating Fragile X and Rett syndromes
Saima Sidik
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
The X chromosome creates a challenge for human cells. Unlike most chromosomes, which are present in duplicate regardless of a person’s sex, females have two copies of X while males have only one. Females don’t need twice as many of the genes encoded on the X chromosome as males, however, so they must inactivate one of their two copies.
How this inactivation occurs has been a long-standing question in cell biology — one Jeannie Lee’s lab at Mass General has been central to answering. In a study published last month, Lee and her colleagues describe how cells orchestrate this chromosomal silencing. The findings could lead to relief for the many thousands of people living with diseases caused by mutations on the X chromosome.
Inactivation depends on a gelatinous substance that coats all chromosomes, creating discrete bubbles that work as separators. “It’s like Jell-O. And if chromosomes weren’t surrounded by this Jell-O, they’d get tangled up like spaghetti,” says Lee, who is vice chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
At the X chromosome, things get a bit more complicated. A gene on this chromosome instructs cells to make an RNA molecule called Xist (pronounced “exist”) that changes the material properties of the “Jell-O” around the X chromosome. When Xist first comes into contact with the Jell-O, the two engage in a tug-of-war, each pulling on the other. But Xist is no match for the Jell-O, and so it gets engulfed. Once inside, Xist changes the biophysical properties of the Jell-O, making it more flexible and closer to a liquid.
Other molecules important for X-chromosome inactivation also infiltrate the Jell-O. Together with Xist, these molecules work their way into nooks and crannies along the chromosome that would not be so accessible if the Jell-O were stiffer and thicker. By coating the X chromosome, they render it inactive. “It’s that simple!” Lee says.
But as simple as it sounds, figuring out how X-inactivation works has taken decades. At the end of this long journey lies a tantalizing possibility: Freeing inactivated X chromosomes could cure certain genetic disorders. That’s because mutations are often present on only one of two X chromosomes, but the healthy version of the gene is bound up in the inactivated chromosome, making it unavailable for cells to use.
The Lee lab has developed a number of approaches to unsilence X-linked genes in isolated cells, making them potential treatments for two such diseases: the intellectual disability Fragile X Syndrome and the neurodevelopmental disorder Rett Syndrome. “We’ll be further optimizing the approaches and doing safety studies over the next couple of years, and then we hope to move these compounds into clinical trials,” Lee says.
These treatments could also benefit males, even though their cells don’t use X-inactivation. A similar process silences individual genes on the X chromosome if they carry certain mutations, such as a mutation that causes Fragile X Syndrome.
Mysteries remain, however. For example, freeing inactivated X chromosomes seems to restore the function of mutated genes without having much impact on healthy genes carried by the chromosome. That’s encouraging because it suggests that this strategy can cure diseases with minimal side effects, but it’s not clear why other X chromosome genes remain largely unaffected. Lee thinks cells may have a limited capacity to use each gene, and that capacity is already maxed out by a single copy of a healthy gene. With mutated genes, on the other hand, the cell still has the capacity to use the healthy version when it becomes available.
Today, the clinical potential of Lee’s work is obvious, but that hasn’t always been the case. “We were supported by the National Institutes of Health for 25 years to answer a really basic question: How is the X-chromosome inactivated? And it’s only recently that we had this ‘Aha’ moment and realized we could get to a therapeutic,” she says.
The research described in this story received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Scientist to start with governing board on July 1, succeeding Shirley Tilghman
5 min read
Richard P. Lifton, a prominent leader in biomedical research and higher education, will join the Harvard Corporation this summer, the University announced Monday. A scientist and physician who is a pioneer in using genetics and genomics in understanding human disease, Lifton has served as the 11th president of The Rockefeller University since 2016 and also leads that institution’s Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics.
“Rick is known to colleagues as a person of deep integrity, extraordinary intellectual curiosity and creativity, exceptional incisiveness, and sound judgment,” said President Alan M. Garber and Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker in a message to the Harvard community. “He has dedicated his life’s work to the advancement of higher education and the progress and promise of science, embracing and embodying the pursuit of academic excellence. We look forward to welcoming Rick Lifton to the Corporation this summer, as we navigate these consequential and challenging times for our own university and others.”
“Harvard is a national treasure for its leadership in education, scholarship, and research. Its generation of new knowledge advances the betterment of humanity with global impact.”
Richard P. Lifton
Under Lifton’s leadership, Rockefeller has strengthened its position as one of the world’s preeminent research institutions, including by fostering support for new programs in basic, translational, and clinical research, constructing a new campus in Manhattan, and collaborating in the creation of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York. Lifton is also a champion for Rockefeller’s multidisciplinary faculty, whose members have received two Nobel Prizes, three Lasker Awards, and two Breakthrough Prizes in life sciences during his tenure.
“Harvard is a national treasure for its leadership in education, scholarship, and research. Its generation of new knowledge advances the betterment of humanity with global impact,” Lifton said. “I’m honored to join President Garber and the other distinguished members of the Corporation, and I look forward to working with them and other colleagues to ensure that Harvard sustains and enhances its exceptional contributions to society.”
Lifton’s pathbreaking research has centered around genetic material that underlies common problems in human health, including cardiovascular disease, neoplasia, kidney disease, and osteoporosis. He is especially known for his discovery of mutations in 20 genes that drive blood pressure to high or low extremes by altering renal salt reabsorption, work that has informed public health efforts and therapeutic strategies worldwide.
Lifton joined the faculty of Yale University in 1993. Over nearly a quarter-century, he served as chair of the Department of Genetics at Yale Medical School, a Howard Hughes Medical Institution Investigator, and as director of two research centers. He rose to become a Sterling Professor, Yale’s highest academic rank, and was a member of Yale’s presidential search committee.
Before being recruited to Yale, Lifton served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1986 to 1993. He did his medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he became chief medical resident. A summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College, he earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University.
Across his career, Lifton has served on many boards, committees, and councils related to scientific discovery and science policy, including scientific advisory boards for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. His many roles have included chairing the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative, co-chairing the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing, and serving as a member of both the governing council of the National Academies and the advisory committee for the director of the National Institutes of Health. He has served on fiduciary boards and scientific advisory boards for various biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and he was a member of the presidential search committee for the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine).
“Richard Lifton is a thoughtful and highly respected leader with a profound commitment to advancing education, science, and human health,” said Vivian Hunt, president of the Board of Overseers. “His expertise in guiding a renowned research university and his extensive engagement as an admired leader and sought-after adviser within the broader biomedical field will strengthen Harvard’s governing boards. I know my colleagues are excited to work with him.”
In line with Harvard’s charter, Lifton was elected by the Corporation with the consent of the Board of Overseers. He will become a fellow of Harvard College on July 1, filling the vacancy created by the planned departure of Shirley Tilghman, an eminent life scientist and president emerita of Princeton University.
Garber and Pritzker thanked Tilghman for “having brought to the Corporation an extraordinary combination of university leadership experience, academic stature and scientific accomplishment, engagement with a wide array of other institutions, and constant devotion to higher education’s highest ideals.” They expressed their profound gratitude to Tilghman for “continuing exemplary service” that “sets a standard for us all.”
Known formally as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Harvard Corporation is the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. Chartered in 1650, the Corporation exercises fiduciary responsibility with regard to the University’s academic, financial, and physical resources and overall well-being. With 13 members, the Corporation is one of Harvard’s two governing boards. Members of Harvard’s other governing board, the Board of Overseers, are elected by holders of Harvard degrees.
MIT Health Student Health Plan Research and Resolution Specialist Juanita Battle passed away on Jan. 14. She was 70.
Battle was best known throughout the MIT community as one of the friendly faces and voices that students encountered whenever they had a question about their health insurance. For more than 17 years, Juanita was there to help students navigate the complexities of the U.S. health-care system.
“Juanita really cared about the students,” remembers Affiliate Health Plan Representative Lawanda Santiago. Whenever Battle was on a call with a student, you knew that call could take 20 minutes. “She would always go above and beyond.”
Sheila Sanchez, lead student health plan research and resolution specialist, agrees. “There was nothing she wouldn’t do to make sure that the student had a good experience when it came to some insurance question. She made sure that the student was always heard, always happy.”
“At the end of any conversation, she knew the student’s name, where they were from, what their mother’s name was, and even their favorite color,” says Sanchez.
“Juanita was the outward face of the MIT Student Health Insurance Plan,” adds David Tytell, MIT Health’s director of marketing and communications. “Whenever there was a call for volunteers to help promote student insurance, like Campus Preview Weekend, Juanita was always the first to raise her hand.” Her detailed, clear explanations of difficult insurance concepts were featured in multiple MIT Health videos.
“She also had a ‘crush’ on Tim the Beaver,” says Tytell. “She would instantly become a kid again whenever Tim entered the room, and she never missed an opportunity to take a selfie with him.”
Battle’s friends also recall her passion for dining out. “Juanita loved food! When we would go out to eat, Juanita would have the menu memorized before we even got there,” says Sanchez. "She had already done her research, read Yelp reviews, looked at pictures, figured out her top three favorite things, and even had recommendations for everybody else!”
“She especially loved tiramisu,” says Santiago.
Battle’s laugh was infectious. She was known for always looking at the bright side of things and had the uncanny ability to make a joke out of just about anything. Halloween was her favorite holiday, and she would always dress up and pose for pictures. “One of my last encounters with Juanita was last Halloween,” says Tytell. “I came back from a meeting to find a trick-or-treat bag filled with candy and a note from Juanita on my desk.”
“She didn’t let anything affect her attitude,” says Sanchez. “Everything about her was just happy.”
Immune molecules called cytokines play important roles in the body’s defense against infection, helping to control inflammation and coordinating the responses of other immune cells. A growing body of evidence suggests that some of these molecules also influence the brain, leading to behavioral changes during illness.
Two new studies from MIT and Harvard Medical School, focused on a cytokine called IL-17, now add to that evidence. The researchers found that IL-17 acts on two distinct brain regions — the amygdala and the somatosensory cortex — to exert two divergent effects. In the amygdala, IL-17 can elicit feelings of anxiety, while in the cortex it promotes sociable behavior.
These findings suggest that the immune and nervous systems are tightly interconnected, says Gloria Choi, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and one of the senior authors of the studies.
“If you’re sick, there’s so many more things that are happening to your internal states, your mood, and your behavioral states, and that’s not simply you being fatigued physically. It has something to do with the brain,” she says.
Jun Huh, an associate professor of immunology at Harvard Medical School, is also a senior author of both studies, which appear today in Cell. One of the papers was led by Picower Institute Research Scientist Byeongjun Lee and former Picower Institute research scientist Jeong-Tae Kwon, and the other was led by Harvard Medical School postdoc Yunjin Lee and Picower Institute postdoc Tomoe Ishikawa.
Behavioral effects
Choi and Huh became interested in IL-17 several years ago, when they found it was involved in a phenomenon known as the fever effect. Large-scale studies of autistic children have found that for many of them, their behavioral symptoms temporarily diminish when they have a fever.
In a 2019 study in mice, Choi and Huh showed that in some cases of infection, IL-17 is released and suppresses a small region of the brain’s cortex known as S1DZ. Overactivation of neurons in this region can lead to autism-like behavioral symptoms in mice, including repetitive behaviors and reduced sociability.
“This molecule became a link that connects immune system activation, manifested as a fever, to changes in brain function and changes in the animals’ behavior,” Choi says.
IL-17 comes in six different forms, and there are five different receptors that can bind to it. In their two new papers, the researchers set out to map which of these receptors are expressed in different parts of the brain. This mapping revealed that a pair of receptors known as IL-17RA and IL-17RB is found in the cortex, including in the S1DZ region that the researchers had previously identified. The receptors are located in a population of neurons that receive proprioceptive input and are involved in controlling behavior.
When a type of IL-17 known as IL-17E binds to these receptors, the neurons become less excitable, which leads to the behavioral effects seen in the 2019 study.
“IL-17E, which we’ve shown to be necessary for behavioral mitigation, actually does act almost exactly like a neuromodulator in that it will immediately reduce these neurons’ excitability,” Choi says. “So, there is an immune molecule that’s acting as a neuromodulator in the brain, and its main function is to regulate excitability of neurons.”
Choi hypothesizes that IL-17 may have originally evolved as a neuromodulator, and later on was appropriated by the immune system to play a role in promoting inflammation. That idea is consistent with previous work showing that in the worm C. elegans, IL-17 has no role in the immune system but instead acts on neurons. Among its effects in worms, IL-17 promotes aggregation, a form of social behavior. Additionally, in mammals, IL-17E is actually made by neurons in the cortex, including S1DZ.
“There’s a possibility that a couple of forms of IL-17 perhaps evolved first and foremost to act as a neuromodulator in the brain, and maybe later were hijacked by the immune system also to act as immune modulators,” Choi says.
Provoking anxiety
In the other Cell paper, the researchers explored another brain location where they found IL-17 receptors — the amygdala. This almond-shaped structure plays an important role in processing emotions, including fear and anxiety.
That study revealed that in a region known as the basolateral amygdala (BLA), the IL-17RA and IL-17RE receptors, which work as a pair, are expressed in a discrete population of neurons. When these receptors bind to IL-17A and IL-17C, the neurons become more excitable, leading to an increase in anxiety.
The researchers also found that, counterintuitively, if animals are treated with antibodies that block IL-17 receptors, it actually increases the amount of IL-17C circulating in the body. This finding may help to explain unexpected outcomes observed in a clinical trial of a drug targeting the IL-17-RA receptor for psoriasis treatment, particularly regarding its potential adverse effects on mental health.
“We hypothesize that there’s a possibility that the IL-17 ligand that is upregulated in this patient cohort might act on the brain to induce suicide ideation, while in animals there is an anxiogenic phenotype,” Choi says.
During infections, this anxiety may be a beneficial response, keeping the sick individual away from others to whom the infection could spread, Choi hypothesizes.
“Other than its main function of fighting pathogens, one of the ways that the immune system works is to control the host behavior, to protect the host itself and also protect the community the host belongs to,” she says. “One of the ways the immune system is doing that is to use cytokines, secreted factors, to go to the brain as communication tools.”
The researchers found that the same BLA neurons that have receptors for IL-17 also have receptors for IL-10, a cytokine that suppresses inflammation. This molecule counteracts the excitability generated by IL-17, giving the body a way to shut off anxiety once it’s no longer useful.
Distinctive behaviors
Together, the two studies suggest that the immune system, and even a single family of cytokines, can exert a variety of effects in the brain.
“We have now different combinations of IL-17 receptors being expressed in different populations of neurons, in two different brain regions, that regulate very distinct behaviors. One is actually somewhat positive and enhances social behaviors, and another is somewhat negative and induces anxiogenic phenotypes,” Choi says.
Her lab is now working on additional mapping of IL-17 receptor locations, as well as the IL-17 molecules that bind to them, focusing on the S1DZ region. Eventually, a better understanding of these neuro-immune interactions may help researchers develop new treatments for neurological conditions such as autism or depression.
“The fact that these molecules are made by the immune system gives us a novel approach to influence brain function as means of therapeutics,” Choi says. “Instead of thinking about directly going for the brain, can we think about doing something to the immune system?”
The research was funded, in part, by Jeongho Kim and the Brain Impact Foundation Neuro-Immune Fund, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Marcus Foundation, the N of One: Autism Research Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Picower Institute Innovation Fund, the MIT John W. Jarve Seed Fund for Science Innovation, Young Soo Perry and Karen Ha, and the National Institutes of Health.
MIT scientists find the protein IL-17 that fights infection also acts on two distinct brain regions — the amygdala and the somatosensory cortex — inducing anxiety or sociability.
NASA technology guides scientists as they track health of ‘Earth’s lungs’
With their ability to store carbon, forests are often considered the lungs of the Earth, but they are vulnerable to the world’s ills, too. A new study, using NASA laser technology from the International Space Station, reveals the impact of climate change on global tropical forests with greater depth and breadth than ever before.
The forest canopy, the upper layer of mature trees, “is a very critical indicator of forest health and ecosystem productivity,” explained Shaoqing Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) and the first author on the paper.
Shaoqing Liu.
Courtesy photo
“In general, taller canopies are associated with high carbon storage and greater above-ground biomass. Tall canopies can buffer the microclimate,” Liu said, even helping reduce the temperature during heat waves. The study looked at tropical forests in Asia, Africa, and South America — lands with minimal disturbances or human activities such as logging.
To measure changes in such forests, his group used laser measurements from GEDI, which allowed the group to study a wide swath of forests globally, whereas earlier studies had been limited to small areas.
“Over the past decade, NASA has been using the International Space Station as a convenient platform for evaluating new forms of space-based remote sensing measurements,” said Paul Moorcroft, professor of OEB and senior author of the study. “The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation waveform LiDAR is a prime example of this approach.”
GEDI — pronounced “Jedi” — “can tell us the vertical structure of the forest canopy” such as leaf density, said Liu. “Our study demonstrates that climate, topography, and soil properties account for almost three-quarters of the variation in tropical forest canopy height. We also found the elevation, dry season, and solar radiation are the most important variants to determine the canopy height.”
The researchers discovered that “tropical forests in the southern Amazon area are vulnerable to climate change” because of increasingly prolonged dry seasons. “The dry season is the dominant driver determining forest canopy height in this area,” said Liu.
Because global climate model projections show that this area will have longer dry seasons, “We may see significant reductions in canopy height,” he added.
“Understanding the environmental controls of tropical forest height is important for assessing the carbon sequestration and conservation value of different tropical forest areas,” said Moorcroft. “Understanding the environmental drivers of forest canopy height variation is also crucial for understanding how tropical forests will respond to climate change.”
The impact of climate change is not uniform, however. Thanks to GEDI, the researchers were able to view differences in its manifestation and effect on the canopy. “In the central Amazon, because it is relatively moist, the first important driver is actually elevation,” said Liu. This was also true in Africa, the researchers found.
Looking ahead, Liu would like to move beyond studying the primary forest to examine more of the globe’s forest and woodland areas. He said he hopes these studies will influence policy.
“In terms of climate-change policies, we see the tropical forests are not only biodiversity hotspots, they are critical for carbon storage. Protecting them is essential for mitigating climate change,” he said. “We hope to help policymakers help identify areas that are vulnerable to climate change and prioritize them.”
Funding for this study was provided, in part, by a NASA grant.
Now in its eighth year, the Fellowship provides financial support for a postdoctoral placement of one to two years at a world-class research institution.
The funding equips scientists to apply their knowledge to a new field of study with the goal of accelerating discoveries, and to develop their leadership potential.
Dr Poppy Oldroyd, a 2025 Schmidt Science Fellow from the Department of Engineering, plans to pioneer a new frontier in understanding brain communication through optical measurements, ultimately advancing treatments for memory-related diseases.
The human brain communicates through intricate networks of neurons, crucial for learning and memory. However, how these neural conversations translate into memory formation remains a mystery in neuroscience. Oldroyd’s research aims to use light-based tools, like advanced optogenetics, to explore these pathways in detail. By uncovering how specific brain circuits contribute to learning and memory, this research could revolutionise our understanding of these essential brain functions.
Ultimately, this knowledge may enhance our comprehension of memory-related disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy.
Dr Matthew McLouglin, a 2025 Schmidt Science Fellow from the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, plans to develop tools to study how our cells age in real time. This will help us understand why we age and how we might promote healthy aging to improve quality of life in the elderly.
Our DNA is organised into structures called chromosomes. Each chromosome has a protective cap, the ‘telomere’, which is partially lost with each cell division. In old age, cells cannot function properly due to the loss of telomeres, increasing the risk of age-related diseases such as cancer and dementia. McLoughlin will use cutting-edge imaging technology to track the loss of telomeres over time, understanding how telomeres are lost and why this stops cells from functioning.
Oldroyd and McLoughlin join a community of 209 Schmidt Science Fellows from nearly 40 countries who are leaders in interdisciplinary science.
“Philanthropic funding of scientific research, and especially support of early-career researchers, has never been more important,” said Wendy Schmidt, who co-founded Schmidt Science Fellows with her husband, Eric.
“By providing Schmidt Science Fellows with support, community, and freedom to work across disciplines and gain new insights, we hope they’ll tackle some of the world’s most vexing challenges, achieve breakthroughs and help create a healthier, more resilient world for all.”
Established in 2017, Schmidt Science Fellows is a programme of Schmidt Sciences delivered in partnership with the Rhodes Trust.
The 2025 Fellows represent 15 nationalities, including researchers from Jordan and the United Arab Emirates for the first time in the programme’s history.
This year’s cohort will work on a range of problems from cancer treatment to quantum technologies to sustainability.
Alongside their research Placement, Fellows participate in a 12-month interdisciplinary Science Leadership Programme.
Each year, Schmidt Science Fellows works in partnership with more than 100 universities to identify candidates for the Fellowship.
Nominees are selected via an application process that includes an academic review with panels of experts in their original disciplines and final interviews with a multidisciplinary panel of scientists and private sector leaders.
“The Schmidt Science Fellows Program is cultivating a dynamic global community of remarkable scientists and champions of interdisciplinary research,” said Stu Feldman, Chief Scientist at Schmidt Sciences.
“Their work exemplifies Schmidt Sciences’ commitment to support pioneering approaches that will drive the next era of discovery and innovation.”
The 2025 Schmidt Science Fellows represent 27 nominating universities, including, for the first time, McGill University in Canada, RWTH Aachen University in Germany, Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, University of California, Los Angeles in the US, and University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Two University of Cambridge researchers are among the thirty-two early career researchers, tackling issues from improving food security to developing better medical implants, who have been announced as the 2025 Schmidt Science Fellows.
Professor Rajasekhar Balasubramanian from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering under the College of Design and Engineering at NUS has been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is recognised for his distinguished contributions to the field of air quality and international leadership in atmospheric research, particularly in establishing an understanding of tropical biomass burning, and its environmental and health impacts.
AAAS is one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals. Prof Balasubramanian joins an esteemed group of 471 scientists and engineers who have been elected as Fellows this year.
A pioneer in environmental sustainability, climate change and urban air quality, Prof Balasubramanian’s research in sustainability offers a thorough understanding of the intricate relationship between urbanisation, the environment and society. He is also a member of the Science Panel of the Asia Pacific Clean Air Partnership (APCAP), which was established to bring together scientific expertise from regional initiatives to offer policy recommendations guided by science, supporting efforts to address air pollution in the Asia Pacific region.
For the first time, ETH Zurich Materials Scientists are measuring the rolling friction of tiny, micrometre-sized particles. These measurements permit them to better understand everyday products such as concrete.
‘Oscars of Science’ recognize advances in gene editing and physics and against MS, obesity
5 min read
Three Harvard researchers received 2025 Breakthrough Prizes — the “Oscars of Science” — on Saturday. Also recognized was the ATLAS general-purpose particle physics experiment at CERN, to which Harvard faculty, researchers, and students have made significant contributions.
The Breakthrough Prize, founded in 2013 by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, honors achievements in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics.
Six prizes were announced. The Harvard recipients are:
Alberto Ascherio, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, was recognized for work establishing Epstein-Barr virus infection as leading cause of multiple sclerosis.
MS is a chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system that affects about 2.9 million people worldwide and currently has no cure. Epstein-Barr is a herpes virus that can cause mononucleosis and establishes a lifelong latent infection.
Although there was no single eureka moment in Ascherio’s more than 25-year effort to identify the cause of multiple sclerosis, the results of his 2022 Science study were undoubtedly dramatic. Using data from more than 10 million U.S. soldiers monitored over a 20-year period, Ascherio and his colleagues found that infection with the Epstein-Barr virus significantly increased the risk of developing multiple sclerosis later in life — the first compelling evidence of a cause for this devastating disease.
The discovery revolutionized the field of MS research, and a vaccine and antibody drugs that target Epstein-Barr are now in development. “It’s virtually a consensus now that Epstein-Barr is the leading cause of MS,” Ascherio said. “I’m happy to say that finally, after 25 years, it’s been a big splash.”
Read more about Ascherio and the MS/Epstein-Barr research here.
Joel Habener, a professor at Harvard Medical School, was part of a group of scientists honored for contributions to the discovery and characterization of the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1 — findings that subsequently led to the development of treatments based on GLP-1.
GLP-1 is a hormone produced by the small intestine that plays a key role in regulating blood sugar, controlling appetite, and modulating digestion. To coordinate these complicated tasks, the hormone must simultaneously communicate with other hormones and with multiple organs and systems, including the stomach, pancreas, liver, brain, heart, blood vessels, and immune system.
The body of research conducted by the five scientists, supported in part by federal funding, has dramatically advanced understanding of how GLP-1 functions in the body. Notably, their work contributed to the development of GLP-1 drugs, which have revolutionized treatment for Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
Read more about Habener and the GLP-1 research here.
David Liu — the Richard Merkin Professor at the Broad Institute, director of the institute’s Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, and the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard — was honored for the development of the gene editing platforms base editing and prime editing, which can correct the vast majority of known disease-causing genetic variations and have already been used in at least 15 clinical trials, with life-saving results. Base editing was recently used to achieve the first-ever correction of a disease-causing mutation in patients.
Base editing, which Liu’s team developed in 2016, is a gene editing technique that directly converts an individual DNA base pair into a different base pair. Prime editing, which Liu’s group pioneered three years later, can make insertions, deletions, and substitutions up to hundreds of base pairs long in the genome.
Since their initial development, both base editing and prime editing have been used by thousands of laboratories around the world and have enabled the study and potential treatment of many genetic diseases.
“The real heroes behind our work are the incredibly talented graduate students, postdocs, and collaborators who worked tirelessly to develop these technologies in ways that would allow them to benefit society,” said Liu. “Without their dedication, this work would not be possible. The honor of my professional life is to be able to work with and support such a vibrant group of scientists.”
Read more about Liu and the gene editing research here.
Three Harvard faculty in the Physics Department as well as several students and researchers were recognized with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work on the ATLAS collaboration. The team of 13,000 physicists, engineers, and technicians conducts general-purpose particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Harvard members of ATLAS include Melissa Franklin, Mallinkrodt Professor of Physics; Masahiro Morii, Donner Professor of Science; John Huth, Donner Professor of Science; postdocs Rongkun Wang, Aaron White, Knut Koch, and Simone Francescato; and Harvard Griffin GSAS students Gustavo Kehris, Laura Bruce, Kees Bekendorfer, Jerry Ling, and Alexis Mulski.
Alum who co-produces ‘Severance’ says show speaks to real-life mysteries
The Apple TV+ show “Severance” wrapped up its second season last month, leaving fans with a lingering sense of unease about what just happened and what comes next.
“Severance” follows a group of office workers who have chosen to undergo a procedure that separates their consciousnesses into an “innie” who only exists at the office and an “outie” who exists everywhere else, each with no memory of the other’s experiences. It’s about work-life balance, but it’s also about free will, identity, and the feeling of being at war with oneself.
Among the show’s producers is Nicky Weinstock, who graduated from Harvard College in 1991. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, he talks about “Severance” as a “willfully strange” provocation and a TV sensation, and recalls his transition from Cambridge to Hollywood.
What do you most remember about your time on campus?
At Harvard, I found a lot of friends and professors and inspirations from all over the planet. It was very energizing as a place.
Ironically, I spent a lot of time leaving it, because I was an anthropology major and did anthropology work in Kenya and went to the University of Nairobi for a while, and spent as much time as I could traveling. All of it was very much of a piece, I think, in terms of being free-range and talking about writing and creativity with all kinds of people in all kinds of places.
To be honest, when I got to Hollywood and started producing, I was shocked that Hollywood did not seem to have much interest in other places. I sucked it up and was able to do a lot of fun, Hollywood-based projects, but I always wanted to have a global sensibility. Finally, about three years ago, I was able to start my own company and draw stories from all over the world.
Nicky Weinstock.
Photo courtesy of Nicky Weinstock
How did you get involved with “Severance” and what did you first think of the concept?
“Severance” found me in a very lucky way. It was a script by Dan Erickson. Dan had never produced a television series before, and in fact he didn’t have an agent. The script started to be passed around and noticed and was generating excitement. I was running a company called Red Hour with Ben Stiller. I had never seen a concept like that. It’s what everyone hopes for in movies and television: something that A) hasn’t been done before and B) is perfectly rendered. This had both, all credit to Dan.
We began to develop it together and refine the pilot script. We managed to sell it to Apple and proceeded to package it with actors and with Ben directing it, and to make a reality of it in a way that doesn’t usually happen in Hollywood. Most of the time you start with a known writer; you start with massive actors. In this case it was literally the coolness of the idea that attracted everybody: John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette. They all responded to the sheer originality and resonance of the idea.
Are you surprised that the show has taken on a life of its own?
Yes and no. It surprised me because it was always willfully strange. It was always committed to the specificity of that world. That can often lead to a very fringe-y phenomenon that doesn’t catch on with a wide audience.
But then again, I was not that surprised, because what I responded to when I first read it is what people respond to, which is that everybody feels like two people in their lives, at least. Everybody has a certain persona at their job and a different persona at home, and everyone is trying to reconcile different aspects of their lives into some coherent whole, and we spend all our lives doing it.
“Everybody has a certain persona at their job and a different persona at home, and everyone is trying to reconcile different aspects of their lives into some coherent whole, and we spend all our lives doing it.”
The trajectory of the show seems to mirror our experience during and after COVID. Season 1 came out in 2022, and it felt like a very closed world, and then Season 2 expands that world to ask bigger questions about what it means to be a person.
I very much agree. Season 1 was very much a result of how we were living at the time, and that claustrophobia and confusion and isolation was very much part of our culture. I think that’s why a lot of people responded to it the way they did. And the world has only gotten stranger since then. The unpredictability and the shakiness and the bottomlessness that we’re all going through right now is why people responded to the show, too.
For everyone, across the political spectrum, no matter where you live, there is a sense of “Where is the world going right now?” and “What do the people in power know and what is their intention?” That was not true when I was growing up. “Severance” has become a little bit of a vessel to demonstrate that mysteries abound and we don’t know who to trust.
The second season ended on a bit of cliff-hanger that I won’t spoil, but was essentially about an “innie” character making a dramatic choice that heightened the stakes and set up a lot of new questions for the third season. Is there anything you can say about where the show will go?
I can’t say much, but I can say that the concept of severance is so expansive. We wanted to do a first season that was claustrophobic. We wanted to do a second season that was out in the world. The idea of bifurcating your life and having different selves can go in so many directions. All I can say is Season 3 will not look anything like Season 2 or Season 1. It’s an expansive idea.
The MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering Breakerspace transformed into an art gallery on March 10, with six easels arranged in an arc to showcase arresting images — black-and-white scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of crumpled biological structures alongside the brilliant hues of digital optical microscopy.
The images were the winning entries from the inaugural Breakerspace Microscope Image Contest, which opened in fall 2024. The contest invited all MIT undergraduates to train on the Breakerspace’s microscopic instruments, explore material samples, and capture images that were artistic, instructive, or technically challenging.
“The goal of the contest is to inspire curiosity and creativity, encouraging students to explore the imaging tools in the Breakerspace,” says Professor Jeffrey Grossman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “We want students to see the beauty and complexity of materials at the microscopic level, to think critically about the images they capture, and to communicate what they mean to others.”
Grossman was a driving force behind the Breakerspace, a laboratory and lounge designed to encourage MIT undergraduates to explore the world of materials.
The contest drew about 50 entries across four categories:
Most Instructive, for images illustrating key concepts with documentation
Most Challenging, requiring significant sample preparation
Best Optical Microscope Image of a sample, rendered in color
Best Electron Microscope Image, magnified hundreds or even thousands of times
“By making this a competition with prizes, we hope to motivate more students to explore microscopy and develop a stronger connection to the materials science community at MIT,” Grossman says.
A window onto research
Amelia How, a DMSE sophomore and winner of the Most Instructive category, used an SEM to show how hydrogen atoms seep into titanium — a phenomenon called hydrogen embrittlement, which can weaken metals and lead to material failure in applications such as aerospace, energy, or construction. The image stemmed from How’s research in Associate Professor Cem Tasan’s research lab, through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). She trained on the SEM for the contest after seeing an email announcement.
“It helped me realize how to explain what I was actually doing,” How says, “because the work that I’m doing is something that’s going into a paper, but most people won’t end up reading that.”
Mishael Quraishi, a DMSE senior and winner of Best SEM Image, captured the flower Alstroemeria and its pollen-bearing structure, the anther. She entered the contest mainly to explore microscopy — but sharing that experience was just as rewarding.
“I really love how electron images look,” Quraishi says. “But as I was taking the images, I was also able to show people what pollen looked like at a really small scale — it’s kind of unrecognizable. That was the most fun part: sharing the image and then telling people about the technique.”
Quraishi, president of the Society of Undergraduate Materials Scientists, also organized the event, part of Materials Week, a student-run initiative that highlights the department’s people, research, and impact.
Persistence in practice
The winner of the Most Challenging category, DMSE sophomore Nelushi Vithanachchi gained not just microscopy experience, but also perseverance. The category called for significant effort put into the sample preparation — and Vithanachchi spent hours troubleshooting.
Her sample — a carving of MIT’s Great Dome in silicon carbide — was made using a focused ion beam, a tool that sculpts materials by bombarding them with ions, or charged atoms. The process requires precision, as even minor shifts can ruin a sample.
In her first attempt, while milling the dome’s façade, the sample shifted and broke. A second try with a different design also failed. She credits her UROP advisor, Aaditya Bhat from Associate Professor James LeBeau’s research group, for pushing her to keep going.
“It was four in the morning, and after failing for the third time, I said, ‘I’m not doing this,’” Vithanachchi recalls. “Then Aaditya said, ‘No, we’ve got to finish what we started.’” After a fourth attempt, using the lessons learned from the previous failures, they were finally able to create a structure that resembled the MIT dome.
Anna Beck, a DMSE sophomore and runner-up for Best Electron Microscope Image, had a much different experience. “It was very relaxed for me. I just sat down and took images,” she says. Her entry was an SEM image of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) fibers from an event wrist band. HDPE is a durable material used in packaging, plumbing, and consumer goods.
Through the process, Beck gained insight into composition and microscopy techniques — and she’s excited to apply what she’s learned in the next competition in fall 2025. “In hindsight, I look at mine now and I wish I turned the brightness up a little more.”
Although 35 percent of the entries came from DMSE students, a majority — 65 percent — came from other majors, or first-year students.
With the first contest showcasing both creativity and technical skill, organizers hope even more students will take on the challenge, bringing fresh perspectives and discoveries to the microscopic world. The contest will run again in fall 2025.
“The inaugural contest brought in an incredible range of submissions. It was exciting to see students engage with microscopy in new ways and share their discoveries,” Grossman says. “The Breakerspace was designed for all undergraduates, regardless of major or experience level — whether they’re conducting research, exploring new materials, or simply curious about what something is made of. We’re excited to expand participation and encourage even more entries in the next competition.”
Undergraduate winners and runners-up in the Breakerspace Microscope Image Contest are: (left to right) Amelia How, Mishael Quraishi, Syd Robinson, Anna Beck, and Robert Sansone.
The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) has awarded MIT Lincoln Laboratory a 2025 FLC Excellence in Technology Transfer Award. The award recognizes the laboratory's exceptional efforts in commercializing microwave sounders hosted on small satellites called CubeSats. The laboratory first developed the technology for NASA, demonstrating that such satellites could work in tandem to collect hurricane data more frequently than previously possible and significantly improve hurricane forecasts. The technology is now licensed to the company Tomorrow.io, which will launch a large constellation of the sounder-equipped satellites to enhance hurricane prediction and expand global weather coverage.
"This FLC award recognizes a technology with significant impact, one that could enhance hourly weather forecasting for aviation, logistics, agriculture, and emergency management, and highlights the laboratory's important role in bringing federally funded innovation to the commercial sector," says Asha Rajagopal, Lincoln Laboratory's chief technology transfer officer.
A nationwide network of more than 300 government laboratories, agencies, and research centers, the FLC helps facilitate the transfer of technologies out of federal labs and into the marketplace to benefit the U.S. economy, society, and national security.
Lincoln Laboratory originally proposed and demonstrated the technology for NASA's TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats) mission. For TROPICS, the laboratory put its microwave sounders on low-cost, commercially available CubeSats for the first time.
Of all the technology used for sensing hurricanes, microwave sounders provide the greatest improvement to forecasting models. From space, these instruments detect a range of microwave frequencies that penetrate clouds, allowing them to measure 3D temperature, humidity, and precipitation in a storm. State-of-the-art instruments are typically large (the size of a washing machine) and hosted aboard $2 billion polar-orbiting satellites, which collectively may revisit a storm every six hours. If sounders could be miniaturized, laboratory researchers imagined, then they could be put on small satellites and launched in large numbers, working together to revisit storms more often.
The TROPICS sounder is the size of a coffee cup. The laboratory team worked for several years to develop and demonstrate the technology that resulted in a miniaturized instrument, while maintaining performance on par with traditional sounders for the frequencies that provide the most useful tropical cyclone observations. By 2023, NASA launched a constellation of four TROPICS satellites, which have since collected rapidly refreshed data of many tropical storms.
Now, Tomorrow.io plans to increase that constellation to a global network of 18 satellites. The resulting high-rate observations — under an hour — are expected to improve weather forecasts, hurricane tracking, and early-warning systems.
"This partnership with Tomorrow.io expands the impact of the TROPICS mission. Tomorrow.io’s increased constellation size, software pipeline, and resilient business model enable it to support a number of commercial and government organizations. This transfer to industry has resulted in a self-sustaining national capability, one that is expected to help the economy and the government for years to come," says Tom Roy, who managed the transfer of the technology to Tomorrow.io.
The technology transfer spanned 18 months. Under a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), the laboratory team adapted the TROPICS payload to an updated satellite design and delivered to Tomorrow.io the first three units, two of which were launched in September 2024. The team also provided in-depth training to Tomorrow.io and seven industry partners who will build, test, launch, and operate the future full commercial constellation. The remaining satellites are expected to launch before the end of this year.
"With these microwave sounders, we can set a new standard in atmospheric data collection and prediction. This technology allows us to capture atmospheric data with exceptional accuracy, especially over oceans and remote areas where traditional observations are scarce," said Rei Goffer, co-founder of Tomorrow.io, in a press release announcing the September launches.
Tomorrow.io will use the sounder data as input into their weather forecasts, data products, and decision support tools available to their customers, who range from major airlines to governments. Tomorrow.io's nonprofit partner, TomorrowNow, also plans to use the data as input to its climate model for improving food security in Africa.
This technology is especially relevant as hurricanes and severe weather events continue to cause significant destruction. In 2024, the United States experienced a near-record 27 disaster events that each exceeded $1 billion in damage, resulting in a total cost of approximately $182.7 billion, and that caused the deaths of at least 568 people. Globally, these storm systems cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage each year.
“It has been great to see the Lincoln Laboratory, Tomorrow.io, and industry partner teams work together so effectively to rapidly incorporate the TROPICS technology and bring the new Tomorrow.io microwave sounder constellation online,” says Bill Blackwell, principal investigator of the NASA TROPICS mission and the CRADA with Tomorrow.io. “I expect that the improved revisit rate provided by the Tomorrow.io constellation will drive further improvements in hurricane forecasting performance over and above what has already been demonstrated by TROPICS.”
The team behind the transfer includes Tom Roy, Bill Blackwell, Steven Gillmer, Rebecca Keenan, Nick Zorn, and Mike DiLiberto of Lincoln Laboratory and Kai Lemay, Scott Williams, Emma Watson, and Jan Wicha of Tomorrow.io. Lincoln Laboratory will be honored among other winners of 2025 FLC Awards at the FLC National Meeting to be held virtually on May 13.
Lincoln Laboratory transferred its small microwave sounder technology to the weather company Tomorrow.io. The sounders are integrated on small satellites (roughly 20 x 10 x 30 cm in size), two of which are shown here.
LEGOs are no stranger to many members of the MIT community. Faculty, staff, and students, alike, have developed a love of building and mechanics while playing with the familiar plastic bricks. In just a few hours, a heap of bricks can become a house, a ship, an airplane, or a cat. The simplicity lends itself to creativity and ingenuity, and it has inspired many MIT faculty members to bring LEGOs into the classroom, including class 2.S00 (Introduction to Manufacturing), where students use LEGO bricks to learn about manufacturing processes and systems.
It was perhaps no surprise, then, that the lecture hall in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing was packed with students, faculty, staff, and guests to hear Carsten Rasmussen, chief operating officer of the LEGO Group, speak as part of the Manufacturing@MIT Distinguished Speaker Series on March 20.
In his engaging and inspiring talk, Rasmussen asked one of the most important questions in manufacturing: How do you balance innovation with sustainability while keeping a complex global supply chain running smoothly? He emphasized that success in modern manufacturing isn’t just about cutting costs — it’s about creating value across the entire network, and integrating every aspect of the business.
Successful manufacturing is all about balance
The way the toy industry views success is evolving, Rasmussen said. In the past, focusing on “cost, quality, safety, delivery, and service” may have been enough, but today’s landscape is far more demanding. “Now, it’s about availability, customers’ happiness, and innovation,” he said.
Rasmussen, who has been with the LEGO Group since 2001, started as a buyer before moving to various leadership roles within the organization. Today, he oversees the LEGO Group’s operations strategy, including manufacturing and supply chain planning, quality, engineering, and sales and operations planning.
“The way we can inspire the builders of tomorrow is basically, whatever we develop, we are able to produce, and we are able to sell,” he said.
The LEGO Group’s operations are intricate. Focusing on areas such as capacity and infrastructure, network utilization, analysis and design, and sustainability, keeps the company true to its mission, “to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.” Within the organization, departments operate with a focus on how their decisions will impact the rest of the company. To do this, they need to communicate effectively.
Intuition and experience play a big role in effective decision-making
In a time where data analytics is a huge part of decision-making in manufacturing and supply-chain management, Rasmussen highlighted the importance of blending data with intuition and experience.
“Many of the decisions you have to make are very, very complex,” he explained. “A lot of the data you’re going to provide me is based on history. And what happened in history is not what you’re facing right now. So, you need to really be able to take great data and blend that with your intuition and your experience to make a decision.”
This shift reflects a broader trend in industries where leaders are beginning to see the benefits of looking beyond purely data-driven decision-making. With global supply chains disrupted by unforeseen events like the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s growing acknowledgement that historical data may not be the most effective way to predict the future. Rasmussen said that the audience should practice blending their own intuition and experience with data by asking themselves: “Does it make sense? Does it feel right?”
Prioritizing sustainability
Rasmussen also highlighted the LEGO Group’s ambitious sustainability goals, signaling that innovation cannot come at the expense of environmental responsibility. “There is no excuse for us to not leave a better planet for the next generation, for the next hundred years,” he said.
With an ambition to make its products from more renewable or recycled materials by 2032 and eliminate single-use packaging, the company aims to lead a shift in trends in manufacturing toward being more environmentally friendly, including an effort to turn waste into bricks.
Innovation doesn’t exist in a vacuum
Throughout his talk, Rasmussen underscored the importance of innovation. The only way to stay on top is to be constantly thinking of new ideas, he said.
“Are you daring to put new products into the market?” he asked, adding that it’s not enough to come up with a novel product or approach. How its implementation will work within the system is essential, too. “Our challenge that you need to help me with,” he said to the audience, “is how can we bring in innovation, because we can’t stand still either. We also need to be fit for the future … that is actually one of our bigger challenges.”
He reminded the audience that innovation is not a linear path. It involves risk, some failure, and continuous evolution. “Resilience is absolutely key,” he said.
Q&A
After his presentation, Rasmussen sat down with Professor John Hart for a brief Q&A, followed by audience questions. Among the questions that Hart asked Rasmussen was how he would respond to a designer who presented a model of MIT-themed LEGO set, assuring Rasmussen it would break sales records. “Oh, I’ve heard that so many times,” Rasmussen laughed.
Hart asked what it would take to turn an idea into reality. “How long does it take from bricks to having it on my doorstep?” he asked.
“Typically, a new product takes between 12 to 18 months from idea to when we put it out on the market,” said Rasmussen, explaining that the process requires a good deal of integration and that there is a lot of planning to make sure that new ideas can be implemented across the organization.
Then the microphone was opened up to the crowd. The first audience questions came from Emerson Linville-Engler, the youngest audience member at just 5 years old, who wanted to know what the most difficult LEGO set to make was (the Technic round connector pieces), as well as Rasmussen’s favorite LEGO set (complex builds, like buildings or Technic models).
Other questions showcased how much LEGO inspired the audience. One member asked Rasmussen if it ever got old being told that he worked for a company that inspires the inner child? “No. It motivates me every single day when you meet them,” he said.
Through the Q&A, the audience was also able to ask more about the manufacturing process from ideas to execution, as well as whether Rasmussen was threatened by imitators (he welcomes healthy competition, but not direct copycats), and whether the LEGO Group plans on bringing back some old favorites (they are discussing whether to bring back old sets, but there are no set plans to do so at this time).
For the aspiring manufacturing leaders and innovators in the room, the lesson of Rasmussen’s talk was clear: Success isn’t just about making the right decision, it’s about understanding the entire system, having the courage to innovate, and being resilient enough to navigate unexpected challenges.
The event was hosted by the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group as part of the Manufacturing@MIT Distinguished Speaker Series. Past speakers include the TSMC founder Morris Chang, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf.
LEGO Group COO Carsten Rasmussen (right), shown here with Department of Mechanical Engineering head Professor John Hart, discussed the importance of balancing cost efficiency, innovation, and sustainability in manufacturing.
SGS co-founder Frank von Hippel returned to campus Tuesday for a 50th anniversary event and book discussion about his new memoir, “Ending the Nuclear Arms Race: A Physicist’s Quest.”
Former Greek PM outlines strategies to strengthen EU
Encourages European autonomy while retaining trans-Atlantic dialogue
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Alexis Tsipras.
Photo by David Elmes
Stressing the need for European reform and unity in the face of multiple challenges, Alexis Tsipras, the former prime minister of Greece, addressed a standing-room-only crowd at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies on March 25, which marked Independence Day in Greece.
Tsipras presented proposals for Europe to counter looming financial and trans-Atlantic turbulence, strengthen its cohesion, and elevate its geopolitical and economic position. The presentation was moderated by Peter A. Hall, Harvard’s Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies and a resident faculty member at CES, where Tsipras is a Policy Fellow this spring.
“We are seeing historical changes in the world that affect not only the geopolitical balance of power and the post-war liberal international order, but democracy itself,” said Tsipras, who currently serves as a member of the Hellenic Parliament for the SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance party.
He noted that the post-Cold War international order led not only to unfairly distributed growth but to the deregulation of financial markets, culminating in the global and European financial crises. He also said that the West had “underestimated the warnings that Russia would respond militarily if NATO insisted on adopting an open-door policy on Ukraine and Georgia in 2008.” U.S. engagement in the region has not allowed for the pivot to the Indo-Pacific to take place, leaving more space for China, “not only in the South China Sea but globally.”
These developments have heralded “a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world in which the United States remains the most powerful force but has lost its dominance,” Tsipras said. To counter, the U.S. is “disengaging itself from any obligation toward Europe and promoting a logic of might makes right.”
“We are seeing historical changes in the world that affect not only the geopolitical balance of power and the post-war liberal international order, but democracy itself.”
Alexis Tsipras
Tsipras called for Europe to enhance its strategic autonomy while retaining trans-Atlantic dialogue regardless of NATO’s future. “I believe strongly that Europe can and should use its common foreign and security policy to play a role not only of deterrence, but also as a force for peace and stability particularly in regions where NATO should not or cannot be present,” he said.
Tsipras then named several strategic goals. These include an EU — not NATO — strategy for Ukraine that brings “peace with the best possible terms for Kyiv,” enforced by an international peacekeeping force, as well as a future that gives Ukraine the choice to “move toward the EU.” He also called for an end to Israel’s bombing in Gaza, as well as the resumption of talks for a two-state solution. He stressed the need for a clear message to Turkey, and said that the “unacceptable” recent arrest of opposition leader and mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, must have consequences. “We cannot convince anyone, particularly in the Global South, of our principles if we prove to have double standards,” he said.
For Europe’s economy, Tsipras outlined four policy proposals. First, he referred to Germany’s €900 billion fiscal package as a permanent break from Wolfgang Schäuble’s ordoliberal mindset, reflecting how much faster Europe would have exited the economic crisis if this mindset had been abandoned 15 years ago. He proposed “raising the debt threshold for all member states to around 100 percent.”
His second proposal called for Germany’s new fiscal approach to be leveraged “in a way that benefits Europe as a whole, rather than being used to subsidize domestic firms of bigger countries.”
His third proposal was for “the EU to supplement its common monetary policy with a federal fiscal instrument. A treasury department, just like the United States, as any other successful monetary union does.”
This federal treasury department could be empowered “to issue common European debt to finance the strategic autonomy of the EU on energy and defense, to facilitate the green transition, to promote research and innovation, to restore Europe’s crumbling network infrastructure, and, more importantly, to increase our cohesion funds and to reduce inequalities through investments in the welfare state and education.”
“The EU needs a deepening of its internal market, on the basis of the Draghi and Letta Reports,” he concluded.
Tsipras moved on to the challenges facing EU cohesion. In recent years, he said, political parties have facilitated the rise of nationalist and extreme far right parties. “Conservative parties have adopted the rhetoric and policies of the extreme right to keep their votes. Center-left parties are seen as elitist and disconnected from the middle and working class. And left parties have been absorbed by doctrine and petty politics.” He said the lack of a comprehensive European migration policy has also contributed to the rise of the extreme right.
Returning to the issue of debt, Tsipras reiterated that fiscal solidarity and rebuilding are more important than an imaginary bottom line. “If it is necessary to finance not only the rearming of Europe, but also innovation, growth, and cohesion, then this is something that we’ll have to do,” he said.
“Europe must be a force both for deterrence and for peace,” Tsipras concluded. “The best option is to stand on our feet. That means to strengthen our internal markets, to strengthen our cohesion and convergence, and, of course, to decide for strategic autonomy, which means a common external policy and policy of defense.”
Knocking out a single gene reprograms part of the large intestine to function like the nutrient-absorbing small intestine; Weill Cornell investigators showed that this reversed the malnutrition that results when most of the small intestine is removed.
Lowell House Opera performs “Postcard from Morocco” by Dominick Argento. Baritone Marcus Schenck (center) and cast share the stage in the Lowell House dining hall, which has been transformed into a train station.
‘Postcard from Morocco’ brings opera back to Lowell House
After an eight-year hiatus, Lowell House Opera returned to its historical performance space — the Lowell House dining hall — with a production of “Postcard from Morocco.” Set in a train station in 1914, the opera explores the human mind through seven travelers, each of whom is characterized by a possession.
The February performances marked the company’s homecoming after having moved their productions to other campus venues during the two-year renovation of Lowell House, with COVID-19 causing a further delay.
For its winter performance, set designers used stained glass film to cover the dining hall’s windows and had colored lights cast architectural shadows; together they transformed the space into a bustling train station.
“We really value an equal playing field for seasoned professionals and emerging artists,” said Benjamin Rossen ’23, the Lowell House Opera’s executive director, as well as “Postcard’s” music director and conductor.
Among the show’s cast, orchestra, and crew are Harvard students, alumni, a faculty member, professional opera singers, and students from several Boston-area schools.
Planning for the show started in the summer of 2024. Between mid-January and opening night on Feb. 21, performers rehearsed three to four hours a day to prepare for their roles.
“The performers inhabited their roles with astonishing ease,” said stage director Haley Stark ’25. “With minimal direction, they brought their characters to life in ways that felt deeply intuitive.”
The Lowell House Opera is already working on its next production, “Parade in Concert: The Trial Behind the Tragedy,” in collaboration with Harvard Hillel. Performances will be held at Harvard Hillel on April 26-27.
Conductor and music director Benjamin T. Rossen ’23 leads the orchestra.Coloratura soprano Chen Wine sings “A Lady With a Hand Mirror.”
Marcus Schenck (top) and tenor Leo Balkovetz perform a scene together.
Alicia Chu ’28 in her role as “a foreign singer.”
Leo Balkovetz (left) and Chen Wine embrace during their performance.A dramatic moment draws the audience’s full attention.
When the International Maritime Organization enacted a mandatory cap on the sulfur content of marine fuels in 2020, with an eye toward reducing harmful environmental and health impacts, it left shipping companies with three main options.
They could burn low-sulfur fossil fuels, like marine gas oil, or install cleaning systems to remove sulfur from the exhaust gas produced by burning heavy fuel oil. Biofuels with lower sulfur content offer another alternative, though their limited availability makes them a less feasible option.
While installing exhaust gas cleaning systems, known as scrubbers, is the most feasible and cost-effective option, there has been a great deal of uncertainty among firms, policymakers, and scientists as to how “green” these scrubbers are.
Through a novel lifecycle assessment, researchers from MIT, Georgia Tech, and elsewhere have now found that burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers in the open ocean can match or surpass using low-sulfur fuels, when a wide variety of environmental factors is considered.
The scientists combined data on the production and operation of scrubbers and fuels with emissions measurements taken onboard an oceangoing cargo ship.
They found that, when the entire supply chain is considered, burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers was the least harmful option in terms of nearly all 10 environmental impact factors they studied, such as greenhouse gas emissions, terrestrial acidification, and ozone formation.
“In our collaboration with Oldendorff Carriers to broadly explore reducing the environmental impact of shipping, this study of scrubbers turned out to be an unexpectedly deep and important transitional issue,” says Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), and senior author of the study.
“Claims about environmental hazards and policies to mitigate them should be backed by science. You need to see the data, be objective, and design studies that take into account the full picture to be able to compare different options from an apples-to-apples perspective,” adds lead author Patricia Stathatou, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, who began this study as a postdoc in the CBA.
Stathatou is joined on the paper by Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and others at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece, Naias Laboratories, and the maritime shipping firm Oldendorff Carriers. The research appears today in Environmental Science and Technology.
Slashing sulfur emissions
Heavy fuel oil, traditionally burned by bulk carriers that make up about 30 percent of the global maritime fleet, usually has a sulfur content around 2 to 3 percent. This is far higher than the International Maritime Organization’s 2020 cap of 0.5 percent in most areas of the ocean and 0.1 percent in areas near population centers or environmentally sensitive regions.
Sulfur oxide emissions contribute to air pollution and acid rain, and can damage the human respiratory system.
In 2018, fewer than 1,000 vessels employed scrubbers. After the cap went into place, higher prices of low-sulfur fossil fuels and limited availability of alternative fuels led many firms to install scrubbers so they could keep burning heavy fuel oil.
Today, more than 5,800 vessels utilize scrubbers, the majority of which are wet, open-loop scrubbers.
“Scrubbers are a very mature technology. They have traditionally been used for decades in land-based applications like power plants to remove pollutants,” Stathatou says.
A wet, open-loop marine scrubber is a huge, metal, vertical tank installed in a ship’s exhaust stack, above the engines. Inside, seawater drawn from the ocean is sprayed through a series of nozzles downward to wash the hot exhaust gases as they exit the engines.
The seawater interacts with sulfur dioxide in the exhaust, converting it to sulfates — water-soluble, environmentally benign compounds that naturally occur in seawater. The washwater is released back into the ocean, while the cleaned exhaust escapes to the atmosphere with little to no sulfur dioxide emissions.
But the acidic washwater can contain other combustion byproducts like heavy metals, so scientists wondered if scrubbers were comparable, from a holistic environmental point of view, to burning low-sulfur fuels.
Several studies explored toxicity of washwater and fuel system pollution, but none painted a full picture.
The researchers set out to fill that scientific gap.
A “well-to-wake” analysis
The team conducted a lifecycle assessment using a global environmental database on production and transport of fossil fuels, such as heavy fuel oil, marine gas oil, and very-low sulfur fuel oil. Considering the entire lifecycle of each fuel is key, since producing low-sulfur fuel requires extra processing steps in the refinery, causing additional emissions of greenhouse gases and particulate matter.
“If we just look at everything that happens before the fuel is bunkered onboard the vessel, heavy fuel oil is significantly more low-impact, environmentally, than low-sulfur fuels,” she says.
The researchers also collaborated with a scrubber manufacturer to obtain detailed information on all materials, production processes, and transportation steps involved in marine scrubber fabrication and installation.
“If you consider that the scrubber has a lifetime of about 20 years, the environmental impacts of producing the scrubber over its lifetime are negligible compared to producing heavy fuel oil,” she adds.
For the final piece, Stathatou spent a week onboard a bulk carrier vessel in China to measure emissions and gather seawater and washwater samples. The ship burned heavy fuel oil with a scrubber and low-sulfur fuels under similar ocean conditions and engine settings.
Collecting these onboard data was the most challenging part of the study.
“All the safety gear, combined with the heat and the noise from the engines on a moving ship, was very overwhelming,” she says.
Their results showed that scrubbers reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 97 percent, putting heavy fuel oil on par with low-sulfur fuels according to that measure. The researchers saw similar trends for emissions of other pollutants like carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide.
In addition, they tested washwater samples for more than 60 chemical parameters, including nitrogen, phosphorus, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and 23 metals.
The concentrations of chemicals regulated by the IMO were far below the organization’s requirements. For unregulated chemicals, the researchers compared the concentrations to the strictest limits for industrial effluents from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and European Union.
Most chemical concentrations were at least an order of magnitude below these requirements.
In addition, since washwater is diluted thousands of times as it is dispersed by a moving vessel, the concentrations of such chemicals would be even lower in the open ocean.
These findings suggest that the use of scrubbers with heavy fuel oil can be considered as equal to or more environmentally friendly than low-sulfur fuels across many of the impact categories the researchers studied.
“This study demonstrates the scientific complexity of the waste stream of scrubbers. Having finally conducted a multiyear, comprehensive, and peer-reviewed study, commonly held fears and assumptions are now put to rest,” says Scott Bergeron, managing director at Oldendorff Carriers and co-author of the study.
“This first-of-its-kind study on a well-to-wake basis provides very valuable input to ongoing discussion at the IMO,” adds Thomas Klenum, executive vice president of innovation and regulatory affairs at the Liberian Registry, emphasizing the need “for regulatory decisions to be made based on scientific studies providing factual data and conclusions.”
Ultimately, this study shows the importance of incorporating lifecycle assessments into future environmental impact reduction policies, Stathatou says.
“There is all this discussion about switching to alternative fuels in the future, but how green are these fuels? We must do our due diligence to compare them equally with existing solutions to see the costs and benefits,” she adds.
This study was supported, in part, by Oldendorff Carriers.
Due to the inherent ambiguity in medical images like X-rays, radiologists often use words like “may” or “likely” when describing the presence of a certain pathology, such as pneumonia.
But do the words radiologists use to express their confidence level accurately reflect how often a particular pathology occurs in patients? A new study shows that when radiologists express confidence about a certain pathology using a phrase like “very likely,” they tend to be overconfident, and vice-versa when they express less confidence using a word like “possibly.”
Using clinical data, a multidisciplinary team of MIT researchers in collaboration with researchers and clinicians at hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School created a framework to quantify how reliable radiologists are when they express certainty using natural language terms.
They used this approach to provide clear suggestions that help radiologists choose certainty phrases that would improve the reliability of their clinical reporting. They also showed that the same technique can effectively measure and improve the calibration of large language models by better aligning the words models use to express confidence with the accuracy of their predictions.
By helping radiologists more accurately describe the likelihood of certain pathologies in medical images, this new framework could improve the reliability of critical clinical information.
“The words radiologists use are important. They affect how doctors intervene, in terms of their decision making for the patient. If these practitioners can be more reliable in their reporting, patients will be the ultimate beneficiaries,” says Peiqi Wang, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this research.
He is joined on the paper by senior author Polina Golland, a Sunlin and Priscilla Chou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the leader of the Medical Vision Group; as well as Barbara D. Lam, a clinical fellow at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Yingcheng Liu, at MIT graduate student; Ameneh Asgari-Targhi, a research fellow at Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB); Rameswar Panda, a research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; William M. Wells, a professor of radiology at MGB and a research scientist in CSAIL; and Tina Kapur, an assistant professor of radiology at MGB. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Decoding uncertainty in words
A radiologist writing a report about a chest X-ray might say the image shows a “possible” pneumonia, which is an infection that inflames the air sacs in the lungs. In that case, a doctor could order a follow-up CT scan to confirm the diagnosis.
However, if the radiologist writes that the X-ray shows a “likely” pneumonia, the doctor might begin treatment immediately, such as by prescribing antibiotics, while still ordering additional tests to assess severity.
Trying to measure the calibration, or reliability, of ambiguous natural language terms like “possibly” and “likely” presents many challenges, Wang says.
Existing calibration methods typically rely on the confidence score provided by an AI model, which represents the model’s estimated likelihood that its prediction is correct.
For instance, a weather app might predict an 83 percent chance of rain tomorrow. That model is well-calibrated if, across all instances where it predicts an 83 percent chance of rain, it rains approximately 83 percent of the time.
“But humans use natural language, and if we map these phrases to a single number, it is not an accurate description of the real world. If a person says an event is ‘likely,’ they aren’t necessarily thinking of the exact probability, such as 75 percent,” Wang says.
Rather than trying to map certainty phrases to a single percentage, the researchers’ approach treats them as probability distributions. A distribution describes the range of possible values and their likelihoods — think of the classic bell curve in statistics.
“This captures more nuances of what each word means,” Wang adds.
Assessing and improving calibration
The researchers leveraged prior work that surveyed radiologists to obtain probability distributions that correspond to each diagnostic certainty phrase, ranging from “very likely” to “consistent with.”
For instance, since more radiologists believe the phrase “consistent with” means a pathology is present in a medical image, its probability distribution climbs sharply to a high peak, with most values clustered around the 90 to 100 percent range.
In contrast the phrase “may represent” conveys greater uncertainty, leading to a broader, bell-shaped distribution centered around 50 percent.
Typical methods evaluate calibration by comparing how well a model’s predicted probability scores align with the actual number of positive results.
The researchers’ approach follows the same general framework but extends it to account for the fact that certainty phrases represent probability distributions rather than probabilities.
To improve calibration, the researchers formulated and solved an optimization problem that adjusts how often certain phrases are used, to better align confidence with reality.
They derived a calibration map that suggests certainty terms a radiologist should use to make the reports more accurate for a specific pathology.
“Perhaps, for this dataset, if every time the radiologist said pneumonia was ‘present,’ they changed the phrase to ‘likely present’ instead, then they would become better calibrated,” Wang explains.
When the researchers used their framework to evaluate clinical reports, they found that radiologists were generally underconfident when diagnosing common conditions like atelectasis, but overconfident with more ambiguous conditions like infection.
In addition, the researchers evaluated the reliability of language models using their method, providing a more nuanced representation of confidence than classical methods that rely on confidence scores.
“A lot of times, these models use phrases like ‘certainly.’ But because they are so confident in their answers, it does not encourage people to verify the correctness of the statements themselves,” Wang adds.
In the future, the researchers plan to continue collaborating with clinicians in the hopes of improving diagnoses and treatment. They are working to expand their study to include data from abdominal CT scans.
In addition, they are interested in studying how receptive radiologists are to calibration-improving suggestions and whether they can mentally adjust their use of certainty phrases effectively.
“Expression of diagnostic certainty is a crucial aspect of the radiology report, as it influences significant management decisions. This study takes a novel approach to analyzing and calibrating how radiologists express diagnostic certainty in chest X-ray reports, offering feedback on term usage and associated outcomes,” says Atul B. Shinagare, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved with this work. “This approach has the potential to improve radiologists’ accuracy and communication, which will help improve patient care.”
The work was funded, in part, by a Takeda Fellowship, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT CSAIL Wistrom Program, and the MIT Jameel Clinic.
A new calibration method developed by MIT researchers can improve the accuracy of clinical reports written by radiologists by helping them express their confidence more reliably.
A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a method to fabricate personalised gingival (gum) tissue grafts using an innovative combination of 3D bioprinting and artificial intelligence (AI).
Led by Assistant Professor Gopu Sriram from NUS Faculty of Dentistry, the team’s approach presents a more customisable and less invasive alternative to traditional grafting methods, which often involve harvesting tissue from the patient’s mouth — a process that can be both uncomfortable and constrained by the availability of suitable tissue.
The 3D bioprinting and AI-enabled technique has the potential to address key challenges in dental procedures more effectively, such as repairing gum defects caused by periodontal disease or complications from dental implants. For instance, by enabling the precise fabrication of tissue constructs tailored to individual patients, the method can significantly improve treatment outcomes, reduce patient discomfort, and minimise the risk of complications, such as infections, during recovery.
The team’s research was published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials on 17 December 2024, and was supported by grants from National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Cluster (NAMIC) and National University Health System (NUHS).
Turbocharging the bioprinting process with AI
Gum tissue grafts are essential in dental care, particularly for addressing mucogingival defects such as gum recession, and complications arising from periodontal disease or dental implants. Typically, these grafts are harvested from the patient’s mouth. Though effective, these procedures come with significant drawbacks: patient discomfort, limited tissue availability, and a higher risk of postoperative complications.
To overcome these challenges, the researchers turned to 3D bioprinting, a technique that fabricates custom-made tissue grafts tailored to the specific dimensions of each patient’s defect. They developed a specialised bio-ink which supports the growth of healthy cells, while also ensuring the material can be printed accurately and holds its shape and structure.
However, the viability of 3D bioprinting is only as good as the parameters applied during the process. Factors such as extrusion pressure, print speed, nozzle dimensions, bio-ink viscosity and printhead temperature all play a crucial role in determining the final properties and performance of the printed component. Tuning these parameters has traditionally been done through tedious, manual trial-and-error experiments that are extremely time- and resource-consuming.
“To speed up the 3D bioprinting process, we integrated AI into our workflow to address this critical bottleneck,” said Professor Dean Ho, Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Design and Engineering at NUS, and co-corresponding author of the research paper. “This approach greatly streamlines the process by reducing the number of experiments needed to optimise the bioprinting parameters — from potentially thousands to just 25 combinations,” added Prof Ho, who is also Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and N.1 Institute for Health (N.1) at NUS.
This tremendous efficiency boost afforded by the team’s AI-driven workflow saves time and resources while ensuring the creation of tissue constructs with precise dimensions and structural integrity.
“Our study is among the first to specifically integrate 3D bioprinting and AI technologies for the biofabrication of customised oral soft tissue constructs,” said Asst Prof Sriram, who is also the Thrust Co-Lead of Dental and Craniofacial 3DP Applications at NUS Centre for Additive Manufacturing (AM.NUS). “3D bioprinting is by far more challenging than conventional 3D printing because it involves living cells, which introduce a host of complexities to the printing process.”
The bioprinted gum tissue grafts exhibited strong biomimetic properties, maintaining over 90% cell viability immediately after printing and throughout an 18-day culture period. The grafts also retained their shape and structural integrity, while histological analyses confirmed the presence of key proteins and a multi-layered structure closely resembling natural gum tissue.
The future of dental care
In dentistry, the ability to produce personalised gum tissue grafts with improved efficiency, structural integrity, and biomimetic properties could address longstanding clinical challenges associated with periodontal diseases and dental implants. “This research demonstrates how AI and 3D bioprinting can converge to solve complex medical problems through precision medicine,” added Asst Prof Sriram. “By optimising tissue grafts for individual patients, we can reduce the invasiveness of dental procedures while ensuring better healing and recovery.”
Excitingly, the potential implications of this research extend beyond dentistry. “3D bioprinting allows us to create tissue grafts that precisely match the dimensions of a patient’s wounds, potentially reducing or eliminating the need to harvest tissue from the patient’s body,” said Asst Prof Sriram.
“This level of customisation minimises graft distortion and tension during wound closure, reducing the risk of complications, surgery time and discomfort to the patients.” said Dr Jacob Chew, a periodontist, co-investigator of the study, and Academic Fellow at NUS Faculty of Dentistry.
Furthermore, the scarless healing characteristics of oral tissue provide a unique advantage, as insights from this study could inform the fabrication of similar grafts for other barrier tissues, such as skin, potentially aiding in the scarless healing of skin wounds.
Future research will focus on translating these findings from bench to bedside. The team plans to conduct in vivo studies to assess the integration and stability of the grafts in oral environments. They also aim to explore the integration of blood vessels into the grafts through multi-material bioprinting to create more complex and functional constructs. With these developments, the researchers hope to advance the field of regenerative dentistry while paving the way for broader applications in tissue engineering.
MIT Solve has launched its 2025 Global Challenges, calling on innovators worldwide to submit transformative, tech-driven solutions to some of the planet's most pressing and persistent problems. With over $1 million in funding available, selected innovators have a unique opportunity to scale their solutions and gain an influential network.
"In an era where technology is transforming our world at breakneck speed, we're seeing a profound shift in how innovators approach global problems," says Hala Hanna, executive director of MIT Solve. "The unprecedented convergence of technological capabilities and social consciousness sets our current moment apart. Our Solver teams aren't just creating solutions — they're rewriting the rules of what's possible in social innovation. With their solutions now reaching over 280 million lives worldwide, they're demonstrating that human-centered technology can scale impact in ways we never imagined possible."
Thirty winning solutions will be announced at Solve Challenge Finals during Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Selected innovators join the 2025 Solver Class, gaining access to a comprehensive nine-month support program that includes connections to MIT's innovation ecosystem, specialized mentorship, extensive pro-bono resources, and substantial funding from Solve's growing community of supporters.
2025 funding opportunities for selected Solvers exceed $1 million and include:
Health Innovation Award (supported by Johnson & Johnson Foundation):All Solver teams selected for Solve's Global Health Challenge will receive an additional prize from Global Health Anchor Supporter, Johnson & Johnson Foundation
The Seeding the Future Food Systems Prize (supported by the Seeding The Future Foundation)
The GM Prize (supported by General Motors)
The AI for Humanity Prize (supported by The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation)
The Crescent Enterprises "AI for Social Innovation" Prize(supported by Crescent Enterprises)
The Citizens Workforce Innovation Prize (supported by Citizens)
The E Ink Innovation Prize (supported by E Ink)
Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Ocean Innovation Prize (supported by Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation)
Schmidt Marine Wavemaker’s Prize (supported by Schmidt Marine Technology Partners)
Since 2015, supporters of MIT Solve have catalyzed more than 800 partnerships and deployed more than $70 million, touching the lives of 280 million people worldwide.
For over a decade, through a collaboration managed by MIT.nano, MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec), one of the largest universities in Latin America, have worked together to develop innovative academic and research initiatives with a particular focus in nanoscience and nanotechnology and, more recently, an emphasis on design and smart manufacturing. Now, the collaboration has also expanded to include undergraduate education. Seven Tec undergrads are developing methods to manufacture low-cost, desktop fiber-extrusion devices, or FrEDs, alongside peers at MIT in an “in-the-lab” teaching and learning factory, the FrED Factory.
“The FrED Factory serves as a factory-like education platform for manufacturing scale-up, enabling students and researchers to engage firsthand in the transition from prototype development to small-scale production,” says Brian Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE).
Through on-campus learning, participants observe, analyze, and actively contribute to this process, gaining critical insights into the complexities of scaling manufacturing operations. The product of the FrED Factory are FrED kits — tabletop manufacturing kits that themselves produce fiber and that are used to teach smart manufacturing principles. “We’re thrilled to have students from Monterrey Tec here at MIT, bringing new ideas and perspectives, and helping to develop these new ways to teach manufacturing at both MIT and Tec,” says Anthony.
The FrED factory was originally built by a group of MIT graduate students in 2022 as their thesis project in the Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design program. They adapted and scaled the original design of the device, built by Anthony’s student David Kim, into something that could be manufactured into multiple units at a substantially lower cost. The resulting computer-aided design files were shared with Tec de Monterrey for use by faculty and students. Since launching the FrED curriculum at Tec in 2022, MIT has co-hosted two courses led by Tec faculty: “Mechatronics Design: (Re) Design of FrED,” and “Automation of Manufacturing Systems: FrED Factory Challenge.”
New this academic year, undergraduate Tec students are participating in FrED Factory research immersions. The students engage in collaborative FrED projects at MIT and then return to Tec to implement their knowledge — particularly to help replicate and implement what they have learned, with the launch of a new FrED Factory at Tec de Monterrey this spring. The end goal is to fully integrate this project into Tec’s mechatronics engineering curriculum, in which students learn about automation and robotics firsthand through the devices.
Russel Bradley, a PhD student in MechE supervised by Anthony, is the project lead of FrED Factory and has been working closely with the undergraduate Tec students.
“The process of designing and manufacturing FrEDs is an educational experience in itself,” says Bradley. “Unlike a real factory, which likely wouldn’t welcome students to experiment with the machines, the FrED factory provides an environment where you can fail and learn.”
The Tec undergrads are divided into groups working on specific projects, including Development of an Education 4.0 Framework for FrED, Immersive Technology (AR) for Manufacturing Operations, Gamifying Advanced Manufacturing Education in FrED Factory, and Immersive Cognitive Factory Twins.
Sergio Siller Lobo is a Tec student who is working on the development of the education framework for FrED. He and other students are revising the code to make the interface more student-friendly and best enable the students to learn while working with the devices. They are focused particularly on helping students to engage with the topics of control systems, computer vision, and internet of things (IoT) in both a digital course that they are developing, and in directly working with the devices. The digital course can be presented by an instructor or done autonomously by students.
“Students can be learning the theory with the digital courses, as well as having access to hands-on, practical experience with the device,” says Siller Lobo. “You can have the best of both ways of learning, both the practical and the theoretical.”
Arik Gómez Horita, an undergrad from Tec who has also been working on the education framework, says that the technology that currently exists in terms of how to teach students about control systems, computer vision, and IoT is often very limited in either its capability or quantity.
“A key aspect of the value of the FrEDs is that we are integrating all these concepts and a module for education into a single device,” says Gómez Horita. “Bringing FrED into a classroom is a game-changer. Our main goal is trying to put FrED into the hands of the teacher, to use it for all its teaching capabilities.”
Once the students return to Tec de Monterrey with the educational modules they’ve developed, there will be workshops with the FrEDs and opportunities for Tec students to use their own creativity and iterate on the devices.
“The FrED is really a lab in a box, and one of the best things that FrEDs do is create data,” says Siller Lobo. “Finding new ways to get data from FrED gives it more value.”
Tec students Ángel Alarcón and André Mendoza are preparing to have MIT students test the FrED factory, running a simulation with the two main roles of engineer and operator. The operator role assembles the FrEDs within the workstations that simulate a factory. The engineer role analyzes the data created on the factory side by the operator and tries to find ways to improve production.
“This is a very immersive way to teach manufacturing systems,” says Alarcón. “Many students studying manufacturing, undergraduate and even graduate, finish their education never having even gone to an actual factory. The FrED Factory gives students the valuable opportunity to get to know what a factory is like and experience an industry environment without having to go off campus.”
The data gained from the workstations — including cycle time and defects in an operation — will be used to teach different topics about manufacturing. Ultimately, the FrED factory at Tec will be used to compare the benefits and drawbacks of automation versus manual labor.
Bradley says that the Tec students bring a strong mechatronics background that adds a lot of important insights to the project, and beyond the lab, it’s also a valuable multicultural exchange.
“It’s not just about what the students are learning from us,” says Bradley, “but it’s really a collaborative process in which we’re all complementing each other.”
Undergraduate students from Tecnológico de Monterrey have been learning how to build low-cost fiber-extrusion devices alongside their MIT peers at an in-lab assembly factory set up by MIT graduate students. Back row, l-r: Kayra Ilkbahar (MIT), Arman Shantayev (MIT), Arik Gómez Horita (Tec), Russel Bradley (MIT), Sergio Siller Lobo (Tec), Leonardo Elioenait Galán Cruz (Tec), Rohan Sanghai (MIT), and André Mauricio Mendoza Quevedo (Tec); Middle row, l-r: Adán Flores Ramírez (Tec) and Gilberto Ramírez Tamez (Tec); Front row, l-r: Pedro Ponce Cruz, visiting scientist from Tecnológico de Monterrey, and Brian Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.
“What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of a level playing field,” said Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow, during a conference-opening keynote panel.
The theme of the two-day conference, which is organized each year by MIT students, was “Breakthrough to deployment: Driving climate innovation to market.” Speakers largely expressed optimism about advancements in green technology, balanced by occasional notes of alarm about a rapidly changing regulatory and political environment.
Deese defined what he called “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the current energy landscape. The good: Clean energy investment in the United States hit an all-time high of $272 billion in 2024. The bad: Announcements of future investments have tailed off. And the ugly: Macro conditions are making it more difficult for utilities and private enterprise to build out the clean energy infrastructure needed to meet growing energy demands.
“We need to build massive amounts of energy capacity in the United States,” Deese said. “And the three things that are the most allergic to building are high uncertainty, high interest rates, and high tariff rates. So that’s kind of ugly. But the question … is how, and in what ways, that underlying commercial momentum can drive through this period of uncertainty.”
A shifting clean energy landscape
During a panel on artificial intelligence and growth in electricity demand, speakers said that the technology may serve as a catalyst for green energy breakthroughs, in addition to putting strain on existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to building digital infrastructure responsibly, and part of that means catalyzing the development of clean energy infrastructure that is not only meeting the AI need, but also benefiting the grid as a whole,” said Lucia Tian, head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google.
Across the two days, speakers emphasized that the cost-per-unit and scalability of clean energy technologies will ultimately determine their fate. But they also acknowledged the impact of public policy, as well as the need for government investment to tackle large-scale issues like grid modernization.
Vanessa Chan, a former U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) official and current vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, warned of the “knock-on” effects of the move to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs, for example. “In reality, what you’re doing is undercutting every single academic institution that does research across the nation,” she said.
During a panel titled “No clean energy transition without transmission,” Maria Robinson, former director of the DoE’s Grid Deployment Office, said that ratepayers alone will likely not be able to fund the grid upgrades needed to meet growing power demand. “The amount of investment we’re going to need over the next couple of years is going to be significant,” she said. “That’s where the federal government is going to have to play a role.”
David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy venture builder at MIT, noted that extreme weather events have changed the climate change conversation in recent years. “There was a narrative 10 years ago that said … if we start talking about resilience and adaptation to climate change, we’re kind of throwing in the towel or giving up,” he said. “I’ve noticed a very big shift in the investor narrative, the startup narrative, and more generally, the public consciousness. There’s a realization that the effects of climate change are already upon us.”
“Everything on the table”
The conference featured panels and keynote addresses on a range of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy, and nuclear fusion, as well as a session on carbon capture.
Alex Creely, a chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explained that fusion (the combining of small atoms into larger atoms, which is the same process that fuels stars) is safer and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion facilities, he said, can be powered down instantaneously, and companies like his are developing new, less-expensive magnet technology to contain the extreme heat produced by fusion reactors.
By the early 2030s, Creely said, his company hopes to be operating 400-megawatt power plants that use only 50 kilograms of fuel per year. “If you can get fusion working, it turns energy into a manufacturing product, not a natural resource,” he said.
Quinn Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface facilities at geothermal energy supplier Fervo Energy, said his company is making the geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation, and economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the largest cost in producing geothermal power. Fervo has “completely flipped the cost structure” with advances in drilling, Woodard said, and now the company is focused on bringing down its power plant costs.
“We have to continuously be focused on cost, and achieving that is paramount for the success of the geothermal industry,” he said.
One common theme across the conference: a number of approaches are making rapid advancements, but experts aren’t sure when — or, in some cases, if — each specific technology will reach a tipping point where it is capable of transforming energy markets.
“I don’t want to get caught in a place where we often descend in this climate solution situation, where it’s either-or,” said Peter Ellis, global director of nature climate solutions at The Nature Conservancy. “We’re talking about the greatest challenge civilization has ever faced. We need everything on the table.”
The road ahead
Several speakers stressed the need for academia, industry, and government to collaborate in pursuit of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of sustainability for Microsoft, compared the challenge to the Apollo spaceflight program, and she said that academic institutions need to focus more on how to scale and spur investments in green energy.
“The challenge is that academic institutions are not currently set up to be able to learn the how, in driving both bottom-up and top-down shifts over time,” Luers said. “If the world is going to succeed in our road to net zero, the mindset of academia needs to shift. And fortunately, it’s starting to.”
During a panel called “From lab to grid: Scaling first-of-a-kind energy technologies,” Hannan Happi, CEO of renewable energy company Exowatt, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all the same,” he said. “The only thing [customers] care about with regards to electrons is that they are available when they need them, and that they’re very cheap.”
Melissa Zhang, principal at Azimuth Capital Management, noted that energy infrastructure development cycles typically take at least five to 10 years — longer than a U.S. political cycle. However, she warned that green energy technologies are unlikely to receive significant support at the federal level in the near future. “If you’re in something that’s a little too dependent on subsidies … there is reason to be concerned over this administration,” she said.
World Energy CEO Gene Gebolys, the moderator of the lab-to-grid panel, listed off a number of companies founded at MIT. “They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They all went from somebody’s idea, to a lab, to proof-of-concept, to scale. It’s not like any of this stuff ever ends. It’s an ongoing process.”
During a panel at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference, Lucia Tian (center), head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google, discusses the challenges and opportunities that AI and rapid electrification bring to electricity demand.
There are many categories of humor. Self-deprecating humor is its own category.
I use laughter and humor when treating people struggling with depression and anxiety. Self-deprecating humor can be useful in a clinical setting. I use it myself to show its power and invite connection. For example, I’m a mom and I’m constantly saying, “mom failing,” and things like that. I think that’s fine because to call yourself out like that provides a bit of the unexpected and sends the message that it’s OK not to take yourself so seriously. Bringing humor into that conversation is also beneficial because of the safety it signals. Humor lightens the load or defuses the intensity of that moment, and can help facilitate emotion regulation, which will help you re-establish some sense of clarity and perspective.
The term self-deprecating humor makes it sound much more negative than it is. For me, it is not making fun of yourself; it is taking yourself, or the situation that you’re in, less seriously. People who tend to use self-deprecating humor effectively are quite humble and self-aware. These are people who see themselves for who they are, for better or worse, and they have come to accept that. It signals some level of self-confidence. There is an openness and willingness to be vulnerable. It also highlights the likability of people who don’t take themselves very seriously.
Learning how to take yourself less seriously without putting yourself down is important.
What’s interesting about the use of self-deprecating humor is that it’s almost somewhat spontaneous, which can be very revealing. The language being used can sometimes be indicative of somebody who is coming from a place of hurt or low self-esteem. Extreme self-criticism and the use of very harsh language to talk about yourself, including the tone and the context, matter.
Sometimes, self-deprecation can be used as a bid for attention. Somebody might be using what sounds like humor, but what it’s drawing from us is sympathy. It may also be a little off-putting on the receivers. When you’re saying something that you think is funny, but other people are like, “Oh, that’s not funny,” then do a closer look within to see where some of that is originating from, and what’s the hope in expressing that. Also, when we take ourselves too seriously or take the situations that we find ourselves in too seriously, it can create a feedback loop, in which we are feeling negatively about ourselves and putting negativity out and having that also fed back to us.
Learning how to take yourself less seriously without putting yourself down is important. If you say something that comes into your mind, and you think it’s funny, when you say it, does it make you feel better, or does it make you feel worse? Or does it elicit the response that you were hoping for?
It’s interesting to note that self-deprecating humor tends to be more common in individualistic cultures, while collective cultures often make fun of others. Western cultures put more emphasis on relatability and approachability; being able to have people relate to you by signaling flaws and vulnerabilities sends the message that everybody has struggles and we are all in this together. Cultures that are more collective tend to poke fun at one another because there’s a different sense of community. It’s the same way in which you’d would poke fun at your sibling. It’s good-natured, and it’s not meant to cause ill or harm.
I see a lot of us taking things to an extreme in a way that’s not helpful and probably not healthy. Taking ourselves less seriously is a tool to bring us back into some better balance, either within ourselves or with other people. As an example, think about two people who disagree deeply about something and have trouble connecting with each other. In those situations, finding common ground through something that may be humorous could be a game-changer. That sounds like I’m exaggerating the power of humor, but when we take ourselves too seriously, we end up isolating ourselves and that prevents us from connecting with others.
Researchers ID 17 risk factors shared by age-related brain disease
Liana Wait
Mass General Brigham Communications
4 min read
Study finds that modifying one factor can reduce risk of stroke, dementia, and late-life depression
Seventeen modifiable factors have been identified that can lower people’s risk of age-related brain diseases such as stroke, dementia, and late-life depression, according to researchers at Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham.
The study found a reduced risk of all three conditions by modifying any one of the 17 factors. The results, which provide evidence to inform novel tools, such as the Brain Care Score, are published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry.
The researchers systematically searched the scientific literature for previously published meta-analyses of risk factors associated with stroke, dementia, and late-life depression. Then, they combined these data to identify modifiable risk factors (i.e., those that can be altered through behavioral change) shared amongst at least two out of the three diseases. They also estimated the relative impact of each risk factor on measures of quality of life and early death.
Altogether, the researchers identified risk factors shared by at least two of the diseases, including blood pressure, kidney disease, fasting plasma glucose, total cholesterol, alcohol use, diet, hearing loss, pain, physical activity, purpose in life, sleep, smoking, social engagement, and stress. Of these, high blood pressure and severe kidney disease had the biggest impact on the incidence and burden of stroke, dementia, and late-life depression.
Diabetes
Diabetes is a risk factor for stroke, dementia, and depression.
Blood Pressure
High blood pressure is a major risk factor for all three conditions.
Kidney Disease
Kidney disease can increase the risk of stroke, dementia, and depression.
Fasting Plasma Glucose
High blood sugar levels, as indicated by fasting plasma glucose, are a risk factor.
Total Cholesterol
High cholesterol levels can increase the risk of stroke and dementia.
Alcohol Use
Excessive alcohol consumption is linked to increased risk of stroke, dementia, and depression.
Diet
A poor diet can contribute to the development of all three conditions.
Hearing Loss
Hearing loss is a modifiable risk factor for dementia.
Pain
Chronic pain can increase the risk of depression and potentially other conditions.
Physical Activity
Lack of physical activity is a risk factor for all three conditions.
Purpose in Life
A lack of purpose in life can contribute to depression and potentially other conditions.
Sleep
Poor sleep quality and quantity can increase the risk of depression and potentially other conditions.
Smoking
Smoking is a major risk factor for stroke, dementia, and depression.
Social Engagement
Lack of social engagement can contribute to depression and potentially other conditions.
Stress
Chronic stress can increase the risk of depression and potentially other conditions.
Depression
Untreated depression can increase the risk of other conditions.
Obesity
Obesity is a risk factor for stroke, dementia, and depression.
In contrast, physical activity and engagement in leisure activities with a cognitive aspect (e.g., puzzles) were associated with a lower risk of disease, though the researchers suspect that these associations may be symptomatic rather than causal, since individuals with brain disease may be less capable of engaging in physical and cognitive leisure activities.
“Dementia, stroke, and late-life depression are connected and intertwined, so if you develop one of them, there’s a substantial chance you may develop another one in the future,” said first author Jasper Senff, postdoctoral fellow at the Singh Lab at the Brain Care Labs at Mass General Hospital and at Harvard Medical School. “And because they share these overlapping risk factors, preventive efforts could lead to a reduction in the incidence of more than one of these diseases, which provides an opportunity to simultaneously reduce the burden of age-related brain diseases.”
Mass General Brigham researchers developed and validated the Brain Care Score to measure efforts to protect brain health and offer guidance on how to improve it. The researchers have updated the Brain Care Score to reflect the latest scientific findings. They emphasize the need for more studies on modifiable risk factors of late-life depression and call for a randomized controlled trial to test an intervention using the Brain Care Score.
“Healthcare is increasingly complex. But these findings remind us that preventing disease can be very simple. Why? Because many of the most common diseases share the same risk factors,” said Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, founder of the Global Brain Care Coalition, and the JP Kistler Endowed Chair in Neurology at MGH.
In the fight against bacterial pathogens, researchers are combining vaccination with targeted colonisation of the intestine by harmless microorganisms. This approach could potentially mark a turning point in the antibiotics crisis.
The process of catalysis — in which a material speeds up a chemical reaction — is crucial to the production of many of the chemicals used in our everyday lives. But even though these catalytic processes are widespread, researchers often lack a clear understanding of exactly how they work.
A new analysis by researchers at MIT has shown that an important industrial synthesis process, the production of vinyl acetate, requires a catalyst to take two different forms, which cycle back and forth from one to the other as the chemical process unfolds.
There are two broad classes of catalysts: homogeneous catalysts, which consist of dissolved molecules, and heterogeneous catalysts, which are solid materials whose surface provides the site for the chemical reaction. “For the longest time,” Surendranath says, “there’s been a general view that you either have catalysis happening on these surfaces, or you have them happening on these soluble molecules.” But the new research shows that in the case of vinyl acetate — an important material that goes into many polymer products such as the rubber in the soles of your shoes — there is an interplay between both classes of catalysis.
“What we discovered,” Surendranath explains, “is that you actually have these solid metal materials converting into molecules, and then converting back into materials, in a cyclic dance.”
He adds: “This work calls into question this paradigm where there’s either one flavor of catalysis or another. Really, there could be an interplay between both of them in certain cases, and that could be really advantageous for having a process that’s selective and efficient.”
The synthesis of vinyl acetate has been a large-scale industrial reaction since the 1960s, and it has been well-researched and refined over the years to improve efficiency. This has happened largely through a trial-and-error approach, without a precise understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the researchers say.
While chemists are often more familiar with homogeneous catalysis mechanisms, and chemical engineers are often more familiar with surface catalysis mechanisms, fewer researchers study both. This is perhaps part of the reason that the full complexity of this reaction was not previously captured. But Harraz says he and his colleagues are working at the interface between disciplines. “We’ve been able to appreciate both sides of this reaction and find that both types of catalysis are critical,” he says.
The reaction that produces vinyl acetate requires something to activate the oxygen molecules that are one of the constituents of the reaction, and something else to activate the other ingredients, acetic acid and ethylene. The researchers found that the form of the catalyst that worked best for one part of the process was not the best for the other. It turns out that the molecular form of the catalyst does the key chemistry with the ethylene and the acetic acid, while it’s the surface that ends up doing the activation of the oxygen.
They found that the underlying process involved in interconverting the two forms of the catalyst is actually corrosion, similar to the process of rusting. “It turns out that in rusting, you actually go through a soluble molecular species somewhere in the sequence,” Surendranath says.
The team borrowed techniques traditionally used in corrosion research to study the process. They used electrochemical tools to study the reaction, even though the overall reaction does not require a supply of electricity. By making potential measurements, the researchers determined that the corrosion of the palladium catalyst material to soluble palladium ions is driven by an electrochemical reaction with the oxygen, converting it to water. Corrosion is “one of the oldest topics in electrochemistry,” says Lodaya, “but applying the science of corrosion to understand catalysis is much newer, and was essential to our findings.”
By correlating measurements of catalyst corrosion with other measurements of the chemical reaction taking place, the researchers proposed that it was the corrosion rate that was limiting the overall reaction. “That’s the choke point that’s controlling the rate of the overall process,” Surendranath says.
The interplay between the two types of catalysis works efficiently and selectively “because it actually uses the synergy of a material surface doing what it’s good at and a molecule doing what it’s good at,” Surendranath says. The finding suggests that, when designing new catalysts, rather than focusing on either solid materials or soluble molecules alone, researchers should think about how the interplay of both may open up new approaches.
“Now, with an improved understanding of what makes this catalyst so effective, you can try to design specific materials or specific interfaces that promote the desired chemistry,” Harraz says. Since this process has been worked on for so long, these findings may not necessarily lead to improvements in this specific process of making vinyl acetate, but it does provide a better understanding of why the materials work as they do, and could lead to improvements in other catalytic processes.
Understanding that “catalysts can transit between molecule and material and back, and the role that electrochemistry plays in those transformations, is a concept that we are really excited to expand on,” Lodaya says.
Harraz adds: “With this new understanding that both types of catalysis could play a role, what other catalytic processes are out there that actually involve both? Maybe those have a lot of room for improvement that could benefit from this understanding.”
This work is “illuminating, something that will be worth teaching at the undergraduate level," says Christophe Coperet, a professor of inorganic chemistry at ETH Zurich, who was not associated with the research. “The work highlights new ways of thinking. ... [It] is notable in the sense that it not only reconciles homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, but it describes these complex processes as half reactions, where electron transfers can cycle between distinct entities.”
The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation as a Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation; the Center for Interfacial Ionics; and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
A new analysis by researchers at MIT has shown that an important industrial synthesis process, the production of vinyl acetate, requires a catalyst to take two different forms, which cycle back and forth from one to the other as the chemical process unfolds.
The Potter Museum of Art, the flagship art museum of the University of Melbourne, has announced the full list of artists and details of the six new commissions for the 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art exhibition.
Patricia Lockwood wants you to admit the internet is real life
In Harvard talk, author riffs on ‘cloistered’ upbringing, crafting characters through dialogue, working in bed vs. on couch
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Patricia Lockwood thinks people are uncomfortable with the idea that the internet is real life. It’s why she believes novels about the internet — including her 2021 book, “No One Is Talking About This,” about a social media star whose online life gets upended by a family emergency — are often dismissed as frivolous.
“Honestly, it made people malfunction, like they didn’t know what to do,” Lockwood said about her debut novel at a recent Writers Speak event hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center. “There was still this idea that the internet couldn’t be in a book, and that really fascinated me.”
The discomfort, she theorized, stems from people perceiving their own online lives as private and embarrassing. To admit that the internet is real life is to admit a person’s online self is their authentic self, Lockwood told the Fong Auditorium audience.
The poet, novelist, and author of the 2017 memoir “Priestdaddy,” who is known for her sharp literary voice and irreverent social media presence, spoke with FAS Assistant Professor of English Tara K. Menon about crafting characters, writing long-form in an era of micro-content, and the art of inhabiting another writer’s mind.
“I think it’s worthwhile to spend your life reading and writing, and I think it’s worthwhile studying the way other people did those things,” said Lockwood, adding that, given a free day, she would probably spend eight hours of it reading.
Patricia Lockwood (right) with moderator Tara K. Menon.
Lockwood’s characters are vivid and complex on the page and in real life — none more so than her father, a gun-loving Navy veteran who became a Catholic priest despite being married with five children. Whether writing about him, or fictional characters, she said capturing their dialogue was key.
“If I can reproduce the speech patterns of my parents, if I can write down those odd turns of phrase, you have them,” Lockwood said. “You don’t necessarily need their interiority — because I don’t have that, I don’t understand why they do anything — but I know how they sound, and I know how they interact with each other, and I know how they interact with me.”
Lockwood said her extremely “cloistered” upbringing in the rectory where her family lived after her father became a priest helped her to keenly observe the world.
“I didn’t get out into the world the way that people did, so my encounters with it felt rare or cherished,” she said. “Walking around Harvard Square becomes a very, very rare experience, and you notice all aspects of it. If you notice all aspects, you set them down. That’s how it works for me.”
“I do it [literary criticism] because it is some sort of celestial homework. I do feel like you are working through someone’s mind.”
Lockwood, who didn’t go to college, said that exploring literature on her own gave her a sense of freedom that has helped rather than hindered her as a writer. She could choose her own translations of Tolstoy and not read any ancillary material and biographies if they weren’t interesting to her.
“I didn’t have anxiety about interpretation, really,” Lockwood said. “I was experiencing them as production of a mind, and I was trying to project myself into that mind, into that capability, from a very young age.”
Her preference is to write propped up in bed, notebook on her knees and a cat by her side, but chronic migraines have forced her to adopt a more ergonomic setup. These days, Lockwood writes perched at the end of one couch, legs stretched onto another. She demonstrated her signature posture on a sofa that was hastily dragged onstage, to the delight of the audience.
Menon so admires Lockwood’s literary criticism, especially her searing review of John Updike in the London Review of Books, that she compiled a list of what makes Lockwood such a good critic.
“One thing that I feel has become more and more rare is that you’re not afraid to do two things: say something is good or bad or a failure, and say whether you liked it or didn’t like it,” Menon said. “Even more impressive if you didn’t.”
“I do it because it is some sort of celestial homework,” Lockwood said. “I do feel like you are working through someone’s mind. You’re entering those times, how they thought, and you’re entering their talent. If you feel your own talent to be limited, it’s like you take on their abilities for a time. It’s really this transmutation. It’s amazing. You go above your own height.”
During the Q&A session, an audience member asked Lockwood if the form of the novel can survive in an era of micro-content and shrinking attention spans. Lockwood answered that some people welcome long-form fiction even when surrounded by micro-content. She cautioned against trying to find a prescription for shrinking attention spans or adopting new literary forms to follow a perceived trend.
“I don’t think that because we write this way online, that this is the appetite,” Lockwood said. “I think that the novel creates appetites. If you like the ‘fat,’ stick with the fat, you don’t have to sear that away. People who need solace, people who need to flee from that fragmentation, go to people like you for that sort of thing.”
Polymer-coated nanoparticles loaded with therapeutic drugs show significant promise for cancer treatment, including ovarian cancer. These particles can be targeted directly to tumors, where they release their payload while avoiding many of the side effects of traditional chemotherapy.
Over the past decade, MIT Institute Professor Paula Hammond and her students have created a variety of these particles using a technique known as layer-by-layer assembly. They’ve shown that the particles can effectively combat cancer in mouse studies.
To help move these nanoparticles closer to human use, the researchers have now come up with a manufacturing technique that allows them to generate larger quantities of the particles, in a fraction of the time.
“There’s a lot of promise with the nanoparticle systems we’ve been developing, and we’ve been really excited more recently with the successes that we’ve been seeing in animal models for our treatments for ovarian cancer in particular,” says Hammond, who is also MIT’s vice provost for faculty and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “Ultimately, we need to be able to bring this to a scale where a company is able to manufacture these on a large level.”
Hammond and Darrell Irvine, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Advanced Functional Materials. Ivan Pires PhD ’24, now a postdoc at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a visiting scientist at the Koch Institute, and Ezra Gordon ’24 are the lead authors of paper. Heikyung Suh, an MIT research technician, is also an author.
A streamlined process
More than a decade ago, Hammond’s lab developed a novel technique for building nanoparticles with highly controlled architectures. This approach allows layers with different properties to be laid down on the surface of a nanoparticle by alternately exposing the surface to positively and negatively charged polymers.
Each layer can be embedded with drug molecules or other therapeutics. The layers can also carry targeting molecules that help the particles find and enter cancer cells.
Using the strategy that Hammond’s lab originally developed, one layer is applied at a time, and after each application, the particles go through a centrifugation step to remove any excess polymer. This is time-intensive and would be difficult to scale up to large-scale production, the researchers say.
More recently, a graduate student in Hammond’s lab developed an alternative approach to purifying the particles, known as tangential flow filtration. However, while this streamlined the process, it still was limited by its manufacturing complexity and maximum scale of production.
“Although the use of tangential flow filtration is helpful, it’s still a very small-batch process, and a clinical investigation requires that we would have many doses available for a significant number of patients,” Hammond says.
To create a larger-scale manufacturing method, the researchers used a microfluidic mixing device that allows them to sequentially add new polymer layers as the particles flow through a microchannel within the device. For each layer, the researchers can calculate exactly how much polymer is needed, which eliminates the need to purify the particles after each addition.
“That is really important because separations are the most costly and time-consuming steps in these kinds of systems,” Hammond says.
This strategy eliminates the need for manual polymer mixing, streamlines production, and integrates good manufacturing practice (GMP)-compliant processes. The FDA’s GMP requirements ensure that products meet safety standards and can be manufactured in a consistent fashion, which would be highly challenging and costly using the previous step-wise batch process. The microfluidic device that the researchers used in this study is already used for GMP manufacturing of other types of nanoparticles, including mRNA vaccines.
“With the new approach, there’s much less chance of any sort of operator mistake or mishaps,” Pires says. “This is a process that can be readily implemented in GMP, and that’s really the key step here. We can create an innovation within the layer-by-layer nanoparticles and quickly produce it in a manner that we could go into clinical trials with.”
Scaled-up production
Using this approach, the researchers can generate 15 milligrams of nanoparticles (enough for about 50 doses) in just a few minutes, while the original technique would take close to an hour to create the same amount. This could enable the production of more than enough particles for clinical trials and patient use, the researchers say.
“To scale up with this system, you just keep running the chip, and it is much easier to produce more of your material,” Pires says.
To demonstrate their new production technique, the researchers created nanoparticles coated with a cytokine called interleukin-12 (IL-12). Hammond’s lab has previously shown that IL-12 delivered by layer-by-layer nanoparticles can activate key immune cells and slow ovarian tumor growth in mice.
In this study, the researchers found that IL-12-loaded particles manufactured using the new technique showed similar performance as the original layer-by-layer nanoparticles. And, not only do these nanoparticles bind to cancer tissue, but they show a unique ability to not enter the cancer cells. This allows the nanoparticles to serve as markers on the cancer cells that activate the immune system locally in the tumor. In mouse models of ovarian cancer, this treatment can lead to both tumor growth delay and even cures.
The researchers have filed for a patent on the technology and are now working with MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation in hopes of potentially forming a company to commercialize the technology. While they are initially focusing on cancers of the abdominal cavity, such as ovarian cancer, the work could also be applied to other types of cancer, including glioblastoma, the researchers say.
The research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Marble Center for Nanomedicine, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.
MIT researchers Paula Hammond, Ivan Pires, and Ezra Gordon have developed a way to rapidly manufacture specialized nanoparticles that can be used for targeted delivery of cancer drugs and other therapeutics.
Cambridge is leading one of four projects receiving new funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to model the risks and impacts of solar radiation modification (SRM).
Monuments tell stories, but not always the whole story. Professor of architecture Silke Langenberg on why we need to take a broader approach to heritage conservation and which sites also deserve protection, in this interview to mark the 50th anniversary of the European Architectural Heritage Year.
NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial arm of NUS, celebrated the opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo, its second office in Japan on 28 March 2025. The new Tokyo office strengthens NUS’ role in the global start-up ecosystem and opens new doors for entrepreneurs, made possible by strong collaborations with Japanese partners like JR East, its key partner for BLOCK71 Tokyo.
The partnership between NUS and JR East began in September 2023 with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to promote entrepreneurial opportunities between Singapore and Japan. That same year, NUS launched the NUS Enterprise Market Immersion Programme in Japan, with JR East as one of its partners. This programme has enabled NUS start-ups like M.I. Cloud Technologies and Mycotech Lab to explore the Japanese market and connect with potential corporate partners.
Building on this momentum, NUS teamed up earlier this year with JR East and ICMG Group, a leading business co-creation partner for Japanese companies, to launch a programme aimed at advancing open innovation strategies in Southeast Asia. This initiative encourages Japanese companies to collaborate with start-ups to create new products and services, accelerate growth, and bring innovative solutions to market faster.
The opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo marks a significant milestone in the collaboration between NUS and its Japanese partners, reinforcing the shared commitment to developing robust start-up ecosystems in both countries. Located at TAKANAWA GATEWAY Link Scholars’ Hub, BLOCK71 Tokyo will support the growth of Southeast Asian technology-driven start-ups in Japan, contributing to an urban development focus on environmental sustainability, mobility and robotics, and smart health. It will also provide Japanese start-ups with the resources needed to expand into Southeast Asia and beyond.
"Japan’s strong foundation in technology and research makes it an ideal environment for start-up growth. It ranks among the world’s top three countries for patent applications and invests over 3 per cent of its GDP in R&D, one of the highest globally,” said NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye at the opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo.
“This creates immense potential for innovation. With BLOCK71 Tokyo located in the country’s latest innovation hub, we have a strategic platform to connect start-ups and drive cross-border collaboration. To amplify our impact, we are partnering one of Japan’s top universities, a major corporation, and a leading venture capital firm, all sharing our vision to foster deep tech innovation and build a robust global ecosystem,” he added.
The BLOCK71 Japan team has since supported over 15 start-ups following the successful launch of BLOCK71 Nagoya in November 2024. BLOCK71 is NUS Enterprise’s global network of physical accelerators, providing start-ups with resources, mentorship, and access to international markets across 11 cities.
NUS collaborates with Japanese partners, who will invest about S$10 million to spur global venture creation
To deepen its impact, NUS inked three new partnerships in the lead-up to the opening of BLOCK71 Tokyo. Through these strategic collaborations, NUS will reinforce its position as a leading start-up university in the global innovation landscape, nurturing entrepreneurial mindsets and empowering the next generation of technology entrepreneurs.
Central Japan Innovation Capital
The first partnership is with Central Japan Innovation Capital (CJIC), a subsidiary of the Tokai National Higher Education and Research System. CJIC will invest up to 5 per cent of its assets under management in NUS-affiliated deep tech start-ups, supporting their growth and expansion into the Japanese and Southeast Asian markets. The fund aims to raise over S$40 million by November 2025. This collaboration will also provide broader opportunities for knowledge exchange and cross-border innovation.
Kyoto University
Beyond funding, NUS is enhancing entrepreneurial support for deep tech start-ups through its partnership with Kyoto University. As a first step, Kyoto University will send start-ups to join the NUS Graduate Research Innovation Programme (NUS GRIP). They will also become the first overseas university partner to offer a localised version of the programme. This will empower Kyoto University’s graduate students, researchers, and alumni to transform research into impactful deep tech ventures, addressing some of the social challenges in Asia and seizing new opportunities.
Both universities will also offer exchange programmes to foster cross-border entrepreneurial experiences. Kyoto University students will have the opportunity to intern at NUS GRIP start-ups, while NUS GRIP start-ups can gain hands-on experience from Kyoto University Innovation Capital Co. Ltd, the university’s venture capital arm.
TIS Inc
NUS will expand its entrepreneurship efforts to build a globally connected start-up ecosystem through a partnership with TIS Inc, one of Japan's leading IT companies. Together, they will launch the Deep Tech Seed to A Growth Expansion Programme (Deep-SAGE), a tailored start-up acceleration initiative to help seed-stage start-ups worldwide scale towards pre-Series A and Series A funding.
Over the next three years, TIS Inc will invest a total of S$7.6 million in Deep-SAGE, supporting up to 30 start-ups. As part of this commitment, at least S$500,000 will be allocated annually to fund a minimum of two start-ups per cohort. The programme, delivered by BLOCK71, will provide structured support through virtual mentorship sessions and workshops. Additionally, start-ups will gain access to incubation opportunities at BLOCK71 offices in 11 cities, including Singapore, Silicon Valley, Saigon and Suzhou.
Deepening market immersion and cultural exchange in Tokyo
Building on the collaboration between NUS and JR East, and riding on the success of its second Japan Immersion Programme in Nagoya held in 2024, BLOCK71 Japan will launch the third edition in Tokyo in May 2025. Start-ups that participated in the 2024 programme have gained valuable insights into Japan’s manufacturing landscape and went on to build industry connections, secure customers, and develop proof-of-concept projects, all of which are crucial for breaking into Japan’s competitive market.
Robotics firm RoPlus had a fruitful experience participating in the Japan Immersion Programme organised by BLOCK71 Japan in 2024, said Mr Low Jin Huat, the start-up’s co-founder. “We had the opportunity to engage in individual meetings with stakeholders, including end-users and potential investors. Additionally, we showcased our products at Messe Nagoya, where we connected with various industry partners and increased market awareness.”
“Through this programme, we successfully secured a distributor for the Japanese market and engaged two potential end-users,” Mr Low added, as he thanked BLOCK71 Japan for “fostering a supportive ecosystem and providing a strategic platform for NUS spin-offs to enter the Japanese market.”
Another start-up said the programme enabled it to make valuable connections with Japanese companies. “We were able to secure a pilot project with one of the companies we met during this programme. It has helped us shape our strategy for entering the Japanese market,” said Mr Zaid Ahmed Khan, CEO of M.I. Cloud Technologies.
The 2025 edition will focus on the three key themes of TAKANAWA GATEWAY CITY, namely, environmental sustainability, mobility and robotics, and smart health. It will welcome five Southeast Asian start-ups, who will have the chance to showcase their solutions at the upcoming GATEWAY Tech TAKANAWA, an event for large corporations and start-ups to exchange innovative ideas and solutions. This immersive experience will further strengthen ties between Southeast Asia and Japan, equipping start-ups with the knowledge and networks they need to enter new markets and drive innovation.
Panelist Neal McCluskey, who favors abolishing the Department of Education, expressed concern over the government’s “haphazard” methods.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Panelists weigh potential consequences of Trump plan to eliminate agency, transfer authority to states
A panel of experts convened Tuesday at the Graduate School of Education to weigh the potential consequences of President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education.
A cabinet-level executive branch agency, the department oversees policy, administers federal funding for schools, and ensures equal access to education. It also manages federal student aid programs, including Pell grants, supports research, and collects data. The agency oversees a budget of nearly $80 billion, of which about $34 billion helps low-income students and students with disabilities. It also manages more than $1.6 trillion in student loans.
In the days since the president’s order to “facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states,” the agency, led by Linda McMahon, has canceled research contracts and cut staff by nearly half. Democratic attorneys general, teachers’ unions, and education organizations, among others, have filed 19 separate lawsuits challenging the administration’s education agenda, arguing that the move to close down the agency is an illegal overreach. The department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, and opponents of the Trump order say that shutting it down would also require congressional action.
Martin West (from left), Brian Gill, Catherine Lhamon, Neal McCluskey, and Andrew Rotherham.
Educators, students, and families find themselves in a confusing and unsettling environment, said Martin West, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education, who moderated the conversation.
Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, favors abolishing the agency and restoring control of public schools to the states, but was critical of the government’s methods.
“My biggest concern is that this is being done so haphazardly — like a bull in a china shop,” he said. “I want to see the Department of Education go away, but if it’s done without any planning, in a way that is haphazard, that is just chaos, I’m afraid that it’ll make it look like what I want is horrendous.”
Andrew Rotherham, co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether, a national educational nonprofit, highlighted the potential fallout of lost funds in high-poverty areas across the country. Through Title I, the department provides financial assistance to schools with high numbers of children from low-income families.
“You’re obviously going to see impacts in high-poverty school districts,” said Rotherham. “In terms of the politics of this, it’s important to remember that that money gets spent in red communities, blue communities, red states, blue states, purple states. Everyone’s affected.”
“It’s important to remember that that money gets spent in red communities, blue communities, red states, blue states, purple states. Everyone’s affected.”
Andrew Rotherham, Bellwether
Catherine Lhamon, a former Ed Department assistant secretary for civil rights, lamented the implications for regional civil rights offices, which are responsible for enforcing protections guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law. Seven of 12 offices have been shuttered, she said.
“That means that fewer than half of the investigators who are struggling to do the work already are now left to do the entire nation’s civil rights enforcement work, and to guarantee that no one experiences discrimination based on race, sex, and disability in schools,” said Lhamon. “When I left on Jan. 20, our staff were carrying on average 50 cases per person, which is an untenable caseload.”
She added: “What we know is that schools are incubators for how to be in the world, how to participate in democracy, and how to be effective in our communities. … We are walking away from six decades of commitments to core protections for who each of us is. I find that terrifying.”
The panelists also voiced concerns about cuts to research administered through the agency’s Institute of Education Sciences, which has seen more than 100 layoffs. Brian Gill, a senior fellow at Mathematica, noted that his organization last month saw the cancelation of several projects contracted by the institute. The long-term effects are a big worry, he said.
“Changes to research aren’t going to have immediate effects in schools,” Gill said. “In the research world, it’s been a big deal. If you care about developing research and new programs in education, and making the schools work better in the long term, this is likely to matter.”
The MIT School of Science welcomes Jess Speedie, one of eight recipients of the 2025 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. The announcement was made March 27 by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, named after the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star, was established in 2017 to provide postdocs with the opportunity to conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy.
Speedie, who expects to complete her PhD in astronomy at the University of Victoria, Canada, this summer, will be hosted by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). She will be mentored by Kerr-McGee Career Development Professor Richard Teague as she uses a combination of observational data and simulations to study the birth of planets and the processes of planetary formation.
“The planetary environment is where all the good stuff collects … it has the greatest potential for the most interesting things in the universe to happen, such as the origin of life,” she says. “Planets, for me, are where the stories happen.”
Speedie’s work has focused on understanding “cosmic nurseries” and the detection and characterization of the youngest planets in the galaxy. A lot of this work has made use of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), located in northern Chile. Made up of a collection of 66 parabolic dishes, ALMA studies the universe with radio wavelengths, and Speedie has developed a novel approach to find signals in the data of gravitational instability in protoplanetary disks, a method of planetary formation.
“One of the big, big questions right now in the community focused on planet formation is, where are the planets? It is that simple. We think they’re developing in these disks, but we’ve detected so few of them,” she says.
While working as a fellow, Speedie is aiming to develop an algorithm that carefully aligns and stacks a decade of ALMA observational data to correct for a blurring effect that happens when combining images captured at different times. Doing so should produce the sharpest, most sensitive images of early planetary systems to date.
She is also interested in studying infant planets, especially ones that may be forming in disks around protoplanets, rather than stars. Modeling how these ingredient materials in orbit behave could give astronomers a way to measure the mass of young planets.
“What’s exciting is the potential for discovery. I have this sense that the universe as a whole is infinitely more creative than human minds — the kinds of things that happen out there, you can’t make that up. It’s better than science fiction,” she says.
The other 51 Pegasi b Fellows and their host institutions this year are Nick Choksi (Caltech), Yan Liang (Yale University), Sagnick Mukherjee (Arizona State University), Matthew Nixon (Arizona State University), Julia Santos (Harvard University), Nour Skaf (University of Hawaii), and Jerry Xuan (University of California at Los Angeles).
The fellowship provides up to $450,000 of support over three years for independent research, a generous salary and discretionary fund, mentorship at host institutions, an annual summit to develop professional networks and foster collaboration, and an option to apply for another grant to support a future position in the United States.
MIT welcomes 51 Pegasi b Fellow Jess Speedie, who will combine observational data and simulations to trace the imprints of newborn worlds and reveal hidden processes of planet formation. “Planets, for me, are where the stories happen,” she says.
For 100 years, a top stop for the world’s medievalists
Sean Gilsdorf, administrative director of the Committee on Medieval Studies, delivers opening remarks in Sanders Theatre.
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
800 academics convened in Harvard Yard for workshops, presentations, and discussion
The spread of misinformation online may feel like a modern problem. But more than 600 years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer, author of “The Canterbury Tales,” worried about the same thing.
According to Fernanda García-Oteyza, a Ph.D. candidate in religion at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, echoes of Chaucer’s Middle-English poem “The House of Fame,” where rumor is depicted as an uncontrollable force of distortion, can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This” (2021), a contemporary novel about the internet’s ability to alter truth and destroy literary voice.
“Both Lockwood and Chaucer take up questions of poetic authority, creativity, and inspiration, poking at the troubled relationship between reality and fiction, between rumor and fame, diving headfirst into the cacophony of speech that produces them all,” García-Oteyza explained to an audience at Sever Hall.
“It’s very exciting to be bringing the Medieval Academy back to our home and to be able to demonstrate how medieval studies has changed and grown over the past hundred years.”
Sean Gilsdorf
García-Oteyza was one of nearly two dozen Harvard students who presented at the Medieval Academy of America’s 100th annual meeting in late March. The gathering is a top destination for medievalists worldwide. This time around, more than 800 academics representing 23 countries convened in Harvard Yard for a three-day conference featuring 500 speakers, plenary addresses, workshops, exhibits, and concerts.
“It’s been really fascinating to see how interdisciplinary the field is,” García-Oteyza said of her first medieval studies-focused conference. “It’s been really generative, I’ve been able to meet a lot of people, and recognize faces that I’ve seen on book jackets.”
Elena Shadrina lectured on medieval trade agreements.
The event was a homecoming, of sorts, for the Medieval Academy of America, established in Cambridge and Boston in the early 1920s. The conference was last held on Harvard’s campus for the 50th anniversary in 1975.
“It’s very exciting to be bringing the Medieval Academy back to our home and to be able to demonstrate how medieval studies has changed and grown over the past hundred years,” said Sean Gilsdorf, administrative director of the Committee on Medieval Studies at Harvard as well as a lecturer on medieval studies and co-chair of the conference’s program committee. “These historical moments offer a really great opportunity to think retrospectively but also to think prospectively. Where are we going as a field? What’s the scholarship that’s going to move us into the next century?”
This year’s conference reflected the field’s expanding global scope, with presentations of papers on the medieval worlds of the Mediterranean, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Africa, Central and East Asia, and Islamic regions. A daylong pedagogy workshop on teaching the Global Middle Ages, organized by Assistant Professor of English Anna Wilson, encouraged graduate students to think more globally as medievalists.
Elena Shadrina, Ph.D. candidate in the History Department, presented her research on medieval Venetian trade agreements, focusing on how verbal contracts, witnesses, and forms of written documentation were used by merchants before implementation of an official register system. Colin Brady, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, presented his work on the revival of the Óenach Tailteann (Tailteann Games) regional assembly and sporting festival in 10th-century Ireland.
Emily Sun, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, presented her research on Meghan Purvis’ 2013 translation of “Beowulf,” focusing on Purvis’ perspective as an American woman approaching the Old English poem from across geographical and cultural distance. After the COVID-19 lockdowns, Sun said, she has renewed appreciation for attending conferences such as this one. These events provide opportunities to bring her work beyond the computer screen and into real conversations with other academics.
“This is a big part of what scholarship actually is — meeting your bibliography and having colleagues and professors and scholars from all rungs of the ladder at panels with you, watching your papers, and giving you ideas,” Sun said. “Seeing the recurring cast of characters who also happen to be your scholarly heroes is amazing.”
The annual event honored 420 staff members who achieved service milestones, as well as the winners of the President's Achievement Award and the Donald Griffin '23 Management Award.
The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of 12 faculty members, including three full professors and nine assistant professors.
When major disasters hit and structures collapse, people can become trapped under rubble. Extricating victims from these hazardous environments can be dangerous and physically exhausting. To help rescue teams navigate these structures, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, developed the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT). SPROUT is a vine robot — a soft robot that can grow and maneuver around obstacles and through small spaces. First responders can deploy SPROUT under collapsed structures to explore, map, and find optimum ingress routes through debris.
"The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where even the most hardened technology struggles to operate. The fundamental way a vine robot works mitigates a lot of the challenges that other platforms face," says Chad Council, a member of the SPROUT team, which is led by Nathaniel Hanson. The program is conducted out of the laboratory's Human Resilience Technology Group.
First responders regularly integrate technology, such as cameras and sensors, into their workflows to understand complex operating environments. However, many of these technologies have limitations. For example, cameras specially built for search-and-rescue operations can only probe on a straight path inside of a collapsed structure. If a team wants to search further into a pile, they need to cut an access hole to get to the next area of the space. Robots are good for exploring on top of rubble piles, but are ill-suited for searching in tight, unstable structures and costly to repair if damaged. The challenge that SPROUT addresses is how to get under collapsed structures using a low-cost, easy-to-operate robot that can carry cameras and sensors and traverse winding paths.
SPROUT is composed of an inflatable tube made of airtight fabric that unfurls from a fixed base. The tube inflates with air, and a motor controls its deployment. As the tube extends into rubble, it can flex around corners and squeeze through narrow passages. A camera and other sensors mounted to the tip of the tube image and map the environment the robot is navigating. An operator steers SPROUT with joysticks, watching a screen that displays the robot's camera feed. Currently, SPROUT can deploy up to 10 feet, and the team is working on expanding it to 25 feet.
When building SPROUT, the team overcame a number of challenges related to the robot's flexibility. Because the robot is made of a deformable material that bends at many points, determining and controlling the robot's shape as it unfurls through the environment is difficult — think of trying to control an expanding wiggly sprinkler toy. Pinpointing how to apply air pressure within the robot so that steering is as simple as pointing the joystick forward to make the robot move forward was essential for system adoption by emergency responders. In addition, the team had to design the tube to minimize friction while the robot grows and engineer the controls for steering.
While a teleoperated system is a good starting point for assessing the hazards of void spaces, the team is also finding new ways to apply robot technologies to the domain, such as using data captured by the robot to build maps of the subsurface voids. "Collapse events are rare but devastating events. In robotics, we would typically want ground truth measurements to validate our approaches, but those simply don't exist for collapsed structures," Hanson says. To solve this problem, Hanson and his team made a simulator that allows them to create realistic depictions of collapsed structures and develop algorithms that map void spaces.
SPROUT was developed in collaboration with Margaret Coad, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an MIT graduate. When looking for collaborators, Hanson — a graduate of Notre Dame — was already aware of Coad's work on vine robots for industrial inspection. Coad's expertise, together with the laboratory's experience in engineering, strong partnership with urban search-and-rescue teams, and ability to develop fundamental technologies and prepare them for transition to industry, "made this a really natural pairing to join forces and work on research for a traditionally underserved community," Hanson says. "As one of the primary inventors of vine robots, Professor Coad brings invaluable expertise on the fabrication and modeling of these robots."
Lincoln Laboratory tested SPROUT with first responders at the Massachusetts Task Force 1 training site in Beverly, Massachusetts. The tests allowed the researchers to improve the durability and portability of the robot and learn how to grow and steer the robot more efficiently. The team is planning a larger field study this spring.
"Urban search-and-rescue teams and first responders serve critical roles in their communities but typically have little-to-no research and development budgets," Hanson says. "This program has enabled us to push the technology readiness level of vine robots to a point where responders can engage with a hands-on demonstration of the system."
Sensing in constrained spaces is not a problem unique to disaster response communities, Hanson adds. The team envisions the technology being used in the maintenance of military systems or critical infrastructure with difficult-to-access locations.
The initial program focused on mapping void spaces, but future work aims to localize hazards and assess the viability and safety of operations through rubble. "The mechanical performance of the robots has an immediate effect, but the real goal is to rethink the way sensors are used to enhance situational awareness for rescue teams," says Hanson. "Ultimately, we want SPROUT to provide a complete operating picture to teams before anyone enters a rubble pile."
Left to right: Summer research intern Ankush Dhawan and Lincoln Laboratory staff members Chad Council and Nathaniel Hanson test a vine robot in a laboratory setting.
When major disasters hit and structures collapse, people can become trapped under rubble. Extricating victims from these hazardous environments can be dangerous and physically exhausting. To help rescue teams navigate these structures, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, developed the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT). SPROUT is a vine robot — a soft robot that can grow and maneuver around obstacles and through small spaces. First responders can deploy SPROUT under collapsed structures to explore, map, and find optimum ingress routes through debris.
"The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where even the most hardened technology struggles to operate. The fundamental way a vine robot works mitigates a lot of the challenges that other platforms face," says Chad Council, a member of the SPROUT team, which is led by Nathaniel Hanson. The program is conducted out of the laboratory's Human Resilience Technology Group.
First responders regularly integrate technology, such as cameras and sensors, into their workflows to understand complex operating environments. However, many of these technologies have limitations. For example, cameras specially built for search-and-rescue operations can only probe on a straight path inside of a collapsed structure. If a team wants to search further into a pile, they need to cut an access hole to get to the next area of the space. Robots are good for exploring on top of rubble piles, but are ill-suited for searching in tight, unstable structures and costly to repair if damaged. The challenge that SPROUT addresses is how to get under collapsed structures using a low-cost, easy-to-operate robot that can carry cameras and sensors and traverse winding paths.
SPROUT is composed of an inflatable tube made of airtight fabric that unfurls from a fixed base. The tube inflates with air, and a motor controls its deployment. As the tube extends into rubble, it can flex around corners and squeeze through narrow passages. A camera and other sensors mounted to the tip of the tube image and map the environment the robot is navigating. An operator steers SPROUT with joysticks, watching a screen that displays the robot's camera feed. Currently, SPROUT can deploy up to 10 feet, and the team is working on expanding it to 25 feet.
When building SPROUT, the team overcame a number of challenges related to the robot's flexibility. Because the robot is made of a deformable material that bends at many points, determining and controlling the robot's shape as it unfurls through the environment is difficult — think of trying to control an expanding wiggly sprinkler toy. Pinpointing how to apply air pressure within the robot so that steering is as simple as pointing the joystick forward to make the robot move forward was essential for system adoption by emergency responders. In addition, the team had to design the tube to minimize friction while the robot grows and engineer the controls for steering.
While a teleoperated system is a good starting point for assessing the hazards of void spaces, the team is also finding new ways to apply robot technologies to the domain, such as using data captured by the robot to build maps of the subsurface voids. "Collapse events are rare but devastating events. In robotics, we would typically want ground truth measurements to validate our approaches, but those simply don't exist for collapsed structures," Hanson says. To solve this problem, Hanson and his team made a simulator that allows them to create realistic depictions of collapsed structures and develop algorithms that map void spaces.
SPROUT was developed in collaboration with Margaret Coad, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an MIT graduate. When looking for collaborators, Hanson — a graduate of Notre Dame — was already aware of Coad's work on vine robots for industrial inspection. Coad's expertise, together with the laboratory's experience in engineering, strong partnership with urban search-and-rescue teams, and ability to develop fundamental technologies and prepare them for transition to industry, "made this a really natural pairing to join forces and work on research for a traditionally underserved community," Hanson says. "As one of the primary inventors of vine robots, Professor Coad brings invaluable expertise on the fabrication and modeling of these robots."
Lincoln Laboratory tested SPROUT with first responders at the Massachusetts Task Force 1 training site in Beverly, Massachusetts. The tests allowed the researchers to improve the durability and portability of the robot and learn how to grow and steer the robot more efficiently. The team is planning a larger field study this spring.
"Urban search-and-rescue teams and first responders serve critical roles in their communities but typically have little-to-no research and development budgets," Hanson says. "This program has enabled us to push the technology readiness level of vine robots to a point where responders can engage with a hands-on demonstration of the system."
Sensing in constrained spaces is not a problem unique to disaster response communities, Hanson adds. The team envisions the technology being used in the maintenance of military systems or critical infrastructure with difficult-to-access locations.
The initial program focused on mapping void spaces, but future work aims to localize hazards and assess the viability and safety of operations through rubble. "The mechanical performance of the robots has an immediate effect, but the real goal is to rethink the way sensors are used to enhance situational awareness for rescue teams," says Hanson. "Ultimately, we want SPROUT to provide a complete operating picture to teams before anyone enters a rubble pile."
Left to right: Summer research intern Ankush Dhawan and Lincoln Laboratory staff members Chad Council and Nathaniel Hanson test a vine robot in a laboratory setting.
C. Cem Tasan has been appointed director of MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), effective March 15. The POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), Tasan succeeds Lionel “Kim” Kimerling, who has held the post of interim director since Carl Thompson stepped down in August 2023.
“MRL is a strategic asset for MIT, and Cem has a clear vision to build upon the lab’s engagement with materials researchers across the breadth of the Institute as well as with external collaborators and sponsors,” wrote Vice President for Research Ian Waitz, in a letter announcing the appointment.
The MRL is a leading interdisciplinary center dedicated to materials science and engineering. As a hub for innovation, the MRL unites researchers across disciplines, fosters industry and government partnerships, and drives advancements that shape the future of technology. Through groundbreaking research, the MRL supports MIT’s mission to advance science and technology for the benefit of society, enabling discoveries that have a lasting impact across industries and everyday life.
“MRL has a position at the core of materials research activities across departments at MIT,” Tasan says. “It can only grow from where it is, right in the heart of the Institute’s innovative hub.”
As director, Tasan will lead MRL’s research mission, with a view to strengthening internal collaboration and building upon the interdisciplinary laboratory’s long history of industry engagement. He will also take on responsibility for the management of Building 13, the Vannevar Bush Building, which houses key research facilities and labs.
“MRL is in very good hands with Cem Tasan’s leadership,” says Kimerling, the outgoing interim director. “His vision for a united MIT materials community whose success is stimulated by the convergence of basic science and engineering solutions provides the nutrition for MIT’s creative relevance to society. His collegial nature, motivating energy, and patient approach will make it happen.”
Tasan is a metallurgist with expertise in the fracture in metals and the design of damage-resistant alloys. Among other advances, his lab has demonstrated a multiscale means of designing high-strength/high-ductility titanium alloys; and explained the stress intensification mechanism by which human hair damages hard steel razors, pointing the way to stronger and longer-lasting blades.
“We need better materials that operate in more and more extreme conditions, for almost all of our critical industries and applications,” says Tasan. “Materials research in MRL identifies interdisciplinary pathways to address this important challenge.”
He studied in Turkey and the Netherlands, earning his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology before spending several years leading a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials in Germany. He joined the MIT faculty in 2016 and earned tenure in 2022.
“Cem has led one of the major collaborative research teams at MRL, and he expects to continue developing a strong community among the MIT materials research faculty,” wrote Waitz in his letter on March 14.
The MRL was established in 2017 through the merger of the MIT Materials Processing Center (MPC) and the Center for Materials Science and Engineering. This unification aimed to strengthen MIT’s leadership in materials research by fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and advancing breakthroughs in areas such as energy conversion, quantum materials, and materials sustainability.
From 2008 to 2017, Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, served as director of the MPC. During his tenure, he played a crucial role in expanding materials research and building partnerships with industry, government agencies, and academic institutions. With the formation of the MRL in 2017, Thompson was appointed its inaugural director, guiding the new laboratory to prominence as a hub for cutting-edge materials science. He stepped down from this role in August 2023.
At that time, Kimerling stepped in to serve as interim director of MRL. He brought special knowledge of the lab’s history, having served as director of the MPC from 1993 to 2008, transforming it into a key industry-academic interface. Under his leadership, the MPC became a crucial gateway for industry partners to collaborate with MIT faculty across materials-related disciplines, bridging fundamental research with industrial applications. His vision helped drive technological innovation and economic development by aligning academic expertise with industry needs. As interim director of MRL these past 18 months, Kimerling has ensured continuity in leadership.
“I’m delighted that Cem will be the next MRL director,” says Thompson. “He’s a great fit. He has been affiliated with MPC, and then MRL, since the beginning of his faculty career at MIT. He’s also played a key role in leading a renaissance in physical metallurgy at MIT and has many close ties to industry.”
Nicholas Burns on being U.S. envoy to China, returning to Harvard, lessons from long career in diplomacy
It was a challenging tour of duty.
Ambassador Nicholas Burns makes his return this week to teaching at Harvard Kennedy School after being tapped in 2021 to serve as the U.S. representative to China. Though U.S.-China relations historically are complicated, Burns’ tenure in Beijing came at a particularly difficult time.
Both countries were grappling with the pandemic, and while the U.S. economy slowly recovered, China’s faltered under its Zero COVID policy. The Biden administration imposed new, tougher sanctions on China over its human rights violations and limited exports of critical technology like semiconductors.
In this edited conversation, Burns, the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, spoke to the Gazette about his experience and about what gives the U.S. a strategic advantage over China.
Relations between China and the U.S. were particularly strained during your time as U.S. ambassador. What compelled you to leave Harvard to take on something this difficult?
I had been in the career Foreign Service for 27 years and then came to Harvard for 13 years. So public service was the main mission of my career, and it’s something that I found great value in and enjoyed.
When President Biden called me just after the 2020 election to ask me to go, how could I say no? First of all, I deeply believe in public service. Second, the U.S.-China relationship is one of the most important, if not the most important, relationship we have, and highly problematic, challenging, competitive, disputatious.
I felt it was a unique opportunity to get back into government, to go back into what Teddy Roosevelt called “the arena of public service.” I had been urging all of my students for many years to go into that arena, and I felt if I’m being asked, I’ve got to go, too. I’m very grateful for the opportunity. It was, in many ways, the most difficult job I’ve ever had, and in many ways, the most worthwhile, as well.
What made it worthwhile?
It’s a consequential relationship for both countries. China is our most important competitor in the world. It’s the second-largest economy; it’s the second-strongest military power next to us; it’s our strongest adversary and competitor in the world. A lot is riding on how we manage that relationship for the decades ahead.
In addition to the military and technology and trade competitions, we have competing ideas and opposite ideas about human freedom, about democracy, about human rights, and the ability of people to speak out. The lack of freedoms in China and increasingly repressive and fearful environment made the agenda between us extraordinarily difficult and contested.
How challenging was it to communicate U.S. policy and values to the Chinese people? Are they aware they have less freedom than others around the world?
They’re very much aware that they don’t have access to free information unless you have a virtual private network (VPN), which most Chinese don’t have.
They’re in a phase of Chinese history where a highly educated public does not have a complete view of its own history, and they’re not aware of dissenting views that might contradict and criticize Chinese Communist practices. That’s a major hill to climb if you’re a government like ours that is trying to both manage a difficult and competitive relationship with the government and have a relationship between our society and 1.4 billion Chinese.
So, we spent a lot of time trying to relate and connect with the Chinese people. The Chinese government puts enormous resources into its vast propaganda network to distort our history, to distort what our president or secretary of state was saying or doing, or what I was saying or doing, and we faced a high degree of censorship on Chinese social media. We were trying to get free and fair and factual information into the Chinese bloodstream, and the communist authorities were trying to keep it out.
I had a chance to visit many universities, to speak with many professors and many students. After a couple of minutes, people are frank. It was not that everybody agreed with us. Sometimes in those sessions with students or faculty, I would face a lot of criticism, but I thought that was fair. I came from a university environment here at Harvard. I’m used to the classroom. You want students to speak up, and I certainly felt that students in China had a right to speak up, and sometimes they were very grateful for the opportunity to talk to an American and were very admiring of many parts of the culture. Sometimes they were very critical. But just having the dialogue, I thought, was a step forward and having connection.
What was the most rewarding or the most difficult part of the job?
The most difficult was dealing with the Chinese authorities on issues where we have entirely opposite views, sometimes a different interpretation of the facts, sometimes a different set of facts. That made it hard to negotiate.
We brought speakers; we brought American artists, musicians, sports figures to China to show the Chinese people this side of American culture.
In 2024, my last full year there, on 98 separate occasions, the Chinese authorities interfered with those public diplomacy people-to-people efforts. They actually turned off the electricity in a hall where an American musical group was going to perform. They would actively warn Chinese students not to come to seminars or writers’ workshops.
So that set of problems — not agreeing on the same facts, having wildly different interpretation of facts, active measures taken by the Chinese government to disrupt normal programs that any two countries would want to have with each other — that was the most frustrating part of the job.
The most rewarding was to stand by the flag again, to be back in government, to represent the United States as ambassador in this extraordinarily important country to us and to work alongside the men and women of Mission China. That was the best part of the job, being part of that team, being the leader of that team, working alongside them, and being proud of what they represent for our country.
Is diplomacy any different today from when you first joined the State Department in 1980?
There’s an aspect of diplomacy that remains unchanged. Especially in a difficult relationship like the U.S. and China, you want to make sure that each capital has a very sophisticated and detailed understanding of the other’s position on issues and of their motivations, good or bad. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is communications technology, and the news cycle now is 24 hours a day. It comes from a million different sources. There’s much more transparency. There’s a greater obligation, certainly in the United States and democratic countries, to be open with their publics and to describe exactly what we’re doing and not to hide as many things as were hidden in the past. That’s something that we should be very good at.
That’s why I think it’s been a major mistake to try to deconstruct the federal workforce over the last couple of months, to abolish USAID, a great organization doing necessary and very important things for the American people around the world, and to take away Radio Free Europe/Liberty Radio, Radio Free Asia. Millions of people listen to those in authoritarian countries. It’s information that tells the truth about our society and about events that are happening in the world. I’m really concerned that we’re giving China an enormous propaganda advantage here, because we’re creating a vacuum.
“NATO is one of the most important institutions in American history. The fact that we’ve been able to lead it allowed us to keep the peace in the Cold War for five and a half decades.”
You once served as U.S. ambassador to NATO. At HKS, you were faculty chair of the Project on the Transatlantic Relationship. Where is that relationship today?
One of the key lessons I learned in a long diplomatic career is: Be nice to your allies and be faithful to them because they’re multipliers of American power and influence in the world. I certainly saw that at NATO on Sept. 11, 2001, when I was a very new ambassador.
The Canadian ambassador, David Wright, came to me hours after the attack, and said, “We should invoke Article Five of the NATO Treaty.” And within 24 hours, the Europeans and Canadians came to our defense.
They are the best allies we could hope to have. They share our values, and they share our interests. My job in China was made easier by the fact that the NATO countries were acting with us to try to constrain and limit what the Chinese could do in their very aggressive expansion of their own power.
NATO is one of the most important institutions in American history. The fact that we’ve been able to lead it allowed us to keep the peace in the Cold War for five and a half decades. Putin is trying to divide Europe. There’s no question that Russia, if it gets away with its crimes in Ukraine, if it’s a lenient peace agreement that favors Russian interests, then that will simply encourage Putin to be aggressive against Ukraine again, against Moldova, against the Baltic countries (now members of NATO), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
So, there are enormous stakes for the United States in being tough-minded with Russia. Everyone wants the war to end, and I agree that it should end. Let’s try to end the war but negotiate it in a way that makes it far more likely that Putin will be constrained and limited in the future and not emboldened.
How does our relationship with European and East Asian allies affect U.S.-China relations?
China has no real allies in the world. We have over 30 treaty allies in Europe and five treaty allies in the Indo Pacific. This is what gives the United States strategic advantage over China that will play out over the next 10 to 20 to 30 years. It will be one of the most important stories in American history if we are able to retain our strength and protect our democracy and protect democracy around the world, because we deter Chinese aggression.
It would be a mistake of historic proportions to forsake our Indo-Pacific allies and NATO and give up the leadership role that we’ve had. I don’t think the American people will support doing that, and certainly, I don’t think most of our elected politicians in Congress would support it.
“Our mission, particularly at the Kennedy School, is to encourage bright young women and men to go into public service. That mission is more important than ever right now given everything that’s happening in Washington.“
How does it feel to be back at Harvard?
I’m really grateful to return to Harvard. I loved teaching at the Kennedy School. We have a first-rate faculty; we have outstanding students from over 90 countries all around the world. I learned so much from them when I was a professor here, and I’m really pleased to come back.
I’m going to reconstitute the Future of Diplomacy Project to make sure that we’re bringing diplomacy into our studies about global affairs. I’m going to teach a joint course next year with Professor Jim Sebenius of Harvard Business School on negotiations and diplomacy.
It’s one of the greatest institutions I’ve been involved with, and it’s doing great good in the world. Our mission, particularly at the Kennedy School, is to encourage bright young women and men to go into public service. That mission is more important than ever right now given everything that’s happening in Washington.
It’s certainly understandable if students here and elsewhere would feel that a public service career is no longer available to them. Our job is to encourage students, to understand that at the municipal level, at the state level, at the national level, and at the global level, we need good people to go into public service. That is not going to change. The pendulum in the United States, at some point, will swing back to honor public service as we have always done in our history.
AC use to surge as world gets hotter. Harvard startup has a solution.
Novel system works like a coffee filter to dry, cool air more efficiently
Harvard Office of Technology Development Communications
7 min read
Today, systems that cool buildings account for as much as 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That may seem like a small fraction, but it’s significant: double the emissions associated with all air travel, for example.
As the world gets hotter due to climate change, the need for cooling is set to rise substantially. Air conditioning demand is expected to soar by up to 40 percent by 2030. Energy use, and the associated climate-warming emissions, will balloon along with it.
“There’s a climate-change solution here,” said Jonathan Grinham, assistant professor of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “The problem is big, and the market opportunity is big.”
Despite the revolution coming for demand, the technology used to cool spaces has remained relatively stagnant for more than a century. “We’ve lived in the status quo of the bigger industries delivering the same vapor-compression technology,” said Grinham.
Trellis Air, a Harvard startup, is set to disrupt that status quo. Thanks to collaborative efforts from across the University, the company recently launched with aims to drastically reduce the energy needed to run air conditioners with its novel approach to dehumidification.
‘Marriage of raw science and engineering breakthroughs’
Most air conditioners are not all that different from souped-up dehumidifiers. A cooling system pulls in room-temperature air and chills it using chemicals called refrigerants. Water vapor separated from the air is condensed — resulting in that “drip, drip, drip” that air conditioners are notorious for — while the cooler air is released into a room and heat is diverted outside.
Air-conditioning technology also makes air drier, and dehumidifiers use a similar process to condense water out of ambient air. The cool, dry air is then rewarmed and released back into the room.
“A dehumidifier burns a lot of energy,” said Russ Wilcox, Trellis Air CEO. “It’s like driving with one foot on the gas, the other foot on the brake: You’ve got one part making cold, the other part making heat.”
While refrigerants — which have significant planet-warming potential of their own — are at the core of most modern cooling systems, some industrial facilities that need incredibly dry air may also choose what’s called a desiccant air dryer, a system that uses a material like salt to absorb water.
Trellis Air, on the other hand, will rely on a “third way,” of pulling moisture from the air, said Wilcox. Harvard scientists developed a unique membrane capable of separating water vapor directly from the air — similar to a coffee filter. The system uses much less energy than traditional air conditioners and dehumidifiers and is more stable than desiccant systems.
A Trellis Air prototype, pictured alongside a traditional AC unit, is tested in Miami.
To develop the underlying tech, Grinham worked closely with staff scientist Jack Alvarenga and others in the lab of Joanna Aizenberg, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard. Leveraging his deep expertise in architecture and building science, Grinham collaborated with Alvarenga and other researchers in the Aizenberg Lab to prototype materials and conduct the foundational science needed to create Trellis Air’s product.
Membrane dehumidification systems have been attempted in the past, but struggled to achieve high-water selectivity with scalable and robust materials. In addition to developing a workable membrane, the Harvard team designed a novel, 3D-printed tile assembly that allows water to readily pass through while protecting the delicate membrane, which is just 15 microns thick — thinner than a human hair — for long periods of time.
“It was this really nice marriage of raw science and engineering breakthroughs,” said Christopher Petty, OTD’s director of business development for physical sciences.
‘If he says something is worth seeing, it’s usually worth seeing’
OTD protected the intellectual property of the innovations developed at Harvard and licensed it to Trellis Air for further development. Grinham and Alvarenga will stay involved as scientific advisers to the company, as will Aizenberg and Martin Bechthold from the School of Design.
Petty, a former entrepreneur himself, wasn’t initially familiar with the type of tech Grinham and the research team set out to develop. But what he learned about the scope of the air conditioning challenge stunned him, and convinced him of the business’s potential.
“Sometimes it’s enough that it’s a good business, it has to be,” says Petty. “But if you feel you can work on something that might have that kind of impact, then it helps you sleep at night too.”
He began networking to find an entrepreneur who could shepherd the idea from technological breakthrough to big-time business.
Wilcox, an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who had previously popularized the electronic paper-display technology that’s today used in millions of Kindles, was among Petty’s early calls. And his interest was immediately piqued. “If he says something is worth seeing, it’s usually worth seeing,” says Wilcox.
Still, it took more than a dozen meetings before Wilcox decided to become the company’s CEO. Wilcox was convinced from the beginning that the opportunity was a huge one, due to the sheer size of the AC industry, but he decided to make the jump after learning that several past colleagues from his former company, E Ink, were willing to sign on with him.
Starting a company that he believed in with past coworkers “just seemed like the most joyful thing I could do,” he said. “Nothing could be more exciting.”
Wilcox sees three roads to commercialization for Trellis Air: replacing desiccant systems in industrial applications, swapping basement dehumidifiers for more efficient models, and the big-time bet: integrating Trellis Air’s technology with air conditioners across the world. Wilcox says the company will pitch the tech as a “pre-drying module” that will allow ACs to run much more efficiently, consuming much less energy.
The CEO has backed nearly two dozen companies as an investor, and sees big possibilities for Trellis Air, in part because of the huge potential reward. “In order for a deep-tech startup to work, you need a big, bold goal that everyone will decide is worth the risk,” he said. The scope of the air conditioning challenge fits the bill.
To de-risk the tech and show that it can work, Trellis Air has spent the past year prototyping. Before the company launched, a proof-of-concept prototype was piloted in Miami through the team’s Department of Energy Grant with Forrest Meggers at Princeton University and Les Norford at MIT. Next, the team tested a fully integrated system at Harvard’s HouseZero, the headquarters of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, retrofitted as a “living lab” to test and collect data on the technology’s efficiency in a real-world setting. These demonstrations showed what Trellis Air’s tech can do in Boston’s hot, humid summers and the even more inhospitable Miami climate.
Those real-world examples should help give funders confidence in the system’s capabilities.
“It’s one thing to build energy models to say that this is possible, and it’s a whole other thing to actually deliver the physical prototype at scale,” said Alvarenga. “We were able to bring the idea into existence inside the lab and then move beyond the lab into pilot field studies. With Trellis Air we want to go further and scale up a commercial product that can meaningfully reduce the future massive energy and emissions needs of cooling.”
Harvard IP licensed to Trellis Air was funded in part by the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.
The undergraduate financial aid budget is projected to increase 8%, to $306 million, and total graduate student support is projected to rise 7%, to $365 million, for 2025-26.
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 1, 2025, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Robert Sanford Brustein was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
The legacy and influence of Robert Brustein, a major presence in American theater of the 20th century, live on in the 21st. As dean of the Yale School of Drama starting in 1966, Brustein founded the Yale Repertory Theatre, where he worked with playwrights such as Sam Shepherd and David Mamet and with players such as Meryl Streep. In 1980 at Harvard, he became director of the Loeb Drama Center and turned it into the home of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.). He later founded the Institute for Advanced Theater Training. While at Harvard, Brustein also taught as a full professor of English. He retired in 2003, becoming a research professor of English and creative consultant to the A.R.T.
While Brustein’s command of drama, from ancient Greek plays to avant-garde theater, was legendary, he was always a theatrical innovator, seeking and creating genuinely new, profound productions. He was a leader in the regional theater movement, which emphasized serious, intelligent engagement with past great authors and newly rising ones. His founding of repertory companies at Yale and Harvard established fresh relationships between research universities and the performing arts, a model copied at other schools. In 1990 he told The New York Times, “The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit” and “the basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”
Brustein believed deeply in textual criticism of plays and honored their interpretations both as literary works and as fluid dramas that demand different performances for different times. Coming to Harvard, he apparently worried that the institution might not always support theater of high quality. President Derek Bok was said to have given that guarantee. The joke was that if the box office did not provide enough for the A.R.T., then Bok’s Office would. Brustein’s concerns were not without merit. Two early A.R.T. productions witnessed audiences leave midway through performances, but he was willing to accept such risks to achieve unique qualities that a calculated, commercial theater could rarely equal.
At the A.R.T., Brustein succeeded in melding performance, scholarship, and dramaturgy, while bringing together professionals, amateurs, and students. Under his leadership, the A.R.T. championed directors such as Alvin Epstein, JoAnne Akalaitis, Peter Sellars, Julie Taymor, and Robert Wilson. Despite a demanding national and international schedule, Brustein regularly gave lecture courses on modern or post-modern drama from 1980 through 2001.
The current artistic director of the A.R.T., Diane Paulus, became acquainted with Brustein’s work when she was an undergraduate at Harvard. She thinks that his vision for theater remains bold and innovative. Sam Marks, a senior lecturer on playwriting in the Department of English, notes, “Not only does he leave an immense legacy in the theater, he changed the lives of so many of his students, whom he loved.”
Born in Brooklyn on April 21, 1927, the son of the businessman Max Brustein and the former Blanche Haft, Brustein grew up in Manhattan, attended the High School of Music and Art, then graduated from Amherst College. During college, he took time off to serve in the Merchant Marine. After receiving an M.A. in dramatic literature from Columbia University and two years at the University of Nottingham on a Fulbright fellowship, he pursued the Ph.D. at Columbia, then taught at Columbia, Vassar College, and Cornell University.
In 1964 Brustein published “The Theatre of Revolt,” a critical study. His publications are remarkably extensive. With his leading genres the review or chapter essay, he authored more than a dozen books, chapters in volumes edited by others, scores of reviews, articles in learned journals, a comedy about Shakespeare and Marlowe, and an autobiographical play, “Spring Forward, Fall Back.” His other plays include “Nobody Dies on Friday,” which satirizes the acting teacher Lee Strasberg, and “Shlemiel the First,” a klezmer musical based on stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Beginning in 1959, Brustein was a drama critic for The New Republic for 46 years. He contributed reviews and essays to The New York Review of Books. Among his books, one should mention “Letters to a Young Actor,” a variation on Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” Brustein advised young actors to obtain a broad liberal arts education rather than a narrow professional one. He edited Strindberg. Other favorite playwrights included Ibsen, O’Neill, Genet, Pirandello, and Shaw, all of whom he treated in “The Theater of Revolt” and whose works he showcased at the A.R.T. He continued to publish until shortly before his death, which occurred at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 29, 2023.
Brustein’s energy and productivity in directing, producing, teaching, mentoring, and writing were astounding. Feisty, he sometimes created controversy but to those encounters always brought opinions informed by knowledge, theatrical experience, and scholarly research. He seemed, at times unusually, to love the heat of friction. The more prominent his opponent, the grittier became his sandpaper.
Brustein and Samuel Beckett clashed over Akalaitis’s version of the set for Beckett’s “Endgame” at the A.R.T. Brustein retorted, “To threaten any deviations from a purist rendering of this or any other play . . . not only robs collaborating artists of their interpretive freedom but threatens to turn the theater into a waxworks.” Brustein also disputed with August Wilson about the nature and scope of Black theater in the United States.
Later in life, Brustein criticized what he believed was a renewed, even vicious, American worship of money and success, along with a concomitant decline in integrity, intelligence, and soul. He believed similar forces were eroding American theater. To The Boston Globe, he remarked in 2012, “I think the American theater reflects America now, as everything that happens is beginning to reflect America — one-percent America.”
First married to Norma Ofstrock, who died in 1979, Brustein in 1996 married Doreen Beinart, who survives him, as do his son, Daniel Brustein, stepchildren, and several grandchildren and step-grandchildren.
Pregnancy may offer some protection from developing long COVID, found a new study led by Weill Cornell Medicine, University of Rochester Medical Center, University of Utah Health and Louisiana Public Health Institute.
ETH Zurich has provided its final report to the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) on the “Leading House Asia” mandate. After more than 20 years and around 1,000 funded projects, the University has declined to apply for a new mandate period. The University of Zurich will take on the future role of Leading House for research cooperation with Asia.
Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place.
The company seeks to minimize costs while meeting a 23 percent increase in demand.
Wouldn’t it be easier for the company to just ask ChatGPT to come up with an optimal plan? In fact, for all their incredible capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often perform poorly when tasked with directly solving such complicated planning problems on their own.
Rather than trying to change the model to make an LLM a better planner, MIT researchers took a different approach. They introduced a framework that guides an LLM to break down the problem like a human would, and then automatically solve it using a powerful software tool.
A user only needs to describe the problem in natural language — no task-specific examples are needed to train or prompt the LLM. The model encodes a user’s text prompt into a format that can be unraveled by an optimization solver designed to efficiently crack extremely tough planning challenges.
During the formulation process, the LLM checks its work at multiple intermediate steps to make sure the plan is described correctly to the solver. If it spots an error, rather than giving up, the LLM tries to fix the broken part of the formulation.
When the researchers tested their framework on nine complex challenges, such as minimizing the distance warehouse robots must travel to complete tasks, it achieved an 85 percent success rate, whereas the best baseline only achieved a 39 percent success rate.
The versatile framework could be applied to a range of multistep planning tasks, such as scheduling airline crews or managing machine time in a factory.
“Our research introduces a framework that essentially acts as a smart assistant for planning problems. It can figure out the best plan that meets all the needs you have, even if the rules are complicated or unusual,” says Yilun Hao, a graduate student in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and lead author of a paper on this research.
She is joined on the paper by Yang Zhang, a research scientist at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab; and senior author Chuchu Fan, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and LIDS principal investigator. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.
Optimization 101
The Fan group develops algorithms that automatically solve what are known as combinatorial optimization problems. These vast problems have many interrelated decision variables, each with multiple options that rapidly add up to billions of potential choices.
Humans solve such problems by narrowing them down to a few options and then determining which one leads to the best overall plan. The researchers’ algorithmic solvers apply the same principles to optimization problems that are far too complex for a human to crack.
But the solvers they develop tend to have steep learning curves and are typically only used by experts.
“We thought that LLMs could allow nonexperts to use these solving algorithms. In our lab, we take a domain expert’s problem and formalize it into a problem our solver can solve. Could we teach an LLM to do the same thing?” Fan says.
Using the framework the researchers developed, called LLM-Based Formalized Programming (LLMFP), a person provides a natural language description of the problem, background information on the task, and a query that describes their goal.
Then LLMFP prompts an LLM to reason about the problem and determine the decision variables and key constraints that will shape the optimal solution.
LLMFP asks the LLM to detail the requirements of each variable before encoding the information into a mathematical formulation of an optimization problem. It writes code that encodes the problem and calls the attached optimization solver, which arrives at an ideal solution.
“It is similar to how we teach undergrads about optimization problems at MIT. We don’t teach them just one domain. We teach them the methodology,” Fan adds.
As long as the inputs to the solver are correct, it will give the right answer. Any mistakes in the solution come from errors in the formulation process.
To ensure it has found a working plan, LLMFP analyzes the solution and modifies any incorrect steps in the problem formulation. Once the plan passes this self-assessment, the solution is described to the user in natural language.
Perfecting the plan
This self-assessment module also allows the LLM to add any implicit constraints it missed the first time around, Hao says.
For instance, if the framework is optimizing a supply chain to minimize costs for a coffeeshop, a human knows the coffeeshop can’t ship a negative amount of roasted beans, but an LLM might not realize that.
The self-assessment step would flag that error and prompt the model to fix it.
“Plus, an LLM can adapt to the preferences of the user. If the model realizes a particular user does not like to change the time or budget of their travel plans, it can suggest changing things that fit the user’s needs,” Fan says.
In a series of tests, their framework achieved an average success rate between 83 and 87 percent across nine diverse planning problems using several LLMs. While some baseline models were better at certain problems, LLMFP achieved an overall success rate about twice as high as the baseline techniques.
Unlike these other approaches, LLMFP does not require domain-specific examples for training. It can find the optimal solution to a planning problem right out of the box.
In addition, the user can adapt LLMFP for different optimization solvers by adjusting the prompts fed to the LLM.
“With LLMs, we have an opportunity to create an interface that allows people to use tools from other domains to solve problems in ways they might not have been thinking about before,” Fan says.
In the future, the researchers want to enable LLMFP to take images as input to supplement the descriptions of a planning problem. This would help the framework solve tasks that are particularly hard to fully describe with natural language.
This work was funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is collaborating with Microsoft Research Asia to drive deep scientific exploration in artificial intelligence (AI) and computing while fostering the next generation of tech talent across Asia and beyond.
NUS will focus on AI-driven research with Microsoft Research Asia in key areas such as healthcare, societal AI, spatial intelligence, as well as data-intensive computing. This collaboration will boost progress in these fields, enhance cross-disciplinary research capability, and aim to strengthen the region’s role in shaping the future of AI and computing on a global scale.
Talent is the key driver behind the development of AI. NUS has signed a five-year research collaboration agreement with Microsoft Research Asia for a Joint PhD Supervision Programme, bringing together NUS' academic and research excellence with Microsoft Research Asia’s global leadership in AI, computing research, and industrial applications to cultivate talent. As part of this collaboration, NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will nurture PhD students through the Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP), a programme supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) that enables globally leading companies to develop talent aligned with industry needs, as well as PhD programmes offered by the NUS School of Computing. This initiative will help to cultivate interdisciplinary, high-calibre tech professionals and drive the integration of AI technology across industries.
Through strategic research projects and workshops, NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will strive to strengthen Asia’s integration with the global AI research community and amplify the region’s impact on international technology innovation.
Professor Tan Eng Chye, NUS President, said, “In line with Singapore’s AI strategy to accelerate the growth of the digital economy, the collaboration between NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will strengthen local AI capabilities and create meaningful impact for society and industries. As a leader in AI research and innovation, Microsoft Research Asia has a strong track record of pioneering breakthroughs and fostering deep academic collaborations. By joining forces with Microsoft Research Asia, we hope to drive cutting-edge advancements, translate research into real-world applications, and nurture AI talent with a global perspective.”
Dr Lidong Zhou, Corporate Vice President and Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, added, “Microsoft Research Asia is committed to driving technological innovation through cutting-edge open research and establishing long-term collaboration with leading academic institutions worldwide. Asia is a key global hub for AI innovation with a robust research ecosystem, strong industrial foundation, and international outlook. NUS, as one of the most influential academic institutions in Asia and beyond, has been our longstanding partner. We believe this collaboration will significantly advance AI technology and its applications and contribute to the global AI ecosystem.”
Mr Jermaine Loy, Managing Director, EDB said, "Talent development is central to Singapore’s vision to become a globally leading AI innovation hub. This collaboration between NUS and Microsoft Research Asia will offer our local students the opportunity to advance the development of frontier AI technology in Singapore under the mentorship of world-class researchers. At the same time, by fostering interdisciplinary expertise and industry-academia collaboration, this initiative will further strengthen Singapore’s AI talent pipeline and enhance the competitiveness of our companies and industries here."
Mortality rates between Black, white Americans narrow — except in case of infants
70-year study finds widening gap despite longer life expectancy for both racial groups
Anna Gibbs
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Americans are living longer than ever. And the disparity in overall mortality rates between Black and white Americans has narrowed since the 1950s. Among infants, however, the gap has widened, with Black infants dying at twice the rate of white infants, a new study reports.
A team of researchers, including Associate Professor Soroush Saghafian, founder and director of the Public Impact Analytics Science Lab at Harvard, collected and analyzed data across the U.S. from 1950 to 2019 to determine how mortality rates and disparities have changed over time.
In general, life expectancy has improved for both Black Americans (from 60.5 years in the 1950s to 76 years in the 2010s, a 20.4 percent increase) and white Americans (from 69 years in the 1950s to 79.3 years in the 2010s, a 13 percent rise), according to the new research. The racial gap has also improved, though Black adults still have an 18 percent higher mortality rate.
The picture for Black infants is far bleaker. While mortality rates for both Black and white infants have improved, the disparity between races has worsened. The mortality rate for Black infants was 92 percent higher than for white infants in the 1950s. Today the difference is 115 percent. Medical conditions during pregnancy were the leading cause of excess death in the 2010s.
In this edited conversation, Saghafian explains where these disparities have persisted and what needs to happen to address them.
Soroush Saghafian.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Life expectancy has been improving for 70 years, and yet the difference between mortality in Black and white infants has actually gotten worse. What’s happened since the 1950s?
There is a public understanding that healthcare has improved over time in the U.S., and that life expectancy and other healthcare metrics are improving. This study is showing that, while all that is true, there have been gaps between different races, specifically between Black and white Americans.
When focusing on adults, we see that, fortunately, things have improved. But in the case of Black infants, they are now dying twice as often as white infants. That’s just a huge number. And the fact that it has worsened since the 1950s is of great concern. Public policy and public health authorities should have put their utmost priority on at least improving such gaps. I mean, the ideal is to make measures like this equal between different races. But at least you can improve things.
What accounts for the disparity in infant rates?
We did look at the causes of death, and it turns out that, for infants, the main reasons for excess mortalities are medical. There is, unfortunately, a large amount of healthcare inequality, and it’s multidimensional. There’s access to care, but also quality of care. There’s a large set of factors that cause these disparities.
However, the goal of this particular study was not to study the reasons, but to point out the important differences. The hope is that it can inform other studies to get to the reasons, and to inform policymakers about what they should do. Our work raises the critical question of why, over seven decades post-World War II, we still haven’t figured out a solution for this enormous problem.
“This is like a red alarm. Our findings are saying: Look, we could have saved 5 million Black Americans if they had the same things as white Americans have.”
Several shorter-span studies have also found mortality rate disparities between races. What does this study tell us that the others didn’t?
This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the whole data over seven decades — the entire postwar era — has been collected and analyzed. When you look at shorter periods, you might not get the full picture.
Looking at a more extended period, we can think more carefully about all the claims that say, “Look, healthcare is improving” — which, to be clear, is mostly true. We are still seeing that, by and large, healthcare is improving for both Black and white Americans in most dimensions.
The problem is the comparisons. For instance, are things getting better for Black people compared to white people? When we look at measures like excess infant and childhood mortality among Black Americans during this whole seven-decade period, it becomes clear that not only have things not improved, but they have gotten worse. However, if you looked at, say, only three decades, instead of seven, you might not be able to see this full picture.
Your results showed that 5 million excess deaths of Black Americans could’ve been avoided over the past 70 years.Now that the disparities have been laid out, what needs to happen next?
As I mentioned, we didn’t go into the details of the causes, and I think that needs a lot more attention from both researchers and public policy and public health authorities. At the same time, our findings raise important questions for both researchers and authorities.
This is like a red alarm. Our findings are saying: Look, we could have saved 5 million Black Americans if they had the same things as white Americans have. This, in turn, raises an important question: What should the priorities for public policy and public health officials be now and in the next few decades?
Healthy Minds Survey asks students about mental health
University will use results to tailor resources and support to students’ needs
Nicole Rura
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
On Wednesday the University will launch the Healthy Minds Survey, which asks all degree-seeking undergraduate and graduate students about their current mental health, as well as their awareness and utilization of Harvard’s mental health resources and support. Sponsored by the Provost Office of Student Affairs and University Health Services, the confidential survey will be open until April 23.
The survey, developed at the University of Michigan and administered at hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, will provide Harvard with national benchmarking data to gauge progress and evaluate challenges related to student mental health. It is one of a series of steps Harvard has taken in response to the University’s Report of the Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health released in 2020.
To learn more about the survey and how the University will use its results, the Gazette sat down with Robin Glover, associate provost for student affairs, and Giang Nguyen, associate provost for campus health and well-being and executive director of Harvard University Health Services.
What is the Healthy Minds Survey?
Glover: The Healthy Minds Survey is a national survey based at the University of Michigan that has provided data for more than 15 years on the mental health of students in colleges and universities across the U.S. It includes a lot of the questions that we wanted to ask our students about their mental health and whether the resources and support we’re currently offering meet students’ needs. Without asking, we don’t really know how we’re doing. All of this information will inform decisions about any changes to the services and support we provide to our students.
Nguyen: The Healthy Minds Survey will also help us evaluate where we stand within the context of the broader mental health needs of college and university students all over the country. While the University has recently administered other surveys, such as the HESMA and Pulse surveys, Healthy Minds is the only University-wide survey specifically focused on student mental health and benchmarked against other universities.
How will the survey’s results be used?
Nguyen: In response to previous assessments of the student mental health experience, we improved student access to mental health support by implementing the 24/7 CAMHS Cares phone support line, providing access to TimelyCare for virtual mental health visits, and implementing a new clinical access coordinator team staffed by CAMHS licensed clinicians. We’ve also implemented campus-wide educational programs for members of our community to address mental health needs. Through the Healthy Minds Survey, we want to know whether our students know that these resources exist, what their experience has been with them, and which resources should be added or strengthened.
Periodically surveying students about their experiences and needs regarding health, and specifically mental health, is good public health practice. So, we will likely be conducting additional surveys every three years in the future.
Why is this survey important, and why should students take it?
Glover: We are really encouraging every student who is invited — every undergraduate and graduate student — to complete the survey. We want to hear as many different voices from as many different perspectives as possible. This will give us a complete picture of the mental health status of our students, as well as feedback about the programs that we offer here. A broad response across the University is important because an undergraduate student is different from a graduate student, and a professional student at the Medical School is different from one at the Business School.
What type of questions will be included and how long will it take?
Nguyen: In addition to asking about awareness and utilization of mental health services on campus, we do ask students to anonymously share with us their own experiences with mental health, which may include questions about depression, anxiety, body image issues, or other mental health diagnoses. We also ask questions about how connected they are with the community around them, as well as any exposures to trauma or substance abuse in the past. All of this feedback helps us to understand, in a more direct way, the experience of our students.
Glover: In total, the survey will take about 25 minutes, and we recognize that’s a significant commitment. As a thank-you for their time, students will receive a $15 gift card after completing the survey. Students may also exit the survey at any time, or they can pause taking it and pick it up again later using their personal survey link.
Mental health can be a difficult topic. How will the responses be kept confidential?
Nguyen: The folks at the national Healthy Minds Study have been doing this since 2007. Because they know how sensitive this subject matter is for participants, they have worked out very thoughtful and careful approaches to protecting students’ privacy.
Glover: That’s correct. They are contractually committed to anonymizing all responses and will not generate or maintain any internal connection logs with IP addresses. No information linking a student’s identity to their survey response, including an incomplete survey response, will be available to Harvard, any of the other participating universities, or any other party that may have access to the anonymized data.
Why is it important for Harvard to continue to invest in student mental health awareness services and resources?
Nguyen: We know that throughout academic life, our students face challenges. These are sometimes related to campus life and sometimes related to things going on in the broader world. We want to support our students throughout their academic journey at Harvard by helping them address their well-being and developing the capacity to strengthen their well-being in all its facets. And we recognize that one of the most critical facets of well-being is emotional well-being.
Glover: Our undergraduate and graduate students are here one year, two years, five years, seven years. Harvard is their home, their community during that time. It’s up to us to make sure that we’re offering them all the services and support that ensures their well-being, and that they feel comfortable about getting those services, support, and resources, where they need it, in a timely manner, and without judgment.
It’s very important for all of us to know that mental health is just as important as physical health. If someone says they’re getting a physical examination, people don’t think twice. And we want taking care of mental health to be the same way.
In ‘Make Your Own Job,’ Erik Baker explores how entrepreneurialism has altered Americans’ relationship with work
There are lots of entrepreneurs these days. Founders of businesses, of course, are entrepreneurs, and so are the managers below them. Ride-share drivers, influencers, life coaches: entrepreneurs. There are self-styled intrapreneurs, solopreneurs, and sidepreneurs, all of whom embody the ideals of entrepreneurialism in their own unique ways.
In “Make Your Own Job,” history of science lecturer Erik Baker explores the American embrace of entrepreneurialism and why, for all the popularity of the approach, it can feel so exhausting.
Baker got interested in the topic as his friends graduated from college, landed well-paying corporate jobs, and quickly became miserable. One told him that she felt like Natalie Portman’s character in the sci-fi movie “Annihilation,” who descends into a black pit and discovers a sinister doppelganger. There was something interesting, Baker thought, about how work changes our relationships with ourselves.
In “Make Your Own Job,” Baker traces America’s enthusiasm for entrepreneurialism to the end of the 19th century. It was the conclusion of the first era of American industrialization, and the rapid electrification of manufacturing plants, among other developments, depressed demand for factory labor. After high levels of job growth throughout the 1800s, Baker writes, “The rate of employment growth in manufacturing began to taper off in 1890 and became negative around 1920.”
Social scientists called this job loss “structural” or “technological” unemployment: “Unemployment that was not the product of transient, cyclical crises,” Baker writes, “but was rather a side effect of irreversible changes to the technical structure of American industry.”
In response, Americans shifted from an industrious work ethic to an entrepreneurial one infused with ideas of personal transcendence in New Thought. Instead of focusing on the inherent value of hard work, the new ethic emphasized that hard work wasn’t enough; one should apply one’s own unique skills to the task at hand with ceaseless ambition. A cohort of success writers, across racial and gender demographics, began preaching a similar ideology: “Make your own job.”
Baker chronicles how entrepreneurialism, and its very definition, expanded over time. In the early 1900s, orthodox management styles that focused primarily on production processes gave way to “entrepreneurial management,” which focused not on merely managing employees, but inspiring them. At Harvard Business School, among other institutions, management intellectuals preached the importance of leaders who made workers “not truly feel like subordinates,” in Baker’s words, “but like members of a team or a family, or even a revolutionary cadre.”
The new ethic emphasized that hard work wasn’t enough; one should apply one’s own unique skills to the task at hand with ceaseless ambition.
In Baker’s narrative, entrepreneurial fervor tends to increase during times of economic stress. During the Great Depression, “odd jobs” became something more. Doing freelance work was not just a way to make a few dollars, but, as the authors of the 1933 book “Make Your Own Job: Opportunities in Unusual Vocations” put it, a way for someone to build “a small one-man business of his own.” Women over 40, who often faced hiring discrimination, could embrace this individualistic ethic. “We Are Forty and We Did Get Jobs,” boasted the title of one self-help book aimed at women.
Baker uses these references to self-help literature to illustrate shifts in national sentiment. Authors such as Napoleon Hill, whose 1937 book “Think and Grow Rich” remains popular to this day, encouraged readers to turn work into a calling that relied on specialized knowledge, creativity, and self-promotion. “With the changed conditions ushered in by the world economic collapse,” Hill wrote, “came also the need for newer and better ways of marketing personal services.”
By the mid-20th century, Baker writes, interest in entrepreneurialism had surged into non-economic fields, with Abraham Maslow and other psychologists becoming cheerleaders. “The most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society,” Maslow wrote, “would be not 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs.”
It also became a catch-all explanation for a lack of economic development. As the fate of American cities sharply diverged with the relocation and shuttering of factories during the 1960s, certain experts blamed increasing unemployment in places like Detroit on a lack of entrepreneurial spirit.
With these mid-century changes, Baker argues, almost everyone could think of themselves as entrepreneurs: leaders of companies, managers who could inspire their co-workers, employees who could take more initiative, and even unemployed people looking for work. “It was far from obvious that high-tech corporate executives … were doing exactly the same sort of thing as a laid-off Black worker taking adult education classes, or a shopkeeper in India contemplating a change in management methods,” Baker writes. “But midcentury thinking about entrepreneurship and development depended upon precisely this equivalence.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn’t so much a scarcity of work that drew people toward entrepreneurialism, Baker argues, but a scarcity of jobs people found meaningful. This yearning was filled in part by leaders who encouraged employees to see their work as a source of enlightenment. Apple’s Steve Jobs would state that competing with IBM was not an economic imperative but a moral one — lest IBM win and stifle innovation. Ralph Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law was supported by young, ambitious employees. When asked how many hours he expected them to work, Nader deadpanned: “The ideal is 100.”
The popularity of entrepreneurialism continues to this day, Baker says, in part because it glorifies a perpetual state of risk. With fears of technological job displacement rising along with the number of people in freelance or temporary roles, more people can consider themselves the center of an entrepreneurial operation — even if the operation is just themselves.
Reading “Make Your Own Job,” one can see why Baker’s friend found herself experiencing science-fiction levels of misery. When failure always feels tangible, it’s hard to relax. For Baker, entrepreneurialism requires that everyone keep a solitary eye on the future — and remain anxious in the present.
Aramont Fellowships champion research at forefront of innovation
6 min read
Winning projects selected for potential to fuel scientific progress
Offering a better understanding of the universe. Revealing a possible layer of gene regulation in human cells. Treating muscular diseases with implantable neurotechnologies. These are examples of the research supported by the Aramont Fellowship Fund for Emerging Science Research, which acknowledges the visionary work of exceptional early career scientists.
Established in 2017 through a gift from the Aramont Charitable Foundation, the award recognizes groundbreaking scientific innovation and exploration by providing crucial funding for high-risk, high-reward research that otherwise might not be conducted. This year’s cohort includes five scholars spearheading projects with the potential to significantly impact their respective fields and advance novel discoveries with wide-ranging implications.
“The Aramont Fund’s transformative impact on the awardees’ work and careers is inspiring,” said Vice Provost for Research John Shaw. “Investing in our early career scholars is vital to driving scientific innovation and nurturing the next generation of researchers. We all look forward to following the newest cohort’s achievements.”
Guanhao Huang
“Exploring Gravitational Physics Using Nano-mechanics on a Chip”
Postdoctoral fellow in applied physics, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The nature of gravity at the quantum level and the mysterious properties of dark matter are two of the biggest open questions in modern physics. While past breakthroughs have come from large-scale international collaborations using massive scientific instruments, an exciting new approach is emerging: using nanomechanical devices in university labs to probe these mysteries. Unlike traditional methods that rely on laser-controlled individual atoms, these tiny but relatively heavy devices — often made of materials like diamonds — act as ultra-sensitive quantum force sensors and sources of gravity. This makes them uniquely suited to explore new gravitational effects at microscopic scales. Most current research focuses on only a few vibrational states and leaves many unexplored, which limits the potential for studying gravity. To overcome this challenge, Huang aims to develop ultra-precise sensors by engineering and controlling these devices at the quantum level across a broad range of vibrational states. This could open new doors for detecting dark matter and gravitational phenomena, offering fresh insights into both the microscopic and cosmic scales — all using compact, tabletop experiments within a university setting. His work has the potential to reshape the understanding of the universe in ways previously thought possible only with massive, billion-dollar facilities.
Giacomo Maddaloni
“Discovering Brain Circuits That Change Seasonally and Offer Clues to the Seasonal Exacerbation of Diseases from Neuropsychiatric to Cardiovascular”
Postdoctoral fellow in genetics, Harvard Medical School.
Credit: Ajja Photography
The ability to anticipate the light-dark cycle of the days and seasons — and to organize appropriate responses — are vital adaptive strategies that have been observed across the animal kingdom and in humans. When thrown off, the sleep-wake cycle and other biological rhythms can cause or exacerbate disease. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying such adaptations. Giacomo Maddaloni has undertaken studies that led to the discovery of a previously unappreciated mouse brain circuit and form of plasticity that proves critical for synchronizing activity and sleep-wake rhythms. As part of that work, he discovered that specialized neurons function as initial broadcasters of day length information in a region of the brain that controls many behaviors and physiological processes. Now Maddaloni is expanding on this work by characterizing the neurons’ molecular identity and deciphering how they decode and relay information to orchestrate whole-organism responses. He aims to identify a master brain hub vital for accurate circadian and seasonal adaptations, and molecular and circuit pathways, with far-reaching translational therapeutic potential.
Silvi Rouskin
“Unveiling Human Riboswitches Through High Throughput Detection and Analysis”
Assistant professor of microbiology, HMS.
Credit: Gretchen Ertl
Riboswitches are dynamic RNA structures that control various metabolic pathways in simple organisms. They have not been detected in humans, which is likely due to the technical limitations of research. The discovery of human riboswitches could enable new therapeutic targets for metabolic diseases and change our understanding of how gene expression is regulated. Silvi Rouskin has already identified promising riboswitch candidates, and her unique integration of experimental and computational approaches puts her team in a strong position to make this pivotal discovery — potentially revealing a previously unrecognized layer of gene regulation in human cells. This finding would fill a critical gap in the knowledge of cellular biology and open new avenues for medical research and drug development.
Shriya Srinivasan
“Accessible Neurotechnology and Human-Machine Interfacing”
Assistant professor of bioengineering, SEAS.
Eliza Grinnell/SEAS
Implantable neurotechnologies hold promise for treating muscular diseases and are expected to be available as a consumer technology within the next 10 to 15 years, but the significant invasiveness required to implant the devices will limit accessibility and exacerbate gaps in care and capabilities. Shriya Srinivasan aims to make neurotechnology scalable and accessible by developing neurostimulation devices that can be precisely implanted through a single skin injection. Preliminary prototypes in rats have demonstrated that Srinivasan’s lab can read high-resolution neural signals and stimulate discrete muscles for fine motor control. The system can stimulate the muscles to provide sensory feedback about the movement of a prosthesis or robotic, augment forces in weak muscles, and potentially relay complex physical data through the body’s neural processing centers. The implications of Srinivasan’s project are significant for treating neuromuscular diseases, studying human sensorimotor performance, and advancing consumer technology.
Melanie Weber
“Geometry-informed Foundation Models for Scientific Machine Learning”
Assistant professor of applied mathematics and of computer science, SEAS.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing scientific research, with foundation models driving breakthroughs that may hold the key to challenges such as climate change or currently incurable diseases. But there are limitations: Foundation models require extensive training data and substantial amounts of computing resources, posing challenges when the data is expensive or limited. For example, a foundation model for weather prediction may need training on millions of data points to provide accurate results. Encoding data geometry, such as symmetries arising from fundamental laws of physics, could significantly reduce the data and resources needed by providing the model with information it can use to avoid wasting resources on pursuing scenarios that we know cannot exist. Melanie Weber seeks to develop geometry-informed models that balance the strengths of current geometric models and general-purpose foundation models to produce models that are both resource-efficient and applicable to a wide range of scientific problems.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine developed a more effective model for predicting how patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer will respond to chemotherapy.
Set up in 2014 on a generous endowment by an anonymous donor, the NUS Singapore History Prize has been awarded to fiction and non-fiction books in 2018, 2021 and 2024 with the aim to spur interest in the understanding of Singapore’s history.
The 2027 NUS Singapore History Prize will, for the first time, recognise a non-print media work that engages deeply with Singapore’s history under the new ‘Arts and Multimedia’ category. Moving forward, the Prize will alternate between the ‘Books’ and ‘Arts and Multimedia’ categories every three years.
Thanks to a doubling of the endowment by the donor, prize money for the 2027 NUS Singapore History Prize winner will also increase twofold, from S$50,000 to S$100,000, to inspire more impactful works and submissions in the coming years.
These new developments broaden the Prize’s reach and seeks to further the objective of the Prize – that is, to make Singapore’s unique and complex history more accessible to non-academic audiences and to encourage greater discussion among Singaporeans and the world of Singapore’s rich and vibrant history, and its place in the world.
Head of the FASS Department of History, Associate Professor Joey Long said, “We firmly support our donor’s belief that Singaporeans can learn a lot more about Singapore’s rich history from different mediums. These include documentaries, films, visual arts, performing arts, installation art, podcasts, and videos (excluding audiobooks, books in printed form, and e-books). As such, we are glad that the Prize has now been expanded to recognise works beyond books, which also reflects NUS’ commitment to foster a comprehensive appreciation of Singapore’s past through accessible and modern platforms.”
A distinguished Jury Panel chaired by Mr Kishore Mahbubani will judge the Prize and announce a winner in 2027. Mr Mahbubani is a Distinguished Fellow at the NUS Asia Research Institute.
Mr Mahbubani said, “Thanks to our donor who has doubled the prize money and encouraged the creation of a new category, Singaporeans will be able to engage more deeply with their rich history. There is no doubt that for the next phase of Singapore’s national development, the Singaporean sense of national identity must be deepened and strengthened. The best way to do this is to develop a deep and common understanding of Singapore’s history. Hence, in addition to its academic and scholarly contributions, the NUS Singapore History Prize is also supporting a strong national imperative.”
Details of the 2027 NUS Singapore History Prize
The new Arts and Multimedia category will mirror the Book category in its selection process, with the winner determined through an open, public and global competition. For the 2025-2027 competition, the organisers will accept nominations from any artist, author, playwright, performer, producer, or publisher of a multimedia and artistic historical work delivered in the English language (works translated into the English language are also acceptable). There will be no limitations on the date of production as the goal is to open the admission window as wide as possible. The work should address any field, theme, or period of Singaporean history, with the goal of providing either new insights or new ways of exciting the imagination of Singaporeans about Singapore’s history. Nominations will be restricted to a maximum of three works per applicant and will have to be submitted by 31 May 2027.
For more information about the NUS Singapore History Prize, please email: hisbox11@nus.edu.sg.
How far would you go for a good meal? For some of the ocean’s top predators, maintaining a decent diet requires some surprisingly long-distance dives.
MIT oceanographers have found that big fish like tuna and swordfish get a large fraction of their food from the ocean’s twilight zone — a cold and dark layer of the ocean about half a mile below the surface, where sunlight rarely penetrates. Tuna and swordfish have been known to take extreme plunges, but it was unclear whether these deep dives were for food, and to what extent the fishes’ diet depends on prey in the twilight zone.
In a study published recently in the ICESJournal of Marine Science, the MIT student-led team reports that the twilight zone is a major food destination for three predatory fish — bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish. While the three species swim primarily in the shallow open ocean, the scientists found these fish are sourcing between 50 and 60 percent of their diet from the twilight zone.
The findings suggest that tuna and swordfish rely more heavily on the twilight zone than scientists had assumed. This implies that any change to the twilight zone’s food web, such as through increased fishing, could negatively impact fisheries of more shallow tuna and swordfish.
“There is increasing interest in commercial fishing in the ocean’s twilight zone,” says Ciara Willis, the study’s lead author, who was a PhD student in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program when conducting the research and is now a postdoc at WHOI. “If we start heavily fishing that layer of the ocean, our study suggests that could have profound implications for tuna and swordfish, which are very reliant on the twilight zone and are highly valuable existing fisheries.”
The study’s co-authors include Kayla Gardener of MIT-WHOI, and WHOI researchers Martin Arostegui, Camrin Braun, Leah Hougton, Joel Llopiz, Annette Govindarajan, and Simon Thorrold, along with Walt Golet at the University of Maine.
Deep-ocean buffet
The ocean’s twilight zone is a vast and dim layer that lies between the sunlit surface waters and the ocean’s permanently dark, midnight zone. Also known as the midwater, or mesopelagic layer, the twilight zone stretches between 200 and 1,000 meters below the ocean’s surface and is home to a huge variety of organisms that have adapted to live in the darkness.
“This is a really understudied region of the ocean, and it’s filled with all these fantastic, weird animals,” Willis says.
In fact, it’s estimated that the biomass of fish in the twilight zone is somewhere close to 10 billion tons, much of which is concentrated in layers at certain depths. By comparison, the marine life that lives closer to the surface, Willis says, is “a thin soup,” which is slim pickings for large predators.
“It’s important for predators in the open ocean to find concentrated layers of food. And I think that’s what drives them to be interested in the ocean’s twilight zone,” Willis says. “We call it the ‘deep ocean buffet.’”
And much of this buffet is on the move. Many kinds of fish, squid, and other deep-sea organisms in the twilight zone will swim up to the surface each night to find food. This twilight community will descend back into darkness at dawn to avoid detection.
Scientists have observed that many large predatory fish will make regular dives into the twilight zone, presumably to feast on the deep-sea bounty. For instance, bigeye tuna spend much of their day making multiple short, quick plunges into the twilight zone, while yellowfin tuna dive down every few days to weeks. Swordfish, in contrast, appear to follow the daily twilight migration, feeding on the community as it rises and falls each day.
“We’ve known for a long time that these fish and many other predators feed on twilight zone prey,” Willis says. “But the extent to which they rely on this deep-sea food web for their forage has been unclear.”
Twilight signal
For years, scientists and fishers have found remnants of fish from the twilight zone in the stomach contents of larger, surface-based predators. This suggests that predator fish do indeed feed on twilight food, such as lanternfish, certain types of squid, and long, snake-like fish called barracudina. But, as Willis notes, stomach contents give just a “snapshot” of what a fish ate that day.
She and her colleagues wanted to know how big a role twilight food plays in the general diet of predator fish. For their new study, the team collaborated with fishermen in New Jersey and Florida, who fish for a living in the open ocean. They supplied the team with small tissue samples of their commercial catch, including samples of bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish.
Willis and her advisor, Senior Scientist Simon Thorrold, brought the samples back to Thorrold’s lab at WHOI and analyzed the fish bits for essential amino acids — the key building blocks of proteins. Essential amino acids are only made by primary producers, or members of the base of the food web, such as phytoplankton, microbes, and fungi. Each of these producers makes essential amino acids with a slightly different carbon isotope configuration that then is conserved as the producers are consumed on up their respective food chains.
“One of the hypotheses we had was that we’d be able to distinguish the carbon isotopic signature of the shallow ocean, which would logically be more phytoplankton-based, versus the deep ocean, which is more microbially based,” Willis says.
The researchers figured that if a fish sample had one carbon isotopic make-up over another, it would be a sign that that fish feeds more on food from the deep, rather than shallow waters.
“We can use this [carbon isotope signature] to infer a lot about what food webs they’ve been feeding in, over the last five to eight months,” Willis says.
The team looked at carbon isotopes in tissue samples from over 120 samples including bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish. They found that individuals from all three species contained a substantial amount of carbon derived from sources in the twilight zone. The researchers estimate that, on average, food from the twilight zone makes up 50 to 60 percent of the diet of the three predator species, with some slight variations among species.
“We saw the bigeye tuna were far and away the most consistent in where they got their food from. They didn’t vary much from individual to individual,” Willis says. “Whereas the swordfish and yellowfin tuna were more variable. That means if you start having big-scale fishing in the twilight zone, the bigeye tuna might be the ones who are most at risk from food web effects.”
The researchers note there has been increased interest in commercially fishing the twilight zone. While many fish in that region are not edible for humans, they are starting to be harvested as fishmeal and fish oil products. In ongoing work, Willis and her colleagues are evaluating the potential impacts to tuna fisheries if the twilight zone becomes a target for large-scale fishing.
“If predatory fish like tunas have 50 percent reliance on twilight zone food webs, and we start heavily fishing that region, that could lead to uncertainty around the profitability of tuna fisheries,” Willis says. “So we need to be very cautious about impacts on the twilight zone and the larger ocean ecosystem.”
This work was part of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Ocean Twilight Zone Project, funded as part of the Audacious Project housed at TED. Willis was additionally supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the MIT Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability.
Frederick “Fred” Davis Greene II, professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Chemistry who was accomplished in the field of physical organic chemistry and free radicals, passed away peacefully after a brief illness, surrounded by his family, on Saturday, March 22. He had been a member of the MIT community for over 70 years.
“Greene’s dedication to teaching, mentorship, and the field of physical organic chemistry is notable,” said Professor Troy Van Voorhis, head of the Department of Chemistry, upon learning of Greene’s passing. “He was also a constant source of joy to those who interacted with him, and his commitment to students and education was legendary. He will be sorely missed.”
Greene, a native of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, was born on July 7, 1927 to parents Phillips Foster Greene and Ruth Altman Greene. He spent his early years in China, where his father was a medical missionary with Yale-In-China. Greene and his family moved to the Philippines just ahead of the Japanese invasion prior to World War Il, and then back to the French Concession of Shanghai, and to the United States in 1940. He joined the U.S. Navy in December 1944, and afterwards earned his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1949 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1952. Following a year at the University of California at Los Angeles as a research associate, he was appointed a professor of chemistry at MIT by then-Department Head Arthur C. Cope in 1953. Greene retired in 1995.
Greene’s research focused on peroxide decompositions and free radical chemistry, and he reported the remarkable bimolecular reaction between certain diacyl peroxides and electron-rich olefins and aromatics. He was also interested in small-ring heterocycles, e.g., the three-membered ring 2,3-diaziridinones. His research also covered strained olefins, the Greene-Viavattene diene, and 9, 9', 10, 10'-tetradehydrodianthracene.
Greene was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College for his research in free radicals. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society from 1962 to 1988. He was awarded a special fellowship form the National Science Foundation and spent a year at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, and was a member of the Chemical Society of London.
Greene and Professor James Moore of the University of Philadelphia worked closely with Greene’s wife, Theodora “Theo” W. Greene, in the conversion of her PhD thesis, which was overseen by Professor Elias J. Corey of Harvard University, into her book “Greene’s Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis.” The book became an indispensable reference for any practicing synthetic organic or medicinal chemist and is now in its fifth edition. Theo, who predeceased Fred in July 2005, was a tremendous partner to Greene, both personally and professionally. A careful researcher in her own right, she served as associate editor of the Journal of Organic Chemistry for many years.
Fred Greene was recently featured in a series of videos featuring Professor EmeritusDietmar Seyferth (who passed away in 2020) that was spearheaded by Professor Rick Danheiser. The videos cover a range of topics, including Seyferth and Greene’s memories during the 1950s to mid-1970s of their fellow faculty members, how they came to be hired, the construction of various lab spaces, developments in teaching and research, the evolution of the department’s graduate program, and much more.
Danheiser notes that it was a privilege to share responsibility for the undergraduate class 5.43 (Advanced Organic Chemistry) with Greene. “Fred Greene was a fantastic teacher and inspired several generations of MIT undergraduate and graduate students with his superb lectures,” Danheiser recalls. The course they shared was Danheiser’s first teaching assignment at MIT, and he states that Greene’s “counsel and mentoring was invaluable to me.”
The Department of Chemistry recognized Greene’s contributions to its academic program by naming the annual student teaching award the “Frederick D. Greene Teaching Award.” This award recognizes outstanding contributions in teaching in chemistry by undergraduates. Since 1993 the award has been given to 46 students.
Dabney White Dixon PhD ’76 was one of many students with whom Greene formed a lifelong friendship and mentorship. Dixon shares, “Fred Greene was an outstanding scientist — intelligent, ethical, and compassionate in every aspect of his life. He possessed an exceptional breadth of knowledge in organic chemistry, particularly in mechanistic organic chemistry, as evidenced by his long tenure as editor of the Journal of Organic Chemistry (1962 to 1988). Weekly, large numbers of manuscripts flowed through his office. He had an acute sense of fairness in evaluating submissions and was helpful to those submitting manuscripts. His ability to navigate conflicting scientific viewpoints was especially evident during the heated debates over non-classical carbonium ions in the 1970s.
“Perhaps Fred’s greatest contribution to science was his mentorship. At a time when women were rare in chemistry PhD programs, Fred’s mentorship was particularly meaningful. I was the first woman in my scientific genealogical lineage to study chemistry, and his guidance gave me the confidence to overcome challenges. He and Theo provided a supportive and joyful environment, helping me forge a career in academia where I have since mentored 13 PhD students — an even mix of men and women — a testament to the social progress in science that Fred helped foster.
“Fred’s meticulous attention to detail was legendary. He insisted that every new molecule be fully characterized spectroscopically before he would examine the data. Through this, his students learned the importance of thoroughness, accuracy, and organization. He was also an exceptional judge of character, entrusting students with as much responsibility as they could handle. His honesty was unwavering — he openly acknowledged mistakes, setting a powerful example for his students.
“Shortly before the pandemic, I had the privilege of meeting Fred with two of his scientific ‘granddaughters’ — Elizabeth Draganova, then a postdoc at Tufts (now an assistant professor at Emory), and Cyrianne Keutcha, then a graduate student at Harvard (now a postdoc at Yale). As we discussed our work, it was striking how much science had evolved — from IR and NMR of small-ring heterocycles to surface plasmon resonance and cryo-electron microscopy of large biochemical systems. Yet, Fred’s intellectual curiosity remained as sharp as ever. His commitment to excellence, attention to detail, and passion for uncovering chemical mechanisms lived on in his scientific descendants.
“He leaves a scientific legacy of chemists who internalized his lessons on integrity, kindness, and rigorous analysis, carrying them forward to their own students and research. His impact on the field of chemistry — and on the lives of those fortunate enough to have known him — will endure.”
Carl Renner PhD ’74 felt fortunate and privileged to be a doctoral student in the Greene group from 1969 to 1973, and also his teaching assistant for his 5.43 course. Renner recalls, “He possessed a curious mind of remarkable clarity and discipline. He prepared his lectures meticulously and loved his students. He was extremely generous with his time and knowledge. I never heard him complain or say anything unkind. Everyone he encountered came away better for it.”
Gary Breton PhD ’91 credits the development of his interest in physical organic chemistry to his time spent in Greene’s class. Breton says, “During my time in the graduate chemistry program at MIT (1987-91) I had the privilege of learning from some of the world’s greatest minds in chemistry, including Dr. Fred Greene. At that time, all incoming graduate students in organic chemistry were assigned in small groups to a seminar-type course that met each week to work on the elucidation of reaction mechanisms, and I was assigned to Dr. Greene’s class. It was here that not only did Dr. Greene afford me a confidence in how to approach reaction mechanisms, but he also ignited my fascination with physical organic chemistry. I was only too happy to join his research group, and begin a love/hate relationship with reactive nitrogen-containing heterocycles that continues to this day in my own research lab as a chemistry professor.
“Anyone that knew Dr. Greene quickly recognized that he was highly intelligent and exceptionally knowledgeable about all things organic, but under his mentorship I also saw his creativity and cleverness. Beyond that, and even more importantly, I witnessed his kindness and generosity, and his subtle sense of humor. Dr. Greene’s enduring legacy is the large number of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs whose lives he touched over his many years. He will be greatly missed.”
John Dolhun PhD ’73 recalls Greene’s love for learning, and that he “was one of the kindest persons that I have known.” Dolhun shares, “I met Fred Greene when I was a graduate student. His organic chemistry course was one of the most popular, and he was a top choice for many students’ thesis committees. When I returned to MIT in 2008 and reconnected with him, he was still endlessly curious — always learning, asking questions. A few years ago, he visited me and we had lunch. Back at the chemistry building, I reached for the elevator button and he said, ‘I always walk up the five flights of stairs.’ So, I walked up with him. Fred knew how to keep both mind and body in shape. He was truly a beacon of light in the department.”
Liz McGrath, retired chemistry staff member, warmly recalls the regular coffees and conversations she shared with Fred over two decades at the Institute. She shares, “Fred, who was already emeritus by the time of my arrival, imparted to me a deep interest in the history of MIT Chemistry’s events and colorful faculty. He had a phenomenal memory, which made his telling of the history so rich in its content. He was a true gentleman and sweet and kind to boot. ... I will remember him with much fondness.”
Greene is survived by his children, Alan, Carol, Elizabeth, and Phillips; nine grandchildren; and six great grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on April 5 at 11 a.m. at the First Congregational Church in Winchester, Massachusetts.
Harvard Business School’s Nien-hê Hsieh (standing) posed a hypothetical to the panel.
Photos by Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
New Ethics Center events mull real-life conflicts, with first focusing on improving campus discourse on hard topics in social media age
Social media exerts a powerful influence on college campuses. Has the technology helped broker new connections across ideological difference? Or has it simply siphoned students into conversations with those who share their views?
This was the topic of last Thursday’s inaugural Ethics IRL (or, in real life,) a new series organized by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Its format, inspired by the 1980s PBS show “Ethics in America,” uses the Socratic method to engage Harvard community members on pressing issues.
Things got underway with moderator Nien-hê Hsieh, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, posing a hypothetical: Assigned reading for a general-education course covers immigration, with students required to post their responses to a class discussion board.
One student writes: “I don’t understand why people who want to defend their country are being called racist, are being called xenophobic nationalists. Since when did it become a crime to defend the borders of your country?”
“I don’t see how you can live in a country where federal agents are ripping children from the arms of their parents and families,” responds another. “This is basically state-sanctioned trauma.”
On the panel were a dean, an activist, a journalist, an influencer, and a current undergraduate who largely avoids the technology. Hsieh instructed the group to put themselves in the place of students.
“I think this prompt is missing a very important piece of context, and that is whether or not the responses posted are anonymous.”
Soleil Golden ’24
Soleil Golden.
“Would you give your honest opinion no matter what people might say in response to those posts? Would you carefully craft a neutral position and try not to attract your classmates’ attention?” he asked.
“I think this prompt is missing a very important piece of context, and that is whether or not the responses posted are anonymous,” answered Soleil Golden ’24, a premedical neuroscience student at Boston Children’s Hospital with more than 70,000 Instagram followers, who described using social media to hone her rhetorical skills. “If it’s anonymous, I think people would feel a lot freer in voicing their opinions.”
And what if the instructor pulled those comments into the lecture, pressing both students to elaborate on their positions?
“I think I’d be more inclined to speak out,” answered Brody Douglass ’27, an economics concentrator and Navy ROTC midshipman who said he limits social media in favor of in-person socializing. “I believe that, in general, better dialogue happens when it’s actually dialogue rather than just a series of discussion posts where words can be taken more easily out of context.”
Panelists offered a mix of deeply personal and evidence-based insights on the state of modern discourse. The series was introduced with support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Civil Discourse initiative.
“Can we imagine how this would have played out on social media?” Hsieh wondered.
“Perhaps there would have been some grains of interesting conversation,” replied researcher and activist Yaёl Eisenstat, a policy director at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, who noted the platforms’ influence on the very formulation of the assignment. “But chances are, in the way social media is constructed today, it would have been drowned out by the more emotional.”
And what if both students were doxed? What if the resulting fear drove one to withdraw from the university entirely?
“I think would be extremely sad if the first student left,” said Sewell Chan ’98, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Speaking directly to the charge that universities have become inhospitable to conservatives, he continued: “We live in a world in which 40 percent or more of the country not only agrees with student number one but would say things much harsher. If we’re acting like we’re so offended or bothered by student number one that we can’t handle what they said, that should say something about us.”
As the conversation progressed, panelists kept returning to the tension between the goals of higher education and the algorithmically driven platforms.
“Universities have a particular mission,” explained Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College. “Their mission is to search for Veritas, as close as they can get. They do that by bringing diverse perspectives and points of view to an environment. They create certain conditions that are different than free speech conditions, which is that you can say what you want to say but you have to defend it with reason and evidence.
“I can stand outside and say, ‘The Earth is flat;’it’s perfectly within my free speech rights,” he continued. “I can say it in the classroom, but don’t expect it to get marked correct in my Earth and Planetary Sciences class.”
But Eisenstat said that social media algorithms actively undermine the pursuit Khurana described.
“The world that social media has helped create affects how students interact with each other on campus,” she argued. “What the world of social media has done is made it easier and easier to both choose your silos but also be pushed into silos that you’re not aware you’re being pushed into. … It’s the personalization. It’s the using all your human behavioral data to then turn around and target you with the information that is going to most appeal to your lizard brain.”
The event ended with panelists sharing suggestions for community members who want to help foster a climate more conducive to open exchange.
“Push yourself to engage with people who are not like-minded,” Eisenstat said. “But do not therefore think it is too hard to create the social media environment we want and to push for the legislation that would help.”
“I’ve spent hours talking to people online,” Golden said. “While those conversations can be frustrating and you can feel like you’re losing the argument, I have not engaged in any social interaction online where I haven’t walked away with a new piece of knowledge.”
“I now try to discipline myself,” Khurana said. “When I find myself disagreeing with somebody, I assume we’re plugged into different algorithms.”
The Lifetime Research Award is given to individuals whose research in human-computer interaction (HCI) is considered both fundamental and influential to the field. Recipients are selected based on their cumulative contributions, influence on the work of others, new research developments, and being an active participant in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) community.
Her nomination recognizes her advocacy to place human agency at the center of HCI and artificial intelligence research. Rather than AI replacing human capabilities, Maes has advocated for ways in which human capabilities can be supported or enhanced by the integration of AI.
Pioneering the concept of software agents in the 1990s, Maes’ work has always been situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence and has helped lay the foundations for today’s online experience. Her article “Social information filtering: algorithms for automating 'word of mouth'” from CHI 95, co-authored with graduate student Upendra Shardanand, is the second-most-cited paper from ACM SIGCHI.
Beyond her contributions in desktop-based interaction, she has an extensive body of work in the area of novel wearable devices that enhance the human experience, for example by supporting memory, learning, decision-making, or health. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Maes has explored accessible and ethical designs while stressing the need for a human-centered approach.
“As a senior faculty member, Pattie is an integral member of the Media Lab, MIT, and larger HCI communities,” says Media Lab Director Dava Newman. “Her contributions to several different fields, alongside her unwavering commitment to enhancing the human experience in her work, is exemplary of not only the Media Lab’s interdisciplinary spirit, but also our core mission: to create transformative technologies and systems that enable people to reimagine and redesign their lives. We all celebrate this well-deserved recognition for Pattie!”
Maes is the second MIT professor to receive this honor, joining her Media Lab colleague Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Tangible Media research group.
“I am honored to be recognized by the ACM community, especially given that it can be difficult sometimes for researchers doing highly interdisciplinary research to be appreciated, even though some of the most impactful innovations often emerge from that style of research,” Maes comments.
On March 25, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT launched the global Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) with Community Jameel at an event in São Paulo, Brazil.
ADEPT is a network of universities, governments, and other members united by a shared vision: To empower the next generation of policymakers, decision-makers, and researchers with the tools to innovate, test, and scale the most effective social policies and programs. These programs have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.
Too often, policy decisions in governments and other organizations are driven by ideology or guesswork. This can result in ineffective and inefficient policies and programs that don’t always serve their intended populations. ADEPT will bring a scientific perspective to policymaking, focusing on topics like statistical analysis, data science, and rigorous impact evaluation.
Together with J-PAL, members will create innovative pathways for learners that include virtual and in-person courses, develop new academic programs on policy evaluation and data analysis, and cultivate a network of evidence-informed policy professionals to drive change globally.
At the launch event at Insper, a Brazilian higher education institution, MIT economists Esther Duflo, co-founder of J-PAL, and Sara Fisher Ellison, faculty director of ADEPT, spoke about the importance of building a community aligned in support of evidence-informed policymaking.
“Our aim is to create a vision-driven network of institutions around the world able to equip far more people in far more places with the skills and ambition for evidence-informed policymaking,” said Duflo. “We are excited to welcome Insper to the movement and create new opportunities for learners in Brazil.”
Members of the alliance will also have access to the MITxMicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), which offers online courses taught by MIT Department of Economics faculty through MIT’s Office of Open Learning. The program offers graduate-level courses that combine the tools of economics and policy design with a strong foundation in economic and mathematical principles.
Early members of the alliance include Insper, a leading research and training institution in Brazil; the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics of Abidjan in collaboration with the Cote d’Ivorian government; the Paris School of Economics; and Princeton University.
“This unprecedented initiative in Latin America reinforces Insper’s commitment to academic excellence and the internationalization of teaching, providing Brazilian students with access to a globally renowned program,” says Cristine Pinto, Insper’s director of research. “Promoting large-scale impact through research and data analysis is a core objective of Insper, and shared by J-PAL and the expansion of ADEPT.”
Learners who obtain the DEDP MicroMasters credential through ADEPT can accelerate their pursuit of a master’s degree by applying to participating universities, including Insper and MIT, opening doors for learners who may not otherwise have access to leading economics programs.
By empowering learners with the tools and ambition to create meaningful change, ADEPT seeks to accelerate data-driven decision-making at every step of the policymaking process. Ultimately, the hope is that ADEPT’s impact will be felt not only by alliance members and their individual learners, but by millions of people reached by better policies and programs worldwide.
At an event marking the launch of the Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) at Insper in São Paulo, Brazil, Sarah Kopper (right), director of ADEPT and associate director of research and education at J-PAL, speaks alongside (left to right) MIT Professor Esther Duflo, MIT Professor Sara Fisher Ellison, and Community Jameel Director George Richards.
Exercise can help colon cancer survivors live longer
Post-treatment physical activity narrows gap between patients and general population, study shows
Dana-Farber Communications
3 min read
Regular physical activity after treatment for stage 3 colon cancer reduces and may even eliminate disparities in survival between those with cancer and those in a general population of similar age and sex, according to new Dana-Farber Cancer Institute research.
Colon cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. People with the disease face higher rates of premature death than people in the general population with matched characteristics such as age and sex.
“This study suggests that exercise can have a meaningful impact on long-term survival for patients,” said senior author Jeffrey Meyerhardt, co-director of the Colon and Rectal Care Center at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
For patients whose cancer returned, those with low activity levels had overall survival rates 50.5 percent lower than a matched general population.
Previous research suggested that colon cancer patients who are more active after treatment have longer survival. This study looked at data from two National Cancer Institute–sponsored Cancer and Leukemia Group B clinical trials — now part of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology — for patients with stage 3 colon cancer. In both trials, CALGB 89803 and CALGB 80702, patients underwent surgery, were treated with chemotherapy, and were offered an option to self-report about lifestyle factors during and after treatment.
A total of 2,875 patients self-reported physical activity across the two trials. Survival rates were calculated after a median of six and 5.9 years of follow up, respectively, for CALGB 89803 and CALGB 80702. Reported activity levels were converted into metabolic-equivalent hours per week, or MET-hours. A person who walks most days of the week for about an hour will get about 18 MET-hours of activity, Meyerhardt said.
The researchers found that for patients who were alive three years after treatment, those with high activity levels (18 or more MET-hours per week) had subsequent overall survival rates that were closer to those of the matched general population than those with low activity levels (fewer than three MET-hours per week).
For instance, in the analysis of data from CALGB 89803, three-year survivors with low levels of activity had overall survival rates that were 17.1 percent lower than the matched general population, while those with high activity levels had 3.5 percent lower overall survival rates.
In both trials, more activity was associated with improved survival rates and the benefits were seen in patients regardless of their age at the time of diagnosis. “Some exercise is better than none,” says Meyerhardt. “If you can’t get out for an hour, try 10 or 20 minutes.”
In a pooled analysis of data from the two trials, the researchers focused on the 1,908 patients who were alive without a recurrence of their cancer after three years. Among those who reported low activity levels, overall survival rates were 3.1 percent lower than the matched general population. Those with high activity levels had overall survival rates that were 2.9 percent higher than the matched general population.
Exercise also reduced survival disparities in patients whose cancer came back within three years. Most tumor recurrences are seen within two or three years of diagnosis with stage 3 colon cancer. In these cases, treatment becomes very difficult. For patients whose cancer returned, those with low activity levels had overall survival rates 50.5 percent lower than a matched general population. Those with high activity levels had overall survival rates 33.2 percent lower.
“Those who were more active had improvements in survival even if their cancer recurred,” Meyerhardt said. “And for those who did not experience a recurrence, their overall survival rates looked better than the matched general population.”
The research described in this story received funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Princeton University Art Museum will host a free, 24-hour open house for its highly anticipated new home. Inaugural special exhibitions include “Princeton Collects,” with major paintings donated in honor of the new building. The mosaics and other 'embedded' works are already in place.
Historian Joyce Chaplin’s latest book on Benjamin Franklin (center) explores one of his lesser-known inventions: a stove (left). The science behind it helped further understanding of atmospheric phenomena such as the Gulf Stream (right), which Franklin helped map for the first time.
Images via Library of Congress; illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
When a stove’s virtues amount to more than just hot air
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Science historian examines how Benjamin Franklin’s invention sparked new thinking on weather, technology
Joyce Chaplin thought she was done with Benjamin Franklin.
“But then I was reading about the Little Ice Age and the particularly bad winter of 1740 to 1741,” said Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. “Major harbors were reported as freezing over — in Boston, in London, in Venice. The consequence was famine in several places including Ireland, where as much as 20 percent of the population may have died — that’s a bigger toll than the more famous Great Hunger of the 19th century.
“And all along I kept thinking, ‘I know the dates 1740 and 1741 from somewhere.’”
Chaplin, an expert on early American science, technology, and medicine, eventually put things together. These were the years when Franklin — a humble printer who went on to become a world-renowned scientist, inventor, and statesman — devised the prototype for his Pennsylvania fireplace, a flatpack of iron plates colonists could assemble and insert into their hearths to improve heating.
“It was developed during this very, very cold winter as a climate adaptation,” explained Chaplin, who has written at length on Franklin’s scientific contributions. “The design was supposed to burn less wood yet make a room even warmer than an ordinary fireplace.”
Franklin went on to develop at least five separate iterations of the influential technology over half a century, moving from wood to coal for fuel. Chaplin’s newly released “The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution” finds this seemingly modest invention catalyzing new thinking on weather, technology, and comfort.
We sat down with Chaplin, who is also affiliated faculty in the History of Science Department, to ask about the book and its many lessons for the 21st century. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Joyce Chaplin.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
You published an intellectual biography of Benjamin Franklin in 2006 and edited an edition of his autobiography for Norton a few years later. What draws you to this 18th-century figure time and again?
The popular conception is “Poor Richard,” Franklin’s alter ego from the almanacs he published. But he’s far more complicated than that. He was the youngest son of a Boston chandler, somebody who worked with his hands making soap and candles out of animal fat. It was a completely respectable but not very distinguished background.
The classic ways of getting ahead that were available to a man like Franklin included war or some kind of military career that would advance him beyond the rank he was born to. Politics, if he could get a foot in. Writing, perhaps. Science had also become a part of popular culture, with Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle becoming household names in the wake of their big discoveries.
I think Franklin looked over all these options. He eventually looked at Newton and thought: “Why not try that route?”
Is it fair to call the Franklin stove one of his lesser-known inventions?
For the moment, I think that’s fair. A lot of people know about Franklin inventing the lightning rod. Those who need progressive glasses at some point probably know he invented bifocals. Others have heard about his more charming inventions — his swimming fins, his folding chair/step stool for reaching books in the library. But given the climate framing of this particular invention, perhaps the public will start to embrace the stove as central to his life in science.
Let’s dig into the environmental issues Franklin faced during the winter of 1740 and ’41. It was more than frigid weather.
Franklin was aware that as more settlers were arriving, being born, and spreading across the landscape, they were going to deforest the territory and make firewood more expensive and possibly even inaccessible to the poor. We have his accounts of people stealing firewood or ripping off pieces of fences.
But the most ambitious part of his plan was to make people more comfortable than ever before. And the fact that it was colder than ever before makes that a really interesting manifestation of enlightenment confidence — that humans could use science and technology to make life better, whatever the circumstances.
“Atmosphere was a relatively new word in terms of describing the envelope around the Earth, and this is what Franklin thought a good heating system could create indoors.”
How did the stove help further understanding of the natural world?
Atmosphere was a relatively new word in terms of describing the envelope around the Earth, and this is what Franklin thought a good heating system could create indoors. He explained in a self-published pamphlet how his fireplace worked through the principle of convection: that air, when it’s warmed, will expand and rise. And what you want is some kind of heat source that does this layer by layer until the entire room is warmed.
But Franklin also used this concept to explain atmospheric phenomena outdoors. He used it to explain how storm systems move up the Atlantic coast. He eventually used it to explain the Gulf Stream — how heated air moves up from the Gulf of Mexico and out over the Atlantic Ocean with a relationship to the warmer current of water underneath. When making these grand statements, Franklin would often write something like: “Just like there’s a draft of air from your fireplace to the door.” It was a brilliant strategy for making science accessible to a reading public.
Franklin is known for his late-in-life abolitionism, but your book adds one more entry to the list of ways he profited from slavery before that. What new information did you uncover?
I knew from reading my colleague John Bezís-Selfa’s “Forging America” (2004) that there had been an iron industry in the colonies, including Pennsylvania. I also had a sense from reading Bezís-Selfa that enslaved Black people performed some of the labor on these estates.
I went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which holds most of the surviving records of the Pennsylvania iron industry, and indeed found these two enslaved men — Cesar and Streaphon — who worked in the iron establishment that made most of the Pennsylvania fireplaces.
One of these men — Streaphon — managed to buy his own freedom. That, to me, was an important indication that the desire to be free was a constant. It can be seen everywhere in early American history.
What compelled Franklin to try minimizing emissions from his stove?
He was appalled at the filthy air in places like London. So, he tried to design the last three versions of his stove to re-burn smoke — by sending the smoke that would otherwise be ascending into the chimney back into the fire.
Franklin pointed out, correctly, that smoke is really particles of unburned fuel. If you could burn it again, at least it’s more efficient. You’re wasting less fuel. You’re putting less junk into the air. He’s so concerned with doing this that a friend teases him for being “a universal smoke doctor.”
To me, it’s a very interesting statement about questioning the level of emissions that already seemed to be compromising human health. Of course, what gets identified decades after his death in 1790 is that some of these emissions are invisible. The American scientific observer and experimenter Eunice Foote documented the climate-altering effects of CO2 in 1856.
You connect today’s techno-optimism to Franklin and other inventors of his era, who thought they could invent their way out of a climate crisis. What lessons does your book hold for inheritors of this philosophy?
I don’t think Franklin meant to validate burning coal in the industrial sense, but he did validate it as an energy source. That says to me: Don’t pick the quick and obvious solution. Or at least be suspicious and monitor how it’s doing.
We should be wary of this silver bullet fantasy, that we need to find just one thing to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. Or that we can just shift to sustainable energy in the absence of climate mitigation before chemical changes in the atmosphere become too dire.
We’ll need more than one inventor, one device, one hero. There are just too many variables for one solution to be possible. We need to modify our course as soon as possible with a lot of solutions working together.
Play should be a core feature of children’s healthcare in forthcoming plans for the future of the NHS, according to a new report which argues that play ‘humanises’ the experiences of child patients.
The report, by University of Cambridge academics for the charity Starlight, calls for play, games and playful approaches to be integrated into a ‘holistic’ model of children’s healthcare – one that acknowledges the emotional and psychological dimensions of good health, alongside its physical aspects.
Both internationally and in the UK, health systems have, in recent decades, increasingly promoted play in paediatric healthcare. There is a growing understanding that making healthcare more child-friendly can reduce stress and positively improve younger patients’ experiences.
Despite this recognition, play often remains undervalued and inconsistently integrated across healthcare contexts. For the first time, the report compiles evidence from over 120 studies to make the case for its more systematic incorporation.
In the case of the UK, the authors argue that the Government’s forthcoming 10-year health plan for the NHS offers an important opportunity to embed play within a more holistic vision for childhood health.
The report was produced by academics at the Centre for Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Starlight, which commissioned the review, is a national charity advocating to reduce trauma through play in children’s healthcare.
Dr Kelsey Graber, the report’s lead author, said: “Play and child-centred activities have a unique capacity to support the emotional and mental aspects of children’s healthcare experiences, whether in hospital or during a routine treatment at the GP. It won’t directly change the course of an illness, but it can humanise the experience by reducing stress and anxiety and enhancing understanding and comfort. Hospital-based play opens up a far more complete understanding of what it means for a child to be a healthy or well.”
Adrian Voce, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Starlight, said: “With the government promising to create the healthiest generation of children ever as part of its new long term health plan, this compelling evidence of the benefits of play to children’s healthcare is very timely. We encourage ministers and NHS leaders to make health play teams an integral part of paediatric care.”
The report synthesised evidence from 127 studies in 29 countries. Most were published after 2020, reflecting intensified interest in children’s healthcare interventions following the COVID-19 outbreak.
Some studies focused on medically-relevant play. For example, hospital staff sometimes use role-play, or games and toys like Playmobil Hospital to familiarise children with medical procedures and ease anxiety. Other studies focused on non-medical play: the use of activities like social games, video games, arts and crafts, music therapy and storytelling to help make patients more comfortable. Some hospitals and surgeries even provide “distraction kits” to help children relax.
In its survey of all these studies, the report finds strong evidence that play benefits children’s psychological health and wellbeing. Play is also sometimes associated with positive physical health; one study, for example, found that children who played an online game about dentistry had lower heart rates during a subsequent dental procedure, probably because they felt more prepared.
The authors identify five main ways in which play enhances children’s healthcare based on the available body of evidence:
Reducing stress and discomfort during medical procedures. Play is sometimes associated with physiological markers of reduced distress, such as lower heart rates and blood pressure. Therapeutic play can also ease pain and anxiety.
Helping children express and manage emotions. Play can help to alleviate fear, anxiety, boredom and loneliness in healthcare settings. It also provides an outlet for emotional expression among all age groups.
Fostering dignity and agency. In an environment where children often feel powerless and a lack of personal choice, play provides a sense of control which supports mental and emotional wellbeing.
Building connection and belonging. Play can strengthen children’s relationships with other patients, family members and healthcare staff, easing their experiences in a potentially overwhelming environment. This may be particularly important for children in longer term or palliative care.
Preserving a sense of childhood. Play helps children feel like children, and not just patients, the report suggests, by providing “essential moments of happiness, respite and emotional release”.
While play is widely beneficial, the report stresses that its impact will vary from child to child. This variability highlights a need, the authors note, for informed, child-centred approaches to play in healthcare settings. Unfortunately, play expertise in these settings may often be lacking: only 13% of the studies reviewed covered the work of health play specialists, and most of the reported activities were directed and defined by adults, rather than by children themselves.
The report also highlights a major gap in research on the use of play in mental healthcare. Just three of the 127 studies focused on this area, even though 86% emphasised play’s psychological benefits. The report calls for greater professional and academic attention to the use of play in mental health support, particularly in light of escalating rates of mental health challenges among children and young people. More work is also needed, it adds, to understand the benefits of play-based activities in healthcare for infants and adolescents, both of which groups were under-represented in the research literature.
Embedding play more fully in healthcare as part of wider Government reforms, the authors suggest, could reduce healthcare-related trauma and improve long-term outcomes for children. “It is not just healthcare professionals, but also policy leaders who need to recognise the value of play,” Graber said. “That recognition is foundational to ensuring that children’s developmental, psychological, and emotional health needs are met, alongside their physical health.”
The Cambridge report argues that play should be a recognised component of children’s healthcare in the Government’s forthcoming 10-year plan for the NHS.
Hospital-based play opens up a far more complete understanding of what it means for a child to be a healthy or well
It’s tricky to predict precisely what the impacts of climate change will be, given the many variables involved. To predict the impacts of a warmer world on plant life, some researchers look at urban “heat islands,” where, because of the effects of urban structures, temperatures consistently run a few degrees higher than those of the surrounding rural areas. This enables side-by-side comparisons of plant responses.
But a new study by researchers at MIT and Harvard University has found that, at least for forests, urban heat islands are a poor proxy for global warming, and this may have led researchers to underestimate the impacts of warming in some cases. The discrepancy, they found, has a lot to do with the limited genetic diversity of urban tree species.
The findings appear in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT postdoc Meghan Blumstein, professor of civil and environmental engineering David Des Marais, and four others.
“The appeal of these urban temperature gradients is, well, it’s already there,” says Des Marais. “We can’t look into the future, so why don’t we look across space, comparing rural and urban areas?” Because such data is easily obtainable, methods comparing the growth of plants in cities with similar plants outside them have been widely used, he says, and have been quite useful. Researchers did recognize some shortcomings to this approach, including significant differences in availability of some nutrients such as nitrogen. Still, “a lot of ecologists recognized that they weren’t perfect, but it was what we had,” he says.
Most of the research by Des Marais’ group is lab-based, under conditions tightly controlled for temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration. While there are a handful of experimental sites where conditions are modified out in the field, for example using heaters around one or a few trees, “those are super small-scale,” he says. “When you’re looking at these longer-term trends that are occurring over space that’s quite a bit larger than you could reasonably manipulate, an important question is, how do you control the variables?”
Temperature gradients have offered one approach to this problem, but Des Marais and his students have also been focusing on the genetics of the tree species involved, comparing those sampled in cities to the same species sampled in a natural forest nearby. And it turned out there were differences, even between trees that appeared similar.
“So, lo and behold, you think you’re only letting one variable change in your model, which is the temperature difference from an urban to a rural setting,” he says, “but in fact, it looks like there was also a genotypic diversity that was not being accounted for.”
The genetic differences meant that the plants being studied were not representative of those in the natural environment, and the researchers found that the difference was actually masking the impact of warming. The urban trees, they found, were less affected than their natural counterparts in terms of when the plants’ leaves grew and unfurled, or “leafed out,” in the spring.
The project began during the pandemic lockdown, when Blumstein was a graduate student. She had a grant to study red oak genotypes across New England, but was unable to travel because of lockdowns. So, she concentrated on trees that were within reach in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then collaborated with people doing research at the Harvard Forest, a research forest in rural central Massachusetts. They collected three years of data from both locations, including the temperature profiles, the leafing-out timing, and the genetic profiles of the trees. Though the study was looking at red oaks specifically, the researchers say the findings are likely to apply to trees broadly.
At the time, researchers had just sequenced the oak tree genome, and that allowed Blumstein and her colleagues to look for subtle differences among the red oaks in the two locations. The differences they found showed that the urban trees were more resistant to the effects of warmer temperatures than were those in the natural environment.
“Initially, we saw these results and we were sort of like, oh, this is a bad thing,” Des Marais says. “Ecologists are getting this heat island effect wrong, which is true.” Fortunately, this can be easily corrected by factoring in genomic data. “It’s not that much more work, because sequencing genomes is so cheap and so straightforward. Now, if someone wants to look at an urban-rural gradient and make these kinds of predictions, well, that’s fine. You just have to add some information about the genomes.”
It's not surprising that this genetic variation exists, he says, since growers have learned by trial and error over the decades which varieties of trees tend to thrive in the difficult urban environment, with typically poor soil, poor drainage, and pollution. “As a result, there’s just not much genetic diversity in our trees within cities.”
The implications could be significant, Des Marais says. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases its regular reports on the status of the climate, “one of the tools the IPCC has to predict future responses to climate change with respect to temperature are these urban-to-rural gradients.” He hopes that these new findings will be incorporated into their next report, which is just being drafted. “If these results are generally true beyond red oaks, this suggests that the urban heat island approach to studying plant response to temperature is underpredicting how strong that response is.”
The research team included Sophie Webster, Robin Hopkins, and David Basler from Harvard University and Jie Yun from MIT. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Bullard Fellowship at the Harvard Forest, and MIT.
Meghan Blumstein studied red oak genotypes across New England, concentrating on trees that were within reach in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then collaborated with people doing research at the Harvard Forest, a research forest in rural central Massachusetts.
As a college student in Serbia with a passion for math and physics, Ana Trišović found herself drawn to computer science and its practical, problem-solving approaches. It was then that she discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, and decided to study a course on Data Analytics with Python in 2012 — something her school didn’t offer.
That experience was transformative, says Trišović, who is now a research scientist at the FutureTech lab within MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
“That course changed my life,” she says. “Throughout my career, I have considered myself a Python coder, and MIT OpenCourseWare made it possible. I was in my hometown on another continent, learning from MIT world-class resources. When I reflect on my path, it’s incredible.”
Over time, Trišović's path led her to explore a range of OpenCourseWare resources. She recalls that, as a non-native English speaker, some of the materials were challenging. But thanks to the variety of courses and learning opportunities available on OpenCourseWare, she was always able to find ones that suited her. She encourages anyone facing that same challenge to be persistent.
“If the first course doesn’t work for you, try another,” she says. “Being persistent and investing in yourself is the best thing a young person can do.”
In her home country of Serbia, Trišović earned undergraduate degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering before going on to Cambridge University and CERN, where she contributed to work on the Large Hadron Collider and completed her PhD in computer science in 2018. She has also done research at the University of Chicago and Harvard University.
“I like that computer science allows me to make an impact in a range of fields, but physics remains close to my heart, and I’m constantly inspired by it,” she says.
MIT FutureTech, an interdisciplinary research group, draws on computer science, economics, and management to identify computing trends that create risk and opportunities for sustainable economic growth. There, Trišović studies the democratization of AI, including the implications of open-source AI and how that will impact science. Her work at MIT is a chance to build on research she has been pursuing since she was in graduate school.
“My work focuses on computational social science. For many years, I’ve been looking at what's known as 'the science of science' — investigating issues like research reproducibility," Trišović explains. “Now, as AI becomes increasingly prevalent and introduces new challenges, I’m interested in examining a range of topics — from AI democratization to its effects on the scientific method and the broader landscape of science.”
Trišović is grateful that, way back in 2012, she made the decision to try something new and learn with an OpenCourseWare course.
“I instantly fell in love with Python the moment I took that course. I have such a soft spot for OpenCourseWare — it shaped my career,” she says. “Every day at MIT is inspiring. I work with people who are excited to talk about AI and other fascinating topics.”
ChemFORWARD, winner of Belfer Center award, explains how its database of industrial chemicals can help protect human, environmental health
Have you ever thought of the chemicals that went into making your iPhone? Your favorite pleather chair? The shirt on your back? It takes thousands of chemicals to produce things we use every day, and some of them could be harmful to both your health and the planet’s.
Heather McKenney, the science and safer chemistry lead at ChemFORWARD, was joined by Kennedy School experts as well as David Bourne, lead sustainability strategist at Google, in a panel last week at the Kennedy School’s Malkin Penthouse to discuss the company’s work as well as challenges the private sector faces in trying to reduce chemical hazards.
“We live in a world with thousands of chemicals,” said Henry Lee, Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of the Kennedy School’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and senior lecturer in Public Policy. “They are present in the clothes we wear, what we eat and drink, the furniture in our homes, and even in the health products that we buy. Thus, focusing on what society can do to ensure the protection of public health in this chemical-intense world is especially important.”
ChemFORWARD, a Washington D.C.-based 501c3, compiles and maintains a digital repository of “verified chemical hazard assessments,” or CHAs, available to corporate subscribers in order to make informed and environmentally sound decisions about the chemicals used in their supply chains.
“There’s no requirement across all industries that all chemicals must be vetted before use,” said McKenney, who was a lead for the toxicology and product safety team at Honest Company, a baby and beauty products maker, for six years.
“There’s no requirement across all industries that all chemicals must be vetted before use.”
Heather McKenney, ChemFORWARD
Heather McKenney and David Bourne.
Benn Craig/Belfer Center
McKenney said there are well-intentioned companies that want to certify their products as safe, but struggle keeping track of every chemical used in their supply chain, and what the impacts of those chemicals are.
“There’s tons of toxicology data out there, and how do we start to apply and share that information such that it’s not just siloed in a REACH dossier in the EU or in an individual organization who’s developed that data?” she said, referring to the EU’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals regulation. “We’ve developed a methodology that houses the chemical hazard assessments across 24-plus human and environmental health endpoints.”
On the human side, ChemFORWARD assesses a chemical’s carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, reproductive toxicity, skin irritation, eye irritation, and neurotoxicity, among other things. On the environmental side, they measure things like persistence, or the ability of chemicals to break down.
“Looking at the totality of the data, we then take the totality of the hazards and send an overall hazard classification, or what we call our hazard bands,” McKenney said.
ChemFORWARD hazard bands fall into alphabetical rankings (A, B, C, etc.,) but are also categorized based on how much data is available about a given substance. There are chemicals marked with a question mark when the data is deemed insufficient.
Bourne said companies like his are partnering with ChemFORWARD as an important step toward creating healthier products at his firm and across the private sector.
“What we realize in partnership with ChemFORWARD is that every time we do a chemical hazard assessment, it’s not just proprietary information for Google or for whoever did the assessment. It’s now available to anyone who wants to try to platform. And so the scalability that creates is really what we saw as transformational,” he said. “The analogy I like to give is if you wanted to watch a great TV show, and you had to pay a Hollywood studio to make a show just for you, it would cost you an absurd amount of money. Because they have lots of subscribers to a streaming platform, everyone can contribute and get access to a whole body of content that is valuable.”
Charles Taylor, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, said this type of information-gathering could have important benefits beyond the private sector.
“This kind of information is really important to get out to researchers and others who can … assess if we see chronic effects or downstream effects,” he said.
The Roy Family Award is presented biannually to celebrate an outstanding cross-sector partnership that enhances environmental quality through novel and creative approaches.
How has the internet changed fiction? 8 writers weigh in.
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Fiction is as old as time. From the ancient “Epic of Gilgamesh” to contemporary novels and short stories, fiction has explored the human condition and pushed us to think outside ourselves and expand our imaginations. The internet, on the other hand, is less than 50 years old. It’s evolved exponentially over the last four decades, and inarguably changed the way we communicate, live, and think.
In these edited responses, writers of the genre share how they believe the internet has changed fiction.
Readers have become audiences
Greg Jackson ’06 is the author of several short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His debut novel, “The Dimensions of a Cave,” was published in 2023.
Fiction is fundamentally about one privacy addressing another. Its power and meaning depend on the writer speaking with uncomfortable candor, channeling a brave private truth, and the reader receiving this message as a solitary conscience. “Write as though your parents are dead,” writers are counseled. But in the age of the internet, writers must go further and write as though the unignorable sphere of a vast judging public did not exist. This is increasingly hard to do.
The internet — what we refer to, in shorthand, as social media — has made personal taste into a matter of public enthusiasm and, as often, condemnation. It has turned “readers” into “audiences.” Taste has become something impersonal, conditioned by influencers, likes, star ratings, Tweets, and lists. Traditional tastemakers — critics, editors, booksellers — have seen their influence overtaken by mass opinion and viral acclaim. Without them, we have few champions of challenging, difficult, and subversive work. Sensitive to their audiences’ whims and the viability of their careers, writers adapt their work to what they think a mass public wants and believes. The imperative to startle readers with what they don’t know they want, with a truth pitched at a deeper place than superficial opinion, disappears. Readers may well forget that this is what fiction offers.
Are there positives? I don’t see many and I think pairing the minuses with some pluses obscures what is, on balance, a negative equation. Sometimes a net effect is simply bad. Literature is a vital companion to self-discovery, illuminating our condition. It addresses a realm of experience prior to politics, mass conviction, commonplace belief, and rote speech. You cannot discover what you already know. Fiction’s radiant core — private truth — may well turn out to be the chief casualty of our age of social media.
A time-saver and a time-suck
Scott Turow, J.D. ’78, is a lawyer and the author of 13 fiction and three nonfiction books including “Presumed Innocent” and the memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, “One L.”
I use the internet for research, and the ease of it is sometimes striking. In my most recent novel, “Presumed Guilty,”I learned about the minutiae of the Nike Air Force 1 sneaker and the question of how far cell signals travel, both with days less time than it would have taken me when I started out 40 years ago. Because of that, I think my books are probably more research-intensive than they would have been decades ago.
Fiction exists on the assumption that we can learn the inmost thoughts and feelings of others. That people have an appetite for learning that is no surprise, but it makes storytelling a profoundly moral enterprise, because it sharpens our empathy for others. I don’t think posts or emails generally have the same depth.
The internet obviously competes for readers’ time, and I think it’s true that book sales began to drop when people started “cruising the net,” as it used to be called when people just gave themselves over to wandering through the online world. But the internet carries benefits as well, especially the easy accessibility of eBooks. Readers connect online and share word-of-mouth about books they like. So, it’s not all one way.
The one thing I am sure of is that the novel has withstood technological changes since the 18th century — or the 13th century, depending on how you figure its birth. And it’s not going away soon.
We lost a major plot device
Jennifer Finney Boylan was the 2022-2023 Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett Schlesinger Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of 19 books, including her latest, “Cleavage” (2025), president of PEN America, and the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.
A major plot hook used to be people losing each other, or getting lost, or not knowing where they were, and so on. And this particular situation is now one that’s very unlikely — since we’re always tied into the web somehow. Think of the film “After Hours” (by Martin Scorsese), in which Griffin Dunne’s money flies out of a taxicab window one night and he’s then left stranded downtown, unable to get home. This kind of twist is pretty rare now, isn’t it? And if you think about it, so many great stories — from the “Odyssey” to, say, “Ulysses” — are about people who have gotten lost, or who are trying to find their way home, and the obstacles to their journey consist of not knowing where they are, or being unable to tell their loved ones of their fate.
In my heart I think we’d all have been better off if the internet — and the iPhone and its knockoffs — had never been invented. We would spend more of our time looking at each other, rather than our screens. We would read more, scream less. Is that world so much worse than the one we live in now?
A time machine for research
Julie Orringer was the 2013-2014 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of three award-winning books: “The Invisible Bridge,” “How to Breathe Underwater” and “The Flight Portfolio,” a novel about Harvard alumnus Varian Fry, an American journalist who traveled to France in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. Her work has also appeared in Granta and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction, and she is the winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize.
Two things that have been really helpful to research are doors that open via the internet. One is newspaper archives. It’s incredibly helpful to be able to go into Times Machine via The New York Times, for example, and look at the newspaper pages exactly as they were laid out and to see the article that you’re trying to read in context, and for that article to be searchable. It used to be that researchers would have to go and look at microfilm, which was just impossible. And so you can page through the day-by-day events of a particular historical moment, but also you get all the context of the other articles, and the ads for hats and suits and foods and theater shows and modes of transportation, and a lot of the other kind of contextual cues that would help to place you in a particular temporal setting.
And then the other thing that I’ve found that’s similarly helpful is radio archives, because we tend to forget what a constant presence radio was in people’s lives, especially when we’re writing about the 20th century. And there are numerous archives that allow you access to the radio shows that people were listening to regularly every day. If you don’t hear the voices that were speaking into people’s ears about the political events and the artistic events and the fashions of a time, then you don’t really have the whole picture.
Less time at the library, for better and for worse
Weike Wang ’11 is the author of several novels, including “Chemistry,” “Joan is Okay,” and “Rental House.” She is the recipient of a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Best American Short Stories, and she has won an O. Henry Award.
I learned to read at the library. My mother would take me and she would be in the adult section, looking through job listings in newspapers, and I would be in the kids section, reading “Anne of Green Gables” or “Goosebumps” and playing the Oregon Trail. I’m not sure if the internet changed fiction but it changed reading. Without the internet or a phone with internet access, I read for longer, deeper periods. I would spend whole days reading. Now I can’t do that. Also I have more responsibilities and reading has become part of my job rather than my leisure.
The internet has certainly made research easier for stories. Instead of going to the library, I can find more things online. I can Google. I can watch YouTube videos. I also can use Google Maps to see what the area I’m writing about looks like. Without the internet, I would have to go there. I would also have to interview people if I’m interested in writing a character with that occupation. Nowadays, so many people post online about their experiences that writers have easy access to this kind of material.
We need emotional truth too
Min Jin Lee was the 2018-2019 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of the novels “Free Food for Millionaires” and “Pachinko,” a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Lee is also the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence.
Apart from the fact that the internet may have contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary 2024 Word of the Year, “brain rot,” and that neoliberalism has made our attention the commodity to exploit without mercy, I remain unreasonably hopeful that fiction will emerge as the primary vehicle of enduring narrative. We may love nonfiction in many of its forms, but fiction has the capacity to enlarge our grasp of emotional truth through the prism of non-fact.
Expanding knowledge
Andrè Aciman, Ph.D. ’88, is the author of several New York Times bestselling novels, including “Call Me by Your Name,” “Out of Egypt,” and “Eight White Nights.” He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Books are important. They mold who you are, and they give you an aperture into history and into the universe that is not available elsewhere. Does “Crime and Punishment” give you a better sense of who human beings are? Absolutely. Does Shakespeare? Yes. But a small article on the net that appears and then disappears? That’s the way people think nowadays, and I have no argument against it.
My experience has been that young people, people under 35 with the exception of a few, don’t read or they are constantly online, reading the newspaper, the magazines. They know all sorts of things that I would never have even imagined existed. I, on the other hand, know nothing except for what I read in The New York Times, and I don’t even read that very thoughtfully. My sons, for example, seem to know so much, as all their friends do, but none of them read books.
Some things ‘can only be experienced through face-to-face interactions’
Yxta Maya Murray is the current Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a law professor, writer, social practice artist, and beginning filmmaker. She also is the David P. Leonard Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, where she writes legal scholarship examining the relationship among law, social justice, and the arts. She has published 11 books.
I have written several novels that are steeped in legal, scientific and archival research. And these books would have been impossible for me without the internet. My 2020 book, “The World Doesn’t Work that Way, but It Could” is a collection of stories reflecting President Donald Trump rolling back the administrative state, by which I mean unraveling safety regulations in the Department of the Interior and EPA. I did legal and scientific research and asked the web to deliver me reports. But the research alone can’t enliven the text. There are things that are not available on the web, and that can only be experienced through face-to-face interactions. So I did interviews. Fiction is important so that we can imagine other people’s lives, so that we can develop empathy, so that we can move outside of ourselves, and we can see ourselves mirrored. It’s galactically important, because only a very small part of reality can be expressed, and if you confine yourself to nonfiction and are trying to do a good ethical job of that, then you strangle the ability to express all sorts of other parts of human experience.
When Jinah Kim learned in 2016 that Museum of Fine Arts conservation scientist Michele Derrick had detected cobalt in a 15th-century Indian manuscript, she was presented with an obvious explanation: the document had probably been retouched later, potentially with synthetic pigments. After all, European-made cobalt-based pigments like smalt were widely imported to South Asia only in the 17th century, and synthetic cobalt blue was popularized only in the early 19th century.
But Kim, who was gathering data on pigments as research for her second book, wasn’t convinced.
“What do we know about actual pigment usage in this region at this time period?” Kim, George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art in the Department of History of Art & Architecture, asked herself. “Does it all have to come from Europe? It’s possible there are indigenous knowledge of colorants that we don’t know about.”
Further analysis by Katherine Eremin, Patricia Cornwell Senior Conservation Scientist at Harvard Art Museums, confirmed that the smalt found in the Jain manuscript had a different composition from European-manufactured smalt, indicating it came from a different source.
It was a “eureka” moment for Kim, who hypothesized that some pigments believed to have gotten to South Asia as imports from Europe may in fact have been used in South Asia long before. The result was the “Mapping Color in History Project,” an ongoing effort since 2018 to create an object-based pigment database for historical research on art from this region.
“I realized a lot of pigment databases available out there are based on a Western European canon, because that’s where the research has been,” Kim said. “If you look at Asian materials, especially South Asia, Himalaya, and Southeast Asia, everything is so colorful but the baseline understanding of what colorants were available is not known.”
“I realized a lot of pigment databases available out there are based on a Western European canon, because that’s where the research has been.”
Jinah Kim
The open-access database allows users to search by painting title, keyword, pigment, color, or element, and filter results by artist, date, and more. There’s also a map to search by location of origin. On each artwork’s page, users can view an analysis of what pigments were found in the painting, what method was used to identify them, and the scientists’ confidence level. Kim wants the database to be useful for “anyone interested in color,” including people in the cultural heritage field, art historians, curators, teachers, and students.
Kim describes Mapping History as highly collaborative, bringing together experts in digital humanities, conservation science, and art history.
“I do describe it as a three-legged stool,” Kim said. “It cannot be done by one person because it requires a lot of different expertise. You need to do computer programming to make this database, you need to work with material analysis, and you need art historical research to map it in history and time.”
“Hindu Goddess Ganga with Two Female Attendants Carrying Fly-Whisks,” Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of James E. Robinson III in honor of Stuart Cary Welch and Alve John Erickson
Kim worked with Rashmi Singhal and the Arts & Humanities Research Computing (DARTH) team and Jeff Steward from Harvard Art Museums on the technology aspects of the project. The database was built from scratch.
Tracy Stuber, digital humanities specialist with DARTH who acts as bridge between the research teams and software engineers, said the Mapping Color website is unique because it links two types of data that are usually siloed and used by separate audiences: data about the artwork itself and data about the scientific analysis.
“Because we know approximately where or when an artwork was made, we’re then able to say, ‘This pigment that we’ve identified in this artwork was therefore made approximately in that place at that time,’” Stuber said. “Linking them together in a database not only makes that data accessible to the other audience but facilitates more collaboration and conversation between those two disciplines.”
Katherine Eremin (left) and Jinah Kim observe a manuscript under a microscope.
Photos by Grace DuVal
Working with ancient art means that scientists can’t usually take samples for analysis. Mapping Color’s scientists rely 99% of the time on non-destructive methods, according to Eremin, who is one of the project’s core partners.
When Eremin analyzes an artwork, she typically starts with imaging which can identify certain pigments that behave differently in infrared and ultraviolet lights. Indian Yellow, for example, glows under UV light. She also examines the pigment under a microscope to see the blend of colors used.
“You look at them to begin with and you think, ‘Oh that’s beautiful,’ but then you actually look down the microscope and see the really fine details,” she said. “You think, ‘that’s just blue,’ and then you look at it and see that actually it’s lots of different things mixed together.”
She will then try to identify elements using x-ray fluorescence to see what characteristic x-rays are emitted from the painting. For example, a green can be identified as copper green if there are visible copper rays, or yellow orpiment (an arsenic sulfide mineral) blended with blue if there are visible arsenic rays. To gather information at the molecular level, Eremin uses Raman spectroscopy, a non-invasive laser technology which can reveal if a copper green is either malachite or atacamite.
On rare occasions if an artwork is already flaking, it may begin a conversation between conservators, curators, and scientists about whether to take a sample. Eremin used an infrared light technique known as Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy on one tiny particle taken from a crumbling 16th-century Indian manuscript, and identified that kaolin clay was used for the white border detail.
The findings give insight into the vision of the artists. In an analysis of a 1588 “Divan of Anvari” manuscript series, Mapping Color scientists realized the artist used an Indian yellow pigment for the pure yellow of figure’s clothing, but used orpiment, an older arsenic sulfide yellow, for highlighting leaves on a tree.
“What that tells me is that artists are trying to get to that pure form of brilliant yellow, and they’re discerning between different shades,” Kim said.
“Krishna’s Manifest Vision through Sound (Kavitt),” from a Rasikapriya series, Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Philip Hofer
With support from the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, the Mapping Color in History Project has also collaborated with Jaipur-based traditional Indian painter Babulal Marotia to analyze samples of pigments he uses in his studio. It’s helpful to study materials used by contemporary artists like Marotia, who are carrying on artistic traditions that have been passed down for generations, according to Kim.
“You can’t dissolve a 700-year-old painting to see what has happened.” Kim said. “This gives us an access point to that historical moment through this type of material that’s still being used.”
Mapping the origin locations of the paintings in the database isn’t easy, as historic paintings from South Asia often lack precise information about the date, location, and artist.
Mapping the origin locations of the paintings in the database isn’t easy, as historic paintings from South Asia often lack precise information about the date, location, and artist.
“If you look up certain Indian painting in a museum’s database, it will say, ‘North India, 17th-18th century,” Kim said. “You cannot map “North India, 17th -18th century” in any point in time and place. That’s where we need to do more research on objects, find more relevant information and answer comparative studies to narrow it down and come up with better attribution.”
Kim has a list of ideas for how to improve the database (adding more artworks, visualization tools, and certainty indicators) that she is excited to implement.
“I want to understand certain trends, I want to be able to see patterns, I want to see things that were not visible before,” Kim said. “But a database is only as good as the data itself, so there’s a lot of work that still needs to go in.”
Some of the work on the database was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy joined President Eisgruber and representatives from Microsoft, CoreWeave and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) for an official ribbon cutting.
New miniature laboratories are ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t make mistakes. They provide a controlled test environment where algorithms and AI models can be checked before being put to work under real-life conditions. The aim is for AI to work reliably.
You’re an aerospace engineer on a tight timeline to develop a component for a rocket engine. No sweat, you think — you know the concepts by heart, and the model looks appropriate in CAD. But you inspect the 3D-printed part that you’ve outsourced for manufacturing, and something is wrong. The impeller blade angle is off, and the diameter is larger than the design intent. The vendor won’t get back to you. Suddenly you’re over budget. Something is leaking. Running the pump test rig, you’re not sure where that vibration is coming from.
Successfully navigating nightmares like this can make or break an engineer, but real-time problem-solving during assembly is something few undergraduates experience as part of their curriculum. Enter class 16.811 (Advanced Manufacturing for Aerospace Engineers), a new communication-intensive laboratory course that allows juniors and seniors to drive a full engineering cycle, gaining experience that mirrors the challenges they’ll face as practicing engineers.
In just 13 weeks, students design, build, and test a laboratory-scale electric turbopump, the type of pump used in liquid rocket propulsion systems to deliver fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber under high pressure. Teams of two or three students work through the entire production process while balancing budgets, documenting, and testing.
The course was developed and taught by Zachary Cordero, Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor, and Zoltán Spakovszky, the T. Wilson Professor in Aeronautics, along with a team of teaching assistants (TAs), technical instructors, and communication experts. It ran for the first time last fall, open to students who had completed Unified Engineering, the foundational Course 16 curriculum covering the four disciplines at the core of aerospace engineering. It generated so much interest upon its announcement that spots were allocated via lottery.
“Sometimes it’s assumed that students will get hands-on experience through their extracurriculars, but they may not. Students in this class gain that experience through exposure to cutting-edge design and manufacturing tools, like metal 3D printing,” says Cordero. “They don’t just learn how to solve a problem set — they learn how to be an engineer.”
Training for a rapidly evolving field
The course was born out of feedback from participants at an annual workshop that Cordero organizes each summer addressing materials challenges in reusable rocket engines. Attendees representing industry, government, and academic sectors consistently emphasized the need for the next generation of engineers to be familiar with advanced engineering concepts, in addition to having strong fundamentals. Experience with new computational design tools and processes like additive manufacturing is becoming essential for success in the aerospace industry. “Our mission is to train, inspire, and motivate the next generation of aerospace engineers. We have to listen to what our industry partners want from engineers and adapt our curriculum to meet those needs,” says Cordero.
Spakovszky, Cordero, and the team built the course over two years of Independent Activities Period workshops, developing independent modules that teach concepts for constructing the turbopump. The first set of labs focuses on the impellers — the rotating bladed-disk component that draws fluid into the pump to pressurize it. The second lab breaks down the rotor system that supports the pump impeller, and the third covers integration of the rotor assembly into the casing and final testing.
Throughout the course, students receive instruction in technical communication and training on the full array of machine shop tools available in the Arthur and Linda Gelb Laboratory. Beyond learning the concepts and tools, the majority of the design and implementation is up to the students.
“They are pushed to learn how to learn on their own,” says Spakovszky. “The key differentiator here is that there is no solution. In other classes, you have a problem, and the instructor has the solution. This is open ended, and every team has a different design.” Project management is left up to each team, with instructors and TAs serving as resources, rather than leads. Each team works with vendors to help bring their designs to life. The students conducted their machinery analysis using the Agile Engineering Design System (AEDS) and Advanced Rotating Machine Dynamics (ARMD) software tools from Concepts NREC. Impellers were printed at the MIT SHED (Safety Health Environmental Discovery lab), with support from Tolga Durak, managing director of environment, health and safety, and by industry collaborators at Desktop Metal.
“A lot of the design questions we were working with don’t have firm answers,” says junior Danishell Destefano. “I learned a lot about how to read technical literature and compare design trade-offs to make my own decisions.”
On the floor
“Making things is really hard,” says Spakovszky. “In addition to manufacturing parts and components, the assembly of rotating machinery requires careful tolerancing of the part dimensions and precision manufacturing of the interfaces to meet design specification.”
At the core of the curriculum is the manufacturing process itself, with its myriad components posing a unique challenge for students who may not have experienced the kind of rapid design cycle that is becoming more and more common in the field. The course uses concurrent engineering as a methodology to emphasize the close connections between fundamental concepts, functional requirements, design, materials, and manufacturing.
Student teams document their lab results in written reports and give regular progress presentations. Lecturer Jessie Stickgold-Sarah instructed the class on professional communication. At the end of the semester, students walk away with the ability to not only create new things, but communicate about their creations.
“I really enjoyed working with this group of students,” says Stickgold-Sarah. “The main paper and presentations required students to express the reasoning using the design-build-test sequence, and to explain and justify their choices based on their technical understanding of core topics. They were incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and the papers and presentations they produced exceeded my expectations.”
The course culminates in a final presentation, where teams showcase their findings and get feedback from their MIT instructors and industry representatives — potential future colleagues and employers.
Whether or not students go directly into a career in rocket or jet propulsion, the breadth of skills they learn in class has applications across disciplines. “The biggest skill I’ve gained is time and project management. To build a pump in a semester is a pretty tough timeline challenge, and learning how to manage my time and work with a team has been a great soft skill to learn,” says Destafano.
The course drives home the reality that the manufacturing process can be just as important as the product. “I hope through this, they gain confidence to explore the unknown and deal with uncertainty in engineering systems,” says Cordero. “In the real world, things are leaking. Things aren’t as you initially anticipated or behaving as you thought they would behave. And the students had to react and respond. That's real life. It's kind of intuitive, kind of common sense, sure — but you can hone that skill, and develop confidence in that skill.”
Class 16.811 (Advanced Manufacturing for Aerospace Engineers) allows juniors and seniors to drive a full engineering cycle, gaining experience that mirrors the challenges they’ll face as engineers.
Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have demonstrated that a single, standard silicon transistor, the fundamental building block of microchips used in computers, smartphones and almost every electronic system, can function like a biological neuron and synapse when operated in a specific, unconventional way.
Led by Associate Professor Mario Lanza from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering, NUS, the research team’s work presents a highly scalable and energy-efficient solution for hardware-based artificial neural networks (ANNs). This brings neuromorphic computing — where chips could process information more efficiently, much like the human brain — closer to reality. Their study was published in the journal Nature on 26 March 2025.
Putting the brains in silicon
The world’s most sophisticated computers already exist inside our heads. Studies show that the human brain is, by and large, more energy-efficient than electronic processors, thanks to almost 90 billion neurons that form some 100 trillion connections with each other, and synapses that tune their strength over time — a process known as synaptic plasticity, which underpins learning and memory.
For decades, scientists have sought to replicate this efficiency using artificial neural networks (ANNs). ANNs have recently driven remarkable advances in artificial intelligence (AI), loosely inspired by how the brain processes information. But while they borrow biological terminology, the similarities run only skin deep — software-based ANNs, such as those powering large language models like ChatGPT, have a voracious appetite for computational resources, and hence, electricity. This makes them impractical for many applications.
Neuromorphic computing aims to mimic the computing power and energy efficiency of the brain. This requires not only re-designing system architecture to carry out memory and computation at the same place — the so-called in-memory computing (IMC) — but also to develop electronic devices that exploit physical and electronic phenomena capable of replicating more faithfully how neurons and synapses work. However, current neuromorphic computing systems are stymied by the need for complicated multi-transistor circuits or emerging materials that are yet to be validated for large-scale manufacturing.
“To enable true neuromorphic computing, where microchips behave like biological neurons and synapses, we need hardware that is both scalable and energy-efficient,” said Professor Lanza.
The NUS research team has now demonstrated that a single, standard silicon transistor, when arranged and operated in a specific way, can replicate both neural firing and synaptic weight changes — the fundamental mechanisms of biological neurons and synapses. This was achieved through adjusting the resistance of the bulk terminal to specific values, which allow controlling two physical phenomena taking place into the transistor: punch through impact ionisation and charge trapping. Moreover, the team built a two-transistor cell capable of operating either in neuron or synaptic regime, which the researchers have called "Neuro-Synaptic Random Access Memory", or NS-RAM.
“Other approaches require complex transistor arrays or novel materials with uncertain manufacturability, but our method makes use of commercial CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology, the same platform found in modern computer processors and memory microchips,” explained Professor Lanza. “This means it’s scalable, reliable and compatible with existing semiconductor fabrication processes.”
Through experiments, the NS-RAM cell demonstrated low power consumption, maintained stable performance over many cycles of operation and exhibited consistent, predictable behaviour across different devices — all of which are desired attributes for building reliable ANN hardware suited for real-world applications. The team’s breakthrough marks a step change in the development of compact, power-efficient AI processors that could enable faster, more responsive computing.
Metamaterials are artificially-structured materials with extraordinary properties not easily found in nature. With engineered three-dimensional (3D) geometries at the micro- and nanoscale, these architected materials achieve unique mechanical and physical properties with capabilities beyond those of conventional materials — and have emerged over the past decade as a promising way to engineering challenges where all other existing materials have lacked success.
Architected materials exhibit unique mechanical and functional properties, but their full potential remains untapped due to challenges in design, fabrication, and characterization. Improvements and scalability in this space could help transform a range of industries, from biomedical implants, sports equipment, automotive and aerospace, and energy and electronics.
“Advances in scalable fabrication, high-throughput testing, and AI-driven design optimization could revolutionize the mechanics and materials science disciplines, enabling smarter, more adaptive materials that redefine engineering and everyday technologies,” says Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
In a Perspective published this month in the journal Nature Materials, Portela and James Surjadi, a postdoc in mechanical engineering, discuss key hurdles, opportunities, and future applications in the field of mechanical metamaterials. The paper is titled “Enabling three-dimensional architected materials across length scales and timescales.”
“The future of the field requires innovation in fabricating these materials across length scales, from nano to macro, and progress in understanding them at a variety of time scales, from slow deformation to dynamic impact,” says Portela, adding that it also demands interdisciplinary collaboration.
A Perspective is a peer-reviewed content type that the journal uses to invite reflection or discussion on matters that may be speculative, controversial, or highly technical, and where the subject matter may not meet the criteria for a Review.
“We felt like our field, following substantial progress over the last decade, is still facing two bottlenecks: issues scaling up, and no knowledge or understanding of properties under dynamic conditions,” says Portela, discussing the decision to write the piece.
Portela and Surjadi’s paper summarizes state-of-the-art approaches and highlights existing knowledge gaps in material design, fabrication, and characterization. It also proposes a roadmap to accelerate the discovery of architected materials with programmable properties via the synergistic combination of high-throughput experimentation and computational efforts, toward leveraging emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for their design and optimization.
“High-throughput miniaturized experiments, non-contact characterization, and benchtop extreme-condition methods will generate rich datasets for the implementation of data-driven models, accelerating the optimization and discovery of metamaterials with unique properties,” says Surjadi.
The Portela Lab’s motto is “architected mechanics and materials across scales.” The Perspective aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and real-world applications of next-generation architected materials, and it presents a vision the lab has been working toward for the past four years.
Promising directions in the design, fabrication, characterization, and application of 3D architected materials (from left to right, top to bottom): 3D woven metamaterials, aperiodic self-assembled morphologies, microscale impact experiments, and pressure sensing functionalities.
Photos by Justin Knight; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Sy Boles
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Exhibit traces scholar’s quest to reconstruct abbey destroyed after French Revolution
Cluny III, once the largest building in Europe, was little more than rubble when Harvard architectural historian Kenneth Conant laid eyes on it in the 1920s. His efforts to painstakingly recreate the medieval abbey as it looked in the Middle Ages — outlined as part of an exhibition now on view at the Graduate School of Design — illustrate how architects learn to see what isn’t there.
“The exhibit is the story of a man and his passion, which is the Cluny abbey church, and how we can experience it today using modern tools,” said Matt Cook, digital scholarship program manager at Harvard Library, who worked closely with curator and architectural historian Christine Smith. “Several teams across Harvard Library allowed Christine to realize her vision for the exhibit with emerging technology.”
Construction began on the Benedictine abbey of Cluny III, located in the Burgundy region of France, in 1088. It stood for more than 700 years, growing to more than 500 feet long and 100 feet high; at one time, it was home to about 1,000 monks. But after the French Revolution, the impressive structure was demolished and sold for scrap materials.
When Conant first arrived at Cluny decades after its destruction, all that remained was the south transept and eight partially destroyed capitals, or the decorative tops of columns, which once stood behind the altar.
Conant received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard and taught architectural history at the University from 1920 to 1954. It was an era when architectural historians were still learning to classify medieval architecture and to understand what a building might have looked like in its original form before pieces were added or taken away over the centuries.
Kenneth Conant as a student at Harvard University.
Conant inside an excavation at Cluny III.
“It’s a kind of an idealism,” said Smith, who is the Robert C. and Marian K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History.
The “idealist” task that Conant gave himself was to imagine Cluny III as it once was, in excruciating detail, based on what he knew of similar buildings and on 20 years of excavations.
Conant tried to identify the original form of the abbey church before later additions were built.
Conant made precise illustrations of the inside of Cluny III from a variety of perspectives, all without ever seeing the building.
“It was unimaginably immense,” Christine Smith said of Cluny III.
Like Conant himself, “Envisioning Cluny” attempts to recreate the feeling of being inside one of medieval Europe’s largest buildings, long since ruined.
“In my own work, when I’m studying something, I try to know it in such reality and detail that I live it,” Smith said. “I think that’s what he’s doing: He’s living it. He wants to see it. He wants to feel it in many different ways. He wants to understand it objectively, but also in terms of the color, the light, how you moved around in it, how it felt to be there.”
Technology allows viewers to interact with architectural designs in ways Conant’s contemporaries could not have imagined.
The enduring mystery of the Cluny capitals
The eight capitals discovered at Cluny III fascinated Conant. They were damaged, with key details missing, but each seemed to feature ornate designs of people, plants, and musical instruments. It wasn’t clear which sides ought to face the front, or what order they should go in, or if they even told a cohesive story.
Some of the Cluny III capitals are theorized to represent the four seasons, the four winds, and the eight modes of music.
It’s possible that sculptors drew inspiration from the columns from the illustrations in contemporary manuscripts.
“Some people think they’re all by one sculptor; other people think they’re by two identifiable sculptors; other people think we don’t know,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty about them, which is what’s fun.”
Early in his career, Conant hoped the columns told a single story about the virtues of monastic life, Smith said. But eventually, he came to believe there was little uniting them as an octet. To this day, there are no firm answers, but they remain an object of study as one of the earliest examples of figural sculpture in the Romanesque era.
From plaster casts to 3D
Contemporary students of architectural history don’t have to rely on the stone capitals themselves, or even the unwieldy plaster casts that scholars have traditionally used as aids.
Use your cursor or fingers to manipulate these 3D recreations of Cluny casts.
Using a method called photogrammetry, Harvard Library Imaging Services photographed the plaster casts of the Cluny columns to create the 3D models that are featured in the exhibit. The team took hundreds of individual photos of each capital cast to create each model. Additionally, library conservators, archivists, and curators prepared the print and photo reproductions on display.
Viewers can interact with historic architectural designs up close.
With the 3D scans, Smith and her students can zoom in, rotate, and rearrange the eight capitals and each of their designs in a way previous generations never could, giving them new insight into the enduring puzzle of the octet.
“I can compare them in a way that I can’t with the plaster cast,” Smith said. “I can look at all eight of them in a row.”
It’s a different experience for today’s architectural students than for Conant and his contemporaries, she said. But at the core, the exercise is the same: Learning to see what’s there, and learning to imagine what’s not.
“Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025” is on display through April 4 in the Druker Design Gallery.
Rakesh Khurana shares lessons learned at helm — and as an influencer, off- and online
Melih Cevik ’27
Harvard Correspondent
long read
Danoff Dean of Harvard College to step down at end of academic year after 11-year tenure of advances, innovation, and challenges (including pandemic)
For Rakesh Khurana, understanding the mission comes first. Without it, the what-do-we-do-next-and-how are meaningless.
That principle helped guide Khurana, who will step down at the end of the academic year after 11 years as the Danoff Dean of Harvard College and return to teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at Harvard Business School.
Khurana, the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development and a professor of sociology, first arrived at Harvard in 1993 for graduate school, earning a master’s in sociology in 1997 and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 1998.
During his tenure as dean, Khurana worked to enhance opportunities in the arts and public service, reorganized office infrastructure to better align supports for students, helped launch the Intellectual Vitality initiative, and defended the goal of recruiting students to the University from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences.
And, of course, he built a presence on Instagram affectionately known as the Deanstagram. In this edited conversation, Khurana talks about the work he’s done and the lessons he’s learned — about himself and the community.
You’re one of the longest serving deans of Harvard College. Can you talk a bit about aspects of your tenure that you found particularly gratifying?
I think I’ve had the best role in higher education. As an immigrant to this country, growing up in a family that held higher education and education as sacred and Harvard as being one of the institutions that embodied that idea, I feel lucky.
Part of what we accomplished from the start was knowing that we were going to be a mission-oriented organization and institution, going back to the founding. Our aim has been to educate citizen leaders and be clear how we do it — through the transformative experience of a liberal arts and science education and developing specificity around the intellectual, the social, and personal transformation.
One of the things that I feel good about is that there’s a strong sense of understanding of the College’s mission. That clarity has let us take numerous actions on everything ranging from adopting an honor code, which is emblematic of the kind of aspiration that we want to have for our students, to the renewal of the Gen Ed program, which occurred at a time when there was a debate over whether it would even continue.
The commitment to the idea of a general education that’s broad and anchored in the liberal arts and that centers on important questions of society is really critical. Professor Michael Sandel’s renewed class “Justice” is one example of creating a intergenerational connection between our students and alumni who took that class decades earlier that both honors the past, but that’s also relevant/critical for the issues of today.
I am also proud of our work on the Intellectual Vitality initiative, which was something the team had been focused on for several years. Having a data-informed but also flexible approach helped us recognize how Harvard could avoid the fashion of the day and rather commit to substance on these issues. I hope the approach of holding true to our mission and at the same time evolving is remembered as one of the mainstays of my deanship.
“To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege.”
During your tenure as dean, you faced various challenges. Is there one you think you learned the most from?
Universities reflect the world, but they can also magnify what is happening beyond our campus. Bringing together people who are, for the first time, living with and learning from people with very different backgrounds and experiences is probably the greatest opportunity we have.
But creating this community requires building a lot of capacities and skills and role modeling. Maybe in the past we could take for granted that this all existed, but I think we can’t assume that students and faculty and staff are coming here with this understanding.
We have to recognize that Harvard is not a perfect institution. I think recognizing this work of bringing together people with different backgrounds and experiences has existed in this institution from Day One. This is an institution that recognizes that excellence comes in a variety of forms. In the process of that evolving understanding we get closer to our motto of veritas.
How different was the job of being dean from what you expected?
My background is as an organizational sociologist, and my particular focus is studying institutions, leadership, and bureaucracy. In that field, you learn a lot of theory, do empirical work, write case studies.
There’s a lot of knowing, and then there’s the doing, and then you discover the knowing/doing gap. While some of what you teach are concepts that are helpful and useful, they’re often ideal types that don’t take into account all the particular contingencies and challenges of the specific experiences.
There are three things that, for me, held true. A sense of mission — “What is our purpose?” The vision — “Where are we going?” And the values, or “How are we going to get there?” The power of that is something I’d been teaching about for years, and it’s so interesting to see how powerful it is and how easy it is to forget. I start every meeting with the College mission. If people who are leading are not minding the mission and the vision and the values, who is?
The second lesson that I learned is the microscope that we’re under. When you’re in a position of responsibility, you are constantly role modeling. People are not just paying attention to what you say, but to what you do. Your walk has to be your talk. In fact, your walk is probably more important than your talk.
Something you learn working with students and your team is that you’re a coach, and you’re often trying to figure out what people’s aspirational skills are, what their motivations are. While you’re coaching them to try to help connect those two, in the process you’re coaching yourself.
The other thing I learned is that we’re all works in progress. We’re all trying to become better versions of ourselves. If you’re surrounded by people who care about the mission, who understand the vision of where we’re going, and desire to operate with those values, you can create incredible trust, allowing you to do important things, including getting through some really difficult moments.
Structurally, the most difficult moment was COVID-19.
In many ways we had to live without the things that made us distinctive, the day-to-day being on this campus: the serendipity, the sense of learning to see behind each other’s eyes and hear from each other’s perspectives, not only in the classroom but in the dining halls, in our student organizations. To de-densify campus in a short time period, to try to deal with the reality of the situation, the uncertainty that it presented, and keep academic continuity. Keeping the academic mission going and then restarting and bringing people back to campus in a safe way with the protocols and the testing. That was the most challenging moment, but it was the moment where the University worked as one institution to move forward in a really powerful way.
“Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game.”
You’ve been vocal in warning about the challenge higher education faces with declining trust. How do we rebuild that?
Rebuilding trust is not something that can be done overnight. Part of what we have to do is to make sure that our core is quite strong. The basic functions that people expect of a university around teaching and research must be rock-solid.
For a place like Harvard our legitimacy has depended on two things: a commitment to academic excellence and a commitment to meritocracy.
I would say there are three things that institutions like ours should be doing. One is that we convene excellence — in our faculty, our students, and staff. We should be highlighting excellence in bringing people together.
Second is our commitment to veritas. The reason we depend on academic excellence and meritocracy is that it gets you to a better understanding of the truth. We need to be an institution that lives with an uncomfortable truth rather than a comfortable delusion.
The third thing we need to do is streamline as an institution.
In our commitment to being a place where people across differences and backgrounds and experiences can openly and thoughtfully discuss complex issues, we have two responsibilities.
First, we have to make sure that if we’re asking families to invest in our education, we have to educate effectively.
Then there’s the moral responsibility. Any institution that takes on the responsibility of educating youth is a moral institution at the same time. And this cannot be politicized. When you are politicized, people believe you are producing biased research, not encouraging independent thinking, inculcating ideology, or not allowing for conversations on difficult topics.
Many in the community think one of your defining characteristics is your approachability. Is that something that you’ve always had, or did you develop that over time, and if so how?
It would probably surprise people that during the time I spent in college, I could count on my hands how many times I ate a meal with somebody. I had a small group of friends, but they kept very different hours than I did. They were all artists and painters, and so they would work like night owls. I was in social science and would get up early, go to the library to study.
I ate most of my meals by myself, but I never felt lonely. I had my books. I always felt I was in conversation with scholars like Max Weber, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, and others. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people. I was using the four years I had in college to do something I didn’t think I’d ever have the time to do again — work on my thinking and understanding of the world.
In hindsight, I think I should have realized that I had just as much to learn from my peers. Something I learned from my mother and from Stephanie, my partner, is that everybody has an important and interesting story to tell.
My mother would always say, “Nobody’s better than you, but you’re also not better than anyone else.” That kind of humility is something that I just love my parents for because when I came to graduate school I just found myself being friends with and getting to know everybody — not only my peers, but also the custodial staff and the staff at the sociology department and at HBS. I just started realizing that everybody had such an interesting story to tell.
I would often look for the student who was sitting by themselves at a meal and think to myself, “I wish somebody would have sat with me at that time.” I always found myself drawn to sitting with students, which culminated in us becoming faculty deans at Cabot House. That’s when I became comfortable with being uncomfortable in terms of just sitting with somebody new and asking them a couple of questions, and it has become one of the most joyful parts of my day.
Something that you’ve often spoken about is being an immigrant kid who attended New York City public schools. Did that kid ever think he would be the dean of one of the world’s leading educational institutions?
I was born in India. My parents immigrated to the U.S. the same way millions of other families have for the same reason of trying to build a better life for their kids, and primarily for the educational opportunities.
My mother was a public school teacher in the Bronx, and my dad was an accountant for the city. I always remember that we would move because my mom would look at which schools had higher Regents scores, even a couple of blocks, so that we would be zoned for that school. I know firsthand the transformative power that education has — not just on the individual life, but the generational impact that it has.
My higher education experience began at SUNY Binghamton, and then I transferred to Cornell when a professor came up to me after class and said, “You’re doing well in this class. You should think about transferring to Cornell.” I was like, “Why?” He said, “I went there, and I think you would do really well.”
I had never had a teacher say something like that. It showed the power of a teacher seeing something in you that you didn’t even see yourself. This highlights the power of the mission. How do you create those opportunities for interaction where a conversation, question, or suggestion ends up shaping and changing the trajectory of your life?
After college, I worked in a small tech startup that ended up growing. Somebody from HBS came to write a case study on the company and that conversation led me to apply to graduate school. The next year I was at Harvard.
What does working on this campus mean to you now that you’ve been teaching and leading for so many years?
One of the things I love to do is just go to higher education institutions and visit campuses. I remember the first time seeing the libraries, the first place I would go when visiting. Visiting Cornell’s Sage Hall library, Widener and Baker libraries at Harvard, and dropping off my brothers at Dartmouth and Wesleyan.
To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege. At times when things can feel challenging, we need to remember that colleges and universities are a candle in the darkness. We have a special responsibility to make sure that that candle is burning bright.
Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game. Our aspirations should always run ahead of our reality.
Final question: Are we going to have to go to Allston to get a selfie?
It will be interesting to highlight the life of a professor, so I plan on continuing my Instagram. I think sharing our experiences on campus helps also with the element of rebuilding trust, because it takes away the mythology that institutions like ours don’t have people who are working hard and trying to do their best for the world. As former President Drew Faust said, “Harvard’s not trying to be the best in the world. It’s trying to be the best for the world.” My sense is that is what the community is, but you can’t tell that. You have to show it.
Weill Cornell Medicine and Weill Bugando School of Medicine collaborate to strengthen medical education, health care and innovative global health research at both institutions.
Metamaterials are artificially-structured materials with extraordinary properties not easily found in nature. With engineered three-dimensional (3D) geometries at the micro- and nanoscale, these architected materials achieve unique mechanical and physical properties with capabilities beyond those of conventional materials — and have emerged over the past decade as a promising way to engineering challenges where all other existing materials have lacked success.
Architected materials exhibit unique mechanical and functional properties, but their full potential remains untapped due to challenges in design, fabrication, and characterization. Improvements and scalability in this space could help transform a range of industries, from biomedical implants, sports equipment, automotive and aerospace, and energy and electronics.
“Advances in scalable fabrication, high-throughput testing, and AI-driven design optimization could revolutionize the mechanics and materials science disciplines, enabling smarter, more adaptive materials that redefine engineering and everyday technologies,” says Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
In a Perspective published this month in the journal Nature Materials, Portela and James Surjadi, a postdoc in mechanical engineering, discuss key hurdles, opportunities, and future applications in the field of mechanical metamaterials. The paper is titled “Enabling three-dimensional architected materials across length scales and timescales.”
“The future of the field requires innovation in fabricating these materials across length scales, from nano to macro, and progress in understanding them at a variety of time scales, from slow deformation to dynamic impact,” says Portela, adding that it also demands interdisciplinary collaboration.
A Perspective is a peer-reviewed content type that the journal uses to invite reflection or discussion on matters that may be speculative, controversial, or highly technical, and where the subject matter may not meet the criteria for a Review.
“We felt like our field, following substantial progress over the last decade, is still facing two bottlenecks: issues scaling up, and no knowledge or understanding of properties under dynamic conditions,” says Portela, discussing the decision to write the piece.
Portela and Surjadi’s paper summarizes state-of-the-art approaches and highlights existing knowledge gaps in material design, fabrication, and characterization. It also proposes a roadmap to accelerate the discovery of architected materials with programmable properties via the synergistic combination of high-throughput experimentation and computational efforts, toward leveraging emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for their design and optimization.
“High-throughput miniaturized experiments, non-contact characterization, and benchtop extreme-condition methods will generate rich datasets for the implementation of data-driven models, accelerating the optimization and discovery of metamaterials with unique properties,” says Surjadi.
The Portela Lab’s motto is “architected mechanics and materials across scales.” The Perspective aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and real-world applications of next-generation architected materials, and it presents a vision the lab has been working toward for the past four years.
Promising directions in the design, fabrication, characterization, and application of 3D architected materials (from left to right, top to bottom): 3D woven metamaterials, aperiodic self-assembled morphologies, microscale impact experiments, and pressure sensing functionalities.
Six current MIT affiliates and 27 additional MIT alumni have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The 2024 class of AAAS Fellows includes 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators, spanning all 24 of AAAS disciplinary sections, who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.
Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, life member of the MIT Corporation, was named a AAAS Fellow “for outstanding leadership in biotechnology, in particular mRNA therapeutics, and for advocacy for recognition of the contributions of immigrants to economic and scientific progress.” Afeyan is the founder and CEO of the venture creation company Flagship Pioneering, which has built over 100 science-based companies to transform human health and sustainability. He is also the chairman and cofounder of Moderna, which was awarded a 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the development of its Covid-19 vaccine. Afeyan earned his PhD in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987 and was a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management for 16 years, starting in 2000. Among other activities at the Institute, he serves on the advisory board of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and delivered MIT’s 2024 Commencement address.
Cynthia Breazeal SM ’93, ScD ’00 is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group in the MIT Media Lab. At MIT Open Learning, she is the MIT dean for digital learning, and in this role, she leverages her experience in emerging digital technologies and business, research, and strategic initiatives to lead Open Learning’s business and research and engagement units. She is also the director of the MIT-wide Initiative on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (raise.mit.edu). She co-founded the consumer social robotics company, Jibo, Inc., where she served as chief scientist and chief experience officer. She is recognized for distinguished contributions in the field of artificial intelligence education, particularly around the use of social robots, and learning at scale.
Alan Edelman PhD ’89 is an applied mathematics professor for the Department of Mathematics and leads the Applied Computing Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the MIT Julia Lab. He is recognized as a 2024 AAAS fellow for distinguished contributions and outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, random matrix theory, computational science, and in particular for the development of the Julia programming language. Edelman has been elected a fellow of five different societies — AMS, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and AAAS.
Robert B. Millard '73, life member and chairman emeritus of the MIT Corporation, was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for outstanding contributions to the scientific community and U.S. higher education "through exemplary leadership service to such storied institutions as AAAS and MIT." Millard joined the MIT Corporation as a term member in 2003 and was elected a life member in 2013. He served on the Executive Committee for 10 years and on the Investment Company Management Board for seven years, including serving as its chair for the last four years. He served as a member of the Visiting Committees for Physics, Architecture, and Chemistry. In addition, Millard has served as a member of the Linguistics and Philosophy Visiting Committee, the Corporation Development Committee, and the Advisory Council for the Council for the Arts. In 2011, Millard received the Bronze Beaver Award, the MIT Alumni Association’s highest honor for distinguished service.
Jagadeesh S. Moodera is a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics. His research interests include experimental condensed matter physics: spin polarized tunneling and nano spintronics; exchange coupled ferromagnet/superconductor interface, triplet pairing, nonreciprocal current transport and memory toward superconducting spintronics for quantum technology; and topological insulators/superconductors, including Majorana bound state studies in metallic systems. His research in the area of spin polarized tunneling led to a breakthrough in observing tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) at room temperature in magnetic tunnel junctions. This resulted in a huge surge in this area of research, currently one of the most active areas. TMR effect is used in all ultra-high-density magnetic data storage, as well as for the development of nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM) that is currently being advanced further in various electronic devices, including for neuromorphic computing architecture. For his leadership in spintronics, the discovery of TMR, the development of MRAM, and for mentoring the next generation of scientists, Moodera was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow. For his TMR discovery he was awarded the Oliver Buckley Prize (2009) by the American Physical Society (APS), named an American National Science Foundation Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow (2008-10), won IBM and TDK Research Awards (1995-98), and became a Fellow of APS (2000).
Noelle Eckley Selin, the director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, uses atmospheric chemistry modeling to inform decision-making strategies on air pollution, climate change, and toxic substances, including mercury and persistent organic pollutants. She has also published articles and book chapters on the interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations, in particular focusing on global efforts to regulate hazardous chemicals and persistent organic pollutants. She is named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for world-recognized leadership in modeling the impacts of air pollution on human health, in assessing the costs and benefits of related policies, and in integrating technology dynamics into sustainability science.
Additional MIT alumni honored as 2024 AAAS Fellows include: Danah Boyd SM ’02 (Media Arts and Sciences); Michael S. Branicky ScD ’95 (EECS); Jane P. Chang SM ’95, PhD ’98 (Chemical Engineering); Yong Chen SM '99 (Mathematics); Roger Nelson Clark PhD '80 (EAPS); Mark Stephen Daskin ’74, PhD ’78 (Civil and Environmental Engineering); Marla L. Dowell PhD ’94 (Physics); Raissa M. D’Souza PhD ’99 (Physics); Cynthia Joan Ebinger SM '86, PhD '88 (EAPS/WHOI); Thomas Henry Epps III ’98, SM ’99 (Chemical Engineering); Daniel Goldman ’94 (Physics); Kenneth Keiler PhD ’96 (Biology); Karen Jean Meech PhD '87 (EAPS); Christopher B. Murray PhD ’95 (Chemistry); Jason Nieh '89 (EECS); William Nordhaus PhD ’67 (Economics); Milica Radisic PhD '04 (Chemical Engineering); James G. Rheinwald PhD ’76 (Biology); Adina L. Roskies PhD ’04 (Philosophy); Linda Rothschild (Preiss) PhD '70 (Mathematics); Soni Lacefield Shimoda PhD '03 (Biology); Dawn Y. Sumner PhD ’95 (EAPS); Tina L. Tootle PhD ’04 (Biology); Karen Viskupic PhD '03 (EAPS); Brant M. Weinstein PhD ’92 (Biology); Chee Wei Wong SM ’01, ScD ’03 (Mechanical Engineering; and Fei Xu PhD ’95 (Brain and Cognitive Sciences).
Among the 2024 AAAS Fellows are six current faculty, research staff, and MIT Corporation members. Top row (l-r): Noubar Afeyan, Cynthia Breazeal, and Alan Edelman; bottom row (l-r) Robert Millard, Jagadeesh Moodera, and Noelle Selin.
Scholar in literacy development and early learning has served as interim dean since July 2024
Nicole Rura
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
Nonie K. Lesaux, the Roy Edward Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development, has been named dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Lesaux has served as interim dean since July.
“For the past eight months, Nonie has led as interim dean with a wonderful combination of energy and insight,” said Harvard President Alan M. Garber. “Amid unprecedented challenges to both K-12 and higher education, she has demonstrated her ability to meet the moment, bringing to her work courage, humility, and respect in equal measure, motivated always by a deep sense of obligation to the School and its vital mission.”
Lesaux is a developmental psychologist whose career has focused on strategies and innovations to improve learning opportunities and literacy outcomes for children and youth and on leading system-level change in education.
She is currently co-director of the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative at the Ed School, which addresses the global challenge of scaling and improving the quality of early education through research, professional development for educational leaders, and graduate training. The Zaentz initiative includes the Early Learning Study at Harvard, a first-of-its-kind statewide study that examines the effects of early education and care settings on children’s learning and development.
“This is a complex time for the education sector, but I can think of no institution better matched to address today’s needs,” Lesaux said. “In the eight months since I assumed the role of interim dean, I have witnessed the ways in which our Ed School community has stepped up to think both critically and collaboratively about our mission and work in service to society. Our collective effort matters more today than perhaps ever.”
A widely respected scholar and educator, Lesaux has written and edited numerous scholarly publications on children’s literacy development and learning. She has also translated ideas from her research into several books for school leaders and educators.
This work has informed how states and districts approach the teaching of reading across the country, including inspiring Massachusetts legislation intended to advance third-grade reading proficiency. Her research was also used to establish a framework for literacy reform in the New York City and Chicago public schools.
Lesaux has served in leadership roles on the national and state level, including as a member of the U.S. Department of Education’s Reading First Advisory Committee and the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council’s Committee on the Science of Children Birth to Age 8.
In addition, she chaired the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care from 2015 to 2022, which provided oversight of the state agency that licenses and supports childcare and community-based public programs for young children.
Her previous institutional leadership roles at the Ed School include academic dean and faculty director of doctoral studies.
“I’m delighted that Nonie Lesaux will become dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education,” said Provost John F. Manning. “She is a collaborative, creative, and inspiring leader, who will lead HGSE with distinction.”
Lesaux joined the Ed School faculty in 2003 as an assistant professor. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia and was a postdoctoral research fellow at BC Children’s Hospital. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology, with honors, from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada.
Lesaux has earned numerous honors, including the William T. Grant Scholars Award and the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young professionals beginning their independent research careers. In 2019 she was elected to the National Academy of Education.
She serves on the board of the Spencer Foundation and as an expert consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section.
Lesaux succeeds Bridget Long, the Saris Professor of Education and Economics at the Ed School and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, who left the post at the end of the last academic year.
With just over 2 weeks to go until the showdown on the River Thames, the Light Blues are gearing up to defend their titles. Cambridge leads the historic tally in both the men’s and women’s events and will be looking to extend their dominance when they take on Oxford on Sunday 13 April 2025.
Men’s Blue Boat:
• Cox: Ollie Boyne (Downing College)
• Stroke: Douwe de Graaf (St Edmund’s)
• Luca Ferraro (Peterhouse)
• James Robson (Peterhouse)
• George Bourne (Peterhouse)
• Gabriel Mahler (Peterhouse)
• Tom Macky (St Edmund’s)
• Noam Mouelle (Hughes Hall)
• Bow: Simon Hatcher (Peterhouse)
Countdown to The Boat Race 2025
The prestigious race, one of the oldest amateur sporting events in the world, will take place along the 6.8 km Championship Course from Putney to Mortlake. The Women's Boat Race will commence at 1:21pm British Summer Time (BST), followed by the Men's Boat Race at 2:21pm BST.
Cambridge’s women’s crew enters the race as the defending champions and currently leads the overall tally at 48-30. Meanwhile, Cambridge’s men’s crew also holds the advantage, leading Oxford 87-81, with one historic dead heat in 1877.
Praise for the athletes
Siobhan Cassidy, Chair of The Boat Race Company, congratulated the athletes on their selection for one of the Blue Boats. “I am not sure that everyone appreciates just what it takes to compete at this level,” she told the event.
“Having witnessed the intense training over a number of years, I can tell you these guys are no ordinary students; they combine their academic courses with a high-performance rowing programme. Their commitment to excellence on and off the water is truly extraordinary. It is nothing short of superhuman.”
Renowned BBC Sport commentator Andrew Cotter, who hosted the event, emphasised the purity of The Boat Race in today’s sporting landscape. “In the modern era of sport, when so much is inflated by money and professionalism, this is sport stripped back to its essence,” he said.
“It is pure competition, it is about winning and losing. And I know that’s how the athletes feel about it, but they also feel that this is where they will make friendships that will last a lifetime.”
Historic firsts and environmental commitments
This year’s event will also see a landmark moment in Boat Race history. Sarah Winckless MBE will become the first woman to umpire the Men’s Boat Race on the Championship Course. Sir Matthew Pinsent CBE will oversee the Women’s Boat Race.
Additionally, The Boat Race Company, alongside the Cambridge and Oxford University Boat Clubs, have given their support to the London Rivers’ Pledge, a 10-year environmental initiative focused on improving water quality and sustainability on the Thames and beyond.
With the crews now announced and excitement continuing to build, all eyes will be on the Thames this April as Cambridge and Oxford prepare to write the next chapter in their historic rivalry.
The stage has been set for The Boat Race 2025, with Cambridge University Boat Club announcing its Women’s and Men’s Blue Boats at the historic Battersea Power Station in London.
Four leading research institutions, including Weill Cornell Medicine, have united under the Weill Cancer Hub East, an innovative, collaborative partnership that aims to transform cancer treatment.
Joshua Rabinowitz will direct Princeton’s role in the Weill Cancer Hub East, a collaboration with The Rockefeller University, Weill Cornell Medicine and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Its aim is to make immunotherapy more effective for patients.
On 27 March 2025, Gaia’s control team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre switched off the spacecraft’s subsystems and sent it into a ‘retirement orbit’ around the Sun.
Though the spacecraft’s operations are now over, the scientific exploitation of Gaia’s data has just begun.
Launched in 2013, Gaia has transformed our understanding of the cosmos by mapping the positions, distances, motions, and properties of nearly two billion stars and other celestial objects. It has provided the largest, most precise multi-dimensional map of our galaxy ever created, revealing its structure and evolution in unprecedented detail.
The mission uncovered evidence of past galactic mergers, identified new star clusters, contributed to the discovery of exoplanets and black holes, mapped millions of quasars and galaxies, and tracked hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets. The mission has also enabled the creation of the best visualisation of how our galaxy might look to an outside observer.
“The data from the Gaia satellite has and is transforming our understanding of the Milky Way, how it formed, how it has evolved and how it will evolve,” said Dr Nicholas Walton from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, lead of the Gaia UK project team. “Gaia has been in continuous operation for over 10 years, faultless, without interruption, reflecting the quality of the engineering, with significant elements of Gaia designed and built in the UK. But now it is time for its retirement. Gaia has finished its observations of the night sky. But the analysis of the Gaia mission data continues. Later in 2026 sees the next Gaia Data Release 4, to further underpin new discovery unravelling the beauty and mystery of the cosmos.”
Gaia far exceeded its planned lifetime of five years, and its fuel reserves are dwindling. The Gaia team considered how best to dispose of the spacecraft in line with ESA’s efforts to responsibly dispose of its missions.
They wanted to find a way to prevent Gaia from drifting back towards its former home near the scientifically valuable second Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun-Earth system and minimise any potential interference with other missions in the region.
“Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job,” said Gaia Spacecraft Operator Tiago Nogueira. “But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off.
“We had to design a decommissioning strategy that involved systematically picking apart and disabling the layers of redundancy that have safeguarded Gaia for so long, because we don’t want it to reactivate in the future and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sunlight.”
On 27 March, the Gaia control team ran through this series of passivation activities. One final use of Gaia’s thrusters moved the spacecraft away from L2 and into a stable retirement orbit around the Sun that will minimise the chance that it comes within 10 million kilometres of Earth for at least the next century.
The team then deactivated and switched off the spacecraft’s instruments and subsystems one by one, before deliberately corrupting its onboard software. The communication subsystem and the central computer were the last to be deactivated.
Gaia’s final transmission to ESOC mission control marked the conclusion of an intentional and carefully orchestrated farewell to a spacecraft that has tirelessly mapped the sky for over a decade.
Though Gaia itself has now gone silent, its contributions to astronomy will continue to shape research for decades. Its vast and expanding data archive remains a treasure trove for scientists, refining knowledge of galactic archaeology, stellar evolution, exoplanets and much more.
“No other mission has had such an impact over such a broad range of astrophysics. It continues to be the source of over 2,000 peer-reviewed papers per year, more than any other space mission,” said Gaia UK team member Dr Dafydd Wyn Evans, also from the Institute of Astronomy. “It is sad that its observing days are over, but work is continuing in Cambridge, and across Europe, to process and calibrate the final data so that Gaia will still be making its impact felt for many years in the future.”
A workhorse of galactic exploration, Gaia has charted the maps that future explorers will rely on to make new discoveries. The star trackers on ESA’s Euclid spacecraft use Gaia data to precisely orient the spacecraft. ESA’s upcoming Plato mission will explore exoplanets around stars characterised by Gaia and may follow up on new exoplanetary systems discovered by Gaia.
The Gaia control team also used the spacecraft’s final weeks to run through a series of technology tests. The team tested Gaia’s micro propulsion system under different challenging conditions to examine how it had aged over more than ten years in the harsh environment of space. The results may benefit the development of future ESA missions relying on similar propulsion systems, such as the LISA mission.
The Gaia spacecraft holds a deep emotional significance for those who worked on it. As part of its decommissioning, the names of around 1500 team members who contributed to its mission were used to overwrite some of the back-up software stored in Gaia’s onboard memory.
Personal farewell messages were also written into the spacecraft’s memory, ensuring that Gaia will forever carry a piece of its team with it as it drifts through space.
As Gaia Mission Manager Uwe Lammers put it: “We will never forget Gaia, and Gaia will never forget us.”
The Cambridge Gaia DPAC team is responsible for the analysis and generation of the Gaia photometric and spectro-photometric data products, and it also generated the Gaia photometric science alert stream for the duration of the satellite's in-flight operations.
Adapted from a media release by the European Space Agency.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been powered down, after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
We were delighted to welcome pupils from Warrington’s Lymm High School, Ipswich High School, The Charter School in North Dulwich, Rickmansworth School, Sutton Valance School in Maidstone as well as schools closer to home such as St Peter’s Huntingdon, Fenstanton Primary School, Barton Primary School, Impington Village College and St Andrews School in Soham.
Running over two days (25/26 March 2025) and held in the Cambridge Sports Centre, students went on a great alien hunt with Dr Matt Bothwell from the Institute of Astronomy, stepped back in time to explore Must Farm with Department of Archaeology and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit as well as learning to disagree well with Dr Elizabeth Phillips from The Woolf Institute.
Schools had a choice of workshops from a range of departments including, how to think like an engineer and making sustainable food with biotechnology with researchers from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, as well as the chance to get hands-on experience in the world of materials science and explore how properties of materials can be influenced by temperature at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy.
The Department of Veterinary Medicine offered students the opportunity to find out what a career in veterinary medicine may look like with workshops on animal x-rays, how different professionals work together to treat animals in a veterinary hospital as well as meeting the departments horses and cows and learn how veterinarians diagnose and treat these large animals.
Students also had the opportunity to learn about antibodies and our immune system with the MRC Toxicology Unit. The students learnt about the incredible job antibodies do defending our bodies against harmful invaders like bacteria and viruses.
Alongside this, a maths trail, developed by Cambridgeshire County Council, guided students around the West Cambridge site whilst testing their maths skills with a number of problems to solve.
Now in their third year, the Cambridge Festival schools days are offering students the opportunity to experience studying at Cambridge with a series of curriculum linked talks and hands on workshops.
The Cambridge Festival runs from 19 March – 4 April and is a mixture of online, on-demand and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening at Cambridge. The public have the chance to meet some of the researchers and thought-leaders working in some of the pioneering fields that will impact us all.
Over 500 KS2 and KS3 students from as far away as Warrington got the chance to experience studying at the University of Cambridge with a selection of lectures and workshops held as part of the Cambridge Festival.
Students make antibody keychains during a workshop with the MRC Toxicology Unit
The memorable evening, witnessed by over 2,000 spectators, set the perfect stage for the announcement of a new formal partnership between Cambridge University Association Football Club (CUAFC) and Cambridge United FC, strengthening the bond between the historic footballing institutions of the city.
The women’s match opened the night in dramatic fashion, with Cambridge securing a thrilling 3-2 comeback victory. Despite trailing 1-0 at halftime, the Light Blues displayed resilience and attacking intent in the second half. Johanna Niggemann (Gonville & Caius) equalised before Sakina Dhirani (Newnham) put Cambridge ahead. Oxford responded with a goal to level the score, but Alissa Sattentau (King’s) struck late to seal a hard-fought win, sending the home fans into jubilation.
Buoyed by the women’s success, the men’s team delivered a commanding performance, clinching a dominant 4-1 victory to secure their first Varsity triumph since 2019. Cambridge's attacking pressure paid off in the 38th minute when Cai La-Trobe Roberts (Jesus) broke the deadlock with a composed finish. Moments before halftime, he doubled his tally from the penalty spot. Asa Campbell (Fitzwilliam) extended the lead early in the second half, before La-Trobe Roberts completed his hat-trick with another spot-kick, sealing a comprehensive win. Although Oxford’s Captain, Noah Fletcher, converted a penalty late on, Cambridge’s dominance was never in doubt, with midfielders Captain Reece Linney (Girton) and Jesse Tapnack (Trinity) controlling the game throughout.
Following the Light Blues’ sensational Varsity double, Cambridge United FC and CUAFC announced a groundbreaking new partnership intended to deepen and develop collaboration between the two clubs to benefit the wider City of Cambridge community.
Professor David Cardwell, President Elect of CUAFC, highlighted the significance of the partnership, stating:“Cambridge can rightly lay claim to being the global birthplace of football, and CUAFC is proud to be unofficially ‘the oldest football club in the world’. The DNA of the game was discovered here in the city in 1848 when the first game took place on Parker’s Piece under what are now the modern rules.
“Over the last two years, Cambridge United and the University have developed a strong partnership in a number of different areas. We were very grateful that the Varsity matches were once again hosted so well at the Cledara Abbey Stadium. We agree that now is the right time to build on this and seek to deepen the relationship between our two football clubs. There is much we can potentially do together to help each other as clubs, and we share a desire to do more to help the City of Cambridge celebrate its status as the birthplace of the global game.”
Godric Smith CBE, Chair of the Cambridge United Foundation and Director at the Club, echoed these sentiments, emphasising the potential benefits of the collaboration: “Cambridge United is proud to be the professional football club from the university city that gave football to the world, so it is logical and long overdue to have a formal partnership between our two football clubs on both the men’s and women’s side.
“We are at the beginning and will work out the detail of the first steps over the coming months, but there is a united desire to explore how we can best help each other and, most importantly, the City of Cambridge. Areas of collaboration could include merchandising, facilities, sports science and coaching, data, community work and mentoring. We have a lot of resources and expertise between us, and it will be exciting to see how we can potentially make best use of them together over the months and years ahead.”
The announcement of the partnership capped off a remarkable night of football at the Cledara Abbey Stadium. With both the men’s and women’s teams showcasing their talent and determination on the pitch, and a new era of cooperation between Cambridge United and CUAFC beginning, the city’s footballing future looks brighter than ever.
Cambridge University football teams enjoyed a historic night on Friday 21 March, as both the men’s and women’s squads claimed stunning victories over Oxford in the football Varsity matches at Cambridge United FC’s Cledara Abbey Stadium.
Professor Ariando and Dr Stephen Lin Er Chow from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Physics have designed and synthesised a groundbreaking new material—a copper-free superconducting oxide—capable of superconducting at approximately 40 Kelvin (K), or about minus 233 degrees Celsius (deg C), under ambient pressure. This discovery further advances NUS’ and Singapore’s leadership at the forefront of high-temperature superconductivity research.
Nearly four decades after the discovery of copper oxide superconductivity, which earned the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics, the NUS researchers have now identified another high-temperature superconducting oxide that expands the understanding of unconventional superconductivity beyond copper oxides.
The promise of superconductors
Modern electronics generate heat and consume energy during operation. Superconductors, however, possess a unique property known as the zero-resistance state, which eliminates energy loss due to electrical resistance. In theory, this makes them ideal for modern electronic applications, addressing the world's growing energy demands.
Despite the discovery of thousands of superconducting materials, the vast majority function only at extremely low temperatures near absolute zero (0 K), or about minus 273 deg C, making them impractical for widespread use.
The 1987 Nobel Prize Breakthrough
Nearly 40 years ago, physicists Johannes Bednorz and Karl Müller discovered a new class of superconductors—copper oxides—which exhibit superconductivity at temperatures above 30 K, significantly higher than any previously known superconductors.
This breakthrough, which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics, laid the foundation for high-temperature superconductivity research. To this day, copper oxides remain the only superconducting oxides that function at temperatures above 30 K, or about minus 243 dec C, under ambient pressure, without requiring lattice compression.
A breakthrough beyond copper
In a series of studies, Prof Ariando and Dr Chow identified a direct correlation between interlayer interactions in layered systems and superconducting temperatures.
Building on this insight, the researchers developed a phenomenological model that predicted several compounds capable of high-temperature superconductivity, similar to copper oxides, but without copper.
The team successfully synthesised (Sm-Eu-Ca)NiO₂ nickel oxide, one of the predicted materials, and confirmed zero electrical resistance (superconductivity) well above 30 K in this compound.
Dr Chow stated, "As we predicted and designed, this non-copper-based superconducting oxide demonstrates high-temperature superconductivity under atmospheric pressure at sea level, without the need for additional compression—just like copper oxides. This finding suggests that unconventional high-temperature superconductivity is not exclusive to copper but could be a more widespread property among elements in the periodic table."
“This observation has profound implications for both theoretical understanding and experimental realisation of a broader scope of superconducting materials with practical applications in modern electronics,” added Prof Ariando.
The research breakthrough was published in the scientific journal Nature on 20 March 2025.
Expanding the frontier of high-temperature superconductors
"This is the first time since the Nobel-winning discovery that a copper-free high-temperature superconducting oxide has been found to function under ambient pressure," emphasised Prof Ariando.
"Additionally, this new material is highly stable under ambient conditions, significantly improving its accessibility."
This discovery has sparked growing interest, not only in the material itself but also in the broader potential for a new class of high-temperature superconductors.
Further research and future implications
The research team continues to investigate the material’s unique properties, exploring tuning parameters such as electronic occupancy shifting and hydrostatic pressure. These efforts aim to deepen the understanding of high-temperature superconducting mechanisms and pave the way for synthesising a broader family of superconductors with even higher operating temperatures.
Another contributor to this work includes Mr Zhaoyang Luo, an NUS PhD student with the research team, who demonstrated the high crystallinity and pure-phase nature of the synthesised material using electron microscopy.
This breakthrough represents a major step toward the development of next-generation superconducting materials, with practical applications in modern electronics and energy-efficient technologies.
The ETH spin-off Flink Robotics wants to revolutionize the handling of packages. Its founders Moritz Geilinger and Simon Huber have developed software that allows robots to work together and quickly take on new tasks.
Results from global collaboration raise questions about future of universe
Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. Tafreshi
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
3 min read
CfA astronomers play crucial role in DESI analysis of dark energy, matter
New results from the international Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, which includes researchers from Harvard, suggest that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be weakening over time. This suggests the standard model of how the universe works may need an update.
The fate of the universe hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy, which is the force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. DESI tracks dark energy’s influence by studying how matter is spread across the universe. The new analysis, using the largest 3D map of our universe ever made, looked at dark energy’s influence over the past 11 billion years.
The results, using the first three years of collected DESI data, were announced in a March 19 press release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Events in the very early universe left subtle patterns in how matter is distributed, a feature called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations. That pattern acts as a standard ruler, with its size at different times directly affected by how the universe is expanding. Measuring the ruler at different distances shows researchers the strength of dark energy throughout history.
Combining the data of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars with the results from other experiments, scientists have stronger evidence that the impact of dark energy may be evolving in unexpected ways.
The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) researchers, led by Harvard Professor Daniel Eisenstein and his group, were crucial contributors to the DESI collaboration in multiple ways, including co-developing algorithms and simulations that led to the latest results.
Cristhian Garcia Quintero is one of the collaboration leads on the cosmological interpretations of the results. Michael Rashkovetskyi performed calculations that are critical for the distance measurements. Claire Lamman is the co-chair of the DESI education and public outreach committee and helped create the visual material for the public. Eisenstein served as co-spokesperson of the collaboration from 2014 to 2020.
DESI involves more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab. The collaboration shared its findings in multiple papers to be posted on the online repository arXiv and in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California.
Alongside unveiling its latest dark energy results at the summit, the DESI collaboration also announced that its Data Release 1 is now available for anyone to explore. With detailed information on many millions of celestial objects, the data set will support a wide range of astrophysical research at CfA and elsewhere.
In addition to contributing to DESI’s cosmology goals, CfA researchers are using the collaboration to study galaxy evolution, the cosmic web, and the structure of the Milky Way. The DESI survey continues each clear night, extending its map of the cosmos and giving astronomers a continually improving view of the physics of the Universe.
DESI is supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science national user facility.
Declassified JFK files provide ‘enhanced clarity’ on CIA actions, historian says
Declassified documents related to the President John F. Kennedy assassination were released on March 18.
George Walker IV/AP Photo
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer winner writing three-volume Kennedy biography, shares takeaways from declassified docs
Six decades later, Americans know a bit more about the CIA’s clandestine operations in the early 1960s, particularly in Cuba and Mexico, thanks to a new tranche of declassified documents concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy released last week.
The more than 77,000 pages released by the National Archives and Records Administration do not appear to contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusion that gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. But historians say the papers hold important new details about the CIA’s involvement in foreign elections during the Cold War and its infiltration of Fidel Castro’s inner circle.
In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Fredrik Logevall, a professor of history and the Kennedy School’s Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs, highlights key details in the documents, shares what he’d still like to know, and offers some thoughts on why the assassination of JFK remains fodder for conspiracy theorists. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Logevall published the first book in a three-volume series on Kennedy in 2020. The second volume will be published next year.
What’s your impression of this new tranche of JFK records? Have you seen anything noteworthy so far?
With respect to the assassination, there’s little or nothing that’s new, at least in terms of what I’ve been able to see thus far. I can’t say I’m surprised — going in I didn’t expect we’d learn anything that would overturn our understanding of what happened in Dallas. The releases are, however, quite interesting on U.S. covert operations in the Cold War in the early 1960s. Some of them range beyond Kennedy’s years, but it’s for this period that they’re most interesting, especially with respect to Latin America. That’s actually been quite revealing to me.
“Interesting” in terms of what the CIA was doing or the volume of things they were doing back then?
In a way, it’s both. A lot of the “new” documents had been released before; the difference now is that they are unredacted. In 2017, for example, we got some really important CIA documents, but they would have certain words or passages blocked out. What’s been illuminating for me, even though it’s sometimes just a handful of words, is to have those words inserted. This matters, because as we know even a few words can change the meaning of a sentence or a passage dramatically. What we see with enhanced clarity is just how involved the United States was in other countries, not least in interfering in elections. In the past, country names or the names of leaders would have been omitted. Now they are there in black and white. There’s just something about seeing it say “Brazil” or “the Finnish elections,” for example, that makes this more clear, more stark. Also, you see just how large the presence of the CIA was. In certain embassies, those who are attached to the CIA could make up almost half the total personnel. Even those of us who are historians of the Cold War were somewhat taken aback by these figures. If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said that in this or that key embassy, there’s probably 20 percent max secretly attached to the CIA. I had no idea that it was sometimes approaching 40 or 50 percent.
Fredrik Logevall.
Photo by Peter Hessler
Did we learn more about why Kennedy had a fraught relationship with the CIA?
We have not, though this could be buried in there and I just haven’t seen it yet. I thought we might learn more about that important relationship. You’re right to say that there was a wariness between JFK and the agency for various reasons. Some authors have exaggerated the depth and width of the schism, but it was there.
What’s something notable that you discovered?
In one CIA document, dated April 24, 1963, we learn that 14 Cuban diplomats were our agents. That’s quite significant — the degree to which there were people inside the Cuban government who were, in fact, working for the agency. In terms of the so-called Operation Mongoose, which was the effort to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban government, this helps us better understand to what extent were Cubans assisting in that effort. Later in the same document, we learn that there were two Cuban ambassadors on the payroll who provided first-rate reports and were closest to the bone in what Castro was thinking.
What are some key questions historians still have about the Kennedy assassination? Is there much left to learn?
I would like to know more about Oswald’s movements before Dallas. I would like to know more about his visit to Mexico City, which was in late September-early October 1963, just a few weeks before the assassination. He was flirting with defecting to Cuba, and so, in Mexico City, he met with both Cuban diplomats and Soviet diplomats. What exactly was said in those conversations? I’m interested, more broadly, in what U.S. intelligence agencies knew and didn’t know about his whereabouts in these weeks. That’s maybe the biggest issue for me.
The JFK assassination is often cited as the progenitor of modern conspiracy theory culture. Why is there still so much suspicion around it?
Part of it is simply because a president was killed, a president seemingly in the prime of life. I think we human beings have a natural inclination to believe that great events must have great causes. It seems somehow impossible that it was a lone misfit named Lee Oswald who took it upon himself to shoot the president. There’s got to be more to it than that, we tell ourselves. And so, the conspiracies will continue to fly. Regardless of what these documents would or would not have revealed, it would not have satisfied people who believe others were involved.
Someone asked me why we don’t seem to have the same consuming interest in, say, Lincoln’s or RFK’s assassination. It might have something to do with a few things. First there’s the fact that Oswald himself was killed two days later. Understandably, this makes people say, “How was that allowed to happen?” Second, the Warren Commission, which was a government commission formed to investigate the murder, was serious and thorough, but it made mistakes, notably in neglecting to interview everyone it might. Third, the fact that the assassination was captured on film might make a difference. So many of us have seen the Zapruder film, and it lives on in our mind, makes the whole thing more real, more eternal. Finally, there’s the oft-heard suggestion — the implications of which I’m still trying to sort out myself — that something important was lost on that day in Dallas, that it marked the end of American innocence somehow.
Put all of that together, maybe you have part of the explanation for why this particular event has been such fodder for conspiracy theories.
A year into role, Chan School dean focused on driving change amid deep challenges
Andrea Baccarelli has laid out a vision for expanding the School’s impact while navigating a rapidly shifting landscape for federally funded research
9 min read
Andrea Baccarelli has been managing change since he started as dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in January 2024.
On his very first day, Baccarelli entered an environment where the war in Gaza exerted pressures across campus. More recently, rapid shifts in federal policies have raised immediate implications for the Chan School. With about 60 percent of its revenue coming from research grants, primarily from the federal government, the School would face a significant blow to its budget if deep cuts proposed by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies were implemented. Baccarelli has convened a financial planning group of senior leadership, including academic department chairs, to plan for the potential effects.
Amid these challenges, Baccarelli has been developing plans to expand Harvard Chan School’s reach by nurturing high-quality, interdisciplinary, solutions-focused science. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Baccarelli discusses this vision and his approach to current funding uncertainties.
You recently introduced your “AAA Vision” for Harvard Chan School. What does it look like?
Our work is all about saving lives through the highest quality science. That hasn’t changed since our School was founded 112 years ago. We have an exceptional track record. For instance, scientists at our School created a low-cost, easy-to-ship rehydration solution that has saved more than 25 million children from death due to diarrheal disease. They engineered infertile mosquitos to eradicate malaria and are developing new therapies to treat diabetes. Rooted in this record of excellence, the AAA Vision is a strategic path to expanding our impact still further. The three As, which grew out of my listening tour, stand for agile, accessible, and accountable.
Agility is all about being able to pivot quickly to respond to new opportunities. As a School, we must be more entrepreneurial. That will require forging collaborations — inside and outside of Harvard — with all sorts of people who are not traditional partners for public health, like engineers and industry CEOs. The way I see it, we all share an interest in developing solutions to problems with immense human and economic costs, like rising rates of Alzheimer’s disease and the spread of multi-drug-resistant infections. Public health is all about taking on these challenges, and we stand ready to work with anyone who can help.
The second A, accessibility, relates to both education and research. I hope to significantly expand our educational offerings by creating more short courses and certificate programs and by delivering more content online. There’s a tremendous need for public health knowledge in just about every profession, and Harvard Chan School has the potential to be a hub for people who want to expand their skills at any stage of their careers.
On the research front, we need to keep working to get our findings in front of pharma executives, biotech investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, the public, and potential collaborators — to make our science accessible. After all, our goal is not just to advance knowledge in the abstract, but to develop solutions that will make a real difference in people’s lives.
The final A is for accountable. We must be accountable to our mission, delivering the very best education and conducting the highest-impact research to improve health for all communities. We must also be accountable to our values. Public health starts at home, and I am committed to building a pluralistic and inclusive community where everyone feels welcomed and valued.
The uncertainties driven by shifts in federal policy are especially acute at Harvard Chan School, which relies heavily on federal grants. What impacts are you seeing at this point?
Unfortunately, we have had more than a dozen federal grants terminated so far because they do not align with new priorities at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. Those terminations have abruptly cut off important research.
Like the rest of the University, we are also closely monitoring the proposed NIH cut to facilities and administration funding. F&A funding is often called “indirect” funding, but there’s nothing indirect about it. It truly is essential funding for research. A cut of the size the NIH has proposed — to a flat rate of 15 percent — would be devastating. It would have huge impacts on our ability to do critical research in fields like preventing cancer, slowing neurodegeneration, and identifying dietary factors that contribute to longevity.
As dean, how are you considering addressing this gap in federal funding to support research at the School? Can philanthropy make up the difference?
Philanthropy plays a very important role in supporting our research and education mission, but it’s unrealistic to imagine it could make up for our long-standing partnership with the federal government. That said, we are working hard to connect with potential donors to explain why our work matters. In fact, I just got back from a trip to Europe where I talked to supporters in several countries. The top message I shared was that our research has tangible impacts in the real world, helping to shape policies and programs that keep us healthy. And donors can make that research happen.
As one example, private philanthropy just funded a 10-year study of the health impacts of wildfires. This is groundbreaking work: A multi-institutional team led by Harvard Chan researchers is assessing all the pollutants that people living near the Los Angeles wildfires have been exposed to, mapping how these toxins spread or dissipate over time, and tracking the short- and long-term health effects. It’s an incredibly important study, made possible entirely by a generous donor who loves L.A. and wants to protect the public’s health. I hope to encourage more such partnerships with philanthropists who are aligned with our mission of using science to build a world where everyone can thrive.
Returning to the AAA Vision: Can you share a bit more about how you’re approaching accountability and what that looks like with respect to the mission?
Yes, In fact, it’s fundamental to what we do at the Harvard Chan School.
We must put in place processes that ensure that our School’s courses and degree programs consistently offer the highest level of excellence. As a starting point, I recently appointed a faculty working group to review processes and criteria for appointing and renewing instructors. At Harvard Chan School, instructors are non-ladder appointees who play a crucial role in classroom teaching. I tasked this working group to ensure rigor and consistency in how our instructors are appointed and renewed and ensure they have the excellent academic credentials and specific expertise they need to teach classes with the depth and rigor our students deserve. We will then go through a similar process for each tier of academic appointment at Harvard Chan School — lecturers, research scientists, adjuncts, etc. To complement this initiative, I also plan to strengthen our internal review processes for courses and degree programs to ensure they consistently meet the highest academic standards.
To a similar end, I have also relaunched periodic reviews of our centers and programs to ensure the highest quality of scholarship and teaching excellence. For instance, late last summer we initiated a comprehensive review of our FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. We have appointed a blue-ribbon panel of experts to conduct this review, which will conclude this spring. The charge to the review panel is to rigorously evaluate the FXB Center’s current status and future potential, offering candid, forthright, and thorough feedback, including any shortcomings or areas of concern, to ensure the Center meets — and is held to — the highest standards of excellence expected of a University-wide center at Harvard. While this review is ongoing, we have halted the formal collaboration between the FXB Center and Birzeit University. This allows the panel to objectively evaluate partnerships and collaborations and ensure the center exemplifies academic excellence in alignment with our mission. We will conduct similar periodic reviews of all our centers and programs.
I’m also putting a lot of focus on building a pluralistic culture that is accountable to our values. From my earliest messages to the community, I have tried to make clear that all of us can expect to be exposed to speech that we disagree with, even speech that offends us, during our time at Harvard. That’s to be expected at any university with a commitment to free speech and academic freedom. Of course, I have zero tolerance for any speech or conduct that constitutes discrimination or harassment — such behavior is wholly unacceptable and will be addressed decisively at our School. But I’ve emphasized how important it is to be open to learning from people with different views — and how important it is to be able to communicate respectfully and with integrity.
To build those skills, my team and I launched an initiative called Harvard Chan LEADs, which stands for Learn and Engage Across Differences. We created a new module for orientation to engage students in these values as soon as they arrive on campus. Since then, we have hosted quite a few workshops and events, including special trainings to help faculty foster respectful conversations in the classroom, even when the topics are divisive.
I’m also launching the Harvard Chan Citizenship Awards. This award will be given each year to three people — a student, a staff member, and an academic appointee — who best represent our values and who have done the most to create a culture of pluralism and inclusivity. It’s all part of making sure we are accountable to our mission, our values, and one another.
What are some of the key ways you’re mobilizing around the other two As, agile and accessible?
We have taken some promising steps toward making both our education and our research more accessible. On the education front, I set up a working group to assess opportunities for expanding our non-degree offerings. On the research front, our Center for Health Communication has launched an innovative project to connect our faculty to social media creators, with the goal of expanding the amount of scientific content on platforms like TikTok.
In terms of agility, I’m very excited to be collaborating with Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on a research project that models the kind of interdisciplinary problem-solving I’d like to see more of. Our goal is to develop new models for prioritizing and incentivizing preventive healthcare in the U.S. We could save a lot of money and prevent a lot of suffering with a shift to prevention, so this is a project with immense potential.
An exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums asks what we can learn from Edvard Munch’s 40-year obsession with a man and woman at the shore.
Two figures, a man and a woman, stand at a shoreline. They face away from the viewer and toward the sea, side by side and yet isolated from one another.
Sometimes the woman is on the left. Sometimes she’s on the right. Sometimes these figures, and the rocky shore around them, are rendered in careful brushstrokes; other times, perhaps there is a sense of urgency, of haste, of canvas left untouched.
This is “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones,)” one of the most famous motifs by the Norwegian painter and printmaker Edvard Munch (1863-1944.) Munch returned to this motif again and again over more than 40 years, in paintings, metal-plate etchings, and a series of woodcut prints, each with slight differences in color, shape, or technique.
“He couldn’t let go,” said Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums and the co-curator of the exhibition “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking,” on view through July 27. “There are so many more iterations of [‘Two Human Beings’] … in black and white, in grayscale, all violet, monochromatic but in different color schemes, totally different color combinations. There was one we saw in neon color, and the whole thing became psychedelic. With the intensity of variations, the motif starts to have less and less singularity and it can be a vehicle, an exploration of pretty much anything under the sun.”
Munch’s repeated returns to the motif demonstrate the way his paintings informed his prints, and vice versa. He first painted it in 1892, but the painting was destroyed in 1901 in an explosion onboard a ship that was transporting his works for exhibition. When he next painted the motif in about 1906-1908 (above left), he had already experimented with woodblock prints of the theme. The figures appear in reverse from the original painting and were thus likely based on the printed versions, which he would have had as a ready reference.
“He’s mixing a huge range of different painting techniques,” said Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, co-curator of the exhibition. Munch left some of the canvas unpainted; in some places, he applied paint thickly or scratched color away. It’s more than a demonstration of versatility, Roth said: “It also creates a kind of vibration, a sensation of these figures, a dynamism in the painting itself.”
The final version, made in about 1935 (above right), appears more spontaneous than its predecessor, with exposed lines from Munch’s preparatory sketch, large swatches of color, and areas of exposed canvas.
“It was something we were hoping to highlight,” Roth said. “Why this return? What is he learning over time and through the different techniques?”
In his prints, Munch exploded “Two Human Beings” and put it back together again. He used a jigsaw method, inscribing his design onto a block of wood and using a fretsaw to cut each element into its own piece. Then, he could ink each piece separately, push them back together, and run the reunited composition through the press, creating endless variations of color.
Munch incorporated the male figure into the landscape but cut the woman into her own solitary block.
“She almost feels like a doll,” Roth said. “You can take her out, as opposed to the man, who becomes a part of the printing of the landscape. In many of the prints, he begins to feel like he’s more a part of the landscape, whereas she is able to be this very singular figure and a very important one for Munch.”
“He embraced the non-perfect alignment, the break in the block that would be seen then in later prints, the fact that in the painting, things are dripping, things are imperfect. That was something he emphasized: That the too-perfect finish was actually the enemy of the good in a work of art.”
Lynette Roth
“Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)” has long been understood as a rumination on isolation, on the sense of loneliness that one can feel even in the company of someone else. But after spending time with Munch’s multiple iterations on the motif, Roth said she’s not so sure that’s the only interpretation.
A savvy businessman, Munch originally titled the work simply “Two Human Beings.” But when others ascribed loneliness to the figures, Munch leaned into it.
“The more I engaged with this, I started to feel like they actually aren’t that lonely,” Roth said. “They’re connected to the landscape; they’re connected also to each other in the way that color unites them, and the way he’s inching toward her. … For me, it’s also companionship and contemplation, which doesn’t have to be devastating or alienating or cause for anxiety.”
A question of finishMunch’s contemporaries sometimes critiqued a lack of polish in his pieces. But Munch embraced the flaws, imperfections, and empty spaces in his work.
In the final painted version of “Two Human Beings,” Munch leaves exposed sketch lines and areas of bare canvas on the woman’s dress.
“Inger in a Red Dress” is composed on board, a cheap support that artists often use when creating studies. But the painting is a fully realized portrait.
Munch has long been understood as a deeply troubled artist whose struggles with mental health are apparent in psychologically evocative works like “The Scream.” But “Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” invites viewers to disentangle Munch’s artwork from his biography and to view his recurring motifs not only as a window into his psyche but as another material, like paint or charcoal, a vehicle through which Munch explored his artistic practice.
“We know that people will react emotionally or psychologically to what’s on view,” said Peter Murphy, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. “Two things can be true: Munch did suffer psychologically; although he was wealthy and well-off, he did have a lot of crises in his life. And he was also a mastermind of getting his work out there and exploring it.”
Edvard Munch
(1863-1944)
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was one of the most significant artists of the Modernist movement, and an innovator in printmaking, painting, and other arts. He is best known for his painting “The Scream,” which is seen as an expression of modern spiritual angst. He was active for more than 60 years, from the 1880s until his death.
“Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking” is on display through July 27 in the Special Exhibitions Gallery on Level 3 at the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition showcases 70 works, primarily from the Harvard Art Museums collection. Thanks to a transformative gift from Philip A. and Lynn G. Straus, the museums now house one of the largest and most significant collections of artwork by Munch in the U.S.
During their conversation with President Eisgruber, the Princeton Mayor and Council expressed appreciation for town-gown collaborations and the University's important contributions to the community.
A summary of the many ways in which Princeton University currently contributes to and engages with the Princeton community. Submitted in a memo to the Princeton mayor and council on March 21, 2025.
Earle Leonard Lomon PhD ’54, MIT professor emeritus of physics, died on March 7 in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 94.
A longtime member of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Lomon was interested primarily in the forces between protons and neutrons at low energies, where the effects of quarks and gluons are hidden by their confinement.
His research focused on the interactions of hadrons — protons, neutrons, mesons, and nuclei — before it was understood that they were composed of quarks and gluons.
“Earle developed an R-matrix formulation of scattering theory that allowed him to separate known effects at long distance from then-unknown forces at short distances,” says longtime colleague Robert Jaffe, the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics.
“When QCD [quantum chromodynamics] emerged as the correct field theory of hadrons, Earle moved quickly to incorporate the effects of quarks and gluons at short distance and high energies,” says Jaffe. “Earle’s work can be interpreted as a precursor to modern chiral effective field theory, where the pertinent degrees of freedom at low energy, which are hadrons, are matched smoothly onto the quark and gluon degrees of freedom that dominate at higher energy.”
“He was a truly cosmopolitan scientist, given his open mind and deep kindness,” says Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus of physics.
Early years
Born Nov. 15, 1930, in Montreal, Quebec, Earle was the only son of Harry Lomon and Etta Rappaport. At Montreal High School, he met his future wife, Ruth Jones. Their shared love for classical music drew them both to the school's Classical Music Club, where Lomon served as president and Ruth was an accomplished musician.
While studying at McGill University, he was a research physicist for the Canada Defense Research Board from 1950 to 1951. After graduating in 1951, he married Jones, and they moved to Cambridge, where he pursued his doctorate at MIT in theoretical physics, mentored by Professor Hermann Feshbach.
Lomon spent 1954 to 1955 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen. “With the presence of Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Willem V.R. Malkus, there were many physicists from Europe and elsewhere, including MIT’s Dave Frisch, making the Institute for Physics an exciting place to be,” recalled Lomon.
In 1956-57, he was a research associate at the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He received his PhD from MIT in 1954, and did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Denmark, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Cornell. He was an associate professor at McGill from 1957 until 1960, when he joined the MIT faculty.
In 1965, Lomon was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was a visiting scientist at CERN. In 1968, he joined the newly formed MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He became a full professor in 1970 and retired in 1999.
Los Alamos and math theory
From 1968 to 2015, Lomon was an affiliate researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During this time, he collaborated with Fred Begay, a Navajo nuclear physicist and medicine man. New Mexico became the Lomon family’s second home, and Lomon enjoyed the area hiking trails and climbing Baldy Mountain.
Lomon also developed educational materials for mathematical theory. He developed textbooks, educational tools, research, and a creative problem-solving curriculum for the Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools. His children recall when Earle would review the educational tools with them at the dinner table. From 2001 to 2013, he was program director for mathematical theory for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Theoretical Physics research hub.
Lomon was an American Physical Society Fellow and a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists.
Husband of the late Ruth Lomon, he is survived by his daughters Glynis Lomon and Deirdre Lomon; his son, Dylan Lomon; grandchildren Devin Lomon, Alexia Layne-Lomon, and Benjamin Garner; and six great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial service at a later date; instead of flowers, please consider donating to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation.
Harvard launches pilot initiative to tackle some of today’s biggest challenges
Harvard Impact Labs will provide funding and support for faculty to conduct solutions-focused research and drive real-world impact
Harvard Kennedy School Communications
5 min read
Harvard announced Wednesday the launch of a pilot for a new University-wide initiative called Harvard Impact Labs. The initiative will support faculty working in collaboration with leaders in government, nonprofits, and the private sector to develop solutions to pressing societal problems.
Universities have long led the way in generating scientific knowledge to improve the human condition through research in the life sciences and engineering. Harvard Impact Labs seeks to support the impact-focused work of social scientists, harnessing the tools of scientific research to help public leaders solve the problems they confront every day. Each lab will focus on a specific societal challenge, such as local economic development, affordable housing, educational achievement, high-quality healthcare, or public safety.
During the pilot phase, the initiative will have three core components: (1) a fellowship program to support faculty as they develop meaningful scientific collaborations with leaders in the public and social sectors, (2) start-up funding to support these types of collaborations as they design, test, and scale solutions in real-world settings, and (3) public service leaves to give faculty the opportunity to embed in governments or nonprofits to learn more deeply about the problems they wish to work on. Through these functions, Harvard Impact Labs will support faculty who are already doing this critical work and provide others with the skills and resources they need to put their research and expertise to work for society.
“Just as Harvard faculty in the life sciences have long worked to develop medical cures that save and improve lives, Harvard Impact Labs will help faculty and students in other disciplines address the real-world challenges that our society faces,” said Hopi Hoekstra, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the C.Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Sciences, and the Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences.
“In this moment of dissatisfaction with the status quo, declining faith in expertise, and skepticism of government and democracy, there has never been a more important time for an initiative like this,” said Jeremy Weinstein, dean of Harvard Kennedy School and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. “By giving faculty and students the support they need — and connecting them with real-world practitioners — Harvard Impact Labs can help tackle our biggest challenges and improve lives across the world.”
“Harvard Impact Labs builds on the extraordinary work being done by many of our faculty in partnership with communities across the nation and around the globe, whether improving education, healthcare, housing, public safety, the environment, or a host of other issues,” said Nonie K. Lesaux, the interim dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development. “Communities and leaders are working hard to develop solutions, and we can help accelerate more of that work.”
“We are eager to enable more Harvard faculty to work with public- and private-sector changemakers to develop, test, and scale solutions to a range of social problems,” said Jeffrey Liebman, the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School and co-faculty director of Harvard Impact Labs. “At the Government Performance Lab, I’ve seen firsthand how faculty and students can simultaneously change lives and advance scientific understanding by working directly with those on the front lines of society’s biggest challenges — and I’m thrilled to be building upon that mission with Harvard Impact Labs.”
“Many Harvard faculty are eager to put their expertise to work making a difference outside of Harvard, but it can be hard to know where to start,” said Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor, co-faculty director of this initiative, and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. “This initiative is going to make it possible for more faculty to have impact at scale and lead to more rapid progress on some of the nation’s and the world’s most difficult social problems.”
Faculty at all Harvard Schools will be eligible for funding and support. The initiative will be housed at Harvard Kennedy School and report to the deans of the Kennedy School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Education. It will be guided by a distinguished group of faculty advisers from across the University and led by co-faculty directors Danielle Allen; Jeffrey Liebman; James S. Kim, professor of education; and Amanda Pallais, the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics. Its executive director, Pauline Abernathy, brings a wealth of experience creating reform at the national, state and local levels while in senior positions in government, nonprofits, and philanthropy. She is a graduate of the Kennedy School’s Master in Public Policy program.
This pilot is made possible by a generous donation from Julian Baker, who graduated from Harvard College in 1988 with an A.B. in social studies.
More information on the initiative can be found on the Harvard Impact Labs website.
Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.
“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.”
Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.
The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.
“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”
Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.
MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.
The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.
“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS.
“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”
Representatives from across the MIT Maritime Consortium attended a signing ceremony at MIT. Left to right: Fotini Christia (MIT), Anantha Chandrakasan (MIT), Chara Papaefthymiou (Navios), Amulya Mohapatra (Foresight Group Services), Kwangpil Chang (HD KSOE), Chris Wiernicki (ABS), Miltiadis Marinakis (Capital), John Lycouris (Dorian LPG), Daniel Huttenlocher (MIT), and Themis Sapsis (MIT).
The new athletic facilities on the West Windsor side of Lake Carnegie support student-athletes and promote a culture of health and wellness for the entire University community
Panelists look at challenges, opportunities of GAI tools
New initiative advances conversations about role of AI
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
When asked if it’s appropriate to use generative AI to grade student papers, write letters of recommendation, or screen job applicants the audience couldn’t come to a consensus.
First up: Matthew Kopec, program director and lecturer for Embedded EthiCS, who opined, “Science is less fun because of all these tools.”
Quick to push back were Gary King, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, and Michael Brenner, Michael F. Cronin Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics at SEAS.
“We’re in the business of making discoveries to improve the world for humans,” Brenner said. “We should use every tool that we have at our disposal to do that.” He and King posited that while GAI may make certain scientific endeavors easier, it can also encourage researchers to work on harder problems.
King, who is also the director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, noted that Harvard has long taught its students the latest technology to address problems faster and more easily, and GAI is no different.
“The first mathematics books had long passages trying to explain how to do mathematical calculations without wasting valuable paper. Most of us now spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do calculations without blowing up our computers,” he said. “You should be the kind of person that uses whatever the best tools are to progress the fastest and go the farthest.”
The hourlong panel was the first installment in the spring GAI Dialogues series, part of a wider initiative exploring the impact generative AI has on the FAS educational mission. The initiative, a priority of Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra, is being led by her senior adviser on artificial intelligence, Chris Stubbs, the Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy.
The conversation also examined concerns with ethical issues. Despite being an enthusiastic proponent for the use of GAI in science and math fields, Brenner acknowledged the need for scrutiny over who can or should control GAI tools.
King was blunter. “Yes, this technology can be used for harm. Any technology can be used for that. The causal factor isn’t the technology, it’s the humans that decided to use it,” he said.
A question from an audience member on AI’s potential environmental impact had all the panelists agreeing that the technology heavily consumes energy. King answered that AI may ruin the environment, or incent faster creation of new industries to generate clean energy.
“Before you single-handedly eliminate these incredibly visible tools, let’s just figure out the cost and benefits,” he said.
Upcoming events in this spring’s GAI Dialogues include “Teaching With Integrity in the Age of AI” with the College’s offices of Undergraduate Education and Academic Integrity at the Smith Campus Center on Monday. The faculty workshop will explore best practices for using AI in the classroom, potential coursework violations, and prevention strategies. Other events will focus on critical reading and writing in the age of AI, on April 3 and 24, respectively, and “Preparing Students for the Future: AI Literacy in the Liberal Arts” on May 5.
A key goal of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has been to see further than ever before into the distant past of our Universe, when the first galaxies were forming after the Big Bang, a period know as cosmic dawn.
Researchers studying one of those very early galaxies have now made a discovery in the spectrum of its light, that challenges our established understanding of the Universe’s early history. Their results are reported in the journal Nature.
Webb discovered the incredibly distant galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1, observed at just 330 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers used the galaxy’s brightness in different infrared filters to estimate its redshift, which measures a galaxy’s distance from Earth based on how its light has been stretched out during its journey through expanding space.
The NIRCam imaging yielded an initial redshift estimate of 12.9. To confirm its extreme redshift, an international team led by Dr Joris Witstok, previously of the University of Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology, observed the galaxy using Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.
The resulting spectrum confirmed the redshift to be 13.0. This equates to a galaxy seen just 330 million years after the Big Bang, a small fraction of the Universe’s present age of 13.8 billion years.
But an unexpected feature also stood out: one specific, distinctly bright wavelength of light, identified as the Lyman-α emission radiated by hydrogen atoms. This emission was far stronger than astronomers thought possible at this early stage in the Universe’s development.
“The early Universe was bathed in a thick fog of neutral hydrogen,” said co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino from Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology. “Most of this haze was lifted in a process called reionisation, which was completed about one billion years after the Big Bang.
“GS-z13-1 is seen when the Universe was only 330 million years old, yet it shows a surprisingly clear, telltale signature of Lyman-α emission that can only be seen once the surrounding fog has fully lifted. This result was totally unexpected by theories of early galaxy formation and has caught astronomers by surprise.”
Before and during the epoch of reionisation, neutral hydrogen fog surrounding galaxies blocked any energetic ultraviolet light they emitted, much like the filtering effect of coloured glass. Until enough stars had formed and were able to ionise the hydrogen gas, no such light — including Lyman-α emission — could escape from these fledgling galaxies to reach Earth.
The confirmation of Lyman-α radiation from this galaxy has great implications for our understanding of the early Universe. “We really shouldn’t have found a galaxy like this, given our understanding of the way the Universe has evolved,” said co-author Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona. “We could think of the early Universe as shrouded with a thick fog that would make it exceedingly difficult to find even powerful lighthouses peeking through, yet here we see the beam of light from this galaxy piercing the veil.”
The source of the Lyman-α radiation from this galaxy is not yet known, but it may include the first light from the earliest generation of stars to form in the Universe. “The large bubble of ionised hydrogen surrounding this galaxy might have been created by a peculiar population of stars — much more massive, hotter and more luminous than stars formed at later epochs, and possibly representative of the first generation of stars,” said Witstok, who is now based at the Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen. A powerful active galactic nucleus, driven by one of the first supermassive black holes, is another possibility identified by the team.
The team plans further follow-up observations of GS-z13-1, aiming to obtain more information about the nature of this galaxy and origin of its strong Lyman-α radiation. Whatever the galaxy is concealing, it is certain to illuminate a new frontier in cosmology.
JWST is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The data for this result were captured as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).
Astronomers have identified a bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in the very early Universe. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.
This result was totally unexpected by theories of early galaxy formation and has caught astronomers by surprise
Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.
“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.”
Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.
The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.
“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”
Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.
MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.
The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.
“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS.
“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”
Representatives from across the MIT Maritime Consortium attended a signing ceremony at MIT. Left to right: Fotini Christia (MIT), Anantha Chandrakasan (MIT), Chara Papaefthymiou (Navios), Amulya Mohapatra (Foresight Group Services), Kwangpil Chang (HD KSOE), Chris Wiernicki (ABS), Miltiadis Marinakis (Capital), John Lycouris (Dorian LPG), Daniel Huttenlocher (MIT), and Themis Sapsis (MIT).
Torsten Hoefler wins the prestigious ACM Prize in Computing for his pioneering work in high-performance computing. The fact that supercomputers have become so powerful that AI models can be trained very quickly with very large volumes of data is partly down to his research.
When visiting Singapore, most people immediately notice the city’s cleanliness, and so did Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University when he visited for the first time at the invitation of the NUS Sustainable and Green Finance Institute (SGFIN) to be its keynote presenter at the SGFIN Sustainability Summit 2025 held on 13-14 March 2025.
He observed that maintaining Singapore’s clean streets takes not just extensive cleaning efforts, but also a sense of social responsibility to recognise that littering transfers the cost of disposal onto other people and is simply “not okay”.
“When are we going to get to the stage where dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and imposing the cost of disposing of or coping with the impact of your carbon dioxide on other people is also not okay?” asked Prof Allen, who is Head of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics in the Department of Physics and Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and Environment, both at the University of Oxford.
Calling for climate policy to be reframed from the traditional focus on changing corporate and citizen behaviour to a focus on product and waste disposal, Prof Allen’s keynote presentation outlined a roadmap to halt global warming within 30 years, which would limit future warming to less than the amount that has occurred since the 2000s.
“We could stop global warming within a generation, but it requires a fresh approach to climate policy, and one that I think should be inspired by the turbulence we’re seeing over climate policy around the world,” he said.
Prof Allen’s suggestion was among several cautiously optimistic messages about climate action shared during the summit, held to the theme “Commitments, Challenges, and Innovations in the Transition to Sustainable Economy”. The event was attended by about 200 representatives from the global sustainable finance community, including academics, industry leaders, policymakers and regulators, financial institutions, and legal experts.
Optimism amid policy turbulence
In her opening address, Guest of Honour Ms Grace Fu, Minister for Sustainability and the Environment and Minister-in-charge of Trade Relations, noted that the challenges in the fight against climate change are “complex… but not insurmountable.”
Although global momentum appears to be wavering, Singapore is pressing forward with collaborations and contributions to key enablers of the green transition, she said.
Similarly, industry keynote speaker Ms Emily Chew, Head of Sustainability at GIC, said the sovereign wealth fund’s assessment of global climate policies indicates that “despite the headlines, it’s not a one-way pullback on climate policy around the world.”
Policy momentum in the European Union, China, Australia, and the United Kingdom remains strong, and Europe’s focus on renewable energy and related products has intensified, driven by energy cost concerns due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and a desire to compete with China on key components in the clean energy value chain.
Ms Chew noted that demand for energy continues to outstrip supply at a pace that cannot be met with fossil fuel energy alone. This will drive growth in renewable energy capacity, as renewable energy technology development, advances in energy efficiency, improvements in grid management, and innovations in energy storage like battery technology and liquid storage are expected to ramp up even more rapidly to fill the gap.
Nevertheless, through its climate scenarios research, GIC sees growing conviction that the world may face a “too little, too late” scenario when it comes to the global transition. In this scenario, policy responses to address emissions would be insufficient to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. It is thus looking at investing in not just climate solutions and climate transition, but also climate adaptation, which will be inevitable in a world that is 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.
Achieving Geological Net Zero
To avert this crisis, the world must address the issue of carbon dioxide disposal, said Prof Allen.
Progress on replacing fossil fuels with clean energy and reversing deforestation has been far from satisfactory, especially with the reluctance of certain economies and industries to give up fossil fuels. In addition, these methods do not reduce carbon emissions enough to meet net-zero goals.
“If we don’t avoid producing carbon dioxide, we have to take up the slack by increasing the amount we put back in the Earth’s crust, because the amount we can store at the surface by restoring forests is actually quite limited,” Prof Allen said.
“We need to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming, and we need to do it before the world stops using fossil fuels.”
The climate goal should be Geological Net Zero, incorporating capture and storage of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s crust to balance the existing and ongoing emissions, he said. With this approach, getting to net zero by 2055 would entail capturing and storing underground 10 per cent of carbon dioxide produced from fossil sources by 2035, 50 per cent by 2045, and 100 per cent by 2055.
Carbon capture solutions are already available and effective, but more capital is needed to scale up such projects, which currently receive less than 1 per cent of transition investments. The high cost of direct air capture of carbon dioxide, about US$600 per tonne, could be managed by pricing it into fossil fuel costs over time, Prof Allen argued. For example, he estimates that doing so for petrol would increase prices by only 60 US cents per litre over 30 years.
Prof Allen also warned that there is a risk of miscalculating the emissions reduction needed to achieve net-zero targets, due to ambiguous wording in Article 4 of the Paris Agreement. The article calls for striking a balance between carbon emissions and removals to stop global warming but does not specify exactly what removals are included, which leaves the door open for natural carbon uptake by forests and oceans to be “double counted” as part of removal efforts.
“If we only aim for net zero with this definition of emissions, then we stabilise the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, rather than allowing it to fall as it should. We would see constant concentrations (of carbon dioxide) resulting, and that allows ongoing warming,” Prof Allen said.
He ended on a positive note, urging those present to take the helm and not wait for direction from elsewhere.
“There is an opportunity here for Asia to lead the way to a more effective, less intrusive, more pragmatic climate future based on the principle that if you generate carbon dioxide, you have the responsibility to dispose of it responsibly and not just dump it into the atmosphere for somebody else to clean up – a policy that I might say is inspired by the clean streets of Singapore.”
By Dr Goh Jing Wen, Research Fellow, and Dr Lia Troeung, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Ageing Research & Education at Duke-NUS Medical School
Diabetic wounds often lead to severe complications that can result in amputations. These chronic and non-healing wounds are marked by persistent inflammation, affecting more than six per cent of the global population. In Singapore, there are about four lower limb amputations daily due to non-healing diabetic wounds. A study focusing on diabetic wounds in Singapore estimated that the gross amputation-related healthcare cost per patient was S$23,000 in 2017.
To address this challenge of great national and global importance, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed two microneedle technologies that have shown efficacy in accelerating diabetic wound healing in preclinical models by preserving the functions of proteins called growth factors, and removing undesirable inflammatory compounds.
The two novel innovations were developed by a team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Andy Tay from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering at NUS, and the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology. “Growth factors are important for wound healing because they regulate key cellular functions. However, in diabetic wounds, these growth factors are rapidly broken down by other enzymes known as proteases. This dramatically slows down wound recovery. At the same time, diabetic wounds are characterised by persistently high levels of inflammation,” he explained.
“We wanted to tackle these two issues by using microneedles for both delivery and extraction. It is minimally invasive, can be fabricated with precision, and allows for the active compounds to be painlessly administered directly into wounds. Microneedle patches are excellent materials for wound healing,” he said.
The results of the two related studies, which were published online in the scientific journals Biomaterials and Advanced Functional Materials on 4 July 2024 and 24 July 2024 respectively, demonstrate the potential of this innovative approach in treating various skin conditions such as psoriasis or chronic diabetic wounds.
Two unique approaches to accelerate wound healing
In the market, hydrogel is used to deliver growth factors to wounds. However, this method is not as effective because the protease-rich environment of chronic wounds rapidly degrades and inactivates the growth factors. This means that the growth factors need to be delivered in high doses repeatedly, which can be costly and time-consuming.
In the first approach developed by the NUS research team, instead of delivering the growth factors directly, they first increased the production of growth factors within the wound.
They achieved this by developing sucralfate microneedles (SUC-MN) to deliver an important immunomodulatory protein, interleukin-4 (IL-4), to stimulate the production of growth factors in diabetic tissues. IL-4 helps to regulate the immune response and promote tissue regeneration, while sucralfate, a medication commonly used to treat gastrointestinal ulcers, protects growth factors from degradation.
The microneedles dissolve in the wound, delivering IL-4 and sucralfate directly to the wound. This localised delivery system minimises systemic side effects, and also avoids secondary damage to delicate, newly formed tissues caused by traditional adhesive dressing that is currently used clinically. The researchers found that SUC-MN significantly accelerated wound healing twice as fast when compared to traditional treatments.
First-of-its-kind extractive microneedles to remove pro-inflammatory compounds
Although a majority of microneedle technology uses the material for delivery, the NUS team explored the novel use of microneedles to extract undesirable pro-inflammatory proteins and immune cells in the second approach. To do so, the NUS team needed to find a suitable coating material that could act as a sponge to soak up pro-inflammatory compounds, known as chemokines, which are ‘messenger’ molecules that recruit and trap pro-inflammatory immune cells called monocytes in wound tissues.
The research team screened different materials and eventually used heparin-coated porous microneedles (HPMN) to address the issue of persistent inflammation in skin wounds at the source. Based on previous studies, heparin has been found to bind readily to chemokines. The team demonstrated that HPMN could effectively deplete chemokines and monocytes from the wound site, leading to a 50 per cent reduction in tissue inflammation as well as a 90 per cent reduction in wound size by the 14th day of treatment.
These initial findings highlight the potential of HPMN as a promising strategy for the treatment of inflammatory skin disorders. The ability of HPMN to remove chemokines and inflammatory cells deep within the skin tissue offers a unique advantage over existing treatments that only target surface-level inflammation. HPMN could be further developed for personalised wound care and tailored treatment of various inflammatory skin conditions such as psoriasis.
Next steps
The development of SUC-MN and HPMN represents a significant step forward in the field of wound healing and skin disease management. The team intends to conduct further studies to explore the potential of this technology and bring it to market.
For extractive microneedles in particular, the team will fabricate microneedles with more controllable pore sizes using advanced technologies, such as 3D printing, and integrate antibacterial properties into the microneedles as clinical non-healing wounds often accompany infections. They are also designing flexible microneedle patches to ensure that they fit well to various tissue shapes.
“We are excited about the potential impact of our research and look forward to advancing this technology towards clinical translation. The two approaches developed by our team would provide much-needed relief for patients with diabetic wounds, as well as many patients suffering from skin conditions like atopic dermatitis or psoriasis,” said Asst Prof Tay.
Rob Devlin helped develop innovative mini-lens as grad student. Now the startup he runs produces millions of them for consumer electronics.
Over the course of his Harvard doctoral studies, Rob Devlin must have made 100 of a new kind of mini-lens, experimenting with materials and prototyping new designs to bend light like a traditional camera only using a series of tiny pillars on a millimeter-thin wafer.
This new device would be smaller, cheaper, and able to be mass produced — if demand ever warranted it — in semiconductor chip foundries.
Today, demand warrants it.
Metalenz, a startup founded in 2016 with exclusive rights to commercialize the device Devlin helped develop in the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics, says some 100 million of its light-focusing metasurfaces have been made and are installed in an array of consumer electronic devices.
Metalenz — with Devlin now as CEO — wouldn’t disclose which companies are using its devices in their products, but at least one report from a company that does teardowns of consumer products, Yole Group, says metasurfaces are in the iPad, Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and Google’s Pixel 8 Pro.
“It’s remarkable to think that something that started at Harvard — during my Ph.D. and with the work of all the other folks in the Capasso lab — is now out there and people are using it,” Devlin said. “There are many examples of university technology that have great promise, and having metasurfaces actually end up in real-world devices at the scale that we’re now talking about definitely has a great feel to it.”
Sam Liss, executive director of strategic partnerships at Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, said Metalenz emerged from a group that was cross-disciplinary, leveraging different scientific backgrounds and perspectives into a product that is breaking new ground.
“[Former University President] Drew Faust once said that companies create new products; university research creates new industries.”
Sam Liss, Harvard Office of Technology Development
“It’s really taking conventional optics, which have been around for a very, very long time, and disrupting that industry,” Liss said. “That’s what I think university startups are really great at: true disruption. [Former University President] Drew Faust once said that companies create new products; university research creates new industries. And that always resonated with me.”
Capasso’s early work on metasurfaces began in 2007 or 2008. By 2012, when Devlin arrived at the lab, the science was mostly figured out. In a 2011 paper in the journal Science, which has garnered more than 10,000 citations, Capasso and members of his lab showed they could tune nanostructures on the metasurface to control light at will.
Shortly after, they demonstrated the first metalens, which was able to focus light — albeit inefficiently — on a single spot. From there, Devlin added his expertise in materials and nanofabrication, working with other members of the lab to refine the product. And Capasso set the bar even higher: He wanted not only a product that worked, but one that could be mass-produced using existing fabrication methods so they could go to market quickly.
“In record time, metalenses went from a research prototype in 2016 to the creation of Metalenz in the same year and mass manufacturing for the consumer market in the following years,” Capasso said. “Kudos to Rob Devlin for successfully leading this transition.”
All along, researchers knew the device had the potential to disrupt the traditional business of making lenses from curved pieces of polished glass or plastic. As manufacturers crammed more and more features into smartphones, tablets, and other devices, it became clear that the real estate taken up by bulky lenses was a bottleneck to more advanced designs.
A major early victory for Metalenz came in 2021, when the startup signed a contract with STMicroelectronics to put its metasurfaces into STMicro’s FlightSense module.
The distance-measuring module uses near-infrared light for 3D sensing, and the metasurface is involved in both emitting light and in detecting its reflections. The time taken for the infrared light to bounce back provides key data in drawing the 3D picture. It is used in facial recognition, 3D room mapping, augmented reality, and similar applications.
Though these metasurfaces are not typically used for visual images, they can provide depth information that helps focus visual camera lenses.
Rob Devlin.
Photo courtesy of Metalenz
Metalenz is currently based in Boston’s North End and has doubled in size to about 45 employees over the last three years. The company doesn’t need all that much space, because the manufacturing is left to large semiconductor foundries, which turn out more than a trillion chips a year for the global technology industry.
At Metalenz, Devlin said, the staff focuses on improving performance of their current product and developing what they hope will be the next big breakthrough: Polar ID.
Polar ID uses polarization of light to provide an additional layer of security for smartphones with a dramatic reduction in cost and size.
Devlin said that a traditional polarization camera is about 100 millimeters long and costs $500 to $1,000. Smaller versions have been created but are found only on top-end devices. Metalenz’s polarization metasurface is about 5 millimeters long and costs roughly $5, Devlin said, which would allow their deployment at low cost in many more devices.
“I can get a standard image of you. I can recognize the distance between your eyes and how far your eyes are from your nose and all of these key landmarks,” Devlin said. “But the polarization signature of you is unique, meaning that even if someone came with a perfect 3D mask of you and put it in front of the device, the polarization signature of that 3D mask would be different than your polarization signature.”
Polarization can be used in other applications as well. For example, skin cancer’s polarization signature is different from healthy skin, so it can be used to detect dangerous growths. It can also be used to monitor air quality.
“There are a lot of exciting things stemming from the power of the metasurface to take complex modules, shrink them down, and let you do entirely new things,” Devlin said.
As with any successful product, other companies are working to catch up, Devlin said. Metalenz’s strategy is to continue to improve current products and develop new ones that leverage the technology to do new and interesting things.
He also counted among advantages their continued relationship with Capasso — a Metalenz founder — providing a pipeline to new developments from his lab.
“There’s a lot of competition and folks are trying to catch up to us,” Devlin said. “The benefit we have is really the first applications we’ve already deployed, and we’ve already started to move on to something where we’re using even more of the unique aspects of the metasurface.”
New AI method lets researchers get better handle on brain-behavior link, may offer insights into disorders like autism
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
It’s all about the body language.
A new AI method for tracking the social lives of rats may help researchers better understand the relationship between the brain and social behavior, with possible implications for human conditions such as autism.
The machine-learning technique was detailed in a paper, “Mapping the Landscape of Social Behavior,” recently published in Cell. Bence P. Ölveczky, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology (OEB) and co-author of the paper, explained: “We are really mapping the social life of rats by capturing the details of their every movement. We see how they interact with each other, and we see the same forms of engagement over and over again.
“We see personalities in these animals that are intriguing. In many ways, these variations can help us understand the basis for a lot of interesting behavioral phenomena, including sociality,” he added.
Rats are social creatures. Much like humans, they interact with each other in ways that influence their behavior through complex social patterns of touching and body language. These rat interactions are not that far from our own, the researchers say.
Ölveczky gave a real-life example: “When people come into my lab, I scratch my head a little bit and soon after they will scratch their heads, or I cross my legs, and they cross their legs. We are subconsciously communicating with each other.”
Although studies of rat behavior have existed for years, in the past they relied on observation and a limited number of data points.
From videos, a machine-learning pipeline extracted more than 110 million 3D poses tracking various points on the rats’ bodies as they moved and interacted.
“The standard in the field is for somebody to just watch hours and hours of rat videos and say, ‘Oh, I think that they touched each other there. I think that this guy was mimicking the other guy,’” Ölveczky said.
The new study was able to take an in-depth look at how those social behaviors are communicated thanks to groundbreaking technology. From videos of the interactions, a machine-learning pipeline extracted more than 110 million 3D poses tracking various points on the rats’ bodies as they moved and interacted. Researchers could then graph how these animals behaved around others, including how they learned and changed through these exchanges.
“By having this methodology, we can replace the subjective human observer with a very rigorous and reproducible method for behavioral quantification and identification of particular gestures or even interaction motifs,” said Ölveczky.
AI also allowed the researchers to “analyze amounts of data that would take humans years and years to scroll through,” said Ugne Klibaite, a postdoctoral fellow in the Ölveczky Lab and lead author on the paper.
“Given how far computer vision and deep learning has progressed and the technology, the cameras, and the computers we have, we can actually get high-resolution animal movement in 3D,” said Klibaite. Now, she continued, “we have a chance to think about what that might mean.”
This advance is already opening new areas for research into autism. A complex disorder, autism probably has environmental components, said Ölveczky. It also seems clear, however, that there is a genetic component, with certain high-risk genes predisposing an individual to autism.
“The question then is how does a mutation or a knockout in this gene affect the brain, and how does that lead to changes in social behavior?”
With funding from the Simons Foundation for Autism Research, which provided rats that had variations in these specific genes, the researchers were able to look at how these genetically modified rats socialized.
While stressing that autism is a human condition, the researchers did find some intriguing parallels.
“This is a spectrum disorder, and we see some of that variability in our different rat models as well,” said Ölveczky.
Noting that children on the autism spectrum often socialize in different ways than children not on the spectrum, he said, “We also see a whole variety of different types of differences in social interactions in these rats that depend on the particular gene that was knocked out.”
Ongoing research will explore these similarities and how they might relate to the altered genes.
“Using this platform, we are going to ask questions about how different parts of the brain process social gestures,” said Ölveczky. “Can we go deeper and really pinpoint the circuits that are responsible for this difference in behavior? And when we can do that — if we can do that — then that could very well inspire new approaches to therapy.”
Adding to the value of the study, the data — the films of the rats and the movement trajectories distilled from them — will be shared, said Klibaite, who led the data collection and behavioral analysis.
“Hopefully by releasing this to the community and getting people to engage with the data as well, we’ll have people in the conversation making better models of how the brain underlies social behavior.”
Funding for this research came, in part, from the National Institutes of Health.
The MIT women's swimming and diving team won the program's first national championship, jumping ahead of New York University by erasing a 20-point deficit as the Engineers finished with 497 points at the 2025 NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving National Championships, hosted by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference March 19-22 at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.
MIT entered the event ranked as the top team in the country. Overall, MIT won three individual national titles and four relay titles. The head coach, Meg Sisson French, was named the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America Women’s Swim Coach of the Year.
On day 1 of the championships, the 400 Medley Relay team of senior Kate Augustyn (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), first-year Sarah Bernard (Brookline, Massachusetts), sophomore Sydney Smith (Atlanta, Georgia), and graduate student Alexandra Turvey (Vancouver, British Colombia) touched the wall first in 3:38.48, just beating the NYU team by 0.8 second and setting a new school record.
Day 2 highlights included Smith posting a winning time of 53.96 in the 100 fly, beating out Nicole Ranile of NYU by under a second. The 200 freestyle relay team of Turvey, Smith, sophomore Ella Roberson (Midland, Michigan) and junior Annika Naveen (Wynnewood, Pennsylvania) held off Pomona-Pitzer for the gold as Naveen brought the title home and gave the Engineers a national record time of 1:30.00.
MIT opened day 3 with another national title, this time in the 200 medley relay. Augustyn led off, followed by Bernard and Naveen. Ella Roberson brought the title home for MIT as she completed her anchor leg in 22.02, which gave the team a combined time of 1:39.51. Roberson was able to hold off a late charge by Kenyon College, which finished second in 1:40.26 as the Engineers set another national record. Augustyn later defended her title in the 100 backstroke as she clocked in with a time of 53.41, tying her own national record.
The final day of action saw MIT pull ahead of NYU with two more national titles. In the 200 backstroke, Augustyn held the lead through most of the event, but Sophia Verkleeren of Williams College caught up to the defending champion in the last half of the race. With just 25 yards left, Augustyn pulled away to defeat Verkleeren with a time of 1:55.85. Augustyn shaved almost 2 seconds off her preliminary time and fell just short of the national record time of 1:55.67. With the win, the Engineers pulled to within one point of NYU for the top spot.
The Engineers sealed the overall national championship by winning their fourth relay of the championship, besting the team from NYU. Turvey set the pace with her lead-off, followed by Smith and Augustyn. Roberson, swimming the anchor leg, held off Kaley McIntyre of NYU, who earlier set the national record in the 100 freestyle, to give MIT the win with a time of 3:19.03 as the Violets took second in 3:19.36.
Augustyn defended her title in the 200 backstroke while sweeping the National Championship in both the 100 and 200 backstroke in consecutive years. She concludes her career as one of the most decorated swimmers in program history, collecting four individual national championships, four relay national championships, and 27 all-America honors, the most in program history.
Researchers develop at-home test to ID those at risk of Alzheimer’s years before symptoms appear
When it comes to early detection of cognitive impairment, a new study suggests that the nose knows.
Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham developed olfactory tests — in which participants sniff odor labels that have been placed on a card — to assess people’s ability to discriminate, identify, and remember odors. They found that participants could successfully take the test at home and that older adults with cognitive impairment scored lower on the test than cognitively normal adults. Results are published in Scientific Reports.
“Early detection of cognitive impairment could help us identify people who are at risk of Alzheimer’s disease and intervene years before memory symptoms begin,” said senior author Mark Albers of the Laboratory of Olfactory Neurotranslation, the McCance Center for Brain Health, Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “Our goal has been to develop and validate a cost-effective, noninvasive test that can be performed at home, helping to set the stage for advancing research and treatment for Alzheimer’s.”
Albers and colleagues are interested in whether olfactory dysfunction — the sometimes-subtle loss of sense of smell — can serve as an early warning sign for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and traumatic brain injury. Albers helped found a company that makes the Aromha Brain Health Test, which is the test used by the research team to conduct the current study.
To evaluate the olfactory test, the team recruited English- and Spanish-speaking participants with subjective cognitive complaints (those with self-reported concerns about memory) and participants with mild cognitive impairment. They compared these participants’ test results with those from people who had no sense of smell and with cognitively normal individuals.
The research team found that odor identification, memory, and discrimination declined with age. They also found that older adults with mild cognitive impairment had lower scores for odor discrimination and identification compared with older adults who were cognitively normal. Overall, the researchers found that test results were similar across English- and Spanish-speakers, and participants performed the test equally successfully regardless of whether they were observed by a research assistant.
The authors note that future studies could incorporate neuropsychological testing and could follow patients over time to see if the tool can predict cognitive decline.
“Our results suggest that olfactory testing could be used in clinical research settings in different languages and among older adults to predict neurodegenerative disease and development of clinical symptoms,” said Albers.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
An international team including engineers from Princeton has devised a way to watch, in stunning detail, as the hollow tendrils of fungi forage for nutrients and then transport those nutrients to the plants’ roots.
Bar graphs and other charts provide a simple way to communicate data, but are, by definition, difficult to translate for readers who are blind or low-vision. Designers have developed methods for converting these visuals into “tactile charts,” but guidelines for doing so are extensive (for example, the Braille Authority of North America’s 2022 guidebook is 426 pages long). The process also requires understanding different types of software, as designers often draft their chart in programs like Adobe Illustrator and then translate it into Braille using another application.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now developed an approach that streamlines the design process for tactile chart designers. Their program, called “Tactile Vega-Lite,” can take data from something like an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into both a standard visual chart and a touch-based one. Design standards are hardwired as default rules within the program to help educators and designers automatically create accessible tactile charts.
The tool could make it easier for blind and low-vision readers to understand many graphics, such as a bar chart comparing minimum wages across states or a line graph tracking countries’ GDPs over time. To bring your designs to the real world, you can tweak your chart in Tactile Vega-Lite and then send its file to a Braille embosser (which prints text as readable dots).
This spring, the researchers will present Tactile Vega-Lite in a paper at the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. According to lead author Mengzhu “Katie” Chen SM ’25, the tool strikes a balance between the precision that design professionals want for editing and the efficiency educators need to create tactile charts quickly.
“We interviewed teachers who wanted to make their lessons accessible to blind and low-vision students, and designers experienced in putting together tactile charts,” says Chen, a recent CSAIL affiliate and master's graduate in electrical engineering and computer science and the Program in System Design and Management. “Since their needs differ, we designed a program that’s easy to use, provides instant feedback when you want to make tweaks, and implements accessibility guidelines.”
Data you can feel
The researchers’ program builds off of their 2017 visualization tool Vega-Lite by automatically encoding both a flat, standard chart and a tactile one. Senior author and MIT postdoc Jonathan Zong SM ’20, PhD ’24 points out that the program makes intuitive design decisions so users don’t have to.
“Tactile Vega-Lite has smart defaults to ensure proper spacing, layout, and texture and Braille conversion, following best practices to create good touch-based reading experiences,” says Zong, who is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an incoming assistant professor at the University of Colorado. “Building on existing guidelines and our interviews with experts, the goal is for teachers or visual designers without a lot of tactile design expertise to quickly convey data in a clear way for tactile readers to explore and understand.”
Tactile Vega-Lite’s code editor allows users to customize axis labels, tick marks, and other elements. Different features within the chart are represented by abstractions — or summaries of a longer body of code — that can be modified. These shortcuts allow you to write brief phrases that tweak the design of your chart. For example, if you want to change how the bars in your graph are filled out, you could change the code in the “Texture” section from “dottedFill” to “verticalFill” to replace small circles with upward lines.
To understand how these abstractions work, the researchers added a gallery of examples. Each one includes a phrase and what change that code leads to. Still, the team is looking to refine Tactile Vega-Lite’s user interface to make it more accessible to users less familiar with coding. Instead of using abstractions for edits, you could click on different buttons.
Chen says she and her colleagues are hoping to add machine-specific customizations to their program. This would allow users to preview how their tactile chart would look before it’s fabricated by an embossing machine and make edits according to the device’s specifications.
While Tactile Vega-Lite can streamline the many steps it usually takes to make a tactile chart, Zong emphasizes that it doesn’t replace an expert doing a final check-over for guideline compliance. The researchers are continuing to incorporate Braille design rules into their program, but caution that human review will likely remain the best practice.
“The ability to design tactile graphics efficiently, particularly without specialized software, is important for providing equal access of information to tactile readers,” says Stacy Fontenot, owner of Font to Dot, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Graphics that follow current guidelines and standards are beneficial for the reader as consistency is paramount, especially with complex, data-filled graphics. Tactile Vega-Lite has a straightforward interface for creating informative tactile graphics quickly and accurately, thereby reducing the design time in providing quality graphics to tactile readers.”
Chen and Zong wrote the paper with Isabella Pineros ’23, MEng ’24 and MIT Associate Professor Arvind Satyanarayan. The researchers’ work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant.
The CSAIL team also incorporated input from Rich Caloggero from MIT’s Disability and Access Services, as well as the Lighthouse for the Blind, which let them observe technical design workflows as part of the project.
The Tactile Vega-Lite system can take data from something like an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into both a standard visual chart and a touch-based one. Design standards are hardwired as default rules within the program, helping educators and designers automatically create accessible tactile charts.
Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.
A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.
The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.
A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.
Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.
Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.
The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.
They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.
In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.
“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.
The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.
In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.
“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”
Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.
“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”
Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.
In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”
And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.
Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”
AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.”
Early support for this research effort was provided by the Tata Center for Technology and Design, a part of the MIT Energy Initiative.
Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers could decrease polluting runoff, while at the same time cutting farmers’ costs and perhaps enhancing productivity.
An international team of scientists have uncovered a thriving underwater ecosystem off the coast of Antarctica that had never before been accessible to humans.
The team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, were working in the Bellingshausen Sea off the coast of Antarctica when a massive iceberg broke away from the George VI Ice Shelf in January of this year.
The team, on board Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too), changed their plans and reached the newly exposed seafloor 12 days later, becoming the first to investigate the area.
Their expedition was the first detailed study of the geology, physical oceanography, and biology beneath such a large area once covered by a floating ice shelf. The A-84 iceberg was approximately 510 square kilometres (209 square miles) in size, and revealed an equivalent area of seafloor when it broke away from the ice shelf.
"We seized upon the moment, changed our expedition plan, and went for it so we could look at what was happening in the depths below," said expedition co-chief scientist Dr Patricia Esquete from the University of Aveiro, Portugal. "We didn't expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years.”
Using Schmidt Ocean Institute’s remotely operated vehicle, ROV SuBastian, the team observed the deep seafloor for eight days and found flourishing ecosystems at depths as great as 1300 meters.
Their observations include large corals and sponges supporting an array of animal life, including icefish, giant sea spiders, and octopus. The discovery offers new insights into how ecosystems function beneath floating sections of the Antarctic ice sheet.
Little is known about what lies beneath Antarctica’s floating ice shelves. In 2021, British Antarctic Survey researchers first reported signs of bottom-dwelling life beneath the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in the Southern Weddell Sea. The current expedition was the first to use an ROV to explore this remote environment.
The team was surprised by the significant biomass and biodiversity of the ecosystems and suspect they have discovered several new species.
Deep-sea ecosystems typically rely on nutrients from the surface slowly raining down to the seafloor. For centuries, the ecosystems under the ice shelf have been covered by ice almost 150 metres thick, completely cutting them off from surface nutrients. "The fact that we found long-living species suggests that the lateral transport, which mostly consists of glacial meltwater from the ice shelf, could be the source of the nutrients to sustain the life we found," said team member Dr Laura Cimoli, from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
The newly exposed Antarctic seafloor also allowed the team, with scientists from Portugal, the United Kingdom, Chile, Germany, Norway, New Zealand, and the United States, to gather critical data on the past behaviour of the larger Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet has been shrinking and losing mass over the last few decades due to climate change.
“The ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet is a major contributor to sea level rise worldwide,” said expedition co-chief scientist Sasha Montelli of University College London (UCL). “Our work is critical for providing longer-term context of these recent changes, improving our ability to make projections of future change — projections that can inform actionable policies. We will undoubtedly make new discoveries as we continue to analyse this data.”
“We were thrilled by the opportunity to explore the newly exposed seafloor,” said team member Dr Svetlana Radionovskaya from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “The research will provide key insights into ice sheet dynamics, oceanography and sub-ice shelf ecosystems. At a time when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting at an alarming rate, understanding these dynamics and their impacts is crucial.”
The oceanography team, led by Cimoli in collaboration with the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, used autonomous underwater vehicles to characterise the ocean circulation of the region and study the impacts of glacial meltwater on the physical and chemical seawater properties. "Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are a nexus point for ocean circulation, so changes that happen around Antarctica can affect global ocean circulation and global climate," said Cimoli.
The researchers are also investigating how the iceberg calving event has contributed to mix the upper ocean, not just in the recently exposed area, but also further downstream as the iceberg floats away. As the giant iceberg drifts, it can generate turbulence that mixes water properties and could potentially mix the deep nutrient-rich water with the surface waters, fuelling biological productivity.
The expedition was part of Challenger 150, a global cooperative focused on deep-sea biological research and endorsed by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) as an Ocean Decade Action.
“The science team was originally in this remote region to study the seafloor and ecosystem at the interface between ice and sea,” said Schmidt Ocean Institute Executive Director, Dr Jyotika Virmani. “Being right there when this iceberg calved from the ice shelf presented a rare scientific opportunity. Serendipitous moments are part of the excitement of research at sea – they offer the chance to be the first to witness the untouched beauty of our world.”
Svetlana Radionovskaya is a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Laura Cimoli is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
Adapted from a media release by the Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Inset image: Dr Cimoli (right) and Dr Meyer (UEA, left) prepare an underwater glider for deployment. Credit: Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Scientists explore a seafloor area newly exposed by iceberg A-84; discover vibrant communities of ancient sponges and corals.
By Dr Chew Han Ei, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, and Ms Isabelle Tan, Research Assistant, both at the Institute of Policy Studies, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS
Professor Liu Bin, NUS Deputy President (Research and Technology), has been inducted into the prestigious Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame, in honour of her outstanding contributions as a scientist, engineer, innovator, and academic leader. The Induction Ceremony was held on 21 March 2025, during the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations’ (SCWO) 45th Anniversary Gala Dinner. As an honouree of the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame, Prof Liu joins an esteemed community of trailblazing women who have shaped our nation, pushed boundaries in their fields and paved the way for future generations.
The Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame was launched by SCWO on 14 March 2014 as an expansion of the Wall of Fame that was established earlier to honour Singapore’s pioneering women activists, educators, and philanthropists. The Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame aims to recognise and salute the outstanding women of Singapore in all fields of endeavour.
“I am deeply honoured and grateful to be inducted into the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame alongside other outstanding women who have made profound impact on Singapore. This recognition affirms my commitment to scientific excellence, innovation, and my role as an academic leader and mentor. I hope it serves as an inspiration for more young women to pursue their passions and make their own meaningful contributions that help shape a better, more inclusive world for all,” said Prof Liu.
From a childhood passion to global impact
Since young, Prof Liu had a wide range of interests ─ she was passionate about mathematics and chemistry. She was also interested in artwork and cooking. Despite having a background in arts and social sciences, Prof Liu’s father understood the crucial role that science plays in shaping our world and he encouraged her to pursue a career in science and engineering.
Prof Liu enrolled into NUS to further her studies and earned her PhD in Chemistry, after obtaining her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Nanjing University. Soon after completing her postdoctoral training at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Prof Liu returned to NUS in 2005 to serve as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering at NUS.
Prof Liu is world-renowned in the field of organic functional materials, particularly for her work in polymer chemistry and applications of organic nanomaterials in medicine, environmental monitoring, and energy systems. One of her most significant research contributions to the study of biocompatible luminogens began in 2011. Her findings led to the development of highly sensitive light-up molecular probes and nanoparticle probes that allow for long-term cell tracing and tumour imaging, crucial for cancer research and cell-based therapies.
Leveraging her research on biocompatible luminogens, Prof Liu co-founded Luminicell, an NUS start-up, to commercialise this cutting-edge technology.
Throughout her academic career, Prof Liu has received numerous accolades in recognition of her innovative and groundbreaking research. Some notable ones from the past year include the President’s Science Award 2024 for her team’s breakthrough discovery of the role of carbazole isomers in room temperature phosphorescence of carbazole, an organic semiconductor, resolving a 95-year debate in the field. She was also inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows Class of 2024, in recognition of her distinguished contributions to the development of nanomaterials for biomedical and energy applications.
Shaping the future of research through visionary leadership and mentorship
Prof Liu has been a key driver in elevating NUS’ international research reputation, forging strong partnerships with leading global universities to promote knowledge exchange and collaborative research initiatives. As NUS’ Deputy President (Research and Technology), Prof Liu’s leadership has been instrumental in fostering innovation across faculties at NUS. A notable initiative, where Prof Liu played a crucial role, was the development of the NUS Sustainability Cluster, which aligned the University’s research efforts with global priorities in sustainable development.
Prof Liu is a strong advocate for women in STEM and encourages more women to pursue careers in science and engineering. She believes that girls should be granted the same opportunities as boys to pursue their interests and thrive in STEM fields. Prof Liu’s active interest in promoting opportunities for girls and women in science and engineering has contributed to the diversity and inclusivity of Singapore's scientific community.
Prof Liu is also committed to nurturing the next generation of research leaders and innovators. During her 18 years at NUS, she has mentored 36 PhD students and 63 post-doctoral fellows and visiting professors.
Taking great pride in her multiple roles - as a researcher, academic leader, and mentor - Prof Liu aims to continue to inspire innovation, foster collaboration, and empower emerging scientists to achieve groundbreaking advancements in their respective fields.
When asked to share some advice with young women aspiring to excel in their fields, Prof Liu said,“As we progress in scientific fields, the number of female scientists tends to decrease. I encourage young women interested in STEM to believe in their potential and boldly pursue their passions. Don’t let fears or assumptions limit what you can achieve. Seek out mentors who can support and guide you along the way.”
Life needs sufficient phosphorus. However, the element is scarce, not only today but also at the time of the origin of life. So where was there sufficient phosphorus four billion years ago for life to emerge? A team of origin-of-life researchers has an answer.
Two years ago, MIT professor of literature Arthur Bahr had one of the best days of his life. Sitting in the British Library, he was allowed to page through the Pearl-Manuscript, a singular bound volume from the 1300s containing the earliest versions of the masterly medieval poem “Pearl,” the famous tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and two other poems.
Today, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is commonly read in high school English classes. But it probably would have been lost to history without the survival of the Pearl-Manuscript, like the other works in the same volume. As it stands, no one knows who authored these texts. But one thing is clear: the surviving manuscript is a carefully crafted volume, with bespoke illustrations and the skilled use of parchment. This book is its own work of art.
“The Pearl-Manuscript is just as extraordinary and unusual and unexpected as the poems it contains,” Bahr says of the document, whose formal name is “British Library MS Cotton Nero A X/2.”
Bahr explores these ideas in a new book, “Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight,” published this month by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Bahr combines his deep knowledge of the volume’s texts with detailed examination of its physical qualities — thanks to technologies such as spectroscopy, which has revealed some manuscript secrets, as well as the good, old-fashioned scrutiny Bahr gave the book in person.
“My argument is that this physical object adds up to more than the sum of its parts, through its creative interplay of text, image, and materials,” Bahr says. “It is a coherent volume that evokes the concerns of the poems themselves. Most manuscripts are constructed in utilitarian ways, but not this one.”
Ode to the most beautiful poem
Bahr first encountered “Pearl” as an undergraduate at Amherst College, in a course taught by medievalist Howell D. Chickering. The poem is an intricate examination of Christian ethics; a father, whose daughter has died, dreams he is discussing the meaning of life with her.
“It is the most beautiful poem I have ever read,” Bahr says. “It blew me away, for its formal complexity, and for the really poignant human drama.” He adds: “It’s in some sense why I’m a medievalist.”
And since Bahr’s first book, “Fragments and Assemblages,” studies how medieval bound volumes were often collections of disparate documents, it was natural for him to apply this scholarly lens to the Pearl manuscript as well.
Most scholars think the Pearl manuscript has a single author — although we cannot be certain. After beginning with “Pearl,” the manuscript follows with two other poems, “Cleanness” and “Patience.” Closing the volume, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is an eerie, surreal tale of courage and chivalry set in the (possibly fictional) court of King Arthur.
In the book, Bahr finds the four texts to be thematically linked, analyzing the “connective tissue” through which the “manuscript starts to cohere into a wrought, imperfect, temporally layered whole,” as he writes. Some of these links are broad, including recurring “challenges to our speculative faculties”; the works are full of seeming paradoxes and dreamscapes that test the reader’s interpretive capacity.
There are other ways the text seem aligned. “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” each have 101 stanzas. The texts have numerically consistent structures, in the case of “Pearl” based around the number 12. All but one of its stanzas has 12 lines (and Bahr suspects this imperfection is intentional, like a fine rug with a deliberate flaw, which may be the case for the “extra” 101st stanza). There are 36 lines per page. And from examining the manuscript in person, Bahr found 48 places with decorated initials, although we do not know whose.
“The more you look, the more you find,” Bahr says.
Materiality matters
Some of our knowledge about the Pearl-Manuscript is quite new: Spectroscopy has revealed that the volume originally had simple line drawings, which were later filled in with colored ink.
But there is no substitute for reading books in person. That took Bahr to London in 2023, where he was permitted an extended look at the Pearl-Manuscript in the flesh. Far from being a formality, that gave Bahr new insights.
For instance: The Pearl-Manuscript is written on parchment, which is animal skin. At a key point in the “Patience” poem, a reworking of the tale of Jonah and the whale, the parchment has been reversed, so that the “hair” side of the material faces up, rather than the “flesh” side; it is the only case of this in the manuscript.
“When you’re reading about Jonah being swallowed by the whale, you feel the hair follicles when you wouldn’t expect to,” Bahr says. “At precisely the moment when the poem is thematizing an unnatural reversal of inside and outside, you are feeling the other side of another animal.”
He adds: “The act of touching the Pearl-Manuscript really changed how I think this poem would have worked for the medieval reader.” In this vein, he says, “Materiality matters. Screens are enabling, and without the digital facsimile I could not have written this book, but they cannot ever replace the original. The ‘Patience’ chapter reinforces that.”
Ultimately, Bahr thinks the Pearl-Manuscript buttresses his view in the “Fragments and Assemblages” book, that the medieval reading experience was often bound up with the way volumes were physically constructed.
“My argument in ‘Fragments and Assemblages’ was that medieval readers and book constructors thought in a serious and often sophisticated way about how the material construction and the selection of the texts into a physical object made a difference — mattered — and had the potential to change the meanings of the texts,” he says.
Good grade on the group project
“Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript” has received praise from other scholars. Jessica Brantley, professor and chair of the English Department at Yale University, has said that Bahr “offers an adventurous multilayered reading of both text and book and provides an important reinterpretation of the codex and its poems.”
Daniel Wakelin of Oxford University has said that Bahr “sets out an authoritative reading of these poems” and presents “a bold model for studying material texts and literary works together.”
For his part, Bahr hopes to appeal to an array of readers, just as his courses on medieval literature appeal to students with an array of intellectual interests. In the making of his book, Bahr also credits two MIT students, Kelsey Glover and Madison Sneve, who helped the project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), studying the illustrations and distinctive manuscript markings, among other things.
“It’s a very MIT kind of poem in the sense that not only is the author, or authors, obsessed with math and geometry and numbers and proportion, they are also obsessed with artifact construction, with architectural details and physical craft,” Bahr says. “There’s a very ‘mens et manus’ quality to the poems that’s reflected in the manuscript,” he says, referring to MIT’s motto, “mind and hand.” “I think helps explain why these extraordinary MIT students helped me so much.”
MIT literature professor Arthur Bahr’s new book, “Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight,” was published this month by the University of Chicago Press.
If you filled out a March Madness bracket this month, you probably faced the same question with each college match-up: What gives one team an edge over another? Is it a team’s record through the regular season? Or the chemistry among its players? Maybe it’s the experience of its coaching staff or the buzz around a top scorer.
All of these factors play some role in a team’s chance to advance. But according to a new study by MIT researchers, there’s one member who consistently boosts their team’s performance: the data analyst.
The new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Sports Economics, quantifies the influence of basketball analytics investment on team performance. The study’s authors looked in particular at professional basketball and compared the investment in data analytics on each NBA team with the team’s record of wins over 12 seasons. They found that indeed, teams that hired more analytics staff, and invested more in data analysis in general, tended to win more games.
Analytics department headcount had a positive and statistically significant effect on team wins even when accounting for other factors such as a team’s roster salary, the experience and chemistry among its players, the consistency of its coaching staff, and player injuries through each season. Even with all of these influences, the researchers found that the depth of a team’s data analytics bench, so to speak, was a consistent predictor of the team’s wins.
What’s more, they were able to quantify basketball analytics’ value, based on their impact on team wins. They found that for every four-fifths of one data analyst, a team gains one additional win in a season. Interestingly, a team can also gain one additional win by increasing its roster salary by $9.6 million. One way to read this is that one data analyst’s impact is worth at least $9 million.
“I don’t know of any analyst who’s being paid $9 million,” says study author Henry Wang, a graduate student in the MIT Sports Lab. “There is still a gap between how the player is being valued and how the analytics are being valued."
While the study focuses on professional basketball, the researchers say the findings are relevant beyond the NBA. They speculate that college teams that make use of data analytics may have an edge over those who don’t. (Take note, March Madness fans.) And the same likely goes for sports in general, along with any competitive field.
“This paper hits nicely not just in sports but beyond, with this question of: What is the tangible impact of big data analytics?” says co-author Arnab Sarker PhD ’25, a recent doctoral graduate of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). “Sports are a really nice, controlled place for analytics. But we’re also curious to what extent we can see these effects in general organizational performance.”
The study is also co-authored by Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
Data return
Across the sports world, data analysts have grown in number and scope over the years. Sports analytics’ role in using data and stats to improve team performance was popularized in 2011 with the movie “Moneyball,” based on the 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, who chronicled the 2002 Oakland Athletics and general manager Billy Beane’s use of baseball analytics to win games against wealthier Major League Baseball teams.
Since then, data analysis has expanded to many other sports, in an effort to make use of the varied and fast-paced sources of data, measurements, and statistics available today. In basketball, analysts can take on many roles, using data, for instance, to optimize a player’s health and minimize injury risk, and to predict a player’s performance to inform draft selection, free agency acquisition, and contract negotiations.
A data analyst’s work can also influence in-game strategy. Case in point: Over the last decade, NBA teams have strategically chosen to shift to shooting longer-range three-pointers, since Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey SM ’00 determined that statistically, shooting more three-pointers wins more games. Today, each of the 30 NBA teams employs at least one basketball analytics staffer. And yet, while a data analyst’s job is entirely based on data, there is not much data on the impact of analysts themselves.
“Teams and leagues are spending millions of dollars on embracing analytical tools without a real sense of return-on-investment,” Wang notes.
Numbers value
The MIT researchers aimed in their new study to quantify the influence of NBA team analysts, specifically on winning games. To do so, they looked to major sources of sports data such as ESPN.com, and NBAstuffer.com, a website that hosts a huge amount of stats on NBA games and team stats, including hired basketball analytics staff, that the website’s managers compile based on publicly available data, such as from official team press releases and staff directories, as well as LinkedIn and X profiles, and news and industry reports.
For their new study, Wang and his colleagues gathered data on each of the 30 NBA teams, over a period from 2009 to 2023, 2009 being the year that NBAstuffer.com started compiling team data. For every team in each season during this period, the researchers recorded an “analyst headcount,” meaning the number of basketball operations analytics staff employed by a team. They considered an analyst to be data analysts, software engineers, sports scientists, directors of research, and other technical positions by title, but also staff members who aren’t formally analysts but may be known to be particularly active in the basketball analytics community. In general, they found that in 2009, a total of 10 data analysts were working across the NBA. In 2023, that number ballooned to 132, with some teams employing more analysts than others.
“What we’re trying to measure is a team’s level of investment in basketball analytics,” Wang explains. “The best measure would be if every team told us exactly how much money they spent every year on their R&D and data infrastructure and analysts. But they’re not going to do that. So headcount is the next best thing.”
In addition to analytics headcount, the researchers also compiled data on other win-influencing variables, such as roster salary (Does a higher-paid team win more games?), roster experience (Does a team with more veterans win more games?), consistent coaching (Did a new coach shake up a team’s win record?) and season injuries (How did a team’s injuries affect its wins?). The researchers also noted “road back-to-backs,” or the number of times a team had to play consecutive away games (Does the wear and tear of constant travel impact wins?).
The researchers plugged all this data into a “two-way fixed effects” model to estimate the relative effect that each variable has on the number of additional games a team can win in a season.
“The model learns all these effects, so we can see, for instance, the tradeoff between analyst and roster salary when contributing to win total,” Wang explains.
Their finding that teams with a higher analytics headcount tended to win more games wasn’t entirely surprising.
“We’re still at a point where the analyst is undervalued,” Wang says. “There probably is a sweet spot, in terms of headcount and wins. You can’t hire 100 analysts and expect to go in 82-and-0 next season. But right now a lot of teams are still below that sweet spot, and this competitive advantage that analytics offers has yet to be fully harvested.”
According to a new study by MIT researchers, there’s one member of a professional basketball team who consistently boosts their team’s performance: the data analyst.
By Prof Hsu Li Yang, Vice-Dean (Global Health) from the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at NUS, and Director of the Asia Centre for Health Security at the same school
The National University of Singapore (NUS) will appoint a distinguished scientist, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, to its Board of Trustees on 1 April 2025.
Dr Swaminathan is former Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization and previously Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research. She is a paediatrician from India and a globally recognised expert in tuberculosis and HIV research. She is now Chairperson at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and Principal Advisor to the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme in India.
As part of board renewal, two members of the NUS Board of Trustees, Professor Cheong Koon Hean and Mr Loh Chin Hua, will retire from the Board on 31 March 2025 after serving for 12 years and 9 years respectively. Prof Cheong is Chairman of the Centre for Liveable Cities and former Chief Executive Officer of the Housing & Development Board, while Mr Loh is Chief Executive Officer of Keppel Ltd.
Mr Hsieh Fu Hua, Chairman of the NUS Board, said, “We warmly welcome Soumya to our Board. With her expertise and deep experience in research translation, she will bring valuable insights to guide the University’s thrusts in this respect. Her international perspective will enrich discussions on charting the growth of NUS towards becoming a leading global university.”
“We also want to extend our deepest appreciation to Koon Hean and Chin Hua for their many contributions and dedication to NUS. Both have served the Board and its committees very well. From their broad experience, they have provided guidance on many strategic issues. We will miss them indeed,” Mr Hsieh added.
With the latest changes, the NUS Board of Trustees will have 19 members.
Members of the Board of Trustees are appointed by the Minister for Education. The Board is made up of eminent leaders from the public sector, academia, business and various professions. The Board works closely with the management and stakeholders of the University to shape its vision, chart major directions, and guide significant initiatives to produce a strong and enduring impact for the University, and for Singapore and beyond.
More information on new Trustee Dr Soumya Swaminathan can be found in Annexe 1. The full list of Trustees can be found in Annexe 2.
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Kevin Rader is the senior preceptor in statistics and associate director of undergraduate studies.
Typically, you’re talking about the perfect bracket of 64 games. Sixty-three teams lose and one team doesn’t, and to get the perfect bracket, you have to pick right in each of those games. The equation is 1 over 263, which is some astronomical number, it’s in the quintillions. It’s like winning the Powerball two drawings in a row.
No one has gotten a perfect bracket ever, or at least not that has been reported. This year, we’re about halfway through the games, and there are no perfect brackets remaining of all the publicly available ones. It’s unlikely to happen in anyone’s lifetime.
The top seeds almost never lose, at least not in the first round. So it’s not really like flipping 63 coins; it’s like flipping 47 coins. So the chances are more like winning the lottery twice out of the next three draws.
The best chance for anyone to get a perfect bracket is if all the best teams win. But there are always going to be some upsets — and good luck correctly picking those.
Winning your office pool is almost a more difficult question. It mainly depends on how many people are in the pool. You need to distinguish yourself from your competition. Yes, you pick the favorites most of the time, but you have to pick a few upsets to distinguish yourself from other people, especially if it’s in a big pool with lots of entries.
To pick the upsets correctly, use the information you can. At a certain point, it’s almost a coin flip, but when there’s a big discrepancy between the teams, you shouldn’t use a coin flip; you should pick chalk.
Next time you cross a crowded plaza, crosswalk, or airport concourse, take note of the pedestrian flow. Are people walking in orderly lanes, single-file, to their respective destinations? Or is it a haphazard tangle of personal trajectories, as people dodge and weave through the crowd?
MIT instructor Karol Bacik and his colleagues studied the flow of human crowds and developed a first-of-its-kind way to predict when pedestrian paths will transition from orderly to entangled. Their findings may help inform the design of public spaces that promote safe and efficient thoroughfares.
In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers consider a common scenario in which pedestrians navigate a busy crosswalk. The team analyzed the scenario through mathematical analysis and simulations, considering the many angles at which individuals may cross and the dodging maneuvers they may make as they attempt to reach their destinations while avoiding bumping into other pedestrians along the way.
The researchers also carried out controlled crowd experiments and studied how real participants walked through a crowd to reach certain locations. Through their mathematical and experimental work, the team identified a key measure that determines whether pedestrian traffic is ordered, such that clear lanes form in the flow, or disordered, in which there are no discernible paths through the crowd. Called “angular spread,” this parameter describes the number of people walking in different directions.
If a crowd has a relatively small angular spread, this means that most pedestrians walk in opposite directions and meet the oncoming traffic head-on, such as in a crosswalk. In this case, more orderly, lane-like traffic is likely. If, however, a crowd has a larger angular spread, such as in a concourse, it means there are many more directions that pedestrians can take to cross, with more chance for disorder.
In fact, the researchers calculated the point at which a moving crowd can transition from order to disorder. That point, they found, was an angular spread of around 13 degrees, meaning that if pedestrians don’t walk straight across, but instead an average pedestrian veers off at an angle larger than 13 degrees, this can tip a crowd into disordered flow.
“This all is very commonsense,” says Bacik, who is a instructor of applied mathematics at MIT. “The question is whether we can tackle it precisely and mathematically, and where the transition is. Now we have a way to quantify when to expect lanes — this spontaneous, organized, safe flow — versus disordered, less efficient, potentially more dangerous flow.”
The study’s co-authors include Grzegorz Sobota and Bogdan Bacik of the Academy of Physical Education in Katowice, Poland, and Tim Rogers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.
Right, left, center
Bacik, who is trained in fluid dynamics and granular flow, came to study pedestrian flow during 2021, when he and his collaborators looked into the impacts of social distancing, and ways in which people might walk among each other while maintaining safe distances. That work inspired them to look more generally into the dynamics of crowd flow.
In 2023, he and his collaborators explored “lane formation,” a phenomenon by which particles, grains, and, yes, people have been observed to spontaneously form lanes, moving in single-file when forced to cross a region from two opposite directions. In that work, the team identified the mechanism by which such lanes form, which Bacik sums up as “an imbalance of turning left versus right.” Essentially, they found that as soon as something in a crowd starts to look like a lane, individuals around that fledgling lane either join up, or are forced to either side of it, walking parallel to the original lane, which others can follow. In this way, a crowd can spontaneously organize into regular, structured lanes.
“Now we’re asking, how robust is this mechanism?” Bacik says. “Does it only work in this very idealized situation, or can lane formation tolerate some imperfections, such as some people not going perfectly straight, as they might do in a crowd?”
Lane change
For their new study, the team looked to identify a key transition in crowd flow: When do pedestrians switch from orderly, lane-like traffic, to less organized, messy flow? The researchers first probed the question mathematically, with an equation that is typically used to describe fluid flow, in terms of the average motion of many individual molecules.
“If you think about the whole crowd flowing, rather than individuals, you can use fluid-like descriptions,” Bacik explains. “It’s this art of averaging, where, even if some people may cross more assertively than others, these effects are likely to average out in a sufficiently large crowd. If you only care about the global characteristics like, are there lanes or not, then you can make predictions without detailed knowledge of everyone in the crowd.”
Bacik and his colleagues used equations of fluid flow, and applied them to the scenario of pedestrians flowing across a crosswalk. The team tweaked certain parameters in the equation, such as the width of the fluid channel (in this case, the crosswalk), and the angle at which molecules (or people) flowed across, along with various directions that people can “dodge,” or move around each other to avoid colliding.
Based on these calculations, the researchers found that pedestrians in a crosswalk are more likely to form lanes, when they walk relatively straight across, from opposite directions. This order largely holds until people start veering across at more extreme angles. Then, the equation predicts that the pedestrian flow is likely to be disordered, with few to no lanes forming.
The researchers were curious to see whether the math bears out in reality. For this, they carried out experiments in a gymnasium, where they recorded the movements of pedestrians using an overhead camera. Each volunteer wore a paper hat, depicting a unique barcode that the overhead camera could track.
In their experiments, the team assigned volunteers various start and end positions along opposite sides of a simulated crosswalk, and tasked them with simultaneously walking across the crosswalk to their target location without bumping into anyone. They repeated the experiment many times, each time having volunteers assume different start and end positions. In the end, the researchers were able to gather visual data of multiple crowd flows, with pedestrians taking many different crossing angles.
When they analyzed the data and noted when lanes spontaneously formed, and when they did not, the team found that, much like the equation predicted, the angular spread mattered. Their experiments confirmed that the transition from ordered to disordered flow occurred somewhere around the theoretically predicted 13 degrees. That is, if an average person veered more than 13 degrees away from straight ahead, the pedestrian flow could tip into disorder, with little lane formation. What’s more, they found that the more disorder there is in a crowd, the less efficiently it moves.
The team plans to test their predictions on real-world crowds and pedestrian thoroughfares.
“We would like to analyze footage and compare that with our theory,” Bacik says. “And we can imagine that, for anyone designing a public space, if they want to have a safe and efficient pedestrian flow, our work could provide a simpler guideline, or some rules of thumb.”
This work is supported, in part, by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of UK Research and Innovation.
The Class of 2025 learned on March 21 where they will be doing their internship and residency training – setting the stage for the next several years of their medical careers and lives.
Weill Cornell Medicine researchers found that restricting telehealth prescriptions for opioid use disorder could keep thousands from accessing buprenorphine, a medication that helps people recover from addiction.
Elsbeth Stern will give her farewell lecture on 27 March. Stern, who conducts research on the topics of learning and teaching, has helped shape the discussion around the transition to the baccalaureate school in Switzerland. We talked to her one more time about her insights.
A new national programme that aims to position Singapore at the forefront of advancements in RNA science and applications was officially launched today. This new initiative – named National Initiative for RNA Biology and Its Applications (NIRBA) – is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) with total funding of S$130 million over seven years. NIRBA will engage scientists and clinicians from leading institutions like the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Duke-NUS Medical School.
RNA biology and its applications has been identified as a rapidly expanding field of critical importance to Singapore’s future health and economic needs. Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Mr Heng Swee Keat, who is also Chairman of NRF, officiated at the inauguration of NIRBA at NUS.
NIRBA is led by Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, a Distinguished Professor of Medicine, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Director of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore at NUS, and Research Director at the Institute of Molecular & Cell Biology, A*STAR. He will work closely with a team of leading local experts in the field, to establish globally leading foundational research in RNA science, with strong translational potential for diverse applications. While the primary focus will be on human health, the research will also have relevance to areas such as agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
Unlocking the vast potential of RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules are present in all living organisms and in many viruses. RNA molecules, transcribed from DNA, serve as vital messengers that translate genetic information into proteins, driving the biological processes essential to life.
Recent research has uncovered that structurally diverse RNA molecules perform a remarkable range of biological functions, with many more yet to be discovered. As a result, RNA has emerged as a vital macromolecule, with its pivotal role in human health and disease only starting to unfold.
The potential of RNA research was both validated and significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which offered compelling proof of the power and adaptability of RNA platforms in vaccine development and their capacity for rapid manufacturing scale-up. The pandemic also greatly advanced various aspects of RNA science and technology worldwide. Of note, this potential impact extends beyond human health to multiple fields, including agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
To further strengthen Singapore’s capabilities in RNA research and translation, NIRBA aims to achieve the following goals:
Swiftly build world-leading foundational research peaks in differentiated challenge areas in RNA research where there are current global gaps, leveraging Singapore’s competitive advantages.
Develop an agile framework of ‘Innovation Clusters’ to create and sustain competitive research peaks, while drawing on relevant expertise from the local and global research community in a nimble and dynamic way.
Operationalise innovative pathways to build an upstream pipeline that fuels the capabilities of Singapore’s downstream units, to fully capitalise on their health and economic value for the nation and beyond.
Prof Venkitaraman said, “NIRBA will serve as a vital force-multiplierfor Singapore’s RNA research. It will integrate Singapore’s existing strengths to build internationally competitive innovation in carefully chosen challenge areas, and synergise between academic and industrial partners, to create short-term and longer-term health and economic benefits. Groundbreaking scientific discoveries are a necessary foundation for translation into economic, health, and societal impact.”
NIRBA’s innovation clusters will draw on a dynamic pool of multidisciplinary researchers from different institutions to promote island-wide inter-organisational collaborations between NUS, NTU Singapore, A*STAR, public health institutions, and industry.
Cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research to address knowledge gaps
NIRBA aims to build four peaks of excellence that are of strategic importance to Singapore. It will differentiate its work by focusing on areas where Singapore has a competitive advantage, such as in the RNA biology of diseases prevalent amongst the Asian population.
Cluster 1 focuses on how Asian genetic diversity impacts the RNA biology of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other conditions relevant to Singapore. Scientists will examine whether Asian genomic variants affect RNA expression, modification and function in different cell types linked to these diseases.
Cluster 2 explores how chemical modifications on RNA alter host immunity. RNA modifications, or small chemical changes made to RNA molecules,play a crucial role in helping our body balance immune responses, enabling the body to fight off infections while protecting our own healthy cells.
Cluster 3 explores how RNA molecules enter cells and are transported within them to lay scientific foundations for effective RNA-based therapeutics that selectively target diseased tissues.
Cluster 4 focuses on how RNA-based drugs exert their effects and are cleared from the body after administration, a critical enabler for the development of RNA-based therapies and vaccines in Singapore.
Central hub to foster collaborations
To promote impactful and meaningful interactions, NIRBA will deploy a ‘hub and spoke’ model where new collaborative research programmes, international academic and industrial collaborations, as well as unique core research resources will be co-located in a central ‘hub’ based physically at NUS. This 2,000-sqm space will be equipped with state-of-the-art technologies and infrastructure to meet the biological, structural, chemical and computational needs of NIRBA. NIRBA will harness diverse research talents from different institutions across Singapore working at the central ‘hub’, enabling synergistic interdisciplinary collaborations with a broad range of partners. Other activities using existing research infrastructure will be performed in distributed ‘spokes’.
Over the next seven years with NRF funding support, NIRBA aims to add considerable value to the RNA research landscape across Singapore, through the training of researchers, recruitment of overseas talent, access to shared infrastructure and unique core resources, and exposure of local research staff to collaborative projects. The peaks of excellence in science, people and platforms established by NIRBA will help to future-proof Singapore’s investments in RNA research, advance precision health for Asian populations and diseases, and generate economic value through spinouts and industrial partnerships.
A new national programme that aims to position Singapore at the forefront of advancements in RNA science and applications was officially launched on 24 March 2025. This new initiative – named National Initiative for RNA Biology and Its Applications (NIRBA) – is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) with total funding of S$130 million over seven years. NIRBA will engage scientists and clinicians from leading institutions like the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Duke-NUS Medical School.
RNA biology and its applications has been identified as a rapidly expanding field of critical importance to Singapore’s future health and economic needs. Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Mr Heng Swee Keat, who is also Chairman of NRF, officiated at the inauguration of NIRBA at NUS.
NIRBA is led by Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, a Distinguished Professor of Medicine, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Director of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore at NUS, and Research Director at the Institute of Molecular & Cell Biology, A*STAR. He will work closely with a team of leading local experts in the field, to establish globally leading foundational research in RNA science, with strong translational potential for diverse applications. While the primary focus will be on human health, the research will also have relevance to areas such as agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
Speaking at the launch ceremony, Mr Heng highlighted that RNA biology in and its applications is an important domain in foundational research, citing the example of the COVID-19 pandemic when the rapid development and deployment of mRNA vaccines saved countless lives. He said, “Today's launch of NIRBA is therefore very timely to strengthen our RNA Research and Innovation capabilities.”
Mr Heng further elaborated, “It is an exciting new chapter that we are writing in our biomedical journey, and I look forward to the breakthroughs and achievements from this new initiative in the years ahead.”
Unlocking the vast potential of RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules are present in all living organisms and in many viruses. RNA molecules, transcribed from DNA, serve as vital messengers that translate genetic information into proteins, driving the biological processes essential to life.
Recent research has uncovered that structurally diverse RNA molecules perform a remarkable range of biological functions, with many more yet to be discovered. As a result, RNA has emerged as a vital macromolecule, with its pivotal role in human health and disease only starting to unfold.
The potential of RNA research was both validated and significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which offered compelling proof of the power and adaptability of RNA platforms in vaccine development and their capacity for rapid manufacturing scale-up. The pandemic also greatly advanced various aspects of RNA science and technology worldwide. Of note, this potential impact extends beyond human health to multiple fields, including agriculture, food safety, veterinary medicine, and synthetic biology.
To further strengthen Singapore’s capabilities in RNA research and translation, NIRBA aims to achieve the following goals:
Swiftly build world-leading foundational research peaks in differentiated challenge areas in RNA research where there are current global gaps, leveraging Singapore’s competitive advantages.
Develop an agile framework of ‘Innovation Clusters’ to create and sustain competitive research peaks, while drawing on relevant expertise from the local and global research community in a nimble and dynamic way.
Operationalise innovative pathways to build an upstream pipeline that fuels the capabilities of Singapore’s downstream units, to fully capitalise on their health and economic value for the nation and beyond.
Prof Venkitaraman said, “NIRBA will serve as a vital force-multiplierfor Singapore’s RNA research. It will integrate Singapore’s existing strengths to build internationally competitive innovation in carefully chosen challenge areas, and synergise between academic and industrial partners, to create short-term and longer-term health and economic benefits. Groundbreaking scientific discoveries are a necessary foundation for translation into economic, health, and societal impact.”
NIRBA’s innovation clusters will draw on a dynamic pool of multidisciplinary researchers from different institutions to promote island-wide inter-organisational collaborations between NUS, NTU Singapore, A*STAR, public health institutions, and industry.
Cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research to address knowledge gaps
NIRBA aims to build four peaks of excellence that are of strategic importance to Singapore. It will differentiate its work by focusing on areas where Singapore has a competitive advantage, such as in the RNA biology of diseases prevalent amongst the Asian population.
Cluster 1 focuses on how Asian genetic diversity impacts the RNA biology of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other conditions relevant to Singapore. Scientists will examine whether Asian genomic variants affect RNA expression, modification and function in different cell types linked to these diseases.
Cluster 2 explores how chemical modifications on RNA alter host immunity. RNA modifications, or small chemical changes made to RNA molecules,play a crucial role in helping our body balance immune responses, enabling the body to fight off infections while protecting our own healthy cells.
Cluster 3 explores how RNA molecules enter cells and are transported within them to lay scientific foundations for effective RNA-based therapeutics that selectively target diseased tissues.
Cluster 4 focuses on how RNA-based drugs exert their effects and are cleared from the body after administration, a critical enabler for the development of RNA-based therapies and vaccines in Singapore.
Central hub to foster collaborations
To promote impactful and meaningful interactions, NIRBA will deploy a ‘hub and spoke’ model where new collaborative research programmes, international academic and industrial collaborations, as well as unique core research resources will be co-located in a central ‘hub’ based physically at NUS. This 2,000-sqm space will be equipped with state-of-the-art technologies and infrastructure to meet the biological, structural, chemical and computational needs of NIRBA. NIRBA will harness diverse research talents from different institutions across Singapore working at the central ‘hub’, enabling synergistic interdisciplinary collaborations with a broad range of partners. Other activities using existing research infrastructure will be performed in distributed ‘spokes’.
Over the next seven years with NRF funding support, NIRBA aims to add considerable value to the RNA research landscape across Singapore, through the training of researchers, recruitment of overseas talent, access to shared infrastructure and unique core resources, and exposure of local research staff to collaborative projects. The peaks of excellence in science, people and platforms established by NIRBA will help to future-proof Singapore’s investments in RNA research, advance precision health for Asian populations and diseases, and generate economic value through spinouts and industrial partnerships.
RNA biology: Potential impact and its wide-ranging applications
A highlight of the launch event was a panel discussion titled “RNA Biology & Its Applications in Human Diseases – The Singapore Perspective”. Prominent leaders in the field - Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, Permanent Secretary of National Research and Development and Chairman of A*STAR; Dr Mohamed ElSayed, Chief Scientific Officer at Nucleic Acid Therapeutics Initiative (NATi); and Dr Tan Si Hui, an RNA biotech entrepreneur – shared insightful perspectives on the topic. The session was moderated by Prof Venkitaraman.
Life takes shape with the motion of a single cell. In response to signals from certain proteins and enzymes, a cell can start to move and shake, leading to contractions that cause it to squeeze, pinch, and eventually divide. As daughter cells follow suit down the generational line, they grow, differentiate, and ultimately arrange themselves into a fully formed organism.
Now MIT scientists have used light to control how a single cell jiggles and moves during its earliest stage of development. The team studied the motion of egg cells produced by starfish — an organism that scientists have long used as a classic model for understanding cell growth and development.
The researchers focused on a key enzyme that triggers a cascade of motion within a starfish egg cell. They genetically designed a light-sensitive version of the same enzyme, which they injected into egg cells, and then stimulated the cells with different patterns of light.
They found that the light successfully triggered the enzyme, which in turn prompted the cells to jiggle and move in predictable patterns. For instance, the scientists could stimulate cells to exhibit small pinches or sweeping contractions, depending on the pattern of light they induced. They could even shine light at specific points around a cell to stretch its shape from a circle to a square.
Their results, appearing today in the journal Nature Physics, provide scientists with a new optical tool for controlling cell shape in its earliest developmental stages. Such a tool, they envision, could guide the design of synthetic cells, such as therapeutic “patch” cells that contract in response to light signals to help close wounds, or drug-delivering “carrier” cells that release their contents only when illuminated at specific locations in the body. Overall, the researchers see their findings as a new way to probe how life takes shape from a single cell.
“By revealing how a light-activated switch can reshape cells in real time, we’re uncovering basic design principles for how living systems self-organize and evolve shape,” says the study’s senior author, Nikta Fakhri, associate professor of physics at MIT. “The power of these tools is that they are guiding us to decode all these processes of growth and development, to help us understand how nature does it.”
The study’s MIT authors include first author Jinghui Liu, Yu-Chen Chao, and Tzer Han Tan; along with Tom Burkart, Alexander Ziepke, and Erwin Frey of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; John Reinhard of Saarland University; and S. Zachary Swartz of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Cell circuitry
Fakhri’s group at MIT studies the physical dynamics that drive cell growth and development. She is particularly interested in symmetry, and the processes that govern how cells follow or break symmetry as they grow and divide. The five-limbed starfish, she says, is an ideal organism for exploring such questions of growth, symmetry, and early development.
“A starfish is a fascinating system because it starts with a symmetrical cell and becomes a bilaterally symmetric larvae at early stages, and then develops into pentameral adult symmetry,” Fakhri says. “So there’s all these signaling processes that happen along the way to tell the cell how it needs to organize.”
Scientists have long studied the starfish and its various stages of development. Among many revelations, researchers have discovered a key “circuitry” within a starfish egg cell that controls its motion and shape. This circuitry involves an enzyme, GEF, that naturally circulates in a cell’s cytoplasm. When this enzyme is activated, it induces a change in a protein, called Rho, that is known to be essential for regulating cell mechanics.
When the GEF enzyme stimulates Rho, it causes the protein to switch from an essentially free-floating state to a state that binds the protein to the cell’s membrane. In this membrane-bound state, the protein then triggers the growth of microscopic, muscle-like fibers that thread out across the membrane and subsequently twitch, enabling the cell to contract and move.
In previous work, Fakhri’s group showed that a cell’s movements can be manipulated by varying the cell’s concentrations of GEF enzyme: The more enzyme they introduced into a cell, the more contractions the cell would exhibit.
“This whole idea made us think whether it’s possible to hack this circuitry, to not just change a cell’s pattern of movements but get a desired mechanical response,” Fakhri says.
Lights and action
To precisely manipulate a cell’s movements, the team looked to optogenetics — an approach that involves genetically engineering cells and cellular components such as proteins and enzymes, such that they activate in response to light.
Using established optogenetic techniques, the researchers developed a light-sensitive version of the GEF enzyme. From this engineered enzyme, they isolated its mRNA — essentially, the genetic blueprint for building the enzyme. They then injected this blueprint into egg cells that the team harvested from a single starfish ovary, which can hold millions of unfertilized cells. The cells, infused with the new mRNA, then began to produce light-sensitive GEF enzymes on their own.
In experiments, the researchers then placed each enzyme-infused egg cell under a microscope and shone light onto the cell in different patterns and from different points along the cell’s periphery. They took videos of the cell’s movements in response.
They found that when they aimed the light in specific points, the GEF enzyme became activated and recruited Rho protein to the light-targeted sites. There, the protein then set off its characteristic cascade of muscle-like fibers that pulled or pinched the cell in the same, light-stimulated spots. Much like pulling the strings of a marionette, they were able to control the cell’s movements, for instance directing it to morph into various shapes, including a square.
Surprisingly, they also found they could stimulate the cell to undergo sweeping contractions by shining a light in a single spot, exceeding a certain threshold of enzyme concentration.
“We realized this Rho-GEF circuitry is an excitable system, where a small, well-timed stimulus can trigger a large, all-or-nothing response,” Fakhri says. “So we can either illuminate the whole cell, or just a tiny place on the cell, such that enough enzyme is recruited to that region so the system gets kickstarted to contract or pinch on its own.”
The researchers compiled their observations and derived a theoretical framework to predict how a cell’s shape will change, given how it is stimulated with light. The framework, Fakhri says, opens a window into “the ‘excitability’ at the heart of cellular remodeling, which is a fundamental process in embryo development and wound healing.”
She adds: “This work provides a blueprint for designing ‘programmable’ synthetic cells, letting researchers orchestrate shape changes at will for future biomedical applications.”
This work was supported, in part, by the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
“By revealing how a light-activated switch can reshape cells in real time, we’re uncovering basic design principles for how living systems self-organize and evolve shape,” says the study’s senior author, Nikta Fakhri, associate professor of physics at MIT
MIT engineers have devised a new way to deliver certain drugs in higher doses with less pain, by injecting them as a suspension of tiny crystals. Once under the skin, the crystals assemble into a drug “depot” that could last for months or years, eliminating the need for frequent drug injections.
This approach could prove useful for delivering long-lasting contraceptives or other drugs that need to be given for extended periods of time. Because the drugs are dispersed in a suspension before injection, they can be administered through a narrow needle that is easier for patients to tolerate.
“We showed that we can have very controlled, sustained delivery, likely for multiple months and even years through a small needle,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), an associate member of the Broad Institute, and the senior author of the study.
The lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemical Engineering, are former MIT and BWH postdoc Vivian Feig, who is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University; MIT graduate student Sanghyun Park; and Pier Rivano, a former visiting research scholar in Traverso’s lab.
Easier injections
This project began as part of an effort funded by the Gates Foundation to expand contraceptive options, particularly in developing nations.
“The overarching goal is to give women access to a lot of different formats for contraception that are easy to administer, compatible with being used in the developing world, and have a range of different timeframes of durations of action,” Feig says. “In our particular project, we were interested in trying to combine the benefits of long-acting implants with the ease of self-administrable injectables.”
There are marketed injectable suspensions available in the United States and other countries, but these drugs are dispersed throughout the tissue after injection, so they only work for about three months. Other injectable products have been developed that can form longer-lasting depots under the skin, but these typically require the addition of precipitating polymers that can make up 23 to 98 percent of the solution by weight, which can make the drug more difficult to inject.
The MIT and BWH team wanted to create a formulation that could be injected through a small-gauge needle and last for at least six months and up to two years. They began working with a contraceptive drug called levonorgestrel, a hydrophobic molecule that can form crystals. The team discovered that suspending these crystals in a particular organic solvent caused the crystals to assemble into a highly compact implant after injection. Because this depot could form without needing large amounts of polymer, the drug formulation could still be easily injected through a narrow-gauge needle.
The solvent, benzyl benzoate, is biocompatible and has been previously used as an additive to injectable drugs. The team found that the solvent’s poor ability to mix with biological fluids is what allows the solid drug crystals to self-assemble into a depot under the skin after injection.
“The solvent is critical because it allows you to inject the fluid through a small needle, but once in place, the crystals self-assemble into a drug depot,” Traverso says.
By altering the density of the depot, the researchers can tune the rate at which the drug molecules are released into the body. In this study, the researchers showed they could change the density by adding small amounts of a polymer such as polycaprolactone, a biodegradable polyester.
“By incorporating a very small amount of polymers — less than 1.6 percent by weight — we can modulate the drug release rate, extending its duration while maintaining injectability. This demonstrates the tunability of our system, which can be engineered to accommodate a broader range of contraceptive needs as well as tailored dosing regimens for other therapeutic applications,” Park says.
Stable drug depots
The researchers tested their approach by injecting the drug solution subcutaneously in rats and showed that the drug depots could remain stable and release drug gradually for three months. After the three-month study ended, about 85 percent of the drug remained in the depots, suggesting that they could continue releasing the drugs for a much longer period of time.
“We anticipate that the depots could last for more than a year, based on our post-analysis of preclinical data. Follow-up studies are underway to further validate their efficacy beyond this initial proof-of-concept,” Park says.
Once the drug depots form, they are compact enough to be retrievable, allowing for surgical removal if treatment needs to be halted before the drug is fully released.
This approach could also lend itself to delivering drugs to treat neuropsychiatric conditions as well as HIV and tuberculosis, the researchers say. They are now moving toward assessing its translation to humans by conducting advanced preclinical studies to evaluate self-assembly in a more clinically relevant skin environment. “This is a very simple system in that it’s basically a solvent, the drug, and then you can add a little bit of bioresorbable polymer. Now we’re considering which indications do we go after: Is it contraception? Is it others? These are some of the things that we’re starting to look into as part of the next steps toward translation to humans,” Traverso says.
The research was funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation, the Karl van Tassel Career Development Professorship, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, a Schmidt Science Fellows postdoctoral fellowship, the Rhodes Trust, a Takeda Fellowship, a Warren M. Rohsenow Fellowship, and a Kwangjeong Educational Foundation Fellowship.
MIT engineers have devised a new way to deliver certain drugs in higher doses with less pain, by injecting them as a suspension of tiny crystals. Once under the skin, the crystals assemble into a drug “depot” that could last for months or years, eliminating the need for frequent drug injections.
The Spotlight on Spinouts 2025 report, produced by the Royal Academy of Engineering in collaboration with Beauhurst, analyses annual trends in UK spinouts. The University of Cambridge ranks second to Oxford for the number of spinouts created since 2011, with Imperial in third. However, in the last year, Cambridge has spun out 26 new companies, showing the largest increase in the number of spinouts among the top three.
According to the report, East of England spinouts secured 35.0% of total investment, leading all regions. The area hosted two of the top five spinout fundraisings in 2024, including a £450 million raise by Cambridge spinout, Bicycle Therapeutics. The South Cambridgeshire-based company develops cancer treatments, with the investment aimed at supporting its R&D efforts.
Dr Jim Glasheen, Chief Executive of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s innovation arm, said: “This rapid increase in the number of spinouts coming out of Cambridge reflects our continued focus on accelerating Cambridge innovations as well as the impact of our newer initiatives, such as the Founders at the University of Cambridge programme and the Technology Investment Fund.”
Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Cambridge added: “It’s heartening to see the growth in spinouts from Cambridge and across the sector as a whole. University entrepreneurship has an increasingly vital role to play in driving UK economic growth and addressing some of our most pressing societal challenges. As one of the world’s top science and tech clusters, Cambridge has a responsibility to deliver innovation-led economic growth for the UK and we have ambitious plans to further strengthen our capabilities in this regard.”
Of the UK’s top three universities for spinouts – Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial - Cambridge saw the most growth in 2024, according to a new report on trends in UK academic spinouts.
The University of Melbourne has published its fourth Sexual Misconduct Annual Report, highlighting the Universitys commitment to transparency in how it responds to sexual misconduct within its community.
Traditional Owner groups and First Nations organisations will be supported to enable better economic outcomes for communities through land and sea rights in a newly formed First Nations-led partnership.
Transforming the cultural health of the nation and our region and responding to emerging threats to cultural legacies will be the core focuses of a new institute in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Maybe a teacher. Or maybe an education policy reformer.
Andrew Zonneveld, who grew up on a military base in North Carolina, is studying government and education.
Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Andrew Zonneveld believes public service is way to make a real difference in world
Andrew Zonneveld sees teaching as the most important job in the world.
“Doctors are great. But doctors are only doctors because they had great teachers,” said the first-generation college student from North Carolina.
Zonneveld ’26, a government concentrator with a secondary in education studies, is attending Harvard College on full financial aid. Graduating debt-free means he can prioritize public service.
“I would love to be a public school teacher for a few years,” said the Leverett House resident.
“He talks a great deal about going back to North Carolina and helping the schools there,” said his mom, Jennifer Eirich. “I think it has a lot to do with the strong connections he formed with the teachers he had as a kid. But I guess I think there’s something bigger out there for him. Maybe he’ll go and change the educational system for the whole country. Maybe he’ll go into politics.”
Zonneveld, who grew up on a military base and counts many servicemembers in his family, has been interested in the intersection of education and policy from an early age. He recalled pitching an elementary school teacher on forming the school’s first student government.
“I won president in third grade or fourth grade,” he said. “In my speech, I promised the principal would kiss a pig if we raised enough money through Box Tops — remember those?”
Entering Onslow Early College High School — where students work toward their diplomas while earning free credits from Coastal Carolina Community College — provided Zonneveld with his next opening. He spent the summer before ninth grade drafting a constitution for the student government association he later helped launch at the newly opened public high school.
“I could tell from the beginning how motivated he was,” remembered Hannah Padilla, a former guidance counselor there. “Within a week or two, he had come out of his shell and was just unapologetically Andrew: a dedicated student who knew exactly what he wanted from life.”
The Class of 2022 valedictorian assumed he would attend North Carolina’s flagship public university. The school offered him a generous scholarship. “But it was still going to cost me 15 or 20 grand per year,” Zonneveld said.
Opening an acceptance letter from Harvard College was a tearful occasion — and a total surprise after applying on a last-minute whim. “Not in a million years did someone from our county think something like this could happen,” Eirich said.
The family had been concerned about covering college costs, so the University’s offer came as a big relief. “Financial aid is really the only reason I’m here at Harvard,” he said. “It’s the only way I can afford it.”
The support also means Zonneveld’s attentions are no longer so splintered. He had trained as a lifeguard in his early teens, and sometimes worked full-time at area pools while attending high school.
At Harvard, Zonneveld has continued teaching aquatics at the Malkin Athletic Center. But only because he still enjoys passing on his knowledge. “I don’t have to work crazy hours,” he said.
Help from Harvard also made other opportunities possible. Zonneveld was able to complete an internship last summer at a research institute in Berlin with the support of the Government Department. He also traveled to Thailand and Vietnam with Harvard Model Congress to teach high schoolers about policy and public speaking. Over spring break, he helped the organization run a government simulation with teens in Brussels.
“Financial aid didn’t just bring me here,” Zonneveld said. “It allowed me to travel the world, to go home and see my family during breaks. It allowed me to have access to opportunities I would have never had anywhere else.”
Maryam Guerrab, who is from North Carolina, is studying government on the political economy track.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Maryam Guerrab, a child of Algerian immigrants, seeks to combine important lessons from classroom with powerful ones from life
Maryam Guerrab says her upbringing, as one of five children of Algerian immigrants, fueled her passion for advocacy.
“Public service work is incredibly important to me, I think in large part because of how I grew up. I come from a large immigrant family whose parents are both blue-collar workers,” Guerrab said. “I’ve seen a lot of the obstacles that different communities face through both my personal experiences and professional experiences I’ve pursued.”
At Harvard, Guerrab is concentrating in government on the political economy track.
“I thought that studying government, learning more about the local and economic institutions that shape the world we live in today, informing how many people lead their lives and the problems they face, would be the best way to advocate for people’s rights,” she said.
Guerrab, now just months away from graduation, was apprehensive about applying.
“I did not think Harvard was an option for me. It seemed this almost mystical place where the upper echelons of society would go, and that was not me,” said the 21-year-old from North Carolina. “I was privileged enough to know that I was going to go to college, but I thought it would be a state school or somewhere nearby.”
She learned about Harvard’s financial aid program in high school but joked with her family that she’d probably never get in anyway.
“There was this confidence from them when I told them I was applying,” she said of her parents. “I was like, ‘Mama, I don’t really know if you realize that very few people get in, and I don’t know if I can do it.’ And it was always, ‘It’s fine! It’ll be OK.’”
Mama turned out to be right.
Guerrab said getting assistance and not having to worry about paying for college has allowed her “to thrive as a student, pursue opportunities that potentially wouldn’t have been possible.”
She also received a launch grant, which is part of the support students on full financial aid receive to help pay for post-Harvard needs such as Medical College Admission Test-prep guides (she is planning to apply in May) and books.
She later added: “I recognize all the privilege that I have been given, and I want to use it to give back.”
Guerrab said she felt she has made the biggest impact during her College career as a case management director for Y2Y Network, which provides overnight housing for unhoused young adults in Greater Boston. The opportunity allowed her to engage with young people in the program and mentor other Harvard student volunteers.
“What drives my persistent pursuit of both my academics and community service work is my passion to give the best service I can and to take advantage of every opportunity,” Guerrab said. “Harvard is a once-in-a-lifetime experience — on the academic end, [being able to] learn from people with such diverse experiences. Harvard provides me an opportunity to learn as much as I can about the fields that I’m passionate about.”
She continued: “Taking what I learned in the classroom to inform how I’m interacting with the communities that I serve is super important.”
Between classes and volunteer work, Guerrab stepped out of her comfort zone and joined the mountaineering club on campus. She acknowledged that growing up, outdoor activities weren’t as accessible.
“I didn’t even think it was something I wanted to explore,” she said. “The Mountaineering Club was definitely something that I was like, ‘I’m just gonna try something crazy and see what happens.’”
Guerrab said her first mountaineering trip to the Boston Basin of the North Cascade National Park in Washington was a mental, physical, and personal “growth moment” that made her aware of her resilience.
“It was something that taught me that I can really do anything, even in really hard moments,” she said.
Her parents came from India. She wants to help other newcomers.
Merlin D’souza from Casa Grande, Arizona, studies human developmental and regenerative biology and hopes to go into medicine.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Merlin D’souza has her sights set on medical school
Merlin D’souza learned about artificial wombs in her high school Career Technical Education biotechnology class. That experience led her to look for unique biomedical programs when considering colleges. Harvard’s Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology Department immediately caught her attention.
“They were working with stem cells and doing projects that focused on the regenerative aspect of medicine,” said the senior from Casa Grande, Arizona. “As someone who wants to go into medicine and wants to be part of the technology and development [side], that was really exciting for me.”
D’souza, a concentrator in human developmental and regenerative biology and global health and health policy, has really enjoyed her time at Harvard, but the road to Cambridge was not entirely smooth. Her family was unsure how they would be able to afford paying for school. Immigrants from India, her father left school at a young age to begin working to support his family, while her mother was also unable to continue her education.
“My mom had a love and dream to go and study, but she had to help her mom in the rice fields and the farm. She always was like, ‘Wherever you want to shoot, however high you want to go, we’ll support you.’ Harvard was that [for me],” she said.
Getting full financial aid from Harvard allowed her to attend worry-free. “Tuition and the grants that I’ve been able to receive have been super helpful, because I’m not shifting the burden on my parents. That was a big concern for me,” she said. “Having that support as I study and go through this hard curriculum has been such a relief.”
D’souza took full advantage of the opportunities she found. During the last four years, she has traveled to India to teach at under-resourced schools, conducted research on mental health with the help of the Boston Public Health Commission, and presented research to the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health.
Financial aid assistance not only has made attendance possible, but also helped D’souza pursue medical school. In the fall of her junior year, she received a launch grant designed to help students transition from Harvard. With that money she was able to pay for the Medical College Admission Test and cover the costs of applications. She highlighted other support available to financial aid students like herself, including funds to buy a winter coat.
“The reason I want to go to medical school is mostly because I want to help populations from the communities I came up in. My parents were immigrants. They didn’t have access to the best medical resources,” she said.
Outside of academics, D’souza has found ways to give back. She serves as a peer advising fellow with the Advising Programs Office, where she supports first-years as they transition to college. She also volunteers at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter and at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“We get a chance to provide support to and play with a kid going through dialysis. It’s really the highlight of my week,” she said.
After graduation, D’souza will take a gap year to teach or do research before starting medical school, a break that she said wouldn’t have been possible if she was saddled with a lot of loan debt.
“One thing that people don’t think about with tuition assistance is that most people need it,” she said. “Tuition assistance has such a long-reaching impact. I’m able to have this education and pursue a degree in a profession that helps to give back. It’s kind of like a full circle.”
Providing medical care is important, but so is ensuring access
Morgan Byers grew up in a small Georgia community with big ideas of how to help
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Morgan Byers grew up in Commerce, Georgia, a community of about 8,200 residents, where she saw how limited access to medical care can be. She was particularly interested in the disproportionately high maternal mortality rate in the South.
“The South has the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, which is due to a complicated recipe of racial and gender discrimination, socioeconomic inequity, and limited access to reproductive health care,” said Byers ’26. “It absolutely breaks my heart that as medicine advances, these regions and women are entirely left behind, coping with the same maternal mortality rate in 2025 that was present in Massachusetts in the 1970s.”
That perspective inspired the Pforzheimer resident’s desire to become a doctor and led her to pursue an interdisciplinary approach to her studies.
“I eventually decided to study human developmental and regenerative biology out of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which is super research-heavy. I paired that with government, so that I can study medicine, research, and then access,” the double concentrator said.
“My ultimate goal is to focus on bringing access to individuals in rural medical deserts to curb preventable disease.”
Morgan Byers
Harvard proved to be “a transformative experience” that allowed her to “study absolutely everything,” she said. The summer after her first year, Byers headed to Portugal through the Office of International Education to study with its country’s doctors.
“I was fascinated by Portugal’s universal health care system after learning about it in a health care economics class,” Byers shared. “That summer, I woke up every day and studied a different specialty, being enthralled by the medical knowledge I was picking up. But I was even more fascinated by the health care system and how policy directly impacts medical practice.”
Beyond academics, Byers works as an EMT with Crimson EMS and conducts research at the Breault Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital. At the lab, Byers works on intestinal organoids and enteroendocrine cells under the supervision of Daniel Zeve, an endocrinologist and lecturer on pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
She also works as a campus tour guide and mentors Boston high school students through the Emerging Leaders Program at Radcliffe Institute.
Although she has taken full advantage of her time at the College, Byers said she wasn’t always sure she would be able to attend. “Nobody in my family had ever gone to college before,” she said. Her mother works as an administrative assistant at a high school, and her father works in equipment management.
She added: “I definitely did not think Harvard was an option for me. I honestly didn’t want to get myself excited about that possibility and it just to be ripped away.”
Even after she was accepted, Byers said her family remained concerned about covering costs. “It’s truly the biggest blessing in the world,” she said. “I was worried that I was going to have to say no because of money, but because of significant tuition assistance that was not the case.”
Her mom, Mandy Byers, added: “If it was not for Harvard’s financial aid program and all the wonderful people at the admissions office that we talked to in the beginning, I don’t know that it would have been an option for her.”
The 21-year-old wants to attend medical school in the South, where she hopes to make an impact on health care access. Several of her Harvard courses have highlighted for her the importance of implementation science, or the study of methods to promote evidence-based practices into public health care.
“I dreamed of being a bridge between the resource epicenters of the world, like Harvard, and the places so desperately in need of that research,” she said. “Those places were small towns all over the South, just like the tiny ones that I come from. My ultimate goal is to focus on bringing access to individuals in rural medical deserts to curb preventable disease.”
“Morgan has more ambition and drive than most adults,” her mother said. “She wants to help people, and I really can’t see her doing anything else. Even if medicine doesn’t work out, it’s going to be serving people in some capacity.”
Byers acknowledged that some students come to college with a clear idea of their path through higher education and beyond. “I’ve tried very consciously to not make it like that at all,” she said. “I’ve tried to be very grateful of the fact that I get to pave my own way at every turn.”
During his visit he saw the proposed city-centre site of Cambridge’s new flagship innovation hub, which was endorsed by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this year, and heard about plans for the space to support venture-backed, rapidly scaling companies. The hub will connect entrepreneurs, investors, and corporates, serving as the UK’s equivalent to Lab Central in Boston or Station F in Paris – a beacon for global talent and capital.
While he was in the city, the Minister unveiled Innovate Cambridge’s new Advisory Council. Featuring global tech and science pioneers, the Council will catalyse the Cambridge cluster’s potential to deliver substantial societal, environmental and economic benefits, and empower the city to become a global centre for responsible innovation.
He also spoke on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme about Cambridge’s role in the development of the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor. In a special edition, the programme focused on government plans to boost UK science and technology growth by linking up the two cities to create new homes, infrastructure, leisure facilities, office and laboratory space.
As part of his visit, the Minister toured the Cambridge West Innovation District, the transformative project that will allow industry to co-locate at scale with the University’s world-leading academic community. Once complete, the campus is expected to employ 14,000 people and will be the leading location in Europe for AI, quantum and climate research.
At the West Hub, a publicly accessible multi-purpose facility, Lord Vallance met with local authority leaders from across the region. He then toured the site and saw key research locations including the Whittle Laboratory, home to the UK’s Integrated Technology Accelerator for zero-carbon flight, and the Computer Lab, a long-standing driver of tech spinouts.
Visiting the Cavendish Laboratory (Department of Physics), he heard about the impact of industry collaboration with major companies like Hitachi and ARM, and the role that the Department’s new state-of-the-art facilities will play in setting the stage for a new era of scientific discovery in areas such as ‘green tech’ – including long-lasting batteries – next-generation ICT devices, and quantum healthcare technology.”
The visit concluded with a roundtable discussion, where senior representatives from across Cambridge’s innovation ecosystem discussed ways to accelerate company growth, attract global talent, and secure new foreign direct investment – delivering growth which will benefit the whole UK.
Lord Vallance said: "The Oxford and Cambridge Corridor is a world-leading, high-growth, innovation cluster and we need to harness the opportunities that innovators are coming up with here. By backing our strengths in the Corridor, we can boost economic growth across the country, unlocking up to £78 billion for our economy, and deliver on our Plan for Change."
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: "Cambridge is a mature innovation ecosystem spanning many high-growth sectors, including AI, technology, and life sciences. By working with the government and other partners, we can accelerate our impact even further, unlock the amazing potential of University research and innovation, and help drive UK growth."
Science Minister and Oxford-Cambridge Innovation Champion, Lord Patrick Vallance, visited Cambridge to see how the world’s most intensive science and technology cluster can drive economic growth.
The Oxford and Cambridge Corridor is a world-leading, high-growth, innovation cluster and we need to harness the opportunities that innovators are coming up with here.
Lord Patrick Vallance, Science Minister
From left, Dr Diarmuid O'Brien, Lord Patrick Vallance, and Professor Deborah Prentice at the proposed innovation hub site.
Who were our earliest ancestors? The answer could lie in a special group of single-celled organisms with a cytoskeleton similar to that of complex organisms, such as animals and plants. ETH researchers made these findings in a new study.
Backslash at Cornell Tech, dedicated to advancing new works of art and technology that escape convention, has announced Nigerian-American artist Mimi Onuoha as its first Backslash Fellow.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems that would be impossible for the most powerful classical supercomputer to crack.
Just like a classical computer has separate, yet interconnected, components that must work together, such as a memory chip and a CPU on a motherboard, a quantum computer will need to communicate quantum information between multiple processors.
Current architectures used to interconnect superconducting quantum processors are “point-to-point” in connectivity, meaning they require a series of transfers between network nodes, with compounding error rates.
On the way to overcoming these challenges, MIT researchers developed a new interconnect device that can support scalable, “all-to-all” communication, such that all superconducting quantum processors in a network can communication directly with each other.
They created a network of two quantum processors and used their interconnect to send microwave photons back and forth on demand in a user-defined direction. Photons are particles of light that can carry quantum information.
The device includes a superconducting wire, or waveguide, that shuttles photons between processors and can be routed as far as needed. The researchers can couple any number of modules to it, efficiently transmitting information between a scalable network of processors.
They used this interconnect to demonstrate remote entanglement, a type of correlation between quantum processors that are not physically connected. Remote entanglement is a key step toward developing a powerful, distributed network of many quantum processors.
“In the future, a quantum computer will probably need both local and nonlocal interconnects. Local interconnects are natural in arrays of superconducting qubits. Ours allows for more nonlocal connections. We can send photons at different frequencies, times, and in two propagation directions, which gives our network more flexibility and throughput,” says Aziza Almanakly, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student in the Engineering Quantum Systems group of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and lead author of a paper on the interconnect.
Her co-authors include Beatriz Yankelevich, a graduate student in the EQuS Group; senior author William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and professor of Physics, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and associate director of RLE; and others at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory. The research appears today in Nature Physics.
In the new work, they took that architecture a step further by connecting two modules to a waveguide in order to emit photons in a desired direction and then absorb them at the other end.
Each module is composed of four qubits, which serve as an interface between the waveguide carrying the photons and the larger quantum processors.
The qubits coupled to the waveguide emit and absorb photons, which are then transferred to nearby data qubits.
The researchers use a series of microwave pulses to add energy to a qubit, which then emits a photon. Carefully controlling the phase of those pulses enables a quantum interference effect that allows them to emit the photon in either direction along the waveguide. Reversing the pulses in time enables a qubit in another module any arbitrary distance away to absorb the photon.
“Pitching and catching photons enables us to create a ‘quantum interconnect’ between nonlocal quantum processors, and with quantum interconnects comes remote entanglement,” explains Oliver.
“Generating remote entanglement is a crucial step toward building a large-scale quantum processor from smaller-scale modules. Even after that photon is gone, we have a correlation between two distant, or ‘nonlocal,’ qubits. Remote entanglement allows us to take advantage of these correlations and perform parallel operations between two qubits, even though they are no longer connected and may be far apart,” Yankelevich explains.
However, transferring a photon between two modules is not enough to generate remote entanglement. The researchers need to prepare the qubits and the photon so the modules “share” the photon at the end of the protocol.
Generating entanglement
The team did this by halting the photon emission pulses halfway through their duration. In quantum mechanical terms, the photon is both retained and emitted. Classically, one can think that half-a-photon is retained and half is emitted.
Once the receiver module absorbs that “half-photon,” the two modules become entangled.
But as the photon travels, joints, wire bonds, and connections in the waveguide distort the photon and limit the absorption efficiency of the receiving module.
To generate remote entanglement with high enough fidelity, or accuracy, the researchers needed to maximize how often the photon is absorbed at the other end.
“The challenge in this work was shaping the photon appropriately so we could maximize the absorption efficiency,” Almanakly says.
They used a reinforcement learning algorithm to “predistort” the photon. The algorithm optimized the protocol pulses in order to shape the photon for maximal absorption efficiency.
When they implemented this optimized absorption protocol, they were able to show photon absorption efficiency greater than 60 percent.
This absorption efficiency is high enough to prove that the resulting state at the end of the protocol is entangled, a major milestone in this demonstration.
“We can use this architecture to create a network with all-to-all connectivity. This means we can have multiple modules, all along the same bus, and we can create remote entanglement among any pair of our choosing,” Yankelevich says.
In the future, they could improve the absorption efficiency by optimizing the path over which the photons propagate, perhaps by integrating modules in 3D instead of having a superconducting wire connecting separate microwave packages. They could also make the protocol faster so there are fewer chances for errors to accumulate.
“In principle, our remote entanglement generation protocol can also be expanded to other kinds of quantum computers and bigger quantum internet systems,” Almanakly says.
This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office, the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Researchers developed a new interconnect that can support scalable, all-to-all communication between a series of superconducting quantum processors, enabling an information-carrying photon to travel between processors in a user-defined direction. The concept is illustrated here.
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