The MIT Global Seed Funds (GSF) program fosters global research collaborations with MIT faculty and their peers abroad — creating partnerships that tackle complex global issues, from climate change to health-care challenges and beyond. Administered by the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), the GSF program has awarded more than $26 million to over 1,200 faculty research projects since its inception in 2008. Through its unique funding structure — comprising a general fund for unrestricted geographical use and several specific funds within individual countries, regions, and universities — GSF supports a wide range of projects. The current call for proposals from MIT faculty and researchers with principal investigator status is open until Dec. 10. 

CIS recently sat down with faculty recipients Josephine Carstensen and David McGee to discuss the value and impact GSF added to their research. Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, generates computational designs for large-scale structures with the intent of designing novel low-carbon solutions. McGee, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), reconstructs the patterns, pace, and magnitudes of past hydro-climate changes.

Q: How did the Global Seed Funds program connect you with global partnerships related to your research?

Carstensen: One of the projects my lab is working on is to unlock the potential of complex cast-glass structures. Through our GSF partnership with researchers at TUDelft (Netherlands), my group was able to leverage our expertise in generative design algorithms alongside the TUDelft team, who are experts in the physical casting and fabrication of glass structures. Our initial connection to TUDelft was actually through one of my graduate students who was at a conference and met TUDelft researchers. He was inspired by their work and felt there could be synergy between our labs. The question then became: How do we connect with TUDelft? And that was what led us to the Global Seed Funds program. 

McGee: Our research is based in fieldwork conducted in partnership with experts who have a rich understanding of local environments. These locations range from lake basins in Chile and Argentina to caves in northern Mexico, Vietnam, and Madagascar. GSF has been invaluable for helping foster partnerships with collaborators and universities in these different locations, enabling the pilot work and relationship-building necessary to establish longer-term, externally funded projects.

Q: Tell us more about your GSF-funded work.

Carstensen: In my research group at MIT, we live mainly in a computational regime, and we do very little proof-of-concept testing. To that point, we do not even have the facilities nor experience to physically build large-scale structures, or even specialized structures. GSF has enabled us to connect with the researchers at TUDelft who do much more experimental testing than we do. Being able to work with the experts at TUDelft within their physical realm provided valuable insights into their way of approaching problems. And, likewise, the researchers at TUDelft benefited from our expertise. It has been fruitful in ways we couldn’t have imagined within our lab at MIT.

McGee: The collaborative work supported by the GSF has focused on reconstructing how past climate changes impacted rainfall patterns around the world, using natural archives like lake sediments and cave formations. One particularly successful project has been our work in caves in northeastern Mexico, which has been conducted in partnership with researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a local caving group. This project has involved several MIT undergraduate and graduate students, sponsored a research symposium in Mexico City, and helped us obtain funding from the National Science Foundation for a longer-term project.

Q: You both mentioned the involvement of your graduate students. How exactly has the GSF augmented the research experience of your students?

Carstensen: The collaboration has especially benefited the graduate students from both the MIT and TUDelft teams. The opportunity presented through this project to engage in research at an international peer institution has been extremely beneficial for their academic growth and maturity. It has facilitated training in new and complementary technical areas that they would not have had otherwise and allowed them to engage with leading world experts. An example of this aspect of the project's success is that the collaboration has inspired one of my graduate students to actively pursue postdoc opportunities in Europe (including at TU Delft) after his graduation.

McGee: MIT students have traveled to caves in northeastern Mexico and to lake basins in northern Chile to conduct fieldwork and build connections with local collaborators. Samples enabled by GSF-supported projects became the focus of two graduate students’ PhD theses, two EAPS undergraduate senior theses, and multiple UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program] projects.

Q: Were there any unexpected benefits to the work funded by GSF?

Carstensen: The success of this project would not have been possible without this specific international collaboration. Both the Delft and MIT teams bring highly different essential expertise that has been necessary for the successful project outcome. It allowed both the Delft and MIT teams to gain an in-depth understanding of the expertise areas and resources of the other collaborators. Both teams have been deeply inspired. This partnership has fueled conversations about potential future projects and provided multiple outcomes, including a plan to publish two journal papers on the project outcome. The first invited publication is being finalized now.

McGee: GSF’s focus on reciprocal exchange has enabled external collaborators to spend time at MIT, sharing their work and exchanging ideas. Other funding is often focused on sending MIT researchers and students out, but GSF has helped us bring collaborators here, making the relationship more equal. A GSF-supported visit by Argentinian researchers last year made it possible for them to interact not just with my group, but with students and faculty across EAPS.

The factors impacting successful patient care are many and varied. Early diagnosis, proper adherence to prescription medication schedules, and effective monitoring and management of chronic disease, for example, all contribute to better outcomes. However, each of these factors can be hindered by outside influences — medication doesn’t work as well if it isn’t taken as prescribed, and disease can be missed or misdiagnosed in early stages if symptoms are mild or not present.

Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and a gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), is working on a variety of innovative solutions to improve patient care. As a physician and an engineer, he brings a unique perspective.

“Bringing those two domains together is what really can help transform and accelerate our capacity to develop new biomedical devices or new therapies for a range of conditions,” he says. “As physicians, we're extremely fortunate to be able to help individuals. As scientists and engineers, not only can we help individuals … we can help populations.”

Traverso found a passion for this work early in life. His family lived in his father’s native Peru through much of his childhood, but left in the late 1980s at the height of the nation’s political instability, emigrating to Canada, where he began high school.

“In high school, I had the incredible opportunity to actually spend time in a lab,” he says. “I really fell in love with molecular genetics. I loved the lab environment and that ability to investigate a very specific problem, with the hopes that those developments would eventually help people.”

He started medical school immediately after high school, attending the University of Cambridge, but paused his medical training to pursue a PhD in medical sciences at Johns Hopkins University before returning to Cambridge. After completing medical school, he completed internal medicine residency at BWH and his gastroenterology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, both at Harvard Medical School. For his postdoctoral research, he transitioned to the fields of chemical and biomedical engineering in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer.

Traverso’s research interests today include biomedical device development, ingestible and implantable robotics, and drug delivery for optimal drug adherence. His academic home at MIT is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, but his work integrates multiple domains, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, and synthetic biology.

“The mechanical engineering department is a tremendous place to engage with students, as well as faculty, towards the development of the next generation of medical devices,” he says. “At the core of many of those medical devices are fundamental mechanical principles.”

Traverso’s team in the Laboratory for Translational Engineering is developing pioneering biomedical devices such as drug delivery systems to enable safe, efficient delivery of therapeutics, and novel diagnostic tests to support early detection of diseases.

The heart of his work, he says, is “about trying to help others. Patients, of course, but also students, to help them see the arc of bench-to-bedside and help stimulate their interest in careers applying engineering to help improve human health.”

Troy Van Voorhis, the Robert T. Haslam and Bradley Dewey Professor of Chemistry, will step down as department head of the Department of Chemistry at the end of this academic year. Van Voorhis has served as department head since 2019, previously serving the department as associate department head since 2015.

“Troy has been an invaluable partner and sounding board who could always be counted on for a wonderful mix of wisdom and pragmatism,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble professor of astrophysics and dean of the MIT School of Science. “While department head, Troy provided calm guidance during the Covid pandemic, encouraging and financially supporting additional programs to improve his community’s quality of life.”

“I have had the pleasure of serving as head of our department for the past five-plus years. It has been a period of significant upheaval in our world,” says Van Voorhis. “Throughout it all, one of my consistent joys has been the privilege of working within the chemistry department and across the wider MIT community on research, education, and community building.”

Under Van Voorhis’ leadership, the Department of Chemistry implemented a department-wide statement of values that launched the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, a Future Faculty Symposium that showcases rising stars in chemistry, and the Creating Bonds in Chemistry program that partners MIT faculty with chemistry faculty at select historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.

Van Voorhis also oversaw a time of tremendous faculty growth in the department with the addition of nine new faculty. During his tenure as head, he also guided the department through a period of significant growth of interest in chemistry with the number of undergraduate majors, enrolled students, graduate students, and graduate student yields all up significantly.

Van Voorhis also had the honor of celebrating with the entire Institute for Professor Moungi Bawendi’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry — the department’s first win in 18 years, since Professor Richard R. Schrock’s win in 2005.

In addition to his service to the department within the School of Science, Van Voorhis had also co-chaired the Working Group on Curricula and Degrees for the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. This service relates to Van Voorhis’ own research interests and programs.

Van Voorhis’ research lies at the nexus of chemistry and computation, and his work has impact on renewable energy and quantum computing. His lab is focused on developing new methods that provide an accurate description of electron dynamics in molecules and materials. Over the years, his research has led to advances in light-emitting diodes, solar cells, and other devices and technologies crucial to addressing 21st-century energy concerns.   

Van Voorhis received his bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics from Rice University and his PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of MIT in 2003 and was promoted to professor of chemistry in 2012.

He has received many honors and awards, including being named an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow, a fellow of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has also received the MIT School of Science’s award for excellence in graduate teaching.

Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius is a tall order. Achieving that goal will not only require a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, but also a substantial reallocation of land to support that effort and sustain the biosphere, including humans. More land will be needed to accommodate a growing demand for bioenergy and nature-based carbon sequestration while ensuring sufficient acreage for food production and ecological sustainability.

The expanding role of land in a 1.5 C world will be twofold — to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to produce clean energy. Land-based carbon dioxide removal strategies include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage; direct air capture; and afforestation/reforestation and other nature-based solutions. Land-based clean energy production includes wind and solar farms and sustainable bioenergy cropland. Any decision to allocate more land for climate mitigation must also address competing needs for long-term food security and ecosystem health.

Land-based climate mitigation choices vary in terms of costs — amount of land required, implications for food security, impact on biodiversity and other ecosystem services — and benefits — potential for sequestering greenhouse gases and producing clean energy.

Now a study in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of competing land-use and technology options to limit global warming to 1.5 C. Led by researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), the study applies the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework to evaluate costs and benefits of different land-based climate mitigation options in Sky2050, a 1.5 C climate-stabilization scenario developed by Shell.

Under this scenario, demand for bioenergy and natural carbon sinks increase along with the need for sustainable farming and food production. To determine if there’s enough land to meet all these growing demands, the research team uses the global hectare (gha) — an area of 10,000 square meters, or 2.471 acres — as the standard unit of measurement, and current estimates of the Earth’s total habitable land area (about 10 gha) and land area used for food production and bioenergy (5 gha).

The team finds that with transformative changes in policy, land management practices, and consumption patterns, global land is sufficient to provide a sustainable supply of food and ecosystem services throughout this century while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the 1.5 C goal. These transformative changes include policies to protect natural ecosystems; stop deforestation and accelerate reforestation and afforestation; promote advances in sustainable agriculture technology and practice; reduce agricultural and food waste; and incentivize consumers to purchase sustainably produced goods.

If such changes are implemented, 2.5–3.5 gha of land would be used for NBS practices to sequester 3–6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ per year, and 0.4–0.6 gha of land would be allocated for energy production — 0.2–0.3 gha for bioenergy and 0.2–0.35 gha for wind and solar power generation.

“Our scenario shows that there is enough land to support a 1.5 degree C future as long as effective policies at national and global levels are in place,” says CS3 Principal Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel, the study’s lead author. “These policies must not only promote efficient use of land for food, energy, and nature, but also be supported by long-term commitments from government and industry decision-makers.”

The MIT Press has released a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem.

The report, entitled “Access to Science and Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held at the Washington headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sept. 20.

While open access aims to democratize knowledge, its implementation has been a factor in the consolidation of the academic publishing industry, an explosion in published articles with inconsistent review and quality control, and new costs that may be hard for researchers and universities to bear, with less-affluent schools and regions facing the greatest risk. The workshop examined how open access and other open science policies may affect research and researchers in the future, how to measure their impact, and how to address emerging challenges.

The event brought together leading experts to discuss critical issues in open scientific and scholarly publishing. These issues include:

• the impact of open access policies on the research ecosystem;
• the enduring role of peer review in ensuring research quality;
• the challenges and opportunities of data sharing and curation; and
• the evolving landscape of scholarly communications infrastructure.

The report identifies key research questions in order to advance open science and scholarship. These include:

• How can we better model and anticipate the consequences of government policies on public access to science and scholarship?
• How can research funders support experimentation with new and more equitable business models for scientific publishing? and
• If the dissemination of scholarship is decoupled from peer review and evaluation, who is best suited to perform that evaluation, and how should that process be managed and funded?

“This workshop report is a crucial step in building a data-driven roadmap for the future of open science publishing and policy,” says Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and professor of biology emeritus at MIT, and faculty lead of the working group behind the workshop and the report. “By identifying key research questions around infrastructure, training, technology, and business models, we aim to ensure that open science practices are sustainable and that they contribute to the highest quality research.”

The full report is available for download, along with video recordings of the workshop.

The MIT Press is a leading academic publisher committed to advancing knowledge and innovation. It publishes significant books and journals across a wide range of disciplines spanning science, technology, design, humanities, and social science.

Captivated as a child by video games and puzzles, Marzyeh Ghassemi was also fascinated at an early age in health. Luckily, she found a path where she could combine the two interests. 

“Although I had considered a career in health care, the pull of computer science and engineering was stronger,” says Ghassemi, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). “When I found that computer science broadly, and AI/ML specifically, could be applied to health care, it was a convergence of interests.”

Today, Ghassemi and her Healthy ML research group at LIDS work on the deep study of how machine learning (ML) can be made more robust, and be subsequently applied to improve safety and equity in health.

Growing up in Texas and New Mexico in an engineering-oriented Iranian-American family, Ghassemi had role models to follow into a STEM career. While she loved puzzle-based video games — “Solving puzzles to unlock other levels or progress further was a very attractive challenge” — her mother also engaged her in more advanced math early on, enticing her toward seeing math as more than arithmetic.

“Adding or multiplying are basic skills emphasized for good reason, but the focus can obscure the idea that much of higher-level math and science are more about logic and puzzles,” Ghassemi says. “Because of my mom’s encouragement, I knew there were fun things ahead.”

Ghassemi says that in addition to her mother, many others supported her intellectual development. As she earned her undergraduate degree at New Mexico State University, the director of the Honors College and a former Marshall Scholar — Jason Ackelson, now a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — helped her to apply for a Marshall Scholarship that took her to Oxford University, where she earned a master’s degree in 2011 and first became interested in the new and rapidly evolving field of machine learning. During her PhD work at MIT, Ghassemi says she received support “from professors and peers alike,” adding, “That environment of openness and acceptance is something I try to replicate for my students.”

While working on her PhD, Ghassemi also encountered her first clue that biases in health data can hide in machine learning models.

She had trained models to predict outcomes using health data, “and the mindset at the time was to use all available data. In neural networks for images, we had seen that the right features would be learned for good performance, eliminating the need to hand-engineer specific features.”

During a meeting with Leo Celi, principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology and IMES and a member of Ghassemi’s thesis committee, Celi asked if Ghassemi had checked how well the models performed on patients of different genders, insurance types, and self-reported races.

Ghassemi did check, and there were gaps. “We now have almost a decade of work showing that these model gaps are hard to address — they stem from existing biases in health data and default technical practices. Unless you think carefully about them, models will naively reproduce and extend biases,” she says.

Ghassemi has been exploring such issues ever since.

Her favorite breakthrough in the work she has done came about in several parts. First, she and her research group showed that learning models could recognize a patient’s race from medical images like chest X-rays, which radiologists are unable to do. The group then found that models optimized to perform well “on average” did not perform as well for women and minorities. This past summer, her group combined these findings to show that the more a model learned to predict a patient’s race or gender from a medical image, the worse its performance gap would be for subgroups in those demographics. Ghassemi and her team found that the problem could be mitigated if a model was trained to account for demographic differences, instead of being focused on overall average performance — but this process has to be performed at every site where a model is deployed.

“We are emphasizing that models trained to optimize performance (balancing overall performance with lowest fairness gap) in one hospital setting are not optimal in other settings. This has an important impact on how models are developed for human use,” Ghassemi says. “One hospital might have the resources to train a model, and then be able to demonstrate that it performs well, possibly even with specific fairness constraints. However, our research shows that these performance guarantees do not hold in new settings. A model that is well-balanced in one site may not function effectively in a different environment. This impacts the utility of models in practice, and it’s essential that we work to address this issue for those who develop and deploy models.”

Ghassemi’s work is informed by her identity.

“I am a visibly Muslim woman and a mother — both have helped to shape how I see the world, which informs my research interests,” she says. “I work on the robustness of machine learning models, and how a lack of robustness can combine with existing biases. That interest is not a coincidence.”

Regarding her thought process, Ghassemi says inspiration often strikes when she is outdoors — bike-riding in New Mexico as an undergraduate, rowing at Oxford, running as a PhD student at MIT, and these days walking by the Cambridge Esplanade. She also says she has found it helpful when approaching a complicated problem to think about the parts of the larger problem and try to understand how her assumptions about each part might be incorrect.

“In my experience, the most limiting factor for new solutions is what you think you know,” she says. “Sometimes it’s hard to get past your own (partial) knowledge about something until you dig really deeply into a model, system, etc., and realize that you didn’t understand a subpart correctly or fully.”

As passionate as Ghassemi is about her work, she intentionally keeps track of life’s bigger picture.

“When you love your research, it can be hard to stop that from becoming your identity — it’s something that I think a lot of academics have to be aware of,” she says. “I try to make sure that I have interests (and knowledge) beyond my own technical expertise.

“One of the best ways to help prioritize a balance is with good people. If you have family, friends, or colleagues who encourage you to be a full person, hold on to them!”

Having won many awards and much recognition for the work that encompasses two early passions — computer science and health — Ghassemi professes a faith in seeing life as a journey.

“There’s a quote by the Persian poet Rumi that is translated as, ‘You are what you are looking for,’” she says. “At every stage of your life, you have to reinvest in finding who you are, and nudging that towards who you want to be.”

James Wesley “Jim” Harris PhD ’67, professor emeritus of Spanish and linguistics, passed away on Nov. 10. He was 92.

Harris attended the University of Georgia, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He later earned a master’s degree in linguistics from Louisiana State University and a PhD in linguistics from MIT.

Harris joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. During his tenure, he served as head of what was then called the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

“I met Jim when I came to MIT in 1977 as department head of the neonatal Department of Linguistics and Philosophy,” says Samuel Jay Keyser, MIT professor emeritus of linguistics. “Throughout his career in the department, he never relinquished his connection to the unit that first employed him at MIT.”

In his early days at MIT, when French, German, and Russian dominated as elite “languages of science and world literature,” Harris championed, over some opposition, the introduction of Spanish language and literature courses.

He later oversaw the inclusion of Japanese and Chinese courses as language offerings at MIT. He promoted undergraduate courses in linguistics, leading to a full undergraduate degree program and later broadening the focus of the prestigious PhD program. 

His research in linguistics centered on theoretical phonology and morphology. His books, presentations at professional meetings, and articles in peer-reviewed journals were among the most discussed — in both positive and negative assessments, as he noted — by prominent scholars in the field. The ability to teach complex technical material comfortably in Spanish, plus the status of an MIT professorship, resulted in invitations to teach at universities across Spain and Latin America. He was also highly valued as a member of the editorial boards of several professional journals.

“I remember Jim most of all for being the consummate scholar,” Keyser says. “His articles were models of argumentation. They were assembled with all the precision of an Inca wall and all the beauty of a Faberge Egg. You couldn’t slip a credit card through any of its arguments, they were so superbly sculpted.”

Having achieved national recognition as an English-Spanish bilingual teacher and teacher-trainer, Harris was engaged as a writer at the Modern Language Materials Development Center in New York. Later, he co-authored, with Guillermo Segreda, a series of popular college-level Spanish textbooks.

“Harris belonged to Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle’s first generation of graduate students,” says MIT linguist Michael John Kenstowicz. “Together they overturned the distributionalist model of the structuralists in favor of ordered generative rules.”

After retiring from MIT, he remained internationally recognized as a highly influential figure in the area of Romance linguistics, and “el decano” (“the dean”) of Spanish phonology.

Harris was married to Florence Warshawsky Harris for 50 years until her passing in 2020. In 2011, in celebration of the program’s 50th anniversary, they partnered to prepare and publish a detailed history of the linguistics program’s origins. Warshawsky Harris, formerly an MIT graduate student, also edited Chomsky and Halle’s influential "The Sound Pattern on English" and numerous other important linguistic texts.

Harris’ scholarship was widely recognized in a diverse group of scholarly articles and textbooks he authored, co-authored, edited, and published.

Harris was born outside Atlanta, Georgia, in 1932. During the Korean War, he performed his military service as the clarinet and saxophone instructor at the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington. After his discharge, he directed the band at the Charlotte Hall School in Maryland, where he also taught Spanish, French, and Latin.

Harris is survived by ​​his daughter, Lynn Corinne Harris, his son-in-law, Rabbi David Adelson, and his grandchildren, Bee Adelson and Sam Harris.

In the latest step to implement commitments made in MIT’s Fast Forward climate action plan, staff from the Department of Facilities; Office of Sustainability; and Environment, Health and Safety Office are advancing new solar panel installations this fall and winter on four major campus buildings: The Stratton Student Center (W20), the Dewey Library building (E53), and two newer buildings, New Vassar (W46) and the Theater Arts building (W97).

These four new installations, in addition to existing rooftop solar installations on campus, are “just one part of our broader strategy to reduce MIT’s carbon footprint and transition to clean energy,” says Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship.

The installations will not only meet but exceed the target set for total solar energy production on campus in the Fast Forward climate action plan that was issued in 2021. With an initial target of 500 kilowatts of installed solar capacity on campus, the new installations, along with those already in place, will bring the total output to roughly 650 kW, exceeding the goal. The solar installations are an important facet of MIT’s approach to eliminating all direct campus emissions by 2050.

The process of advancing to the stage of placing solar panels on campus rooftops is much more complex than just getting them installed on an ordinary house. The process began with a detailed assessment of the potential for reducing the campus greenhouse gas footprint. A first cut eliminated rooftops that were too shaded by trees or other buildings. Then, the schedule for regular replacement of roofs had to be taken into account — it’s better to put new solar panels on top of a roof that will not need replacement in a few years. Other roofs, especially lab buildings, simply had too much existing equipment on them to allow a large area of space for solar panels.

Randa Ghattas, senior sustainability project manager, and Taya Dixon, assistant director for capital budgets and contracts within the Department of Facilities, spearheaded the project. Their initial assessment showed that there were many buildings identified with significant solar potential, and it took the impetus of the Fast Forward plan to kick things into action. 

Even after winnowing down the list of campus buildings based on shading and the life cycle of roof replacements, there were still many other factors to consider. Some buildings that had ample roof space were of older construction that couldn’t bear the loads of a full solar installation without significant reconstruction. “That actually has proved trickier than we thought,” Ghattas says. For example, one building that seemed a good candidate, and already had some solar panels on it, proved unable to sustain the greater weight and wind loads of a full solar installation. Structural capacity, she says, turned out to be “probably the most important” factor in this case.

The roofs on the Student Center and on the Dewey Library building were replaced in the last few years with the intention of the later addition of solar panels. And the two newer buildings were designed from the beginning with solar in mind, even though the solar panels were not part of the initial construction. “The designs were built into them to accommodate solar,” Dixon says, “so those were easy options for us because we knew the buildings were solar-ready and could support solar being integrated into their systems, both the electrical system and the structural system of the roof.”

But there were also other considerations. The Student Center is considered a historically significant building, so the installation had to be designed so that it was invisible from street level, even including a safety railing that had to be built around the solar array. But that was not a problem. “It was fine for this building,” Ghattas says, because it turned out that the geometry of the building and the roofs hid the safety railing from view below.

Each installation will connect directly to the building’s electrical system, and thus into the campus grid. The power they produce will be used in the buildings they are on, though none will be sufficient to fully power its building. Overall, the new installations, in addition to the existing ones on the MIT Sloan School of Management building (E62) and the Alumni Pool (57) and the planned array on the new Graduate Junction dorm (W87-W88), will be enough to power 5 to 10 percent of the buildings’ electric needs, and offset about 190 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, Ghattas says. This is equivalent to the electricity use of 35 homes annually.

Each building installation is expected to take just a couple of weeks. “We’re hopeful that we’re going to have everything installed and operational by the end of this calendar year,” she says.

Other buildings could be added in coming years, as their roof replacement cycles come around. With the lessons learned along the way in getting to this point, Ghattas says, “now that we have a system in place, hopefully it’s going to be much easier in the future.”

Higgins adds that “in parallel with the solar projects, we’re working on expanding electric vehicle charging stations and the electric vehicle fleet and reducing energy consumption in campus buildings.”

Besides the on-campus improvements, he says, “MIT is focused on both the local and the global.” In addition to solar installations on campus buildings, which can only mitigate a small portion of campus emissions, “large-scale aggregation partnerships are key to moving the actual market landscape for adding cleaner energy generation to power grids,” which must ultimately lead to zero emissions, he says. “We are spurring the development of new utility-grade renewable energy facilities in regions with high carbon-intensive electrical grids. These projects have an immediate and significant impact in the urgently needed decarbonization of regional power grids.”

MIT is also making more advances to accelerate renewable energy generation and electricity grid decarbonization at the local and state level. The Institute has recently concluded an agreement through the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program that supports the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ state solar power development goals by enabling the construction of a new 5-megawatt solar energy facility on Cape Cod. The new solar energy system is integral to supporting a new net-zero emissions development that includes affordable housing, while also providing additional resiliency to the local grid.

Higgins says that other technologies, strategies, and practices are being evaluated for heating, cooling, and power for the campus, “with zero carbon emissions by 2050, utilizing cleaner energy sources.” He adds that these campus initiatives “are part of MIT’s larger Climate Project, aiming to drive progress both on campus and beyond, advancing broader partnerships, new market models, and informing approaches to climate policy.” 

MIT is co-leading an effort to enable the development of two new large-scale renewable energy projects in regions with carbon-intensive electrical grids: Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, came online this year, and the Bowman Wind Project in Bowman County, North Dakota, is expected to be operational in 2026. Together, they will add a combined 408 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy capacity to the power grid. This work is a critical part of MIT’s strategy to achieve its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2026.

The Consortium for Climate Solutions, which includes MIT and 10 other Massachusetts organizations, seeks to eliminate close to 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year — more than five times the annual direct emissions from MIT’s campus — by committing to purchase an estimated 1.3-million-megawatt hours of new solar and wind electricity generation annually.

“MIT has mobilized on multiple fronts to expedite solutions to climate change,” says Glen Shor, executive vice president and treasurer. “Catalyzing these large-scale renewable projects is an important part of our comprehensive efforts to reduce carbon emissions from generating energy. We are pleased to work in partnership with other local enterprises and organizations to amplify the impact we could achieve individually.”

The two new projects complement MIT’s existing 25-year power purchase agreement established with Summit Farms in 2016, which enabled the construction of a roughly 650-acre, 60 MW solar farm on farmland in North Carolina, leading to the early retirement of a coal-fired plant nearby. Its success has inspired other institutions to implement similar aggregation models.

A collective approach to enable global impact

MIT, Harvard University, and Mass General Brigham formed the consortium in 2020 to provide a structure to accelerate global emissions reductions through the development of large-scale renewable energy projects — accelerating and expanding the impact of each institution’s greenhouse gas reduction initiatives. As the project’s anchors, they collectively procured the largest volume of energy through the aggregation.  

The consortium engaged with PowerOptions, a nonprofit energy-buying consortium, which offered its members the opportunity to participate in the projects. The City of Cambridge, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Tufts University, the Mass Convention Center Authority, the Museum of Fine Arts, and GBH later joined the consortium through PowerOptions. 
 
The consortium vetted over 125 potential projects against its rigorous project evaluation criteria. With faculty and MIT stakeholder input on a short list of the highest-ranking projects, it ultimately chose Bowman Wind and Big Elm Solar. Collectively, these two projects will achieve large greenhouse gas emissions reductions in two of the most carbon-intensive electrical grid regions in the United States and create clean energy generation sources to reduce negative health impacts.

“Enabling these projects in regions where the grids are most carbon-intensive allows them to have the greatest impact. We anticipate these projects will prevent two times more emissions per unit of generated electricity than would a similar-scale project in New England,” explains Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship Joe Higgins.

By all consortium institutions making significant 15-to-20-year financial commitments to buy electricity, the developer was able to obtain critical external project financing to build the projects. Owned and operated by Apex Clean Energy, the projects will add new renewable electricity to the grid equivalent to powering 130,000 households annually, displacing over 950,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year from highly carbon-intensive power plants in the region. 

Complementary decarbonization work underway 

In addition to investing in offsite renewable energy projects, many consortium members have developed strategies to reduce and eliminate their own direct emissions. At MIT, accomplishing this requires transformative change in how energy is generated, distributed, and used on campus. Efforts underway include the installation of solar panels on campus rooftops that will increase renewable energy generation four-fold by 2026; continuing to transition our heat distribution infrastructure from steam-based to hot water-based; utilizing design and construction that minimizes emissions and increases energy efficiency; employing AI-enabled sensors to optimize temperature set points and reduce energy use in buildings; and converting MIT’s vehicle fleet to all-electric vehicles while adding more electric car charging stations.

The Institute has also upgraded the Central Utilities Plant, which uses advanced co-generation technology to produce power that is up to 20 percent less carbon-intensive than that from the regional power grid. MIT is charting the course toward a next-generation district energy system, with a comprehensive planning initiative to revolutionize its campus energy infrastructure. The effort is exploring leading-edge technology, including industrial-scale heat pumps, geothermal exchange, micro-reactors, bio-based fuels, and green hydrogen derived from renewable sources as solutions to achieve full decarbonization of campus operations by 2050.

“At MIT, we are focused on decarbonizing our own campus as well as the role we can play in solving climate at the largest of scales, including supporting a cleaner grid in line with the call to triple renewables globally by 2030. By enabling these large-scale renewable projects, we can have an immediate and significant impact of reducing emissions through the urgently needed decarbonization of regional power grids,” says Julie Newman, MIT’s director of sustainability.  

The Irish philosopher George Berkely, best known for his theory of immaterialism, once famously mused, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

What about AI-generated trees? They probably wouldn’t make a sound, but they will be critical nonetheless for applications such as adaptation of urban flora to climate change. To that end, the novel “Tree-D Fusion” system developed by researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Google, and Purdue University merges AI and tree-growth models with Google's Auto Arborist data to create accurate 3D models of existing urban trees. The project has produced the first-ever large-scale database of 600,000 environmentally aware, simulation-ready tree models across North America.

“We’re bridging decades of forestry science with modern AI capabilities,” says Sara Beery, MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) assistant professor, MIT CSAIL principal investigator, and a co-author on a new paper about Tree-D Fusion. “This allows us to not just identify trees in cities, but to predict how they’ll grow and impact their surroundings over time. We’re not ignoring the past 30 years of work in understanding how to build these 3D synthetic models; instead, we’re using AI to make this existing knowledge more useful across a broader set of individual trees in cities around North America, and eventually the globe.”

Tree-D Fusion builds on previous urban forest monitoring efforts that used Google Street View data, but branches it forward by generating complete 3D models from single images. While earlier attempts at tree modeling were limited to specific neighborhoods, or struggled with accuracy at scale, Tree-D Fusion can create detailed models that include typically hidden features, such as the back side of trees that aren’t visible in street-view photos.

The technology’s practical applications extend far beyond mere observation. City planners could use Tree-D Fusion to one day peer into the future, anticipating where growing branches might tangle with power lines, or identifying neighborhoods where strategic tree placement could maximize cooling effects and air quality improvements. These predictive capabilities, the team says, could change urban forest management from reactive maintenance to proactive planning.

A tree grows in Brooklyn (and many other places)

The researchers took a hybrid approach to their method, using deep learning to create a 3D envelope of each tree’s shape, then using traditional procedural models to simulate realistic branch and leaf patterns based on the tree’s genus. This combo helped the model predict how trees would grow under different environmental conditions and climate scenarios, such as different possible local temperatures and varying access to groundwater.

Now, as cities worldwide grapple with rising temperatures, this research offers a new window into the future of urban forests. In a collaboration with MIT’s Senseable City Lab, the Purdue University and Google team is embarking on a global study that re-imagines trees as living climate shields. Their digital modeling system captures the intricate dance of shade patterns throughout the seasons, revealing how strategic urban forestry could hopefully change sweltering city blocks into more naturally cooled neighborhoods.

“Every time a street mapping vehicle passes through a city now, we’re not just taking snapshots — we’re watching these urban forests evolve in real-time,” says Beery. “This continuous monitoring creates a living digital forest that mirrors its physical counterpart, offering cities a powerful lens to observe how environmental stresses shape tree health and growth patterns across their urban landscape.”

AI-based tree modeling has emerged as an ally in the quest for environmental justice: By mapping urban tree canopy in unprecedented detail, a sister project from the Google AI for Nature team has helped uncover disparities in green space access across different socioeconomic areas. “We’re not just studying urban forests — we’re trying to cultivate more equity,” says Beery. The team is now working closely with ecologists and tree health experts to refine these models, ensuring that as cities expand their green canopies, the benefits branch out to all residents equally.

It’s a breeze

While Tree-D fusion marks some major “growth” in the field, trees can be uniquely challenging for computer vision systems. Unlike the rigid structures of buildings or vehicles that current 3D modeling techniques handle well, trees are nature’s shape-shifters — swaying in the wind, interweaving branches with neighbors, and constantly changing their form as they grow. The Tree-D fusion models are “simulation-ready” in that they can estimate the shape of the trees in the future, depending on the environmental conditions.

“What makes this work exciting is how it pushes us to rethink fundamental assumptions in computer vision,” says Beery. “While 3D scene understanding techniques like photogrammetry or NeRF [neural radiance fields] excel at capturing static objects, trees demand new approaches that can account for their dynamic nature, where even a gentle breeze can dramatically alter their structure from moment to moment.”

The team’s approach of creating rough structural envelopes that approximate each tree’s form has proven remarkably effective, but certain issues remain unsolved. Perhaps the most vexing is the “entangled tree problem;” when neighboring trees grow into each other, their intertwined branches create a puzzle that no current AI system can fully unravel.

The scientists see their dataset as a springboard for future innovations in computer vision, and they’re already exploring applications beyond street view imagery, looking to extend their approach to platforms like iNaturalist and wildlife camera traps.

“This marks just the beginning for Tree-D Fusion,” says Jae Joong Lee, a Purdue University PhD student who developed, implemented and deployed the Tree-D-Fusion algorithm. “Together with my collaborators, I envision expanding the platform’s capabilities to a planetary scale. Our goal is to use AI-driven insights in service of natural ecosystems — supporting biodiversity, promoting global sustainability, and ultimately, benefiting the health of our entire planet.”

Beery and Lee’s co-authors are Jonathan Huang, Scaled Foundations head of AI (formerly of Google); and four others from Purdue University: PhD students Jae Joong Lee and Bosheng Li, Professor and Dean's Chair of Remote Sensing Songlin Fei, Assistant Professor Raymond Yeh, and Professor and Associate Head of Computer Science Bedrich Benes. Their work is based on efforts supported by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service and is directly supported by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The researchers presented their findings at the European Conference on Computer Vision this month. 

Acoustic metamaterials — architected materials that have tailored geometries designed to control the propagation of acoustic or elastic waves through a medium — have been studied extensively through computational and theoretical methods. Physical realizations of these materials to date have been restricted to large sizes and low frequencies.

“The multifunctionality of metamaterials — being simultaneously lightweight and strong while having tunable acoustic properties — make them great candidates for use in extreme-condition engineering applications,” explains Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Chair and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “But challenges in miniaturizing and characterizing acoustic metamaterials at high frequencies have hindered progress towards realizing advanced materials that have ultrasonic-wave control capabilities.”

A new study coauthored by Portela; Rachel Sun, Jet Lem, and Yun Kai of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE); and Washington DeLima of the U.S. Department of Energy Kansas City National Security Campus presents a design framework for controlling ultrasound wave propagation in microscopic acoustic metamaterials. A paper on the work, “Tailored Ultrasound Propagation in Microscale Metamaterials via Inertia Design,” was recently published in the journal Science Advances. 

“Our work proposes a design framework based on precisely positioning microscale spheres to tune how ultrasound waves travel through 3D microscale metamaterials,” says Portela. “Specifically, we investigate how placing microscopic spherical masses within a metamaterial lattice affect how fast ultrasound waves travel throughout, ultimately leading to wave guiding or focusing responses.”

Through nondestructive, high-throughput laser-ultrasonics characterization, the team experimentally demonstrates tunable elastic-wave velocities within microscale materials. They use the varied wave velocities to spatially and temporally tune wave propagation in microscale materials, also demonstrating an acoustic demultiplexer (a device that separates one acoustic signal into multiple output signals). The work paves the way for microscale devices and components that could be useful for ultrasound imaging or information transmission via ultrasound.

“Using simple geometrical changes, this design framework expands the tunable dynamic property space of metamaterials, enabling straightforward design and fabrication of microscale acoustic metamaterials and devices,” says Portela.

The research also advances experimental capabilities, including fabrication and characterization, of microscale acoustic metamaterials toward application in medical ultrasound and mechanical computing applications, and underscores the underlying mechanics of ultrasound wave propagation in metamaterials, tuning dynamic properties via simple geometric changes and describing these changes as a function of changes in mass and stiffness. More importantly, the framework is amenable to other fabrication techniques beyond the microscale, requiring merely a single constituent material and one base 3D geometry to attain largely tunable properties.

“The beauty of this framework is that it fundamentally links physical material properties to geometric features. By placing spherical masses on a spring-like lattice scaffold, we could create direct analogies for how mass affects quasi-static stiffness and dynamic wave velocity,” says Sun, first author of the study. “I realized that we could obtain hundreds of different designs and corresponding material properties regardless of whether we vibrated or slowly compressed the materials.”

This work was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano facilities.

In 2015, 195 nations plus the European Union signed the Paris Agreement and pledged to undertake plans designed to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet in 2023, the world exceeded that target for most, if not all of, the year — calling into question the long-term feasibility of achieving that target.

To do so, the world must reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and strategies for achieving levels that will “stabilize the climate” have been both proposed and adopted. Many of those strategies combine dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions with the use of direct air capture (DAC), a technology that removes CO₂ from the ambient air. As a reality check, a team of researchers in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) examined those strategies, and what they found was alarming: The strategies rely on overly optimistic — indeed, unrealistic — assumptions about how much CO₂ could be removed by DAC. As a result, the strategies won’t perform as predicted. Nevertheless, the MITEI team recommends that work to develop the DAC technology continue so that it’s ready to help with the energy transition — even if it’s not the silver bullet that solves the world’s decarbonization challenge.

DAC: The promise and the reality

Including DAC in plans to stabilize the climate makes sense. Much work is now under way to develop DAC systems, and the technology looks promising. While companies may never run their own DAC systems, they can already buy “carbon credits” based on DAC. Today, a multibillion-dollar market exists on which entities or individuals that face high costs or excessive disruptions to reduce their own carbon emissions can pay others to take emissions-reducing actions on their behalf. Those actions can involve undertaking new renewable energy projects or “carbon-removal” initiatives such as DAC or afforestation/reforestation (planting trees in areas that have never been forested or that were forested in the past). 

DAC-based credits are especially appealing for several reasons, explains Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at MITEI. With DAC, measuring and verifying the amount of carbon removed is straightforward; the removal is immediate, unlike with planting forests, which may take decades to have an impact; and when DAC is coupled with CO₂ storage in geologic formations, the CO₂ is kept out of the atmosphere essentially permanently — in contrast to, for example, sequestering it in trees, which may one day burn and release the stored CO₂.

Will current plans that rely on DAC be effective in stabilizing the climate in the coming years? To find out, Herzog and his colleagues Jennifer Morris and Angelo Gurgel, both MITEI principal research scientists, and Sergey Paltsev, a MITEI senior research scientist — all affiliated with the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) — took a close look at the modeling studies on which those plans are based.

Their investigation identified three unavoidable engineering challenges that together lead to a fourth challenge — high costs for removing a single ton of CO₂ from the atmosphere. The details of their findings are reported in a paper published in the journal One Earth on Sept. 20.

Challenge 1: Scaling up

When it comes to removing CO₂ from the air, nature presents “a major, non-negotiable challenge,” notes the MITEI team: The concentration of CO₂ in the air is extremely low — just 420 parts per million, or roughly 0.04 percent. In contrast, the CO₂ concentration in flue gases emitted by power plants and industrial processes ranges from 3 percent to 20 percent. Companies now use various carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to capture CO₂ from their flue gases, but capturing CO₂ from the air is much more difficult. To explain, the researchers offer the following analogy: “The difference is akin to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue [the task representing DAC] versus needing to find about 10 red marbles in a jar of 100 marbles of which 90 are blue [the task for CCS].”

Given that low concentration, removing a single metric ton (tonne) of CO₂ from air requires processing about 1.8 million cubic meters of air, which is roughly equivalent to the volume of 720 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And all that air must be moved across a CO₂-capturing sorbent — a feat requiring large equipment. For example, one recently proposed design for capturing 1 million tonnes of CO₂ per year would require an “air contactor” equivalent in size to a structure about three stories high and three miles long.

Recent modeling studies project DAC deployment on the scale of 5 to 40 gigatonnes of CO₂ removed per year. (A gigatonne equals 1 billion metric tonnes.) But in their paper, the researchers conclude that the likelihood of deploying DAC at the gigatonne scale is “highly uncertain.”

Challenge 2: Energy requirement

Given the low concentration of CO₂ in the air and the need to move large quantities of air to capture it, it’s no surprise that even the best DAC processes proposed today would consume large amounts of energy — energy that’s generally supplied by a combination of electricity and heat. Including the energy needed to compress the captured CO₂ for transportation and storage, most proposed processes require an equivalent of at least 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity for each tonne of CO₂ removed.

The source of that electricity is critical. For example, using coal-based electricity to drive an all-electric DAC process would generate 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ for each tonne of CO₂ captured. The result would be a net increase in emissions, defeating the whole purpose of the DAC. So clearly, the energy requirement must be satisfied using either low-carbon electricity or electricity generated using fossil fuels with CCS. All-electric DAC deployed at large scale — say, 10 gigatonnes of CO₂ removed annually — would require 12,000 terawatt-hours of electricity, which is more than 40 percent of total global electricity generation today.

Electricity consumption is expected to grow due to increasing overall electrification of the world economy, so low-carbon electricity will be in high demand for many competing uses — for example, in power generation, transportation, industry, and building operations. Using clean electricity for DAC instead of for reducing CO₂ emissions in other critical areas raises concerns about the best uses of clean electricity.

Many studies assume that a DAC unit could also get energy from “waste heat” generated by some industrial process or facility nearby. In the MITEI researchers’ opinion, “that may be more wishful thinking than reality.” The heat source would need to be within a few miles of the DAC plant for transporting the heat to be economical; given its high capital cost, the DAC plant would need to run nonstop, requiring constant heat delivery; and heat at the temperature required by the DAC plant would have competing uses, for example, for heating buildings. Finally, if DAC is deployed at the gigatonne per year scale, waste heat will likely be able to provide only a small fraction of the needed energy.

Challenge 3: Siting

Some analysts have asserted that, because air is everywhere, DAC units can be located anywhere. But in reality, siting a DAC plant involves many complex issues. As noted above, DAC plants require significant amounts of energy, so having access to enough low-carbon energy is critical. Likewise, having nearby options for storing the removed CO₂ is also critical. If storage sites or pipelines to such sites don’t exist, major new infrastructure will need to be built, and building new infrastructure of any kind is expensive and complicated, involving issues related to permitting, environmental justice, and public acceptability — issues that are, in the words of the researchers, “commonly underestimated in the real world and neglected in models.”

Two more siting needs must be considered. First, meteorological conditions must be acceptable. By definition, any DAC unit will be exposed to the elements, and factors like temperature and humidity will affect process performance and process availability. And second, a DAC plant will require some dedicated land — though how much is unclear, as the optimal spacing of units is as yet unresolved. Like wind turbines, DAC units need to be properly spaced to ensure maximum performance such that one unit is not sucking in CO₂-depleted air from another unit.

Challenge 4: Cost

Considering the first three challenges, the final challenge is clear: the cost per tonne of CO₂ removed is inevitably high. Recent modeling studies assume DAC costs as low as $100 to $200 per ton of CO₂ removed. But the researchers found evidence suggesting far higher costs.

To start, they cite typical costs for power plants and industrial sites that now use CCS to remove CO₂ from their flue gases. The cost of CCS in such applications is estimated to be in the range of $50 to $150 per ton of CO₂ removed. As explained above, the far lower concentration of CO₂ in the air will lead to substantially higher costs.

As explained under Challenge 1, the DAC units needed to capture the required amount of air are massive. The capital cost of building them will be high, given labor, materials, permitting costs, and so on. Some estimates in the literature exceed $5,000 per tonne captured per year.

Then there are the ongoing costs of energy. As noted under Challenge 2, removing 1 tonne of CO₂ requires the equivalent of 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity. If that electricity costs $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, the cost of just the electricity needed to remove 1 tonne of CO₂ is $120. The researchers point out that assuming such a low price is “questionable,” given the expected increase in electricity demand, future competition for clean energy, and higher costs on a system dominated by renewable — but intermittent — energy sources.

Then there’s the cost of storage, which is ignored in many DAC cost estimates.

Clearly, many considerations show that prices of $100 to $200 per tonne are unrealistic, and assuming such low prices will distort assessments of strategies, leading them to underperform going forward.

The bottom line

In their paper, the MITEI team calls DAC a “very seductive concept.” Using DAC to suck CO₂ out of the air and generate high-quality carbon-removal credits can offset reduction requirements for industries that have hard-to-abate emissions. By doing so, DAC would minimize disruptions to key parts of the world’s economy, including air travel, certain carbon-intensive industries, and agriculture. However, the world would need to generate billions of tonnes of CO₂ credits at an affordable price. That prospect doesn’t look likely. The largest DAC plant in operation today removes just 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year, and the price to buy the company’s carbon-removal credits on the market today is $1,500 per tonne.

The researchers recognize that there is room for energy efficiency improvements in the future, but DAC units will always be subject to higher work requirements than CCS applied to power plant or industrial flue gases, and there is not a clear pathway to reducing work requirements much below the levels of current DAC technologies.

Nevertheless, the researchers recommend that work to develop DAC continue “because it may be needed for meeting net-zero emissions goals, especially given the current pace of emissions.” But their paper concludes with this warning: “Given the high stakes of climate change, it is foolhardy to rely on DAC to be the hero that comes to our rescue.”

In April 2019, a group of astronomers from around the globe stunned the world when they revealed the first image of a black hole — the monstrous accumulation of collapsed stars and gas that lets nothing escape, not even light. The image, which was of the black hole that sits at the core of a galaxy called Messier 87 (M87), revealed glowing gas around the center of the black hole. In March 2021, the same team produced yet another stunning image that showed the polarization of light around the black hole, revealing its magnetic field.

The "camera" that took both images is the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which is not one singular instrument but rather a collection of radio telescopes situated around the globe that work together to create high-resolution images by combining data from each individual telescope. Now, scientists are looking to extend the EHT into space to get an even sharper look at M87's black hole. But producing the sharpest images in the history of astronomy presents a challenge: transmitting the telescope's massive dataset back to Earth for processing. A small but powerful laser communications (lasercom) payload developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory operates at the high data rates needed to image the aspects of interest of the black hole.   

Extending baseline distances into space

The EHT created the two existing images of M87's black hole via interferometry — specifically, very long-baseline interferometry. Interferometry works by collecting light in the form of radio waves simultaneously with multiple telescopes in separate places on the globe and then comparing the phase difference of the radio waves at the various locations in order to pinpoint the direction of the source. By taking measurements with different combinations of the telescopes around the planet, the EHT collaboration — which included staff members at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and MIT Haystack Observatory — essentially created an Earth-sized telescope in order to image the incredibly faint black hole 55 million light-years away from Earth.

With interferometry, the bigger the telescope, the better the resolution of the image. Therefore, in order to focus in on even finer characteristics of these black holes, a bigger instrument is needed. Details that astronomers hope to resolve include the turbulence of the gas falling into a black hole (which drives the accumulation of matter onto the black hole through a process called accretion) and a black hole's shadow (which could be used to help pin down where the jet coming from M87 is drawing its energy from). The ultimate goal is to observe a photon ring (the place where light orbits closest before escaping) around the black hole. Capturing an image of the photon ring would enable scientists to put Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity to the test.

With Earth-based telescopes, the farthest that two telescopes could be from one another is on opposite sides of the Earth, or about 13,000 kilometers apart. In addition to this maximum baseline distance, Earth-based instruments are limited by the atmosphere, which makes observing shorter wavelengths difficult. Earth's atmospheric limitations can be overcome by extending the EHT's baselines and putting at least one of the telescopes in space, which is exactly what the proposed CfA-led Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) mission aims to do.

One of the most significant challenges that comes with this space-based concept is transfer of information. The dataset to produce the first EHT image was so massive (totaling 4 petabytes) that the data had to be put on disks and shipped to a facility for processing. Gathering information from a telescope in orbit would be even more difficult; the team would need a system that can downlink data from the space telescope to Earth at approximately 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) in order to image the desired aspects of the black hole.

Enter TBIRD

Here is where Lincoln Laboratory comes in. In May 2023, the laboratory's TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) lasercom payload achieved the fastest data transfer from space, transmitting at a rate of 200 Gbps — which is 1,000 times faster than typical satellite communication systems — from low Earth orbit (LEO).

"We developed a novel technology for high-volume data transport from space to ground," says Jade Wang, assistant leader of the laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "In the process of developing that technology, we looked for collaborations and other potential follow-on missions that could leverage this unprecedented data capability. The BHEX is one such mission. These high data rates will enable scientists to image the photon ring structure of a black hole for the first time."

A lasercom team led by Wang, in partnership with the CfA, is developing the long-distance, high-rate downlink needed for the BHEX mission in middle Earth orbit (MEO).

"Laser communications is completely upending our expectations for what astrophysical discoveries are possible from space," says CfA astrophysicist Michael Johnson, principal investigator for the BHEX mission. "In the next decade, this incredible new technology will bring us to the edge of a black hole, creating a window into the region where our current understanding of physics breaks down."

Though TBIRD is incredibly powerful, the technology needs some modifications to support the higher orbit that BHEX requires for its science mission. The small TBIRD payload (CubeSat) will be upgraded to a larger aperture size and higher transmit power. In addition, the TBIRD automatic request protocol — the error-control mechanism for ensuring data make it to Earth without loss due to atmospheric effects — will be adjusted to account for the longer round-trip times that come with a mission in MEO. Finally, the TBIRD LEO "buffer and burst" architecture for data delivery will shift to a streaming approach.

"With TBIRD and other lasercom missions, we have demonstrated that the lasercom technology for such an impactful science mission is available today," Wang says. "Having the opportunity to contribute to an area of really interesting scientific discovery is an exciting prospect."

The BHEX mission concept has been in development since 2019. Technical and concept studies for BHEX have been supported by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Internal Research and Development program at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Arizona, and the ULVAC-Hayashi Seed Fund from the MIT-Japan Program at MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives. BHEX studies of lasercom have been supported by Fred Ehrsam and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. 

Anoushka Bose ’20 spent the summer of 2018 as an MIT Washington program intern, applying her nuclear physics education to arms control research with a D.C. nuclear policy think tank.

“It’s crazy how much three months can transform people,” says Bose, now an attorney at the Department of Justice.

“Suddenly, I was learning far more than I had expected about treaties, nuclear arms control, and foreign relations,” adds Bose. “But once I was hooked, I couldn’t be stopped as that summer sparked a much broader interest in diplomacy and set me on a different path.”

Bose is one of hundreds of MIT undergraduates whose academic and career trajectories were influenced by their time in the nation’s capital as part of the internship program.

Leah Nichols ’00 is a former D.C. intern, and now executive director of George Mason University’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth. In 1998, Nichols worked in the office of U.S. Senator Max Baucus, D-Mont., developing options for protecting open space on private land.

“I really started to see how science and policy needed to interact in order to solve environmental challenges,” she says. “I’ve actually been working at that interface between science and policy ever since.”

Marking its 30th anniversary this year, the MIT Washington Summer Internship Program has shaped the lives of alumni, and expanded MIT’s capital in the capital city.

Bose believes the MIT Washington summer internship is more vital than ever.

“This program helps steer more technical expertise, analytical thinking, and classic MIT innovation into policy spaces to make them better-informed and better equipped to solve challenges,” she says. With so much at stake, she suggests, it is increasingly important “to invest in bringing the MIT mindset of extreme competence as well as resilience to D.C.”

MIT missionaries

Over the past three decades, students across MIT — whether studying aeronautics or nuclear engineering, management or mathematics, chemistry or computer science — have competed for and won an MIT Washington summer internship. Many describe it as a springboard into high-impact positions in politics, public policy, and the private sector.

The program was launched in 1994 by Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin (1963) Distinguished Professor of Political Science, who still serves as the director.

“The idea 30 years ago was to make this a bit of a missionary program, where we demonstrate to Washington the utility of having MIT students around for things they’re doing,” says Stewart. “MIT’s reputation benefits because our students are unpretentious, down-to-earth, interested in how the world actually works, and dedicated to fixing things that are broken.”

The outlines of the program have remained much the same: A cohort of 15 to 20 students is selected from a pool of fall applicants. With the help of MIT’s Washington office, the students are matched with potential supervisors in search of technical and scientific talent. They travel in the spring to meet potential supervisors and receive a stipend and housing for the summer. In the fall, students take a course that Stewart describes as an “Oxbridge-type tutorial, where they contextualize their experiences and reflect on the political context of the place where they worked.”

Stewart remains as enthusiastic about the internship program as when he started and has notions for building on its foundations. His wish list includes running the program at other times of the year, and for longer durations. “Six months would really change and deepen the experience,” he says. He envisions a real-time tutorial while the students are in Washington. And he would like to draw more students from the data science world. “Part of the goal of this program is to hook non-obvious people into knowledge of the public policy realm,” he says.

Prized in Washington

MIT Vice Provost Philip Khoury, who helped get the program off the ground, praised Stewart’s vision for developing the initial idea.

“Charles understood why science- and technology-oriented students would be great beneficiaries of an experience in Washington and had something to contribute that other internship program students would not be able to do because of their prowess, their prodigious abilities in the technology-engineering-science world,” says Khoury.

Khoury adds that the program has benefited both the host organizations and the students.

“Members of Congress and senior staff who were developing policies prized MIT students, because they were powerful thinkers and workaholics, and students in the program learned that they really mattered to adults in Washington, wherever they went.”

David Goldston, director of the MIT Washington Office, says government is “kind of desperate for people who understand science and technology.” One example: The National Institute of Standards and Technology has launched an artificial intelligence safety division that is “almost begging for students to help conduct research and carry out the ever-expanding mission of worrying about AI issues,” he says.

Holly Krambeck ’06 MST/MCP, program manager of the World Bank Data Lab, can attest to this impact. She hired her first MIT summer intern, Chae Won Lee, in 2013, to analyze road crash data from the Philippines. “Her findings were so striking, we invited her to join the team on a mission to present her work to the government,” says Krambeck.

Subsequent interns have helped the World Bank demonstrate effective, low-cost, transit-fare collection systems; identify houses eligible for hurricane protection retrofits under World Bank loans; and analyze heatwave patterns in the Philippines to inform a lending program for mitigation measures.

“Every year, I’ve been so impressed by the maturity, energy, willingness to learn new skills, and curiosity of the MIT students,” says Krambeck. “At the end of each summer, we ask students to present their projects to World Bank staff, who are invariably amazed to learn that these are undergraduates and not PhD candidates!”

Career springboard

“It absolutely changed my career pathway,” says Samuel Rodarte Jr. ’13, a 2011 program alumnus who interned at the MIT Washington Office, where he tracked congressional hearings related to research at the Institute. Today, he serves as a legislative assistant to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer. An aerospace engineering and Latin American studies double major, Rodarte says the opportunity to experience policymaking from the inside came “at just the right time, when I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do post-MIT.”

Miranda Priebe ’03 is director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy for the Rand Corp. She briefs groups within the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of State, and the National Security Council, among others. “My job is to ask the big question: Does the United States have the right approach in the world in terms of advancing our interests with our capabilities and resources?”

Priebe was a physics major with an evolving interest in political science when she arrived in Washington in 2001 to work in the office of Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I was working really hard at MIT, but just hadn’t found my passion until I did this internship,” she says. “Once I came to D.C. I saw all the places I could fit in using my analytical skills — there were a million things I wanted to do — and the internship convinced me that this was the right kind of work for me.”

During her internship in 2022, Anushree Chaudhuri ’24, urban studies and planning and economics major, worked in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office, where she hoped to experience day-to-day life in a federal agency — with an eye toward a career in high-level policymaking. She developed a web app to help local governments determine which census tracts qualified for environmental justice funds.

“I was pleasantly surprised to see that even as a lower-level civil servant you can make change if you know how to work within the system.” Chaudhuri is now a Marshall Scholar, pursuing a PhD at the University of Oxford on the socioeconomic impacts of energy infrastructure. “I’m pretty sure I want to work in the policy space long term,” she says.

A crowd gathered at the MIT Media Lab in September for a concert by musician Jordan Rudess and two collaborators. One of them, violinist and vocalist Camilla Bäckman, has performed with Rudess before. The other — an artificial intelligence model informally dubbed the jam_bot, which Rudess developed with an MIT team over the preceding several months — was making its public debut as a work in progress.

Throughout the show, Rudess and Bäckman exchanged the signals and smiles of experienced musicians finding a groove together. Rudess’ interactions with the jam_bot suggested a different and unfamiliar kind of exchange. During one duet inspired by Bach, Rudess alternated between playing a few measures and allowing the AI to continue the music in a similar baroque style. Each time the model took its turn, a range of expressions moved across Rudess’ face: bemusement, concentration, curiosity. At the end of the piece, Rudess admitted to the audience, “That is a combination of a whole lot of fun and really, really challenging.”

Rudess is an acclaimed keyboardist — the best of all time, according to one Music Radar magazine poll — known for his work with the platinum-selling, Grammy-winning progressive metal band Dream Theater, which embarks this fall on a 40th anniversary tour. He is also a solo artist whose latest album, “Permission to Fly,” was released on Sept. 6; an educator who shares his skills through detailed online tutorials; and the founder of software company Wizdom Music. His work combines a rigorous classical foundation (he began his piano studies at The Juilliard School at age 9) with a genius for improvisation and an appetite for experimentation.

Last spring, Rudess became a visiting artist with the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), collaborating with the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments research group on the creation of new AI-powered music technology. Rudess’ main collaborators in the enterprise are Media Lab graduate students Lancelot Blanchard, who researches musical applications of generative AI (informed by his own studies in classical piano), and Perry Naseck, an artist and engineer specializing in interactive, kinetic, light- and time-based media. Overseeing the project is Professor Joseph Paradiso, head of the Responsive Environments group and a longtime Rudess fan. Paradiso arrived at the Media Lab in 1994 with a CV in physics and engineering and a sideline designing and building synthesizers to explore his avant-garde musical tastes. His group has a tradition of investigating musical frontiers through novel user interfaces, sensor networks, and unconventional datasets.

The researchers set out to develop a machine learning model channeling Rudess’ distinctive musical style and technique. In a paper published online by MIT Press in September, co-authored with MIT music technology professor Eran Egozy, they articulate their vision for what they call “symbiotic virtuosity:” for human and computer to duet in real-time, learning from each duet they perform together, and making performance-worthy new music in front of a live audience.

Rudess contributed the data on which Blanchard trained the AI model. Rudess also provided continuous testing and feedback, while Naseck experimented with ways of visualizing the technology for the audience.

“Audiences are used to seeing lighting, graphics, and scenic elements at many concerts, so we needed a platform to allow the AI to build its own relationship with the audience,” Naseck says. In early demos, this took the form of a sculptural installation with illumination that shifted each time the AI changed chords. During the concert on Sept. 21, a grid of petal-shaped panels mounted behind Rudess came to life through choreography based on the activity and future generation of the AI model.

“If you see jazz musicians make eye contact and nod at each other, that gives anticipation to the audience of what’s going to happen,” says Naseck. “The AI is effectively generating sheet music and then playing it. How do we show what’s coming next and communicate that?”

Naseck designed and programmed the structure from scratch at the Media Lab with assistance from Brian Mayton (mechanical design) and Carlo Mandolini (fabrication), drawing some of its movements from an experimental machine learning model developed by visiting student Madhav Lavakare that maps music to points moving in space. With the ability to spin and tilt its petals at speeds ranging from subtle to dramatic, the kinetic sculpture distinguished the AI’s contributions during the concert from those of the human performers, while conveying the emotion and energy of its output: swaying gently when Rudess took the lead, for example, or furling and unfurling like a blossom as the AI model generated stately chords for an improvised adagio. The latter was one of Naseck’s favorite moments of the show.

“At the end, Jordan and Camilla left the stage and allowed the AI to fully explore its own direction,” he recalls. “The sculpture made this moment very powerful — it allowed the stage to remain animated and intensified the grandiose nature of the chords the AI played. The audience was clearly captivated by this part, sitting at the edges of their seats.”

“The goal is to create a musical visual experience,” says Rudess, “to show what’s possible and to up the game.”

Musical futures

As the starting point for his model, Blanchard used a music transformer, an open-source neural network architecture developed by MIT Assistant Professor Anna Huang SM ’08, who joined the MIT faculty in September.

“Music transformers work in a similar way as large language models,” Blanchard explains. “The same way that ChatGPT would generate the most probable next word, the model we have would predict the most probable next notes.”

Blanchard fine-tuned the model using Rudess’ own playing of elements from bass lines to chords to melodies, variations of which Rudess recorded in his New York studio. Along the way, Blanchard ensured the AI would be nimble enough to respond in real-time to Rudess’ improvisations.

“We reframed the project,” says Blanchard, “in terms of musical futures that were hypothesized by the model and that were only being realized at the moment based on what Jordan was deciding.”

As Rudess puts it: “How can the AI respond — how can I have a dialogue with it? That’s the cutting-edge part of what we’re doing.”

Another priority emerged: “In the field of generative AI and music, you hear about startups like Suno or Udio that are able to generate music based on text prompts. Those are very interesting, but they lack controllability,” says Blanchard. “It was important for Jordan to be able to anticipate what was going to happen. If he could see the AI was going to make a decision he didn’t want, he could restart the generation or have a kill switch so that he can take control again.”

In addition to giving Rudess a screen previewing the musical decisions of the model, Blanchard built in different modalities the musician could activate as he plays — prompting the AI to generate chords or lead melodies, for example, or initiating a call-and-response pattern.

“Jordan is the mastermind of everything that’s happening,” he says.

What would Jordan do

Though the residency has wrapped up, the collaborators see many paths for continuing the research. For example, Naseck would like to experiment with more ways Rudess could interact directly with his installation, through features like capacitive sensing. “We hope in the future we’ll be able to work with more of his subtle motions and posture,” Naseck says.

While the MIT collaboration focused on how Rudess can use the tool to augment his own performances, it’s easy to imagine other applications. Paradiso recalls an early encounter with the tech: “I played a chord sequence, and Jordan’s model was generating the leads. It was like having a musical ‘bee’ of Jordan Rudess buzzing around the melodic foundation I was laying down, doing something like Jordan would do, but subject to the simple progression I was playing,” he recalls, his face echoing the delight he felt at the time. “You're going to see AI plugins for your favorite musician that you can bring into your own compositions, with some knobs that let you control the particulars,” he posits. “It’s that kind of world we’re opening up with this.”

Rudess is also keen to explore educational uses. Because the samples he recorded to train the model were similar to ear-training exercises he’s used with students, he thinks the model itself could someday be used for teaching. “This work has legs beyond just entertainment value,” he says.

The foray into artificial intelligence is a natural progression for Rudess’ interest in music technology. “This is the next step,” he believes. When he discusses the work with fellow musicians, however, his enthusiasm for AI often meets with resistance. “I can have sympathy or compassion for a musician who feels threatened, I totally get that,” he allows. “But my mission is to be one of the people who moves this technology toward positive things.”

“At the Media Lab, it’s so important to think about how AI and humans come together for the benefit of all,” says Paradiso. “How is AI going to lift us all up? Ideally it will do what so many technologies have done — bring us into another vista where we’re more enabled.”

“Jordan is ahead of the pack,” Paradiso adds. “Once it’s established with him, people will follow.”

Jamming with MIT

The Media Lab first landed on Rudess’ radar before his residency because he wanted to try out the Knitted Keyboard created by another member of Responsive Environments, textile researcher Irmandy Wickasono PhD ’24. From that moment on, “It's been a discovery for me, learning about the cool things that are going on at MIT in the music world,” Rudess says.

During two visits to Cambridge last spring (assisted by his wife, theater and music producer Danielle Rudess), Rudess reviewed final projects in Paradiso’s course on electronic music controllers, the syllabus for which included videos of his own past performances. He brought a new gesture-driven synthesizer called Osmose to a class on interactive music systems taught by Egozy, whose credits include the co-creation of the video game “Guitar Hero.” Rudess also provided tips on improvisation to a composition class; played GeoShred, a touchscreen musical instrument he co-created with Stanford University researchers, with student musicians in the MIT Laptop Ensemble and Arts Scholars program; and experienced immersive audio in the MIT Spatial Sound Lab. During his most recent trip to campus in September, he taught a masterclass for pianists in MIT’s Emerson/Harris Program, which provides a total of 67 scholars and fellows with support for conservatory-level musical instruction.

“I get a kind of rush whenever I come to the university,” Rudess says. “I feel the sense that, wow, all of my musical ideas and inspiration and interests have come together in this really cool way.”

For roboticists, one challenge towers above all others: generalization — the ability to create machines that can adapt to any environment or condition. Since the 1970s, the field has evolved from writing sophisticated programs to using deep learning, teaching robots to learn directly from human behavior. But a critical bottleneck remains: data quality. To improve, robots need to encounter scenarios that push the boundaries of their capabilities, operating at the edge of their mastery. This process traditionally requires human oversight, with operators carefully challenging robots to expand their abilities. As robots become more sophisticated, this hands-on approach hits a scaling problem: the demand for high-quality training data far outpaces humans’ ability to provide it.

Now, a team of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers has developed a novel approach to robot training that could significantly accelerate the deployment of adaptable, intelligent machines in real-world environments. The new system, called “LucidSim,” uses recent advances in generative AI and physics simulators to create diverse and realistic virtual training environments, helping robots achieve expert-level performance in difficult tasks without any real-world data.

LucidSim combines physics simulation with generative AI models, addressing one of the most persistent challenges in robotics: transferring skills learned in simulation to the real world. “A fundamental challenge in robot learning has long been the ‘sim-to-real gap’ — the disparity between simulated training environments and the complex, unpredictable real world,” says MIT CSAIL postdoc Ge Yang, a lead researcher on LucidSim. “Previous approaches often relied on depth sensors, which simplified the problem but missed crucial real-world complexities.”

The multipronged system is a blend of different technologies. At its core, LucidSim uses large language models to generate various structured descriptions of environments. These descriptions are then transformed into images using generative models. To ensure that these images reflect real-world physics, an underlying physics simulator is used to guide the generation process.

The birth of an idea: From burritos to breakthroughs

The inspiration for LucidSim came from an unexpected place: a conversation outside Beantown Taqueria in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ​​“We wanted to teach vision-equipped robots how to improve using human feedback. But then, we realized we didn’t have a pure vision-based policy to begin with,” says Alan Yu, an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT and co-lead author on LucidSim. “We kept talking about it as we walked down the street, and then we stopped outside the taqueria for about half-an-hour. That’s where we had our moment.”

To cook up their data, the team generated realistic images by extracting depth maps, which provide geometric information, and semantic masks, which label different parts of an image, from the simulated scene. They quickly realized, however, that with tight control on the composition of the image content, the model would produce similar images that weren’t different from each other using the same prompt. So, they devised a way to source diverse text prompts from ChatGPT.

This approach, however, only resulted in a single image. To make short, coherent videos that serve as little “experiences” for the robot, the scientists hacked together some image magic into another novel technique the team created, called “Dreams In Motion.” The system computes the movements of each pixel between frames, to warp a single generated image into a short, multi-frame video. Dreams In Motion does this by considering the 3D geometry of the scene and the relative changes in the robot’s perspective.

“We outperform domain randomization, a method developed in 2017 that applies random colors and patterns to objects in the environment, which is still considered the go-to method these days,” says Yu. “While this technique generates diverse data, it lacks realism. LucidSim addresses both diversity and realism problems. It’s exciting that even without seeing the real world during training, the robot can recognize and navigate obstacles in real environments.”

The team is particularly excited about the potential of applying LucidSim to domains outside quadruped locomotion and parkour, their main test bed. One example is mobile manipulation, where a mobile robot is tasked to handle objects in an open area; also, color perception is critical. “Today, these robots still learn from real-world demonstrations,” says Yang. “Although collecting demonstrations is easy, scaling a real-world robot teleoperation setup to thousands of skills is challenging because a human has to physically set up each scene. We hope to make this easier, thus qualitatively more scalable, by moving data collection into a virtual environment.”

Who's the real expert?

The team put LucidSim to the test against an alternative, where an expert teacher demonstrates the skill for the robot to learn from. The results were surprising: Robots trained by the expert struggled, succeeding only 15 percent of the time — and even quadrupling the amount of expert training data barely moved the needle. But when robots collected their own training data through LucidSim, the story changed dramatically. Just doubling the dataset size catapulted success rates to 88 percent. “And giving our robot more data monotonically improves its performance — eventually, the student becomes the expert,” says Yang.

“One of the main challenges in sim-to-real transfer for robotics is achieving visual realism in simulated environments,” says Stanford University assistant professor of electrical engineering Shuran Song, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The LucidSim framework provides an elegant solution by using generative models to create diverse, highly realistic visual data for any simulation. This work could significantly accelerate the deployment of robots trained in virtual environments to real-world tasks.”

From the streets of Cambridge to the cutting edge of robotics research, LucidSim is paving the way toward a new generation of intelligent, adaptable machines — ones that learn to navigate our complex world without ever setting foot in it.

Yu and Yang wrote the paper with four fellow CSAIL affiliates: Ran Choi, an MIT postdoc in mechanical engineering; Yajvan Ravan, an MIT undergraduate in EECS; John Leonard, the Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Phillip Isola, an MIT associate professor in EECS. Their work was supported, in part, by a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research, Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency, Amazon, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. The researchers presented their work at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in early November.

From early development to old age, cell death is a part of life. Without enough of a critical type of cell death known as apoptosis, animals wind up with too many cells, which can set the stage for cancer or autoimmune disease. But careful control is essential, because when apoptosis eliminates the wrong cells, the effects can be just as dire, helping to drive many kinds of neurodegenerative disease.

By studying the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans — which was honored with its fourth Nobel Prize last month — scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research have begun to unravel a longstanding mystery about the factors that control apoptosis: how a protein capable of preventing programmed cell death can also promote it. Their study, led by Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT, and reported Oct. 9 in the journal Science Advances, sheds light on the process of cell death in both health and disease.

“These findings, by graduate student Nolan Tucker and former graduate student, now MIT faculty colleague, Peter Reddien, have revealed that a protein interaction long thought to block apoptosis in C. elegans likely instead has the opposite effect,” says Horvitz, who is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the McGovern Institute. Horvitz shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and characterizing the genes controlling cell death in C. elegans.

Mechanisms of cell death

Horvitz, Tucker, Reddien, and colleagues have provided foundational insights in the field of apoptosis by using C. elegans to analyze the mechanisms that drive apoptosis, as well as the mechanisms that determine how cells ensure apoptosis happens when and where it should. Unlike humans and other mammals, which depend on dozens of proteins to control apoptosis, these worms use just a few. And when things go awry, it’s easy to tell: When there’s not enough apoptosis, researchers can see that there are too many cells inside the worms’ translucent bodies. And when there’s too much, the worms lack certain biological functions or, in more extreme cases, can’t reproduce or die during embryonic development.

Work in the Horvitz lab defined the roles of many of the genes and proteins that control apoptosis in worms. These regulators proved to have counterparts in human cells, and for that reason studies of worms have helped reveal how human cells govern cell death and pointed toward potential targets for treating disease.

A protein’s dual role

Three of C. elegans’ primary regulators of apoptosis actively promote cell death, whereas just one, CED-9, reins in the apoptosis-promoting proteins to keep cells alive. As early as the 1990s, however, Horvitz and colleagues recognized that CED-9 was not exclusively a protector of cells. Their experiments indicated that the protector protein also plays a role in promoting cell death. But while researchers thought they knew how CED-9 protected against apoptosis, its pro-apoptotic role was more puzzling.

CED-9’s dual role means that mutations in the gene that encode it can impact apoptosis in multiple ways. Most ced-9 mutations interfere with the protein’s ability to protect against cell death and result in excess cell death. Conversely, mutations that abnormally activate ced-9 cause too little cell death, just like mutations that inactivate any of the three killer genes.

An atypical ced-9 mutation, identified by Reddien when he was a PhD student in Horvitz’s lab, hinted at how CED-9 promotes cell death. That mutation altered the part of the CED-9 protein that interacts with the protein CED-4, which is proapoptotic. Since the mutation specifically leads to a reduction in apoptosis, this suggested that CED-9 might need to interact with CED-4 to promote cell death.

The idea was particularly intriguing because researchers had long thought that CED-9’s interaction with CED-4 had exactly the opposite effect: In the canonical model, CED-9 anchors CED-4 to cells’ mitochondria, sequestering the CED-4 killer protein and preventing it from associating with and activating another key killer, the CED-3 protein — thereby preventing apoptosis.

To test the hypothesis that CED-9’s interactions with the killer CED-4 protein enhance apoptosis, the team needed more evidence. So graduate student Nolan Tucker used CRISPR gene editing tools to create more worms with mutations in CED-9, each one targeting a different spot in the CED-4-binding region. Then he examined the worms. “What I saw with this particular class of mutations was extra cells and viability,” he says — clear signs that the altered CED-9 was still protecting against cell death, but could no longer promote it. “Those observations strongly supported the hypothesis that the ability to bind CED-4 is needed for the pro-apoptotic function of CED-9,” Tucker explains. Their observations also suggested that, contrary to earlier thinking, CED-9 doesn’t need to bind with CED-4 to protect against apoptosis.

When he looked inside the cells of the mutant worms, Tucker found additional evidence that these mutations prevented CED-9’s ability to interact with CED-4. When both CED-9 and CED-4 are intact, CED-4 appears associated with cells’ mitochondria. But in the presence of these mutations, CED-4 was instead at the edge of the cell nucleus. CED-9’s ability to bind CED-4 to mitochondria appeared to be necessary to promote apoptosis, not to protect against it.

Looking ahead

While the team’s findings begin to explain a long-unanswered question about one of the primary regulators of apoptosis, they raise new ones, as well. “I think that this main pathway of apoptosis has been seen by a lot of people as more-or-less settled science. Our findings should change that view,” Tucker says.

The researchers see important parallels between their findings from this study of worms and what’s known about cell death pathways in mammals. The mammalian counterpart to CED-9 is a protein called BCL-2, mutations in which can lead to cancer.  BCL-2, like CED-9, can both promote and protect against apoptosis. As with CED-9, the pro-apoptotic function of BCL-2 has been mysterious. In mammals, too, mitochondria play a key role in activating apoptosis. The Horvitz lab’s discovery opens opportunities to better understand how apoptosis is regulated not only in worms but also in humans, and how dysregulation of apoptosis in humans can lead to such disorders as cancer, autoimmune disease, and neurodegeneration.

MIT physicists have shown that it should be possible to create an exotic form of matter that could be manipulated to form the qubit (quantum bit) building blocks of future quantum computers that are even more powerful than the quantum computers in development today.

The work builds on a discovery last year of materials that host electrons that can split into fractions of themselves but, importantly, can do so without the application of a magnetic field. 

The general phenomenon of electron fractionalization was first discovered in 1982 and resulted in a Nobel Prize. That work, however, required the application of a magnetic field. The ability to create the fractionalized electrons without a magnetic field opens new possibilities for basic research and makes the materials hosting them more useful for applications.

When electrons split into fractions of themselves, those fractions are known as anyons. Anyons come in variety of flavors, or classes. The anyons discovered in the 2023 materials are known as Abelian anyons. Now, in a paper reported in the Oct. 17 issue of Physical Review Letters, the MIT team notes that it should be possible to create the most exotic class of anyons, non-Abelian anyons.

“Non-Abelian anyons have the bewildering capacity of ‘remembering’ their spacetime trajectories; this memory effect can be useful for quantum computing,” says Liang Fu, a professor in MIT’s Department of Physics and leader of the work. 

Fu further notes that “the 2023 experiments on electron fractionalization greatly exceeded theoretical expectations. My takeaway is that we theorists should be bolder.”

Fu is also affiliated with the MIT Materials Research Laboratory. His colleagues on the current work are graduate students Aidan P. Reddy and Nisarga Paul, and postdoc Ahmed Abouelkomsan, all of the MIT Department of Phsyics. Reddy and Paul are co-first authors of the Physical Review Letters paper.

The MIT work and two related studies were also featured in an Oct. 17 story in Physics Magazine. “If this prediction is confirmed experimentally, it could lead to more reliable quantum computers that can execute a wider range of tasks … Theorists have already devised ways to harness non-Abelian states as workable qubits and manipulate the excitations of these states to enable robust quantum computation,” writes Ryan Wilkinson.

The current work was guided by recent advances in 2D materials, or those consisting of only one or a few layers of atoms. “The whole world of two-dimensional materials is very interesting because you can stack them and twist them, and sort of play Legos with them to get all sorts of cool sandwich structures with unusual properties,” says Paul. Those sandwich structures, in turn, are called moiré materials.

Anyons can only form in two-dimensional materials. Could they form in moiré materials? The 2023 experiments were the first to show that they can. Soon afterwards, a group led by Long Ju, an MIT assistant professor of physics, reported evidence of anyons in another moiré material. (Fu and Reddy were also involved in the Ju work.)

In the current work, the physicists showed that it should be possible to create non-Abelian anyons in a moiré material composed of atomically thin layers of molybdenum ditelluride. Says Paul, “moiré materials have already revealed fascinating phases of matter in recent years, and our work shows that non-Abelian phases could be added to the list.”

Adds Reddy, “our work shows that when electrons are added at a density of 3/2 or 5/2 per unit cell, they can organize into an intriguing quantum state that hosts non-Abelian anyons.”

The work was exciting, says Reddy, in part because “oftentimes there’s subtlety in interpreting your results and what they are actually telling you. So it was fun to think through our arguments” in support of non-Abelian anyons.

Says Paul, “this project ranged from really concrete numerical calculations to pretty abstract theory and connected the two. I learned a lot from my collaborators about some very interesting topics.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The authors also acknowledge the MIT SuperCloud and Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the Simons Foundation.

At age 22, aerospace engineer Eric Shaw worked on some of the world’s most powerful airplanes, yet learning to fly even the smallest one was out of reach. Just out of college, he could not afford civilian flight school and spent the next two years saving $12,000 to earn his private pilot’s license. Shaw knew there had to be a better, less expensive way to train pilots.  

Now a graduate student at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program, Shaw joined the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AeroAstro) Certificate in Aerospace Innovation program to turn a years-long rumination into a viable solution. Along with fellow graduate students Gretel Gonzalez and Shaan Jagani, Shaw proposed training aspiring pilots on electric and hybrid planes. This approach reduces flight school expenses by up to 34 percent while shrinking the industry’s carbon footprint.

The trio shared their plan to create the Aeroelectric Flight Academy at the certificate program’s signature Pitchfest event last spring. Equipped with a pitch deck and a business plan, the team impressed the judges, who awarded them the competition’s top prize of $10,000.

What began as a curiosity to test an idea has reshaped Shaw’s view of his industry.

“Aerospace and entrepreneurship initially seemed antithetical to me,” Shaw says. “It’s a hard sector to break into because the capital expenses are huge and a few big dogs have a lot of influence. Earning this certificate and talking face-to-face with folks who have overcome this seemingly impossible gap has filled me with confidence.”

Disruption by design

AeroAstro introduced the Certificate in Aerospace Innovation in 2021 after engaging in a strategic planning process to take full advantage of the research and ideas coming out of the department. The initiative is spearheaded by AeroAstro professors Olivier L. de Weck SM ʼ99, PhD ʼ01 and Zoltán S. Spakovszky SM ʼ99, PhD ʼ00, in partnership with the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Its creation recognizes the aerospace industry is at an inflection point. Major advancements in drone, satellite, and other technologies, coupled with an infusion of nongovernmental funding, have made it easier than ever to bring aerospace innovations to the marketplace.

“The landscape has radically shifted,” says Spakovszky, the Institute’s T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Aeronautics. “MIT students are responding to this change because startups are often the quickest path to impact.”

The certificate program has three requirements: coursework in both aerospace engineering and entrepreneurship, a speaker series primarily featuring MIT alumni and faculty, and hands-on entrepreneurship experience. In the latter, participants can enroll in the Trust Center’s StartMIT program and then compete in Pitchfest, which is modeled after the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. They can also join a summer incubator, such as the Trust Center’s MIT delta v or the Venture Exploration Program, run by the MIT Office of Innovation and the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps.

“At the end of the program, students will be able to look at a technical proposal and fairly quickly run some numbers and figure out if this innovation has market viability or if it’s completely utopian,” says de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and associate department head of AeroAstro.

Since its inception, 46 people from the MIT community have participated and 13 have fulfilled the requirements of the two-year program to earn the certificate. The program’s fourth cohort is underway this fall with its largest enrollment yet, with 21 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate seniors across seven courses and programs at MIT.

A unicorn industry

When Eddie Obropta SM ʼ13, SM ʼ15 attended MIT, aerospace entrepreneurship meant working for SpaceX or Blue Origin. Yet he knew more was possible. He gave himself a crash course in entrepreneurship by competing in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition four times. Each year, his ideas became more refined and battle-tested by potential customers.

In his final entry in the competition, Obropta, along with MIT doctoral student Nikhil Vadhavkar and Forrest Meyen SM ’13 PhD ’17, proposed using drones to maximize crop yields. Their business, Raptor Maps, won. Today, Obropta serves as the co-founder and chief technology officer of Raptor Maps, which builds software to automate the operations and maintenance of solar farms using drones, robots, and artificial intelligence

While Obropta received support from AeroAstro and MIT's existing entrepreneurial ecosystem, the tech leader was excited when de Weck and Spakovszky shared their plans to launch the Certificate in Aerospace Innovation. Obropta currently serves on the program’s advisory board, has been a presenter at the speaker series, and has served as a mentor and judge for Pitchfest.

“While there are a lot of excellent entrepreneurship programs across the Institute, the aerospace industry is its own unique beast,” Obropta says. “Today’s aspiring founders are visionaries looking to build a spacefaring civilization, but they need specialized support in navigating complex multidisciplinary missions and heavy government involvement.”

Entrepreneurs are everywhere, not just at startups

While the certificate program will likely produce success stories like Raptor Maps, that is not the ultimate goal, say de Weck and Spakovszky. Thinking and acting like an entrepreneur — such as understanding market potential, dealing with failure, and building a deep professional network — are characteristics that benefit everyone, no matter their occupation. 

Paul Cheek, executive director of the Trust Center who also teaches a course in the certificate program, agrees.

“At its core, entrepreneurship is a mindset and a skill set; it’s about moving the needle forward for maximum impact,” Cheek says. “A lot of organizations, including large corporations, nonprofits, and the government, can benefit from that type of thinking.”

That form of entrepreneurship resonates with the Aeroelectric Flight Academy team. Although they are meeting with potential investors and looking to scale their business, all three plan to pursue their first passions: Jagani hopes to be an astronaut, Shaw would like to be an executive at one of the “big dog” aerospace companies, and Gonzalez wants to work for the Mexican Space Agency.

Gonzalez, who is on track to earn her certificate in 2025, says she is especially grateful for the people she met through the program.

“I didn’t know an aerospace entrepreneurship community even existed when I began the program,” Gonzalez says. “It’s here and it’s filled with very dedicated and generous people who have shared insights with me that I don’t think I would have learned anywhere else.”

To fend off the worst impacts of climate change, “we have to decarbonize, and do it even faster,” said William H. Green, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, at MITEI’s Annual Research Conference.

“But how the heck do we actually achieve this goal when the United States is in the middle of a divisive election campaign, and globally, we’re facing all kinds of geopolitical conflicts, trade protectionism, weather disasters, increasing demand from developing countries building a middle class, and data centers in countries like the U.S.?”

Researchers, government officials, and business leaders convened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sept. 25-26 to wrestle with this vexing question at the conference that was themed, “A durable energy transition: How to stay on track in the face of increasing demand and unpredictable obstacles.”

“In this room we have a lot of power,” said Green, “if we work together, convey to all of society what we see as real pathways and policies to solve problems, and take collective action.”

The critical role of consensus-building in driving the energy transition arose repeatedly in conference sessions, whether the topic involved developing and adopting new technologies, constructing and siting infrastructure, drafting and passing vital energy policies, or attracting and retaining a skilled workforce.

Resolving conflicts

There is “blowback and a social cost” in transitioning away from fossil fuels, said Stephen Ansolabehere, the Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University, in a panel on the social barriers to decarbonization. “Companies need to engage differently and recognize the rights of communities,” he said.

Nora DeDontney, director of development at Vineyard Offshore, described her company’s two years of outreach and negotiations to bring large cables from ocean-based wind turbines onshore.

“Our motto is, 'community first,'” she said. Her company works to mitigate any impacts towns might feel because of offshore wind infrastructure construction with projects, such as sewer upgrades; provides workforce training to Tribal Nations; and lays out wind turbines in a manner that provides safe and reliable areas for local fisheries.

Elsa A. Olivetti, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and the lead of the Decarbonization Mission of MIT’s new Climate Project, discussed the urgent need for rapid scale-up of mineral extraction. “Estimates indicate that to electrify the vehicle fleet by 2050, about six new large copper mines need to come on line each year,” she said. To meet the demand for metals in the United States means pushing into Indigenous lands and environmentally sensitive habitats. “The timeline of permitting is not aligned with the temporal acceleration needed,” she said.

Larry Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, is trying to resolve such tensions with universities playing the role of mediators. He is creating renewable energy clinics where students train to participate in emerging disputes over siting. “Talk to people before decisions are made, conduct joint fact finding, so that facilities reduce harms and share the benefits,” he said.

Clean energy boom and pressure

A relatively recent and unforeseen increase in demand for energy comes from data centers, which are being built by large technology companies for new offerings, such as artificial intelligence.

“General energy demand was flat for 20 years — and now, boom,” said Sean James, Microsoft’s senior director of data center research. “It caught utilities flatfooted.” With the expansion of AI, the rush to provision data centers with upwards of 35 gigawatts of new (and mainly renewable) power in the near future, intensifies pressure on big companies to balance the concerns of stakeholders across multiple domains. Google is pursuing 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030, said Devon Swezey, the company’s senior manager for global energy and climate.

“We’re pursuing this by purchasing more and different types of clean energy locally, and accelerating technological innovation such as next-generation geothermal projects,” he said. Pedro Gómez Lopez, strategy and development director, Ferrovial Digital, which designs and constructs data centers, incorporates renewable energy into their projects, which contributes to decarbonization goals and benefits to locales where they are sited. “We can create a new supply of power, taking the heat generated by a data center to residences or industries in neighborhoods through District Heating initiatives,” he said.

The Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation has ramped up employment opportunities in clean energy nationwide, touching every region, including those most tied to fossil fuels. “At the start of 2024 there were about 3.5 million clean energy jobs, with 'red' states showing the fastest growth in clean energy jobs,” said David S. Miller, managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures. “The majority (58 percent) of new jobs in energy are now in clean energy — that transition has happened. And one-in-16 new jobs nationwide were in clean energy, with clean energy jobs growing more than three times faster than job growth economy-wide”

In this rapid expansion, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is prioritizing economically marginalized places, according to Zoe Lipman, lead for good jobs and labor standards in the Office of Energy Jobs at the DoE. “The community benefit process is integrated into our funding,” she said. “We are creating the foundation of a virtuous circle,” encouraging benefits to flow to disadvantaged and energy communities, spurring workforce training partnerships, and promoting well-paid union jobs. “These policies incentivize proactive community and labor engagement, and deliver community benefits, both of which are key to building support for technological change.”

Hydrogen opportunity and challenge

While engagement with stakeholders helps clear the path for implementation of technology and the spread of infrastructure, there remain enormous policy, scientific, and engineering challenges to solve, said multiple conference participants. In a “fireside chat,” Prasanna V. Joshi, vice president of low-carbon-solutions technology at ExxonMobil, and Ernest J. Moniz, professor of physics and special advisor to the president at MIT, discussed efforts to replace natural gas and coal with zero-carbon hydrogen in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in such major industries as steel and fertilizer manufacturing.

“We have gone into an era of industrial policy,” said Moniz, citing a new DoE program offering incentives to generate demand for hydrogen — more costly than conventional fossil fuels — in end-use applications. “We are going to have to transition from our current approach, which I would call carrots-and-twigs, to ultimately, carrots-and-sticks,” Moniz warned, in order to create “a self-sustaining, major, scalable, affordable hydrogen economy.”

To achieve net zero emissions by 2050, ExxonMobil intends to use carbon capture and sequestration in natural gas-based hydrogen and ammonia production. Ammonia can also serve as a zero-carbon fuel. Industry is exploring burning ammonia directly in coal-fired power plants to extend the hydrogen value chain. But there are challenges. “How do you burn 100 percent ammonia?”, asked Joshi. “That's one of the key technology breakthroughs that's needed.” Joshi believes that collaboration with MIT’s “ecosystem of breakthrough innovation” will be essential to breaking logjams around the hydrogen and ammonia-based industries.

MIT ingenuity essential

The energy transition is placing very different demands on different regions around the world. Take India, where today per capita power consumption is one of the lowest. But Indians “are an aspirational people … and with increasing urbanization and industrial activity, the growth in power demand is expected to triple by 2050,” said Praveer Sinha, CEO and managing director of the Tata Power Co. Ltd., in his keynote speech. For that nation, which currently relies on coal, the move to clean energy means bringing another 300 gigawatts of zero-carbon capacity online in the next five years. Sinha sees this power coming from wind, solar, and hydro, supplemented by nuclear energy.

“India plans to triple nuclear power generation capacity by 2032, and is focusing on advancing small modular reactors,” said Sinha. “The country also needs the rapid deployment of storage solutions to firm up the intermittent power.” The goal is to provide reliable electricity 24/7 to a population living both in large cities and in geographically remote villages, with the help of long-range transmission lines and local microgrids. “India’s energy transition will require innovative and affordable technology solutions, and there is no better place to go than MIT, where you have the best brains, startups, and technology,” he said.

These assets were on full display at the conference. Among them a cluster of young businesses, including:

• the MIT spinout Form Energy, which has developed a 100-hour iron battery as a backstop to renewable energy sources in case of multi-day interruptions;
• startup Noya that aims for direct air capture of atmospheric CO₂ using carbon-based materials;
• the firm Active Surfaces, with a lightweight material for putting solar photovoltaics in previously inaccessible places;
• Copernic Catalysts, with new chemistry for making ammonia and sustainable aviation fuel far more inexpensively than current processes; and
• Sesame Sustainability, a software platform spun out of MITEI that gives industries a full financial analysis of the costs and benefits of decarbonization.

The pipeline of research talent extended into the undergraduate ranks, with a conference “slam” competition showcasing students’ summer research projects in areas from carbon capture using enzymes to 3D design for the coils used in fusion energy confinement.

“MIT students like me are looking to be the next generation of energy leaders, looking for careers where we can apply our engineering skills to tackle exciting climate problems and make a tangible impact,” said Trent Lee, a junior in mechanical engineering researching improvements in lithium-ion energy storage. “We are stoked by the energy transition, because it’s not just the future, but our chance to build it.”

J-PAL North America recently selected government partners for the 2024-25 Leveraging Evaluation and Evidence for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) Evaluation Incubator cohort. Selected collaborators will receive funding and technical assistance to develop or launch a randomized evaluation for one of their programs. These collaborations represent jurisdictions across the United States and demonstrate the growing enthusiasm for evidence-based policymaking.

Launched in 2023, LEVER is a joint venture between J-PAL North America and Results for America. Through the Evaluation Incubator, trainings, and other program offerings, LEVER seeks to address the barriers many state and local governments face around finding and generating evidence to inform program design. LEVER offers government leaders the opportunity to learn best practices for policy evaluations and how to integrate evidence into decision-making. Since the program’s inception, more than 80 government jurisdictions have participated in LEVER offerings.

J-PAL North America’s Evaluation Incubator helps collaborators turn policy-relevant research questions into well-designed randomized evaluations, generating rigorous evidence to inform pressing programmatic and policy decisions. The program also aims to build a culture of evidence use and give government partners the tools to continue generating and utilizing evidence in their day-to-day operations.

In addition to funding and technical assistance, the selected state and local government collaborators will be connected with researchers from J-PAL’s network to help advance their evaluation ideas. Evaluation support will also be centered on community-engaged research practices, which emphasize collaborating with and learning from the groups most affected by the program being evaluated.

Evaluation Incubator selected projects

Pierce County Human Services (PCHS) in the state of Washington will evaluate two programs as part of the Evaluation Incubator. The first will examine how extending stays in a fentanyl detox program affects the successful completion of inpatient treatment and hospital utilization for individuals. “PCHS is interested in evaluating longer fentanyl detox stays to inform our funding decisions, streamline our resource utilization, and encourage additional financial commitments to address the unmet needs of individuals dealing with opioid use disorder,” says Trish Crocker, grant coordinator.

The second PCHS program will evaluate the impact of providing medication and outreach services via a mobile distribution unit to individuals with opioid use disorders on program take-up and substance usage. Margo Burnison, a behavioral health manager with PCHS, says that the team is “thrilled to be partnering with J-PAL North America to dive deep into the data to inform our elected leaders on the best way to utilize available resources.”

The City of Los Angeles Youth Development Department (YDD) seeks to evaluate a research-informed program: Student Engagement, Exploration, and Development in STEM (SEEDS). This intergenerational STEM mentorship program supports underrepresented middle school and college students in STEM by providing culturally responsive mentorship. The program seeks to foster these students’ STEM identity and degree attainment in higher education. YDD has been working with researchers at the University of Southern California to measure the SEEDS program’s impact, but is interested in developing a randomized evaluation to generate further evidence. Darnell Cole, professor and co-director of the Research Center for Education, Identity and Social Justice, shares his excitement about the collaboration with J-PAL: “We welcome the opportunity to measure the impact of the SEEDS program on our students’ educational experience. Rigorously testing the SEEDS program will help us improve support for STEM students, ultimately enhancing their persistence and success.”

The Fort Wayne Police Department’s Hope and Recovery Team in Indiana will evaluate the impact of two programs that connect social workers with people who have experienced an overdose, or who have a mental health illness, to treatment and resources. “We believe we are on the right track in the work we are doing with the crisis intervention social worker and the recovery coach, but having an outside evaluation of both programs would be extremely helpful in understanding whether and what aspects of these programs are most effective,” says Police Captain Kevin Hunter.

The County of San Diego’s Office of Evaluation, Performance and Analytics, and Planning & Development Services will engage with J-PAL staff to explore evaluation opportunities for two programs that are a part of the county’s Climate Action Plan. The Equity-Driven Tree Planting Program seeks to increase tree canopy coverage, and the Climate Smart Land Stewardship Program will encourage climate-smart agricultural practices. Ricardo Basurto-Davila, chief evaluation officer, says that “the county is dedicated to evidence-based policymaking and taking decisive action against climate change. The work with J-PAL will support us in combining these commitments to maximize the effectiveness in decreasing emissions through these programs.”

J-PAL North America looks forward to working with the selected collaborators in the coming months to learn more about these promising programs, clarify our partner’s evidence goals, and design randomized evaluations to measure their impact.

Any child who’s spent a morning building sandcastles only to watch the afternoon tide ruin them in minutes knows the ocean always wins.

Yet, coastal protection strategies have historically focused on battling the sea — attempting to hold back tides and fighting waves and currents by armoring coastlines with jetties and seawalls and taking sand from the ocean floor to “renourish” beaches. These approaches are temporary fixes, but eventually the sea retakes dredged sand, intense surf breaches seawalls, and jetties may just push erosion to a neighboring beach. The ocean wins.

With climate change accelerating sea level rise and coastal erosion, the need for better solutions is urgent. Noting that eight of the world’s 10 largest cities are near a coast, a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report pointed to 2023’s record-high global sea level and warned that high tide flooding is now 300 to 900 percent more frequent than it was 50 years ago, threatening homes, businesses, roads and bridges, and a range of public infrastructure, from water supplies to power plants.    

Island nations face these threats more acutely than other countries and there’s a critical need for better solutions. MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab is refining an innovative one that demonstrates the value of letting nature take its course — with some human coaxing.

The Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago of nearly 1,200 islands, has traditionally relied on land reclamation via dredging to replenish its eroding coastlines. Working with the Maldivian climate technology company Invena Private Limited, the Self-Assembly Lab is pursuing technological solutions to coastal erosion that mimic nature by harnessing ocean currents to accumulate sand. The Growing Islands project creates and deploys underwater structures that take advantage of wave energy to promote accumulation of sand in strategic locations — helping to expand islands and rebuild coastlines in sustainable ways that can eventually be scaled to coastal areas around the world. 

“There’s room for a new perspective on climate adaptation, one that builds with nature and leverages data for equitable decision-making,” says Invena co-founder and CEO Sarah Dole.

MIT’s pioneering work was the topic of multiple presentations during the United Nations General Assembly and Climate week in New York City in late September. During the week, Self-Assembly Lab co-founder and director Skylar Tibbits and Maldives Minister of Climate Change, Environment and Energy Thoriq Ibrahim also presented findings of the Growing Islands project at MIT Solve’s Global Challenge Finals in New York.

“There’s this interesting story that’s emerging around the dynamics of islands,” says Tibbits, whose U.N.-sponsored panel (“Adaptation Through Innovation: How the Private Sector Could Lead the Way”) was co-hosted by the Government of Maldives and the U.S. Agency for International Development, a Growing Islands project funder. 

In a recent interview, Tibbits said islands “are almost lifelike in their characteristics. They can adapt and grow and change and fluctuate.” Despite some predictions that the Maldives might be inundated by sea level rise and ravaged by erosion, “maybe these islands are actually more resilient than we thought. And maybe there’s a lot more we can learn from these natural formations of sand … maybe they are a better model for how we adapt in the future for sea level rise and erosion and climate change than our man-made cities.”

Building on a series of lab experiments begun in 2017, the MIT Self-Assembly Lab and Invena have been testing the efficacy of submersible structures to expand islands and rebuild coasts in the Maldivian capital of Male since 2019. Since then, researchers have honed the experiments based on initial results that demonstrate the promise of using submersible bladders and other structures to utilize natural currents to encourage strategic accumulation of sand.

The work is “boundary-pushing,” says Alex Moen, chief explorer engagement officer at the National Geographic Society, an early funder of the project.

“Skylar and his team’s innovative technology reflect the type of forward-thinking, solutions-oriented approaches necessary to address the growing threat of sea level rise and erosion to island nations and coastal regions,” Moen said.

Most recently, in August 2024, the team submerged a 60-by-60-meter structure in a lagoon near Male. The structure is six times the size of its predecessor installed in 2019, Tibbits says, adding that while the 2019 island-building experiment was a success, ocean currents in the Maldives change seasonally and it only allowed for accretion of sand in one season.

“The idea of this was to make it omnidirectional. We wanted to make it work year-round. In any direction, any season, we should be accumulating sand in the same area,” Tibbits says. “This is our largest experiment so far, and I think it has the best chance to accumulate the most amount of sand, so we’re super excited about that.”

The next experiment will focus not on building islands, but on overcoming beach erosion. This project, planned for installation later this fall, is envisioned to not only enlarge a beach but also provide recreational benefits for local residents and enhanced habitat for marine life such as fish and corals.

“This will be the first large-scale installment that’s intentionally designed for marine habitats,” Tibbits says.

Another key aspect of the Growing Islands project takes place in Tibbits’ lab at MIT, where researchers are improving the ability to predict and track changes in low-lying islands through satellite imagery analysis — a technique that promises to facilitate what is now a labor-intensive process involving land and sea surveys by drones and researchers on foot and at sea.

“In the future, we could be monitoring and predicting coastlines around the world — every island, every coastline around the world,” Tibbits says. “Are these islands getting smaller, getting bigger? How fast are they losing ground? No one really knows unless we do it by physically surveying right now and that’s not scalable. We do think we have a solution for that coming.”

Also hopefully coming soon is financial support for a Mobile Ocean Innovation Lab, a “floating hub” that would provide small island developing states with advanced technologies to foster coastal and climate resilience, conservation, and renewable energy. Eventually, Tibbits says, it would enable the team to travel “any place around the world and partner with local communities, local innovators, artists, and scientists to help co-develop and deploy some of these technologies in a better way.”

Expanding the reach of climate change solutions that collaborate with, rather than oppose, natural forces depends on getting more people, organizations, and governments on board. 

“There are two challenges,” Tibbits says. “One of them is the legacy and history of what humans have done in the past that constrains what we think we can do in the future. For centuries, we’ve been building hard infrastructure at our coastlines, so we have a lot of knowledge about that. We have companies and practices and expertise, and we have a built-up confidence, or ego, around what’s possible. We need to change that.

“The second problem,” he continues, “is the money-speed-convenience problem — or the known-versus-unknown problem. The hard infrastructure, whether that’s groins or seawalls or just dredging … these practices in some ways have a clear cost and timeline, and we are used to operating in that mindset. And nature doesn’t work that way. Things grow, change, and adapt on their on their own timeline.”

Teaming up with waves and currents to preserve islands and coastlines requires a mindset shift that’s difficult, but ultimately worthwhile, Tibbits contends.

Faculty and researchers receive many external awards throughout the year. The MIT School of Engineering periodically highlights the honors, prizes, and medals won by community members working in academic departments, labs, and centers. Summer 2024 honorees include the following:

Polina Anikeeva, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was recognized as a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards in the category of physical sciences and engineering. The Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists is the largest unrestricted scientific prize offered to America’s most promising, faculty-level scientific researchers under the age of 42.

Gabriele Farina, the X-Window Consortium Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), received an honorable mention for the 2023 Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award is presented annually to the author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering.

James Fujimoto, the Elihu Thomson Professor in Electrical Engineering, won the 2024 Honda Prize for his research group’s development of optical coherence tomography. The Honda Prize is an international award that acknowledges the efforts of an individual or a group to contribute new ideas that may lead the next generation in the field of ecotechnology.

Jeehwan Kim, an associate professor in MIT’s departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, won the engineering and technology category for the 2024 Falling Walls Global Call for his innovations in semiconductor technology. The Falling Walls Global Call is an international competition that seeks the most recent and innovative science breakthroughs, bringing together science enthusiasts from diverse backgrounds.

Samuel Madden, the College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing and faculty head of computer science in the Department of EECS, received the Edgar F Codd Innovations Award. The award is given for innovative and highly significant contributions of enduring value to the development, understanding, or use of database systems and databases.

Jelena Notaros, an assistant professor in the Department of EECS, received the 2024 Optica CLEO Highlighted Talk Award as co-principal investigator. The Optica CLEO Awards Program celebrates the field's technical, research, education, business, leadership, and service accomplishments.

Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Army Early Career Program Award. The award is among the most prestigious honors granted by the U.S. Army Research Office to outstanding early-career scientists.

Yogesh Surendranath, the Donner Professor of Science in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, was recognized as a finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards in the category of chemical sciences. The Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists is the largest unrestricted scientific prize offered to the United States' most promising, faculty-level scientific researchers under the age of 42.

Ashia Wilson, an assistant professor in the Department of EECS, received the Best Paper Award at the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). ACM FAccT is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities to investigate and tackle issues in this emerging area.

“The question behind my doctoral research is simple,” says Kunal Singh, an MIT political science graduate student in his final year of studies. “When one country learns that another country is trying to make a nuclear weapon, what options does it have to stop the other country from achieving that goal?” While the query may be straightforward, answers are anything but, especially at a moment when some nations appear increasingly tempted by the nuclear option.

From the Middle East to India and Pakistan, and from the Korean peninsula to Taiwan, Singh has been developing a typology of counterproliferation strategies based on historical cases and to some degree on emergent events. His aim is to clarify what states can do “to stop the bomb before it is made.” Singh’s interviews with top security officials and military personnel involved in designing and executing these strategies have illuminated tense episodes in the past 75 years or so when states have jockeyed to enter the elite atomic club. His insights might upend some of the binary thinking that dominates the field of nuclear security.

“Ultimately, I’d like my work to help decision-makers predict counterproliferation strategy, and draw lessons from it on how to shield their own citizens and economies from the impact of these strategies,” he says.

Types of nonproliferation tactics

On Oct. 7, 2023, Singh awoke to air raid sirens in Jerusalem, where he was conducting interviews, and discovered Israel was under attack. He was airlifted to safety back to the United States, having borne witness to the start of a regional war that “now has become relevant to my research,” he says.

Before his hasty departure, Singh was investigating two singular episodes where military force was deployed to advance nonproliferation goals: Israel’s airstrikes against nuclear reactors in 1981 in Iraq, and in 2007 in Syria. To date, these have been the only major attacks on nuclear facilities outside of an active war.

“I spoke with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who ordered the strike in Syria, and with the commander of the Israeli Air Force who planned the Iraq airstrike, as well as with other members of the security bureaucracy,” says Singh. “Israel feels a large degree of threat because it is a very small country surrounded by hostile powers, so it takes a military route to stop another state from acquiring nuclear weapons,” says Singh. But, he notes, “most of the states which are not in this predicament generally resort to diplomatic methods first, and threaten violence only as a last resort.”

Singh defines the military response by Israel as “kinetic reversion,” one of five types of counterproliferation strategies he has identified. Another is “military coercion,” where a state threatens the use of military force or uses moderate force to demonstrate its commitment to preventing the pursuit of the bomb. States can also use diplomatic and economic leverage over the proliferant to persuade it to drop its nuclear program, what Singh calls “diplomatic inhibition.” 

One form this strategy takes is when one country agrees to give up its program in return for the other doing the same. Another form involves “placing sanctions on a country and excluding them from the world economy, until the country rolls back its program — a strategy the U.S. has employed against Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Pakistan,” says Singh.

India was rumored to have embraced military tactics. “I had always read about the claim that India was ready to attack the Pakistani uranium enrichment plant in Kahuta, and that planes were called off at the last minute,” Singh says. “But in interview after interview I found this was not the case, and I discovered that many written accounts of this episode had been completely blown up.”

In another strategy, “pooled prevention,” nations can band together to apply economic, diplomatic, and military pressure on a potential proliferator.

Singh notes that diplomatic inhibition, pooled prevention, and military coercion have succeeded, historically. “In 2003, Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program completely after the U.S. and U.K. placed sanctions on it, and many states do not even start a nuclear weapons program because they anticipate an attack or a sanction.”

The final strategy Singh defines is “accommodation,” where one or more states decide not to take action against nuclear weapon development. The United States arrived at this strategy when China began its nuclear program — after first considering and rejecting military attacks.

Singh hopes that his five kinds of strategies challenge a “binary trap” that most academics in the field fall into. “They think of counterproliferation either as military attack or no military attack, economic sanctions or no sanctions, and so they miss out on the spectrum of behaviors, and how fluid they can be.”

From journalism to security studies

Singh grew up in Varanasi, a Hindu holy city in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Frequent terrorist attacks throughout India, and some inside his city’s temples, made a deep impression on him during his childhood, he says. A math and science talent, he attended the Indian Institute of Technology, majoring in metallurgical and materials engineering. After a brief stint with a management consulting firm, after college, he landed a job at a think tank, the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

“When I moved to New Delhi, I suddenly saw a world which I didn’t know existed,” Singh recalls. “I began meeting people for an evening round of discussions and began reading voraciously: books, editorial and opinion pages in newspapers, and looking for a greater sense of purpose and meaning in my work.”

His widening interests led to a job as staff writer, first at Mint, a business newspaper, and then to the Hindustan Times, working on both papers’ editorial pages. “This was where most of my intellectual development happened,” says Singh. “I made social connections, and many of them grew more towards the academics in the security field.”

Writing about a nuclear security question one day, Singh reached out to an expert in the United States: Vipin Narang, the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science at MIT. Over time, Narang helped Singh realize that the kind of questions Singh hoped to answer “lay more in the academic than in the journalistic domain,” recounts Singh.

In 2019, he headed to MIT and began a doctoral program focused on security studies and international relations. In his dissertation, “Nipping the Atom in the Bud: Strategies of Counterproliferation and How States Choose Among Them,” Singh hopes to move beyond a classic, academic debate: that nuclear weapons are either very destabilizing, or very stabilizing.

“Some argue that there is stability in the world because two states armed with nuclear weapons will avoid nuclear war, because they understand nobody will win a nuclear war,” explains Singh. “If this view is true, then we shouldn’t be alarmed by the proliferation of these weapons.” But “the counterargument is that there will always be an off chance someone will use these weapons, and so states should “try to use all their military and economic might to prevent another state from gaining nuclear weapons.”

As it turns out, neither extreme view governs in the real world. “The main takeaway from my research is that states are obviously concerned when some other country tries to make nuclear weapons, but they are not so concerned that in order to prevent a future destabilizing event, they are ready to destabilize the world as of now.”

In the final throes of writing his thesis and preparing for life as an academic, Singh remains alert to the parlous state of affairs in the Middle East and elsewhere. “I keep following events, knowing that something may prove relevant to my research,” he says.

Given the tense times and the often dark implications of his subject matter, Singh has found an optimal mode of blowing off steam: a daily badminton match. He and his wife also “binge watch either a spy thrill or a murder mystery every Saturday,” he says.

In a world both increasingly interconnected and increasingly threatened by regional conflicts, Singh believes, “there is still much to be discovered about how the world thinks about nuclear weapons, including what the impacts of nuclear weapons use might be,” he says. “I’d like to help shine a light on those new things, and broaden our understanding of nuclear weapons and the politics of nuclear security.”

Imagine using artificial intelligence to compare two seemingly unrelated creations — biological tissue and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9.” At first glance, a living system and a musical masterpiece might appear to have no connection. However, a novel AI method developed by Markus J. Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering at MIT, bridges this gap, uncovering shared patterns of complexity and order.

“By blending generative AI with graph-based computational tools, this approach reveals entirely new ideas, concepts, and designs that were previously unimaginable. We can accelerate scientific discovery by teaching generative AI to make novel predictions about never-before-seen ideas, concepts, and designs,” says Buehler.

The open-access research, recently published in Machine Learning: Science and Technology, demonstrates an advanced AI method that integrates generative knowledge extraction, graph-based representation, and multimodal intelligent graph reasoning.

The work uses graphs developed using methods inspired by category theory as a central mechanism to teach the model to understand symbolic relationships in science. Category theory, a branch of mathematics that deals with abstract structures and relationships between them, provides a framework for understanding and unifying diverse systems through a focus on objects and their interactions, rather than their specific content. In category theory, systems are viewed in terms of objects (which could be anything, from numbers to more abstract entities like structures or processes) and morphisms (arrows or functions that define the relationships between these objects). By using this approach, Buehler was able to teach the AI model to systematically reason over complex scientific concepts and behaviors. The symbolic relationships introduced through morphisms make it clear that the AI isn't simply drawing analogies, but is engaging in deeper reasoning that maps abstract structures across different domains.

Buehler used this new method to analyze a collection of 1,000 scientific papers about biological materials and turned them into a knowledge map in the form of a graph. The graph revealed how different pieces of information are connected and was able to find groups of related ideas and key points that link many concepts together.

“What’s really interesting is that the graph follows a scale-free nature, is highly connected, and can be used effectively for graph reasoning,” says Buehler. “In other words, we teach AI systems to think about graph-based data to help them build better world representations models and to enhance the ability to think and explore new ideas to enable discovery.”

Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.

The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and “Symphony No. 9,” suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity. “Similar to how cells in biological materials interact in complex but organized ways to perform a function, Beethoven's 9th symphony arranges musical notes and themes to create a complex but coherent musical experience,” says Buehler.

In another experiment, the graph-based AI model recommended creating a new biological material inspired by the abstract patterns found in Wassily Kandinsky’s painting, “Composition VII.” The AI suggested a new mycelium-based composite material. “The result of this material combines an innovative set of concepts that include a balance of chaos and order, adjustable property, porosity, mechanical strength, and complex patterned chemical functionality,” Buehler notes. By drawing inspiration from an abstract painting, the AI created a material that balances being strong and functional, while also being adaptable and capable of performing different roles. The application could lead to the development of innovative sustainable building materials, biodegradable alternatives to plastics, wearable technology, and even biomedical devices.

With this advanced AI model, scientists can draw insights from music, art, and technology to analyze data from these fields to identify hidden patterns that could spark a world of innovative possibilities for material design, research, and even music or visual art.

“Graph-based generative AI achieves a far higher degree of novelty, explorative of capacity and technical detail than conventional approaches, and establishes a widely useful framework for innovation by revealing hidden connections,” says Buehler. “This study not only contributes to the field of bio-inspired materials and mechanics, but also sets the stage for a future where interdisciplinary research powered by AI and knowledge graphs may become a tool of scientific and philosophical inquiry as we look to other future work.” 

“Markus Buehler’s analysis of papers on bioinspired materials transformed gigabytes of information into knowledge graphs representing the connectivity of various topics and disciplines,” says Nicholas Kotov, the Irving Langmuir Distinguished Professor of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, who was not involved with this work. “These graphs can be used as information maps that enable us to identify central topics, novel relationships, and potential research directions by exploring complex linkages across subsections of the bioinspired and biomimetic materials. These and other graphs like that are likely to be an essential research tool for current and future scientists.”

For graduate students Kelsey Pittman and Jacqueline Orr, service in the U.S. military led to their interest in engineering, and to the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).

Pittman’s first exposure to the military and engineering took place during her undergraduate years at the United States Military Academy West Point. 

“I remember back in high school, my dad kind of planted the seed of going to a military academy,” says Pittman.  While she admitted to feeling overwhelmed about the prospect of going to college at that time, her father’s rationale for West Point resonated with her. “I’m a structured person and I like routine,” she says — two aspects the environment at West Point provides.

While Pittman’s father hadn’t attended a military academy or served in the military, he was a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 25 years, and her family connections provided Pittman with valuable perspectives on West Point. It ended up being the only undergraduate program Pittman applied to. “I just wanted to be part of something bigger than myself, and all the opportunity West Point could give was pretty incredible,” she says.

Pittman’s parents also recognized her passion for design and encouraged her to consider a career in architecture. Although West Point didn’t offer an architecture program, she chose civil engineering, a field that allowed her to combine her love of math and design.

After graduating, she was commissioned as an engineer officer in the U.S. Army and has served for over seven years. She is now pursuing her graduate education at MIT in structural engineering with advisor John Ochsendorf, professor of civil and environmental engineering and architecture. Pittman is researching Gothic-style infrastructure for its masonry resiliency and stability over time, specifically Beauvais Cathedral and its structural safety. One of the reasons she chose to pursue her graduate studies in CEE was the department’s openness to explore diverse research opportunities.

“I was really drawn to the ability to carve my own research niche and have the freedom to figure out what really interests me, rather than being presented with a limited set of research options,” says Pittman.

After receiving her master’s degree, Pittman will return to West Point as a faculty member for three years and then continue her service obligation in the Army. She credits her mentors at West Point as being instrumental in her academic and professional journey and hopes to play a role in shaping the lives of future generations of cadets. 

“I have incredible mentors that I still talk to, and I really wanted to be able to go back and give back to a place, and the people that gave me so much support and room to grow and find my passion. Every step has been made in my career so far to get back to West Point and teach in the civil engineering department.”

Pittman also acknowledges and values the Army for the opportunities it has provided her, particularly the chance to pursue her master’s degree at MIT, the relationships she has built along the way and career path it has opened.

“I’ve enjoyed getting to know the soldiers from all over the world and seeing them in this environment where you might give each other a hard time, but at the end of the day you know that you have each other’s back.”

Jacqueline Orr, also a U.S. Military Academy graduate, is currently pursuing a master’s degree in structural engineering under the guidance of Josephine Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor for Civil and Environmental Engineering. Inspired by her father to pursue a strong foundation in math and science, she earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. After graduation, she fulfilled her service obligation and served for six years as a member of the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Vicenza, Italy — a unit renowned for its history, combat readiness, and crucial part of the Army’s joint integration with NATO. 

Reflecting on her experience, Orr says, “Airborne units, like many great units in the Army, require overcoming an additional litmus test — in this case, conquering the fear of jumping from high-performance aircraft, hundreds of feet above the ground."

While she enjoyed her time in the Army, her experiences ultimately led her to pursue a career more closely aligned with her passion for engineering. “When I was studying mechanical engineering, I developed a strong interest in structures during my senior design project,” she says.

She particularly enjoyed learning how to model structures and analyze how they respond to various forces. She felt that the traditional methods taught in her classes lacked an optimization component, which sparked her interest in topology optimization as a potential solution.

This desire to further explore topology optimization — specifically in relation to structures and their behavior under different forces — motivated her to seek graduate programs specializing in this field. Orr applied for and was awarded a Department of Defense (DoD) SMART Scholarship that brought her to MIT to study topology optimization in the Carstensen Lab.

“MIT was the ideal institution to pursue this research due to Professor Carstensen’s expertise and innovative work happening in the civil and environmental engineering department,” Orr says.

Looking ahead, Orr plans to apply the knowledge gained at MIT to a research-oriented career as part of her obligation as a DoD SMART Scholar. But for now, she’s adjusting to life as a graduate student. “I’m really enjoying my classes and getting to know people in the lab — it’s been an amazing experience,” she adds.  

Associate Professor Thomas Heldt joined the MIT faculty in 2013 as a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Additionally, Heldt is a principal investigator with MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and he directs the Integrative Neuromonitoring and Critical Care Informatics Group in IMES and RLE. He was recently named an associate director of IMES, where he will focus on internal affairs, among other duties. 

Heldt received his Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD from the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) in 2004. Heldt's research interests include signal processing, estimation and identification of physiological systems, mathematical modeling, model identification to support real-time clinical decision making, monitoring of disease progression, and titration of therapy, primarily in neurocritical and neonatal critical care. Here, Heldt describes how he collaborates closely with MIT colleagues and others at Boston-area hospitals, and how his research uses and analyzes physiologic data to aid clinical action.

Q: How does your research apply to solving clinical needs?

A: We look at current clinical environments and observe the volumes of multimodal physiologic waveform data that are collected on patients in critical care, peri-operative care, or even emergency care. Much of this data is typically visually reviewed by the clinicians and subsequently discarded after a holding period of just a few days. We thus lose the opportunity for more systematic analyses and for deriving patient-specific insights. Critical to such analyses of these data streams is a deep understanding of the relevant physiology at the time scales of interest. We leverage insights from physiology, formulated as reduced order mathematical models capturing the essential mechanisms that enable clinical action. We have applied this approach successfully to estimate intracranial pressure noninvasively, to make diagnostic decisions based on the analysis of the shape of the capnogram, and, are currently using ultrasound-based approaches to detect embolic events in patients on life support, such as ventricular assist devices or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. 

Q: You work closely with colleagues across MIT, and with clinicians at Boston-area hospitals, including Boston Children’s Hospital (where you hold a courtesy research appointment in neurology), Boston Medical Center (neurosurgery), and Massachusetts General Hospital (emergency medicine). What has been the fruit of some of these collaborations — what is the impact on your research?

A: Boston is a fantastic place to conduct translational research that crosses from our laboratories at MIT into the clinical environments for validation in the actual target patient population! The collaborative disposition and forward-thinking mindset of our clinician colleagues have really been fundamentally enabling for our research and have provided amazing mentoring to our students, postdocs, and me. We have collected validation data in brain-injured patients in the ICUs [intensive care units] at Boston Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC); we have collected pilot and validation data for our capnography work in the emergency departments at BCH and BIDMC; we have collected data for our emboli work in the operating rooms and ICUs at BCH, and have analyzed the medical records of the neonatal ICU at BIDMC and the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Our work with the neonatologist at BIDMC was focused on analyzing the monitoring alarm patterns in the neonatal ICU. We counted a staggering 177 alarms/baby/day, or one alarm every eight minutes on average, per baby. And this is a 54-bed neonatal ICU operating close to capacity every day! Such volumes of alarms contribute to noise pollution in an environment that should ideally be very calm. Additionally, since most of the alarms are nuisance alarms or do not require any clinical intervention, the clinical staff becomes desensitized to the alarm load and might end up ignoring truly important events. We analyzed the alarm patterns and alarm thresholds for a particular type of heart rate alarms and recommended a change in thresholds. This resulted in a 50 percent reduction in heart rate alarms per patient per day. Initially, the clinical staff had to file weekly reports to make sure the reduction in the alarm rate did not result in missed or adverse events. After about three months without a single reportable event, the hospital safety committee approved the change.

With colleagues from the MGH Department of Emergency Medicine, we developed and tested a triage rule to identify patients at risk of septic shock. At the time, the MGH ED [emergency department] saw more than 120,000 patients/year, and around 75 percent of patients ending up in the ICU with severe sepsis and septic shock came through the emergency department. Hence, ED triage was the first point of patient contact and the first opportunity to flag patients for possible sepsis and septic shock and initiation of early goal-directed therapy. One result of our work was a significant reduction in the time to appropriate antibiotic administration in the emergency department. The work was subsequently validated in other Partners hospitals and implemented in the electronic medical record system of Partners-affiliated hospitals. 

Q: Can you talk a bit about your background, and about how you became interested in systems-physiology and biomedicine? What are your goals for your research, and for your career?

A: That is a longer story! In short, I started out studying physics back in Germany. After a while, I got interested in applying concepts I learned in physics to physiology and medicine, so I designed my own MD/PhD program by picking up medicine as a second major. Through some fortuitous events, I ended up attending surgeries for congenital heart defects for about a term. This was a very formative experience, and almost pushed me toward dropping physics and going all-out on becoming a surgeon. However, I had also always wanted to spend part of my education abroad and had applied to various universities in the U.S. I ended up getting admitted to the graduate physics program at Yale and spent a couple of years doing nonlinear optics. While I loved the work at Yale and had a fantastic mentor, I missed the clinical exposure and application of my work to medicine. I had heard about the HST program and decided to send in an application. I joined the MEMP program in 1997 and have been at MIT ever since.

In our current research, we are very interested in providing better monitoring modalities for patients with brain injuries. We are developing novel algorithmic and device approaches so we can replace the current invasive monitoring modalities with entirely noninvasive ones and provide additional clinically actionable information that gives insights on the physiology of the injured brain and can help guide treatment decision. I want to see some of these technologies through to routine deployment at the bedside.

The great thing about being in IMES and MIT is that everybody is very collaborative. What I am looking forward to is much of the same, working with colleagues in IMES on important problems that none of us is be able to tackle alone, but that together we have a real chance of tackling — and having fun along the way! 

Jim Ellis II SM ’80 first learned about a special opportunity for members of the U.S. Coast Guard while stationed in Alaska.

“My commander had received a notice from headquarters about this opportunity. They were asking for recommendations for an officer who might be interested,” says Ellis.

The opportunity in question was the MIT Sloan Fellows program, today known as the MIT Sloan Fellows MBA (SFMBA) program. Every year for 50 years, the Coast Guard has nominated a service member to apply to the program. Fifty Sloan Fellows and two Management of Technology participants have graduated since 1976, and the 53rd student is currently enrolled.

With his tour nearly over, Ellis followed his commander’s recommendation to apply. The Coast Guard nominated him and his application to MIT Sloan School of Management was accepted. In 1980, Ellis became the fifth-ever Coast Guard Sloan Fellow to graduate due to the special arrangement.

“My experience at MIT Sloan has been instrumental throughout my entire career,” says Ellis, who, with his wife Margaret Brady, designated half of their bequest to support graduate fellowships through the MIT Sloan Veterans Fund and half to establish the Ellis/Brady Family Fund to support the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative.

“The success of the people who have been through the program is a testament to why the Coast Guard continues the program,” he adds.

The desire to change the world

Throughout its 163-year history, MIT has maintained strong relationships with the U.S. military through programs like the MIT Reserve Officers' Training Corps, the 2N Graduate Program in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and more.

The long-standing collaboration between MIT Sloan and the Coast Guard adds to this history. According to Johanna Hising DiFabio, assistant dean for executive degree programs at MIT Sloan, it demonstrates the Coast Guard’s dedication to leadership development, as well as the unique benefits MIT Sloan has to offer service members.

This is especially evident in the careers of the 52 Coast Guard Sloan Fellow alumni, many of whom the program often invites to speak to current students. “It is inspiring to hear our alumni reflect on how this education has significantly influenced their careers and the considerable impact they have had on the Coast Guard and the global community,” says DiFabio.

Captain Anne O’Connell MBA ’19 says, “It is very rewarding to be able to pay it back, to look for those officers coming up behind you who should absolutely be offered the same opportunities, and to help them chart that course. I think it's hugely important.”

One of the most notable Coast Guard Sloan Fellows is Retired Admiral Thad Allen SM ’89, who served as commandant of the Coast Guard from 2006 to 2010. One of the service’s youngest-ever flag officers, Allen is a figure beloved by current and former guardsmen. As commandant, he embraced new digital technologies, championed further arctic exploration, and solidified relations with the other armed services, federal partners, and private industry.

“When you leave MIT Sloan, you want to change the world,” says Allen.

Inspired by his father, who enlisted after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Allen attended the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and subsequently held various commands at sea and ashore during a career spanning four decades.

A few years before the end of his second decade, Allen learned about the Sloan Fellows Program through a service-wide solicitation. “The people I worked for believed this would be a great opportunity, and that it would match with my skill set,” says Allen. With the guidance of his senior captains, he applied to MIT Sloan.

Allen matriculated with a cohort whose members included Carly Fiorina SM ’89, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard; Daniel Hesse SM ’89, former CEO of Sprint; and Robert Malone SM ’89, former chair and president of BP America. Though he initially felt a sharp disconnect between his national service experience and their global private sector knowledge, Allen realized everyone in the cohort were becoming his peers.

Strong bonds with global perspectives

Like Allen, many of the Coast Guard Sloan Fellows acknowledge just how powerful their cohorts were when they matriculated, as well as how influential they have remained since.

“I have classmates with giant perspectives and unique expertise in places all over the world. It’s remarkable,” says Retired Commander Catherine Kang MBA ’06, who served as deputy of financial transformation for Allen.

The majority of SFMBA candidates come to Cambridge from around the world. For example, the 2023–24 cohort comprised 76 percent international citizens.

For Coast Guard Sloan Fellows with decades of domestic experience, their cohort’s global perspectives are as novel as they are informative. As Retired Captain Gregory Sanial SM ’07 explains, “We had students from 30 to 40 different countries, and I had the opportunity to learn a lot about different parts of the world and open up my mind to many different experiences.”

After the Coast Guard, Sanial pursued a doctoral degree in organizational leadership and a career in higher education that, professionally, has kept him stateside. Yet the bonds he built at MIT Sloan remain just as strong and as international as they were when he first arrived.

Many Coast Guard Sloan Fellows attribute this to the program’s focus on cooperation and social events.

“What impressed me most when I first got there were the team-building exercises, which made a difference in getting a group of diverse people to really gel and work together,” says Retired Captain Lisa Festa SM ’92, SM ’99. “MIT Sloan takes the time at the beginning to invest in you and to make sure you know the people you’re going through school with for the next year.”

The most recent Coast Guard Sloan Fellow alumnus, Commander Mark Ketchum MBA ’24, says his cohort’s connections are still fresh, but he believes they will last a lifetime. Considering the testimonies of his predecessors, this may very well be the case.

“My cohort made me stronger, and I would like to think that I imparted my strengths onto my classmates,” says Ketchum.

Big challenges with high impacts

Before earning the Coast Guard’s nomination and an acceptance letter from the SFMBA program, potential Sloan Fellows have already served in various leadership positions. Once they graduate, the recognition and distinction that comes with an MIT Sloan degree is quick.

So, too, are the more challenging leadership tracks.

After graduation, Allen served as deputy program manager for the Coast Guard’s shipbuilding program at the behest of the then-commandant. “For the agency head to say, ‘This is a bad problem, so I’m picking the next graduate from MIT Sloan,’ is indicative of the program’s cachet value,” he says. Allen then served in the office of budget and programs, a challenging and rewarding post that has become a hub for Coast Guard Sloan Fellows past, present, and future.

Like Rear Admiral Jason Tama MBA ’11 and Captain Brian Erickson MBA ’21, both of whom credit the office with introducing them to the vigorous work ethic necessary for both obtaining an MIT Sloan education and for becoming an effective leader.

“Never in a thousand years would I have gone on the resource management path until a mentor told me it would be one of the most challenging and high-impact things I could do,” says Tama. “You can never be fully prepared for the Sloan Fellows experience, but it can and will change you for the better. It changed the way I approach problems and challenges.”

“I owe MIT for the senior-level opportunities I’ve had in this organization, and I will probably owe them for some of the opportunities I may get in the future,” adds Erickson. “You should never, ever say no to this opportunity.”

From the early cohorts of Ellis, Allen, and Festa, to more recent alumni like O’Connell, Kang, and Ketchum, Coast Guard Sloan Fellows from the past half-century echo Erickson and Tama’s sentiments when asked about how MIT Sloan has changed them. Words like “challenge,” “opportunity,” and “impact” are used often and with purpose.

They believe joining the SFMBA program as up-and-coming senior leaders is an incredible opportunity for the individual and the Coast Guard, as well as the MIT community and the world at large.

“I am excited to see this tradition carry on,” says Tama. “I hope others who are considering it can see the potential and the value, not only for themselves, but for the Coast Guard as well.”

Participation by U.S. Coast Guard members in this highlight of prior MIT Sloan Fellows is not intended as, and does not constitute an endorsement of, the MIT Sloan Fellows MBA program or MIT by either the Department of Homeland Security or the U.S. Coast Guard.

When Nikola Tesla predicted we’d have handheld phones that could display videos, photographs, and more, his musings seemed like a distant dream. Nearly 100 years later, smartphones are like an extra appendage for many of us.

Digital fabrication engineers are now working toward expanding the display capabilities of other everyday objects. One avenue they’re exploring is reprogrammable surfaces — or items whose appearances we can digitally alter — to help users present important information, such as health statistics, as well as new designs on things like a wall, mug, or shoe.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the University of California at Berkeley, and Aarhus University have taken an intriguing step forward by fabricating “PortaChrome,” a portable light system and design tool that can change the color and textures of various objects. Equipped with ultraviolet (UV) and red, green, and blue (RGB) LEDs, the device can be attached to everyday objects like shirts and headphones. Once a user creates a design and sends it to a PortaChrome machine via Bluetooth, the surface can be programmed into multicolor displays of health data, entertainment, and fashion designs.

To make an item reprogrammable, the object must be coated with photochromic dye, an invisible ink that can be turned into different colors with light patterns. Once it’s coated, individuals can create and relay patterns to the item via the team’s graphic design software, or use the team’s API to interact with the device directly and embed data-driven designs. When attached to a surface, PortaChrome’s UV lights saturate the dye while the RGB LEDs desaturate it, activating the colors and ensuring each pixel is toned to match the intended design.

Zhu and her colleagues’ integrated light system changes objects’ colors in less than four minutes on average, which is eight times faster than their prior work, “Photo-Chromeleon.” This speed boost comes from switching to a light source that makes contact with the object to transmit UV and RGB rays. Photo-Chromeleon used a projector to help activate the color-changing properties of photochromic dye, where the light on the object's surface is at a reduced intensity.

“PortaChrome provides a more convenient way to reprogram your surroundings,” says Yunyi Zhu ’20, MEng ’21, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, affiliate of CSAIL, and lead author on a paper about the work. “Compared with our projector-based system from before, PortaChrome is a more portable light source that can be placed directly on top of the photochromic surface. This allows the color change to happen without user intervention and helps us avoid contaminating our environment with UV. As a result, users can wear their heart rate chart on their shirt after a workout, for instance.”

Giving everyday objects a makeover

In demos, PortaChrome displayed health data on different surfaces. A user hiked with PortaChrome sewed onto their backpack, putting it into direct contact with the back of their shirt, which was coated in photochromic dye. Altitude and heart rate sensors sent data to the lighting device, which was then converted into a chart through a reprogramming script developed by the researchers. This process created a health visualization on the back of the user’s shirt. In a similar showing, MIT researchers displayed a heart gradually coming together on the back of a tablet to show how a user was progressing toward a fitness goal.

PortaChrome also showed a flair for customizing wearables. For example, the researchers redesigned some white headphones with sideways blue lines and horizontal yellow and purple stripes. The photochromic dye was coated on the headphones and the team then attached the PortaChrome device to the inside of the headphone case. Finally, the researchers successfully reprogrammed their patterns onto the object, which resembled watercolor art. Researchers also recolored a wrist splint to match different clothes using this process.

Eventually, the work could be used to digitize consumers’ belongings. Imagine putting on a cloak that can change your entire shirt design, or using your car cover to give your vehicle a new look.

PortaChrome’s main ingredients

On the hardware end, PortaChrome is a combination of four main ingredients. Their portable device consists of a textile base as a sort of backbone, a textile layer with the UV lights soldered on and another with the RGB stuck on, and a silicone diffusion layer to top it off. Resembling a translucent honeycomb, the silicone layer covers the interlaced UV and RGB LEDs and directs them toward individual pixels to properly illuminate a design over a surface.

This device can be flexibly wrapped around objects with different shapes. For tables and other flat surfaces, you could place PortaChrome on top, like a placemat. For a curved item like a thermos, you could wrap the light source around like a coffee cup sleeve to ensure it reprograms the entire surface.

The portable, flexible light system is crafted with maker space-available tools (like laser cutters, for example), and the same method can be replicated with flexible PCB materials and other mass manufacturing systems.

While it can also quickly convert our surroundings into dynamic displays, Zhu and her colleagues believe it could benefit from further speed boosts. They'd like to use smaller LEDs, with the likely result being a surface that could be reprogrammed in seconds with a higher-resolution design, thanks to increased light intensity.

“The surfaces of our everyday things are encoded with colors and visual textures, delivering crucial information and shaping how we interact with them,” says Georgia Tech postdoc Tingyu Cheng, who was not involved with the research. “PortaChrome is taking a leap forward by providing reprogrammable surfaces with the integration of flexible light sources (UV and RGB LEDs) and photochromic pigments into everyday objects, pixelating the environment with dynamic color and patterns. The capabilities demonstrated by PortaChrome could revolutionize the way we interact with our surroundings, particularly in domains like personalized fashion and adaptive user interfaces. This technology enables real-time customization that seamlessly integrates into daily life, offering a glimpse into the future of ‘ubiquitous displays.’”

Zhu is joined by nine CSAIL affiliates on the paper: MIT PhD student and MIT Media Lab affiliate Cedric Honnet; former visiting undergraduate researchers Yixiao Kang, Angelina J. Zheng, and Grace Tang; MIT undergraduate student Luca Musk; University of Michigan Assistant Professor Junyi Zhu SM ’19, PhD ’24; recent postdoc and Aarhus University assistant professor Michael Wessely; and senior author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and leader of the HCI Engineering Group at CSAIL.

This work was supported by the MIT-GIST Joint Research Program and was presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in October.

A new MIT initiative aims to elevate human-centered research and teaching, and bring together scholars in the humanities, arts, and social sciences with their colleagues across the Institute.

The MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) launched earlier this fall. A formal kickoff event for MITHIC was held on campus Monday, Oct. 28, before a full audience in MIT’s Huntington Hall (Room 10-250). The event featured a conversation with Min Jin Lee, acclaimed author of “Pachinko,” moderated by Linda Pizzuti Henry SM ’05, co-owner and CEO of Boston Globe Media.

Initiative leaders say MITHIC will foster creativity, inquiry, and understanding, amplifying the Institute’s impact on global challenges like climate change, AI, pandemics, poverty, democracy, and more.

President Sally Kornbluth says MITHIC is the first of a new model known as the MIT Collaboratives, designed among other things to foster and support new collaborations on compelling global problems. The next MIT Collaborative will focus on life sciences and health.

“The MIT Collaboratives will make it easier for our faculty to ‘go big’ — to pursue the most innovative ideas in their disciplines and build connections to other fields,” says Kornbluth.

“We created MITHIC with a particular focus on the human-centered fields, to help advance research with the potential for global impact. MITHIC also has another, more local aim: to support faculty in developing fresh approaches to teaching and research that will engage and inspire a new generation of students,” Kornbluth adds.

A transformative opportunity

MITHIC is co-chaired by Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of the School of Engineering, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Agustin Rayo, Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS).

“MITHIC is an incredibly exciting and meaningful initiative to me as it represents MIT at its core — bringing broad perspectives and human insights to solve some of the world’s most important problems,” says Chandrakasan. “It offers the opportunity to shape the future of research and education at MIT through advancing core scholarship in the individual humanities, arts, and social sciences disciplines, but also through cross-cutting problem formulation and problem-solving. I have no doubt MITHIC will inspire our community to think differently and work together in ways that will have a lasting impact on society.”

Rayo says true innovation must go beyond technology to encompass the full complexity of the human experience.

“At MIT, we aim to make the world a better place. But you can't make the world a better place unless you understand its full economic, political, social, ethical — human — dimensions,” Rayo says. “MITHIC can help ensure that MIT educates broad-minded students, who are ready for the multidimensional challenges of the future.”

Rayo sees MITHIC as a transformative opportunity for MIT.

“MIT needs an integrated approach, which combines STEM with the human-centered disciplines. MITHIC can help catalyze that integration,” he says.

Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation, says MITHIC represents a commitment to collaboration, a spirit of curiosity, and the belief that uniting the humanities and sciences results in solutions that are not only innovative, but meaningful and lasting.

“MIT has long been a place where boundless ideas and entrepreneurial energy come together to meet the world’s toughest challenges,” Gorenberg says. “With MITHIC, we’re adding a powerful new layer to that mission — one that captures the richness of human experience and imagination.”

Support for MITHIC comes from all five MIT schools, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and the Office of the Provost, along with philanthropic support.

Charlene Kabcenell ’79, a life member of the MIT Corporation, and Derry Kabcenell ’75 chose to support MITHIC financially.

“MIT produces world-class scientists and technologists, but expertise in the skills of these areas is not enough. We are excited that the collaborations catalyzed by this initiative will help our graduates to stay mindful of the impact of their work on people and society,” they say.

Ray Stata ’57, MIT Corporation life member emeritus, is also a benefactor of MITHIC.

“In industry, it is not just technical innovation and breakthroughs that win, but also culture, in the ways people collaborate and work together. These are skills and behaviors that can be learned through a deeper understanding of humanities and social sciences. This has always been an important part of MIT’s education and I am happy to see the renewed attention being given to this aspect of the learning experience,” he says.

“A potential game changer”

Keeril Makan, associate dean for strategic initiatives in SHASS and the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor, is the faculty lead for MITHIC.

“MITHIC is about incentivizing collaboration, not research in specific areas,” says Makan. “It’s a ground-up approach, where we support faculty based upon the research that is of interest to them, which they identify.”

MITHIC consists of three new funding opportunities for faculty, the largest of which is the SHASS+ Connectivity Fund. For all three funds, proposals can be for projects ready to begin, as well as planning grants in preparation for future proposals.

The SHASS+ Connectivity Fund will support research that bridges between SHASS fields and other fields at MIT. Proposals require a project lead in SHASS and another project lead whose primary appointment is outside of SHASS.

The SHASS+ Connectivity Fund is co-chaired by David Kaiser, the Germehausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics, and Maria Yang, deputy dean of engineering and Kendall Rohsenow Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

“MIT has set an ambitious agenda for itself focused on addressing extremely complex and challenging problems facing society today, such as climate change, and there is a critical role for technological solutions to address these problems,” Yang says. “However, the origin of these problems are in part  due to humans, so humanistic considerations need to be part of the solution. Such problems cannot be conquered by technology alone.”

Yang says the goal of the SHASS+ Connectivity Fund is to enhance MIT’s research by building interdisciplinary teams, embedding a human-centered focus.

“My hope is that these collaborations will build bridges between SHASS and the rest of MIT, and will lead to integrated research that is more powerful and meaningful together,” says Yang.

Proposals for the first round of projects are due Nov. 22, but MITHIC is already bringing MIT faculty together to share ideas in hopes of sparking ideas for potential collaboration.

An information session and networking reception was held in September. MITHIC has also been hosting a series of “Meeting of the Minds” events. Makan says these have been opportunities for faculty and teaching staff to make connections around a specific topic or area of interest with colleagues they haven’t previously worked with.

Recent Meeting of the Minds sessions have been held on topics like cybersecurity, social history of math, food security, and rebuilding Ukraine.

“Faculty are already educating each other about their disciplines,” says Makan. “What happens in SHASS has been opaque to faculty in the other schools, just as the research in the other schools has been opaque to the faculty in SHASS. We’ve seen progress with initiatives like the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), when it comes to computing. MITHIC will broaden that scope.”

The leadership of MITHIC is cross-disciplinary, with a steering committee of faculty representing all five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Iain Cheeseman, the Herman and Margaret Sokol Professor of Biology, is a member of the MITHIC steering committee. He says that while he continues to be amazed and inspired by the diverse research and work from across MIT, there’s potential to go even further by working together and connecting across diverse perspectives, ideas, and approaches.

“The bold goal and mission of MITHIC, to connect the humanities at MIT to work being conducted across the other schools at MIT, feels like a potential game-changer,” he says. “I am really excited to see the unexpected new work and directions that come out of this initiative, including hopefully connections that persist and transform the work across MIT.”

Enhancing the arts and humanities

In addition to the SHASS+ Connectivity Fund, MITHIC has two funds aimed specifically at enhancing research and teaching within SHASS.

The Humanities Cultivation Fund will support projects from the humanities and arts in SHASS. It is co-chaired by Arthur Bahr, professor of literature, and Anne McCants, the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of History and SHASS research chair.

“Humanistic scholarship and artistic creation have long been among MIT’s hidden gems. The Humanities Cultivation Fund offers an exciting new opportunity to not only allow such work to continue to flourish, but also to give it greater visibility across the MIT community and into the wider world of scholarship. The fund aspires to cultivate — that is, to seed and nurture — new ideas and modes of inquiry into the full spectrum of human culture and expression,” says McCants.

The SHASS Education Innovation Fund will support new educational approaches in SHASS fields. The fund is co-chaired by Eric Klopfer, professor of comparative media studies/writing, and Emily Richmond Pollock, associate professor of music and SHASS undergraduate education chair.

Pollock says the fund is a welcome chance to support colleagues who have a strong sense of where teaching in SHASS could go next.

“We are looking for efforts that address contemporary challenges of teaching and learning, with approaches that can be tested in a specific context and later applied across the school. The crucial role of SHASS in educating MIT students in all fields means that what we devise here in our curriculum can have huge benefits for the Institute as a whole.”

Makan says infusing MIT’s human-centered disciplines with support is an essential part of MITHIC.

“The stronger these units are, the more the human-centered disciplines permeate the student experience, ultimately helping to build a stronger, more inclusive MIT,” says Makan.

The Lemelson-MIT Program has announced the 2024-25 InvenTeams — eight teams of high school students, teachers, and mentors from across the country. Each team will each receive $7,500 in grant funding and year-long support to build a technological invention to solve a problem of their own choosing. The students’ inventions are inspired by real-world problems they identified in their local communities.

The InvenTeams were selected by a respected panel consisting of university professors, inventors, entrepreneurs, industry professionals, and college students. Some panel members were former InvenTeam members now working in industry. The InvenTeams are focusing on problems facing their local communities, with a goal that their inventions will have a positive impact on beneficiaries and, ultimately, improve the lives of others beyond their communities.

This year’s teams are:

• Battle Creek Area Mathematics and Science Center (Battle Creek, Michigan)
• Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
• Colegio Rosa-Bell (Guaynabo, Puerto Rico)
• Edison High School (Edison, New Jersey)
• Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science (Worcester, Massachusetts)
• Nitro High School (Nitro, West Virginia)
• Southcrest Christian School (Lubbock, Texas)
• Ygnacio Valley High School (Concord, California)

InvenTeams are comprised of students, teachers and community mentors who pursue year-long invention projects involving creative thinking, problem-solving, and hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The InvenTeams’ prototype inventions will be showcased at a technical review within their home communities in February 2025, and then again as a final prototype at EurekaFest — an invention celebration taking place June 9-11, 2025, at MIT.

“The InvenTeams are focusing on solving problems that impact their local communities,” says Leigh Estabrooks, Lemelson-MIT’s invention education officer. “Teams are focusing their technological solutions — their inventions — on health and well-being, environmental issues, and safety concerns. These high school students are not just problem-solvers of tomorrow, they are problem solvers today helping to make our world healthier, greener, and safer.”

This year the Lemelson-MIT Program and the InvenTeams grants initiative celebrate a series of firsts in the annual high school invention grant program. For the first time, a team from their home city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will participate, representing the Cambridge community’s innovative spirit on a national stage. Additionally, the program welcomes the first team from Puerto Rico, highlighting the expanding reach of the InvenTeams grants initiative. The pioneering teams exemplify the diversity and creativity that fuel invention.

The InvenTeams grants initiative, now in its 21st year, has enabled 18 teams of high school students to be awarded U.S. patents for their projects. Intellectual property education is combined with invention education offerings as part of the Lemelson-MIT Program’s deliberate efforts to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations. The ongoing efforts empower students from all backgrounds, equipping them with invaluable problem-solving skills that will serve them well throughout their academic journeys, professional pursuits, and personal lives. The program has worked with over 4,000 students across 304 different InvenTeams nationwide and has included:

• partnering with intellectual property (IP) law firms to provide pro bono legal support;
• collaborating with industry-leading companies that provide technical guidance and mentoring;
• providing professional development for teachers on invention education and IP;
• assisting teams with identifying resources within their communities’ innovation ecosystems to support ongoing invention efforts; and
• publishing case studies and research to inform the work of invention educators and policy makers to build support for engaging students in efforts to invent solutions to real-world problems, thus fueling the innovation economy in the U.S.

The Lemelson-MIT Program is a national leader in efforts to prepare the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs, focusing on the expansion of opportunities for people to learn ways inventors find and solve problems that matter to improve lives. A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion aims to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations.

Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history’s most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy founded the Lemelson-MIT Program in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and administered by the MIT School of Engineering. For more information, contact Leigh Estabrooks. 

As educators are challenged to balance student learning and well-being with planning authentic and relevant course materials, MIT pK-12 at Open Learning developed a framework that can help. The student-centered STEAM learning architecture, initially co-created for Itz’at STEAM Academy in Belize, now serves as a model for schools worldwide.

Three core pillars guide MIT pK-12’s vision for teaching and learning: social-emotional and cultural learning, transdisciplinary academics, and community engagement. Claudia Urrea, principal investigator for this project and senior associate director of MIT pK-12, says this innovative framework supports learners’ growth as engaged and self-directed students. Joining these efforts on the pK-12 team are Joe Diaz, program coordinator, and Emily Glass, senior learning innovation designer.

Now that Itz’at has completed its first academic year, the MIT pK-12 team reflects on how the STEAM learning architecture works in practice and how it could be adapted to other schools.

Q: Why would a new school need a STEAM learning architecture? How is this framework used?

Glass: In the case of Itz’at STEAM Academy, the school aims to prepare its students for careers and jobs of the future, recognizing that learners will be navigating an evolving global economy with significant technological changes. Since the local and global landscape will continue to evolve over time, in order to stay innovative, the STEAM learning architecture serves as a reference document for the school to reflect, iterate, and improve its program. Learners will need to think critically, solve large problems, embrace creativity, and utilize digital technologies and tools to their benefit.

Q: How do you begin developing a school from scratch?

Urrea: To build a school that reflected local values and aspired towards global goals, our team knew we needed a deep understanding of the strengths and needs of Belize’s larger education ecosystem and culture. We collaborated with Belize's Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, and Technology, as well as the newly hired Itz’at staff.

Next, we conducted an extensive review of research, drawing from MIT pK-12’s own work and outside academic studies on competency-based education, constructionism, and other foundational pedagogies. We gathered best practices of innovative schools through interviews and global site visits.

MIT’s collective team experience included the creation of schools for the NuVuX network, constructionist pedagogical research and practice, and the development of STEAM-focused educational materials for both formal and informal learning environments.

Q: Why was co-creation important for this process?

Urrea: MIT pK-12 could not imagine doing this project without strong co-creation. Everyone involved has their own expertise and understanding of what works best for learners and educators, and collaborating ensures that all stakeholders have a voice in the school’s pedagogy. We co-designed an innovative framework that’s relevant to Belize.

However, there’s no one-size-fits-all pedagogy that will be successful in every context. This framework allows educators to adapt their approaches. The school and the ministry can sustain Itz’at’s experimental nature with continual reflection, iteration, and improvement.

Q: What was the reasoning behind the framework’s core pillars?

Glass: MIT pK-12 found that many successful schools had strong social-emotional support, specific approaches to academics, and reciprocal relationships with their surrounding communities.

We tailored each core pillar to Itz’at. To better support learners’ social-emotional well-being, Belizean cultural identity is an essential part of the learning needed to anchor this project locally. A transdisciplinary approach most clearly aligns with the school’s focus on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, encouraging learners to ask big questions facing the world today. And to engage learners in real-world learning experiences, the school coordinates internships with the local community.

Q: Which areas of learning science research were most significant to the STEAM architecture? How does this pedagogy differ from Itz’at educators’ previous experiences?

Urrea: Learning at the Itz'at STEAM Academy focuses on authentic learning experiences and concrete evidence of concept mastery. Educators say that this is different from other schools in Belize, where conventional grading is based on rote memorization in isolated academic subjects.

Together as a team, Itz’at educators shifted their teaching to follow the foundational principles from the STEAM learning architecture, both bringing in their own experiences and implementing new practices.

Glass: Itz’at’s competency-based approach promotes a more holistic educational experience. Instead of traditional subjects like science, history, math, and language arts, Itz’at classes cover sustainable environments, global humanities, qualitative reasoning, arts and fabrication, healthy living, and real-world learning. Combining disciplines in multiple ways allows learners to draw stronger connections between different subjects.

Diaz: When the curriculum is relevant to learners’ lives, learners can also more easily connect what happens inside and outside of the classroom. Itz’at educators embraced bringing in experts from the local community to enrich learning experiences.

Q: How does the curriculum support learners with career preparation?

Diaz: To ensure learners can transition smoothly from school to the workforce, Itz’at offers exposure to potential careers early in their journey. Internships with local businesses, community organizations, and government agencies provide learners with real-world experience in professional environments.

Students begin preparing for internships in their second year and attend seminars in their third year. By their fourth and final year, they are expected to begin internships and capstone projects that demonstrate academic rigor, innovative thinking, and mastery of concepts, topics, and skills of their choosing.

Q: What do you hope the impact of the STEAM architecture will be?

Glass: Our hope is that the STEAM learning architecture will serve as a resource for educators, school administrators, policymakers, and researchers beyond Belize. This framework can help educational practitioners respond to critical challenges, including preparation for life and careers, thinking beyond short-term outcomes, learners’ mental health and well-being, and more.

Bridging Talents and Opportunities (BTO) held its second annual forum at the Stratton Student Center at MIT Oct. 11-12. The two-day event gathered over 500 participants, including high school students and their families, undergraduate students, professors, and leaders across STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) fields.

The forum sought to empower talented students from across the United States and Latin America to dream big and pursue higher education, demonstrating that access to prestigious institutions like MIT is possible regardless of socioeconomic barriers. The event featured inspirational talks from world-renowned scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs, social leaders, and major figures in entertainment — from Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum to musician and producer Emilio Estefan, and more.

“Our initiative is committed to building meaningful connections among talented young individuals, their families, foundations, and leaders in science, art, mathematics, and technology,” says Ronald Garcia Ruiz, the Thomas A. Frank Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT and an organizer of the forum. “Recognizing that talent is universal but opportunities are often confined to select sectors of society, we are dedicated to bridging this gap. BTO provides a platform for sharing inspiring stories and offering support to promising young talents, empowering them to seize the diverse opportunities that await them.”

During their talks and panel discussions, speakers shared their insight into topics such as access to STEAM education, overcoming challenges and socioeconomic barriers, and strategies for fostering inclusion in STEAM fields. Students also had the opportunity to network with industry leaders and professionals, building connections to foster future collaborations.

Attendees also participated in hands-on scientific demonstrations, interaction with robots, and tours of MIT labs, providing a view of cutting-edge scientific research. The event also included musical performances from Latin American students from Berklee College of Music.

“I was thrilled to see the enthusiasm of young people and their parents and to be inspired by the great life stories of accomplished scientists and individuals from other fields making a positive impact in the real world,” says Edwin Pedrozo Peñafiel, assistant professor of physics at the University of Florida and an organizer. “This is why I strongly believe that representation matters.”

Welcoming a Nobel laureate

The first day of the forum opened with the welcoming words from Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science, and Boleslaw Wyslouch, director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science and the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center, and concluded with a keynote address by human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum, 1992 Nobel Peace laureate and founder of the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation. Reflecting upon Indigenous perspectives on science, she emphasized the importance of maintaining a humanistic perspective in scientific discovery. “My struggle has been one of constructing a humanistic perspective … that science, technology … are products of the strength of human beings,” Menchú remarked. She also shared her extraordinary story, encouraging students to persevere no matter the obstacles.

Diana Grass, a PhD Student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program and organizer, shares, “As a woman in science and a first-generation student, I’ve experienced firsthand the impact of breaking barriers and the importance of representation. At Bridging Talents and Opportunities (BTO), we are shaping a future where opportunities are available to all. Seeing students from disadvantaged backgrounds, along with their parents, engage with some of today’s most influential scientists and leaders — who shared their own stories of resilience — was both inspiring and transformative. It ignited crucial conversations about how interdisciplinary collaboration in STEAM, grounded in humanity, is essential for tackling the critical challenges of our era.”

Power of the Arts

The second day concluded with a panel on “The Power of the Arts,” featuring actor, singer, and songwriter Carlos Ponce, as well as musician and producer Emilio Estefan. They were joined by journalist and author Luz María Doria, who moderated the discussion. Throughout the panel, the speakers recounted their inspiring journeys toward success in the entertainment industry. “This forum reaffirmed our commitment to bridging talent with opportunity,” says Ponce. “The energy and engagement from students, families, and speakers were incredible, fostering a space of learning, empowerment, and possibility.”

During the forum, a two-hour workshop was held that brought together scientists, nonprofit foundations, and business leaders to discuss concrete proposals for creating opportunities for young talents. In this workshop, they had the opportunity to share their ideas with one another. Key ideas and final takeaways from the workshop included developing strategic programs to match talented young students with mentors from diverse backgrounds who can serve as role models, better utilization of existing programs supporting underserved populations, dissemination of information about such programs, ideas to improve financial support for students pursuing education, and fostering extended collaborations between the three groups involved in the workshop.

Maria Angélica Cuellar, CEO of Incontact Group and a BTO organizer, says, “The event was absolutely spectacular and exceeded our expectations. We not only brought together leaders making a global impact in STEAM and business, but also secured financial commitments to support young talents. Through media coverage and streaming, our message reached every corner of the world, especially Latin America and the U.S. I’m deeply grateful for the commitment of each speaker and for the path now open to turn this dream of connecting stakeholders into tangible results and actions. An exciting challenge lies ahead, driving us to work even harder to create opportunities for these talented young people.”

“Bridging Talents and Opportunities was a unique event that brought together students, parents, professors, and leaders in different fields in a relatable and inspiring environment,” says Sebastián Ruiz Lopera, a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an organizer. “Every speaker, panelist, and participant shared a story of resilience and passion that will motivate the next generation of young talents from disadvantaged backgrounds to become the new leaders and stakeholders.”

The 2024 BTO forum was made possible with the support of the Latinx Graduate Student Association at MIT, Laboratory of Nuclear Science, MIT MLK Scholars Program, Institute Community and Equity Office, the School of Science, the U.S. Department of Energy, University of Florida, CHN, JGMA Architects, Berklee College of Music, and the Harvard Colombian Student Society.

At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the conditions and culture of Black people in Philadelphia, documenting also the racist attitudes and beliefs that pervaded the white society around them. He described how unequal outcomes in domains like health could be attributed not only to racist ideas, but to racism embedded in American institutions.

Almost 125 years later, the concept of “systemic racism” is central to the study of race. Centuries of data collection and analysis, like the work of Du Bois, document the mechanisms of racial inequity in law and institutions, and attempt to measure their impact.

“There’s extensive research showing racial discrimination and systemic inequity in essentially all sectors of American society,” explains Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, who directs the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), where she also co-leads the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR). “Newer research demonstrates how computational technologies, typically trained or reliant on historical data, can further entrench racial bias. But these same tools can also help to identify racially inequitable outcomes, to understand their causes and impacts, and even contribute to proposing solutions.”

In addition to coordinating research on systemic racism across campus, the IDSS initiative has a new project aiming to empower and support this research beyond MIT: the new ICSR Data Hub, which serves as an evolving, public web depository of datasets gathered by ICSR researchers.

Data for justice

“My main project with ICSR involved using Amazon Web Services to build the data hub for other researchers to use in their own criminal justice related projects,” says Ben Lewis SM ’24, a recent alumnus of the MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and current doctoral student at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “We want the data hub to be a centralized place where researchers can access this information via a simple web or Python interface.”

While earning his master’s degree at TPP, Lewis focused his research on race, drug policy, and policing in the United States, exploring drug decriminalization policies’ impact on rates of incarceration and overdose. He worked as a member of the ICSR Policing team, a group of researchers across MIT examining the roles data plays in the design of policing policies and procedures, and how data can highlight or exacerbate racial bias.

“The Policing vertical started with a really challenging fundamental question,” says team lead and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) Professor Devavrat Shah. “Can we use data to better understand the role that race plays in the different decisions made throughout the criminal justice system?”

So far, the data hub offers 911 dispatch information and police stop data, gathered from 40 of the largest cities in the United States by ICSR researchers. Lewis hopes to see the effort expand to include not only other cities, but other relevant and typically siloed information, like sentencing data.

“We want to stitch the datasets together so that we have a more comprehensive and holistic view of law enforcement systems,” explains Jessy Xinyi Han, a fellow ICSR researcher and graduate student in the IDSS Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program. Statistical methods like causal inference can help to uncover root causes behind inequalities, says Han — to “untangle a web of possibilities” and better understand the causal effect of race at different stages of the criminal justice process.

“My motivation behind doing this project is personal,” says Lewis, who was drawn to MIT in large part by the opportunity to research systemic racism. As a TPP student, he also founded the Cambridge branch of End Overdose, a nonprofit dedicated to stopping drug overdose deaths. His advocacy led to training hundreds in lifesaving drug interventions, and earned him the 2024 Collier Medal, an MIT distinction for community service honoring Sean Collier, who gave his life serving as an officer with the MIT Police.

“I’ve had family members in incarceration. I’ve seen the impact it has had on my family, and on my community, and realized that over-policing and incarceration are a Band-Aid on issues like poverty and drug use that can trap people in a cycle of poverty.”

Education and impact

Now that the infrastructure for the data hub has been built, and the ICSR Policing team has begun sharing datasets, the next step is for other ICSR teams to start sharing data as well. The cross-disciplinary systemic racism research initiative includes teams working in domains including housing, health care, and social media.

“We want to take advantage of the abundance of data that is available today to answer difficult questions about how racism results from the interactions of multiple systems,” says Munther Dahleh, EECS professor, IDSS founding director, and ICSR co-lead. “Our interest is in how various institutions perpetuate racism, and how technology can exacerbate or combat this.”

To the data hub creators, the main sign of success for the project is seeing the data used in research projects at and beyond MIT. As a resource, though, the hub can support that research for users from a range of experience and backgrounds.

“The data hub is also about education and empowerment,” says Han. “This information can be used in projects designed to teach users how to use big data, how to do data analysis, and even to learn machine learning tools, all specifically to uncover racial disparities in data.”

“Championing the propagation of data skills has been part of the IDSS mission since Day 1,” says Dahleh. “We are excited by the opportunities that making this data available can present in educational contexts, including but not limited to our growing IDSSx suite of online course offerings.”

This emphasis on educational potential only augments the ambitions of ICSR researchers across MIT, who aspire to use data and computing tools to produce actionable insights for policymakers that can lead to real change.

“Systemic racism is an abundantly evidenced societal challenge with far-reaching impacts across domains,” says Christia. “At IDSS, we want to ensure that developing technologies, combined with access to ever-increasing amounts of data, are leveraged to combat racist outcomes rather than continue to enact them.”

Artist and designer Es Devlin is the recipient of the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT. The $100,000 prize, to be awarded at a gala in her honor, also includes an artist residency at MIT in spring 2025, during which Es Devlin will present her work in a lecture open to the public on May 1, 2025. 

Devlin’s work explores biodiversity, linguistic diversity, and collective AI-generated poetry, all areas that also are being explored within the MIT community. She is known for public art and installations at major museums such as the Tate Modern, kinetic stage designs for the Metropolitan Opera, the Super Bowl, and the Olympics, as well as monumental stage sculptures for large-scale stadium concerts.

“I am always most energized by works I have not yet made, so I am immensely grateful to have this trust and investment in ideas I’ve yet to conceive,” says Devlin. “I’m honored to receive an award that has been granted to so many of my heroes, and look forward to collaborating closely with the brilliant minds at MIT.”

“We look forward to presenting Es Devlin with MIT’s highest award in the arts. Her work will be an inspiration for our students studying the visual arts, theater, media, and design. Her interest in AI and the arts dovetails with a major initiative at MIT to address the societal impact of GenAI [generative artificial intelligence],” says MIT vice provost and Ford International Professor of History Philip S. Khoury. “With a new performing arts center opening this winter and a campus-wide arts festival taking place this spring, there could not be a better moment to expose MIT’s creative community to Es Devlin’s extraordinary artistic practice.”

The Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT recognizes innovative artists working in any field or cross-disciplinary activity. The $100,000 prize represents an investment in the recipient’s future creative work, rather than a prize for a particular project or lifetime of achievement. The official announcement was made at the Council for the Arts at MIT’s 51st annual meeting on Oct. 24. Since it was established in 1974, the award has been bestowed upon 38 individuals who work in performing, visual, and media arts, as well as authors, art historians, and patrons of the arts. Past recipients include Santiago Calatrava, Gustavo Dudamel, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Lepage, Audra McDonald, Suzan-Lori Parks, Bill Viola, and Pamela Z, among others.

A distinctive feature of the award is a short residency at MIT, which includes a public presentation of the artist’s work, substantial interaction with students and faculty, and a gala that convenes national and international leaders in the arts. The goal of the residency is to provide the recipient with unparalleled access to the creative energy and cutting-edge research at the Institute and to develop mutually enlightening relationships in the MIT community.

The Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT was established in 1974 by Margaret McDermott (1912-2018) in honor of her husband, Eugene McDermott (1899-1973), a co-founder of Texas Instruments and longtime friend and benefactor of MIT. The award is presented by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

The award is bestowed upon individuals whose artistic trajectory and body of work have achieved the highest distinction in their field and indicate they will remain leaders for years to come. The McDermott Award reflects MIT’s commitment to risk-taking, problem-solving, and connecting creative minds across disciplines.

Es Devlin, born in London in 1971, views an audience as a temporary society and often invites public participation in communal choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at Tate Modern, V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum, and Lincoln Center, to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic ceremonies, Super Bowl halftime shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for large-scale stadium concerts.

Devlin is the subject of a major monographic book, “An Atlas of Es Devlin,” described by Thames and Hudson as their most intricate and sculptural publication to date, and a retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. In 2020, she became the first female architect of the U.K. Pavilion at a World Expo, conceiving a building which used AI to co-author poetry with visitors on its 20-meter diameter facade. Her practice was the subject of the 2015 Netflix documentary series “Abstract: The Art of Design.” She is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, University of the Arts London, and a Royal Designer for Industry at the Royal Society of Arts. She has been awarded the London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, doctorates from the Universities of Bristol and Kent, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire award.

Like humans and other complex multicellular organisms, single-celled bacteria can fall ill and fight off viral infections. A bacterial virus is caused by a bacteriophage, or, more simply, phage, which is one of the most ubiquitous life forms on earth. Phages and bacteria are engaged in a constant battle, the virus attempting to circumvent the bacteria’s defenses, and the bacteria racing to find new ways to protect itself.

These anti-phage defense systems are carefully controlled, and prudently managed — dormant, but always poised to strike.

New open-access research recently published in Nature from the Laub Lab in the Department of Biology at MIT has characterized an anti-phage defense system in bacteria, CmdTAC. CmdTAC prevents viral infection by altering the single-stranded genetic code used to produce proteins, messenger RNA.

This defense system detects phage infection at a stage when the viral phage has already commandeered the host’s machinery for its own purposes. In the face of annihilation, the ill-fated bacterium activates a defense system that will halt translation, preventing the creation of new proteins and aborting the infection — but dooming itself in the process.

“When bacteria are in a group, they’re kind of like a multicellular organism that is not connected to one another. It’s an evolutionarily beneficial strategy for one cell to kill itself to save another identical cell,” says Christopher Vassallo, a postdoc and co-author of the study. “You could say it’s like self-sacrifice: One cell dies to protect the other cells.”

The enzyme responsible for altering the mRNA is called an ADP-ribosyltransferase. Researchers have characterized hundreds of these enzymes — although a few are known to target DNA or RNA, all but a handful target proteins. This is the first time these enzymes have been characterized targeting mRNA within cells.

Expanding understanding of anti-phage defense

Co-first author and graduate student Christopher Doering notes that it is only within the last decade or so that researchers have begun to appreciate the breadth of diversity and complexity of anti-phage defense systems. For example, CRISPR gene editing, a technique used in everything from medicine to agriculture, is rooted in research on the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 anti-phage defense system.

CmdTAC is a subset of a widespread anti-phage defense mechanism called a toxin-antitoxin system. A TA system is just that: a toxin capable of killing or altering the cell’s processes rendered inert by an associated antitoxin.

Although these TA systems can be identified — if the toxin is expressed by itself, it kills or inhibits the growth of the cell; if the toxin and antitoxin are expressed together, the toxin is neutralized — characterizing the cascade of circumstances that activates these systems requires extensive effort. In recent years, however, many TA systems have been shown to serve as anti-phage defense.

Two general questions need to be answered to understand a viral defense system: How do bacteria detect an infection, and how do they respond?

Detecting infection

CmdTAC is a TA system with an additional element, and the three components generally exist in a stable complex: the toxic CmdT, the antitoxin CmdA, and an additional component called a chaperone, CmdC.

If the phage’s protective capsid protein is present, CmdC disassociates from CmdT and CmdA and interacts with the phage capsid protein instead. In the model outlined in the paper, the chaperone CmdC is, therefore, the sensor of the system, responsible for recognizing when an infection is occurring. Structural proteins, such as the capsid that protects the phage genome, are a common trigger because they’re abundant and essential to the phage.

The uncoupling of CmdC exposes the neutralizing antitoxin CmdA to be degraded, which releases the toxin CmdT to do its lethal work. 

Toxicity on the loose

The researchers were guided by computational tools, so they knew that CmdT was likely an ADP-ribosyltransferase due to its similarities to other such enzymes. As the name suggests, the enzyme transfers an ADP ribose onto its target.

To determine if CmdT interacted with any sequences or positions in particular, they tested a mix of short sequences of single-stranded RNA. RNA has four bases: A, U, G, and C, and the evidence points to the enzyme recognizing GA sequences.

The CmdT modification of GA sequences in mRNA blocks their translation. The cessation of creating new proteins aborts the infection, preventing the phage from spreading beyond the host to infect other bacteria.

“Not only is it a new type of bacterial immune system, but the enzyme involved does something that’s never been seen before: the ADP-ribsolyation of mRNA,” Vassallo says.

Although the paper outlines the broad strokes of the anti-phage defense system, it’s unclear how CmdC interacts with the capsid protein, and how the chemical modification of GA sequences prevents translation.

Beyond bacteria

More broadly, exploring anti-phage defense aligns with the Laub Lab’s overall goal of understanding how bacteria function and evolve, but these results may have broader implications beyond bacteria.

Senior author Michael Laub, Salvador E. Luria Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, says the ADP-ribosyltransferase has homologs in eukaryotes, including human cells. They are not well studied, and not among the Laub Lab’s research topics, but they are known to be up-regulated in response to viral infection.

“There are so many different — and cool — mechanisms by which organisms defend themselves against viral infection,” Laub says. “The notion that there may be some commonality between how bacteria defend themselves and how humans defend themselves is a tantalizing possibility.” 

In 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface — a momentous engineering and science feat marked by his iconic words, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Three years later, Apollo 17 became NASA's final Apollo mission to land humans on the brightest and largest object in our night sky. Since then, no humans have visited the moon or traveled past low Earth orbit (LEO), largely because of shifting politics, funding, and priorities.

But that is about to change. Through NASA's Artemis II mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than September 2025, four astronauts will be the first humans to travel to the moon in more than 50 years. In 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission proved the ability of NASA's new spacecraft Orion — launched on the new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System — to travel farther into space than ever before and return safely to Earth. Building on that success, the 10-day Artemis II mission will pave the way for Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface, with the goal of establishing a future lasting human presence on the moon and preparing for human missions to Mars.

One big step for lasercom

Artemis II will be historic not only for renewing human exploration beyond Earth, but also for being the first crewed lunar flight to demonstrate laser communication (lasercom) technologies, which are poised to revolutionize how spacecraft communicate. Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have been developing such technologies for more than two decades, and NASA has been infusing them into its missions to meet the growing demands of long-distance and data-intensive space exploration.

As spacecraft push farther into deep space and advanced science instruments collect ultrahigh-definition (HD) data like 4K video and images, missions need better ways to transmit data back to Earth. Communication systems that encode data onto infrared laser light instead of radio waves can send more information at once and be packaged more compactly while operating with less power. Greater volumes of data fuel additional discoveries, and size and power efficiency translate to increased space for science instruments or crew, less expensive launches, and longer-lasting spacecraft batteries.

For Artemis II, the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O) will send high-resolution video and images of the lunar surface down to Earth — a stark contrast to the blurry, grainy footage from the Apollo program. In addition, O2O will send and receive procedures, data files, flight plans, voice calls, and other communications, serving as a high-speed data pipeline between the astronauts on Orion and mission control on Earth. O2O will beam information via lasers at up to 260 megabits per second (Mbps) to ground optical stations in one of two NASA locations: the White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Table Mountain Facility in Wrightwood, California. Both locations are ideal for their minimal cloud coverage, which can obstruct laser signals as they enter Earth's atmosphere.

At the heart of O2O is the Lincoln Laboratory–developed Modular, Agile, Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT). About the size of a house cat, MAScOT features a 4-inch telescope mounted on a two-axis pivoted support (gimbal), and fixed back-end optics. The gimbal precisely points the telescope and tracks the laser beam through which communications signals are emitted and received, in the direction of the desired data recipient or sender. Underneath the gimbal, in a separate assembly, are the back-end optics, which contain light-focusing lenses, tracking sensors, fast-steering mirrors, and other components to finely point the laser beam.

A series of firsts

MAScOT made its debut in space as part of the laboratory's Integrated Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) LEO User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T), which launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in November 2023. After a few weeks of preliminary testing, ILLUMA-T transmitted its first beam of laser light to NASA's LCRD satellite in geosynchronous (GEO) orbit 22,000 miles above Earth's surface. Achieving this critical step, known as "first light," required precise pointing, acquisition, and tracking of laser beams between moving spacecraft.

Over the following six months, the laboratory team performed experiments to test and characterize the system's basic functionality, performance, and utility for human crews and user applications. Initially, the team checked whether the ILLUMA-T-to-LCRD optical link was operating at the intended data rates in both directions: 622 Mbps down and 51 Mbps up. In fact, even higher data rates were achieved: 1.2 gigabits per second down and 155 Mbps up.  

"This first demonstration of a two-way, end-to-end laser communications relay system, in which ILLUMA-T was the first LEO user of LCRD, is a major milestone for NASA and other space organizations," says Bryan Robinson, leader of the laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "It serves as a precursor to optical relays at the moon and Mars."

After the relay was up and running, the team assessed how parameters such as laser transmit power, optical wavelength, and relative sun angles impact terminal performance. Lastly, they contributed to several networking experiments over multiple nodes to and from the ISS, using NASA's delay/disruption tolerant networking protocols. One landmark experiment streamed 4K video on a round-trip journey from an airplane flying over Lake Erie in Ohio, to the NASA Glenn Research Center in nearby Cleveland, to the NASA White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, to LCRD in GEO, to ILLUMA-T on the ISS, and then back. In June 2024, ILLUMA-T communicated with LCRD for the last time and powered off.

"Our success with ILLUMA-T lays the foundation for streaming HD video to and from the moon," says co-principal investigator Jade Wang, an assistant leader of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "You can imagine the Artemis astronauts using videoconferencing to connect with physicians, coordinate mission activities, and livestream their lunar trips."

Moon ready

The Artemis II O2O mission will employ the same overall MAScOT design proven on ILLUMA-T. Lincoln Laboratory delivered the payload to NASA's Kennedy Space Center for installation and testing on the Orion spacecraft in July 2023.

"Technology transfer to government is what Lincoln Laboratory does as a federally funded research and development center," explains lead systems engineer Farzana Khatri, a senior staff member in the Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "We not only transfer technology, but also work with our transfer partner to ensure success. To prepare for O2O, we are leveraging lessons learned during ILLUMA-T operations. Recently, we conducted pre-mission dry runs to enhance coordination among the various teams involved."

In August 2024, the laboratory completed an important milestone for the O2O optical terminal: the mission readiness test. The test involved three phases. In the first phase, they validated terminal command and telemetry functions. While laboratory-developed ground software was directly used to command and control ILLUMA-T, for O2O, it will run in the background and all commands and telemetry will be interfaced through software developed by NASA's Johnson Space Center Mission Control Center. In the second phase, the team tested different user applications, including activating some of Orion's HD cameras and sending videos from Cape Canaveral to Johnson Space Center as a mock-up for the actual space link. They also ran file transfers, video conferencing, and other operations on astronaut personal computing devices. In the third phase, they simulated payload commissioning activities, such as popping the latch on the optical hardware and moving the gimbal, and conducting ground terminal operations.

"For O2O, we want to show that this optical link works and is helpful to astronauts and the mission," Khatri says. "The Orion spacecraft collects a huge amount of data within the first day of a mission, and typically these data sit on the spacecraft until it lands and take months to be offloaded. With an optical link running at the highest rate, we should be able to get data down to Earth within a few hours for immediate analysis. Furthermore, astronauts can stay in touch with Earth during their journey, inspiring the public and the next generation of deep-space explorers, much like the Apollo 11 astronauts who first landed on the moon 55 years ago."

O2O is funded by the Space Communication and Navigation program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. O2O was developed by a team of engineers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Lincoln Laboratory. This collaboration has led to multiple lasercom missions, such as the 2013 Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration, the 2021 LCRD, the 2022 TeraByte Infrared Delivery, and the 2023 ILLUMA-T.

The banging on the tables begins almost immediately.

It’s September, and the 53 first-year students in MIT’s Concourse program are debating the pros and cons of capitalism during one of their Friday lunchtime seminars in Building 16. Sasha Rickard ’19 — assistant director of Concourse and the chair, or moderator, of the debate — reminds everyone of the rules: “Stand when you speak, address your questions and comments to the chair, and if you hear someone saying something you support, give them a little bang on the table.” The first speaker walks to the podium, praises the benefits of capitalism for her allotted four minutes, and is rewarded with a cacophony of table-banging.

Other students jump up to question her argument. The next speaker takes the opposite view, denouncing capitalism. For nearly two hours, there are more speeches on both sides of the issue, more questions, more enthusiastic banging on tables. Participants call the back-and-forth “intellectually serious,” “genuine good-faith engagement,” and “incredibly fun.”

The debate is one of the cornerstones of MIT’s Civil Discourse Project, a joint venture between the Concourse program and philosophy professors Brad Skow and Alex Byrne. The premise behind the Civil Discourse Project is that first-year students who practice talking and listening to each other even when they disagree will become more thoughtful and open-minded citizens, during their time at MIT and beyond.

“It’s consistent with free expression and free speech, but also consistent with the mission of the university, which is teaching and learning and getting to a greater sense of the truth,” says Linda Rabieh, a senior lecturer in the Concourse program and co-leader of the Civil Discourse Project with Skow, Byrne, and Concourse Director Anne McCants.

The project appears to be working. First-year Ace Chun, one of the student debaters, says,“It’s easy to just say, ‘Well, you have your opinion and I have mine,’ or ‘You're wrong and I'm right.’ But going through the process of disagreement and coming up with a more informed position feels really important.”

It's debatable

Funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the project launched in fall 2023 as a series of paired events. First, two scholars with opposing views on a particular subject — often one from MIT and one from another institution — participate in a formal debate on campus. A week or two later, the Concourse students, having seen the first debate, hold their own version on the same topic. Past debates have explored feminism, climate change, Covid-19 public-health policies, and the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.

This year’s first scholar debate explored the question “Is capitalism defensible?” and featured economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who argued in the affirmative, and political scientist Alex Gourevitch of Brown University, who vigorously disagreed. Roughly 350 people registered to watch the two take turns delivering prepared remarks and answering audience questions in a large auditorium in the Stata Center.

These debates are open to everyone at MIT, as well as the public. They are not recorded or livestreamed because, Skow says, “we want people to feel free to say whatever’s on their mind without worrying that it’s going to be on the internet forever.” Concourse students in attendance look for ideas for what they might say in their own debate, but also, Rabieh says, how they might say it. Cowen and Gourevitch remained respectful even when their exchanges grew louder and hotter, and they ended the evening with a handshake. Students “were seeing reasonable people disagree,” Rabieh says.

Five or six years ago, Rabieh had begun to notice a reluctance among students to talk about controversial ideas; they didn’t want to risk offending anyone. “Most MIT students spend a lot of their time doing math, science, or engineering, and it’s tempting for them to take refuge in the certainty of quantitative reasoning,” she says.

Today’s combative political and cultural landscape can make it even harder to get students talking about hot-button issues, and as a result, civil discourse has become something of a holy grail in higher education. Some institutions (including MIT) now incorporate free-speech exercises into their orientation programs; others host “conversation” events or offer special faculty training. Byrne sees MIT’s Civil Discourse Project, with its connection to the Concourse curriculum, as consistent, pragmatic, hands-on learning. “We’re talking instead of just talking about talking,” he says. “It's like swimming. It’s all very well to hear a lecture about pool etiquette — stay in your lane, don't dive-bomb your fellow swimmers — but at some point, you have to actually get in the pool.”

Learning to argue

Concourse’s “pool” can be found in a student lounge in Building 16. That’s where a group of “debate fellows” — older students who have gone through the Concourse program themselves — coach the first-year students in crafting statements and speeches that can be presented at a debate. It’s also where the fellows help Rabieh and Rickard adapt the original debate question into a resolution the younger students can reasonably argue about. “Our students are still figuring out what they think about a lot of things,” Rickard says. So, the question debated by Cowen and Gourevitch — Is capitalism defensible? — becomes: “Capitalism is the best economic system because it prioritizes freedom and material wealth.”

The first-year students jumped in. During their lunchtime debate, they crowded around tables, ate lasagna and salad, and waited their turn at the podium. They told personal stories to illustrate their points. They tried arguing in support of an idea that they actually disagreed with. They admitted when they were stumped. “That’s a tricky question,” one of the speakers conceded.

“At a place like MIT, it’s easy to get caught up in your own world, like ‘I have this big assignment or I have this paper due,’” says debate fellow and senior Isaac Lock. “With the Civil Discourse Project, students are thinking about big ideas, maybe not having super-strong, solid opinions, but they’re at least considering them in ways that they probably haven’t done before.”

They’re also learning what a balanced conversation feels like. The student debates use a format developed by Braver Angels, a national organization that holds workshops and debates to try to bridge the partisan divide that exists in the United States today. With strict time limits and room for both prepared speeches and spontaneous remarks, the format “allows different types of people to speak,” says debate fellow Arianna Doss, a sophomore. “Because of the debates, we're better-equipped to articulate our points and provide nuance — why I believe what I believe — while also acknowledging and understanding the shortcomings of our arguments.”

The Civil Discourse Project will publish more about its spring semester lectures on its website. Coleman Hughes, author of “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” will be on campus March 3, and a debate on the relevance of legacy media is being planned for later in the semester.

The banging on the tables begins almost immediately.

It’s September, and the 53 first-year students in MIT’s Concourse program are debating the pros and cons of capitalism during one of their Friday lunchtime seminars in Building 16. Sasha Rickard ’19 — assistant director of Concourse and the chair, or moderator, of the debate — reminds everyone of the rules: “Stand when you speak, address your questions and comments to the chair, and if you hear someone saying something you support, give them a little bang on the table.” The first speaker walks to the podium, praises the benefits of capitalism for her allotted four minutes, and is rewarded with a cacophony of table-banging.

Other students jump up to question her argument. The next speaker takes the opposite view, denouncing capitalism. For nearly two hours, there are more speeches on both sides of the issue, more questions, more enthusiastic banging on tables. Participants call the back-and-forth “intellectually serious,” “genuine good-faith engagement,” and “incredibly fun.”

The debate is one of the cornerstones of MIT’s Civil Discourse Project, a joint venture between the Concourse program and philosophy professors Brad Skow and Alex Byrne. The premise behind the Civil Discourse Project is that first-year students who practice talking and listening to each other even when they disagree will become more thoughtful and open-minded citizens, during their time at MIT and beyond.

“It’s consistent with free expression and free speech, but also consistent with the mission of the university, which is teaching and learning and getting to a greater sense of the truth,” says Linda Rabieh, a senior lecturer in the Concourse program and co-leader of the Civil Discourse Project with Skow, Byrne, and Concourse Director Anne McCants.

The project appears to be working. First-year Ace Chun, one of the student debaters, says,“It’s easy to just say, ‘Well, you have your opinion and I have mine,’ or ‘You're wrong and I'm right.’ But going through the process of disagreement and coming up with a more informed position feels really important.”

It's debatable

Funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the project launched in fall 2023 as a series of paired events. First, two scholars with opposing views on a particular subject — often one from MIT and one from another institution — participate in a formal debate on campus. A week or two later, the Concourse students, having seen the first debate, hold their own version on the same topic. Past debates have explored feminism, climate change, Covid-19 public-health policies, and the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.

This year’s first scholar debate explored the question “Is capitalism defensible?” and featured economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who argued in the affirmative, and political scientist Alex Gourevitch of Brown University, who vigorously disagreed. Roughly 350 people registered to watch the two take turns delivering prepared remarks and answering audience questions in a large auditorium in the Stata Center.

These debates are open to everyone at MIT, as well as the public. They are not recorded or livestreamed because, Skow says, “we want people to feel free to say whatever’s on their mind without worrying that it’s going to be on the internet forever.” Concourse students in attendance look for ideas for what they might say in their own debate, but also, Rabieh says, how they might say it. Cowen and Gourevitch remained respectful even when their exchanges grew louder and hotter, and they ended the evening with a handshake. Students “were seeing reasonable people disagree,” Rabieh says.

Five or six years ago, Rabieh had begun to notice a reluctance among students to talk about controversial ideas; they didn’t want to risk offending anyone. “Most MIT students spend a lot of their time doing math, science, or engineering, and it’s tempting for them to take refuge in the certainty of quantitative reasoning,” she says.

Today’s combative political and cultural landscape can make it even harder to get students talking about hot-button issues, and as a result, civil discourse has become something of a holy grail in higher education. Some institutions (including MIT) now incorporate free-speech exercises into their orientation programs; others host “conversation” events or offer special faculty training. Byrne sees MIT’s Civil Discourse Project, with its connection to the Concourse curriculum, as consistent, pragmatic, hands-on learning. “We’re talking instead of just talking about talking,” he says. “It's like swimming. It’s all very well to hear a lecture about pool etiquette — stay in your lane, don't dive-bomb your fellow swimmers — but at some point, you have to actually get in the pool.”

Learning to argue

Concourse’s “pool” can be found in a student lounge in Building 16. That’s where a group of “debate fellows” — older students who have gone through the Concourse program themselves — coach the first-year students in crafting statements and speeches that can be presented at a debate. It’s also where the fellows help Rabieh and Rickard adapt the original debate question into a resolution the younger students can reasonably argue about. “Our students are still figuring out what they think about a lot of things,” Rickard says. So, the question debated by Cowen and Gourevitch — Is capitalism defensible? — becomes: “Capitalism is the best economic system because it prioritizes freedom and material wealth.”

The first-year students jumped in. During their lunchtime debate, they crowded around tables, ate lasagna and salad, and waited their turn at the podium. They told personal stories to illustrate their points. They tried arguing in support of an idea that they actually disagreed with. They admitted when they were stumped. “That’s a tricky question,” one of the speakers conceded.

“At a place like MIT, it’s easy to get caught up in your own world, like ‘I have this big assignment or I have this paper due,’” says debate fellow and senior Isaac Lock. “With the Civil Discourse Project, students are thinking about big ideas, maybe not having super-strong, solid opinions, but they’re at least considering them in ways that they probably haven’t done before.”

They’re also learning what a balanced conversation feels like. The student debates use a format developed by Braver Angels, a national organization that holds workshops and debates to try to bridge the partisan divide that exists in the United States today. With strict time limits and room for both prepared speeches and spontaneous remarks, the format “allows different types of people to speak,” says debate fellow Arianna Doss, a sophomore. “Because of the debates, we're better-equipped to articulate our points and provide nuance — why I believe what I believe — while also acknowledging and understanding the shortcomings of our arguments.”

The Civil Discourse Project will publish more about its spring semester lectures on its website. Coleman Hughes, author of “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” will be on campus March 3, and a debate on the relevance of legacy media is being planned for later in the semester.

In fall 2009, when Ethan Peterson ’13 arrived at MIT as an undergraduate, he already had some ideas about possible career options. He’d always liked building things, even as a child, so he imagined his future work would involve engineering of some sort. He also liked physics. And he’d recently become intent on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and simultaneously curbing greenhouse gas emissions, which made him consider studying solar and wind energy, among other renewable sources.

Things crystallized for him in the spring semester of 2010, when he took an introductory course on nuclear fusion, taught by Anne White, during which he discovered that when a deuterium nucleus and a tritium nucleus combine to produce a helium nucleus, an energetic (14 mega electron volt) neutron — traveling at one-sixth the speed of light — is released. Moreover, 10²⁰ (100 billion billion) of these neutrons would be produced every second that a 500-megawatt fusion power plant operates. “It was eye-opening for me to learn just how energy-dense the fusion process is,” says Peterson, who became the Class of 1956 Career Development Professor of nuclear science and engineering in July 2024. “I was struck by the richness and interdisciplinary nature of the fusion field. This was an engineering discipline where I could apply physics to solve a real-world problem in a way that was both interesting and beautiful.”

He soon became a physics and nuclear engineering double major, and by the time he graduated from MIT in 2013, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) had already decided to cut funding for MIT’s Alcator C-Mod fusion project. In view of that facility’s impending closure, Peterson opted to pursue graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. There, he acquired a basic science background in plasma physics, which is central not only to nuclear fusion but also to astrophysical phenomena such as the solar wind.

When Peterson received his PhD from Wisconsin in 2019, nuclear fusion had rebounded at MIT with the launch, a year earlier, of the SPARC project — a collaborative effort being carried out with the newly founded MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems. He returned to his alma mater as a postdoc and then a research scientist in the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, taking his time, at first, to figure out how to best make his mark in the field.

Minding your neutrons

Around that time, Peterson was participating in a community planning process, sponsored by the DoE, that focused on critical gaps that needed to be closed for a successful fusion program. In the course of these discussions, he came to realize that inadequate attention had been paid to the handling of neutrons, which carry 80 percent of the energy coming out of a fusion reaction — energy that needs to be harnessed for electrical generation. However, these neutrons are so energetic that they can penetrate through many tens of centimeters of material, potentially undermining the structural integrity of components and damaging vital equipment such as superconducting magnets. Shielding is also essential for protecting humans from harmful radiation.

One goal, Peterson says, is to minimize the number of neutrons that escape and, in so doing, to reduce the amount of lost energy. A complementary objective, he adds, “is to get neutrons to deposit heat where you want them to and to stop them from depositing heat where you don’t want them to.” These considerations, in turn, can have a profound influence on fusion reactor design. This branch of nuclear engineering, called neutronics — which analyzes where neutrons are created and where they end up going — has become Peterson’s specialty.

It was never a high-profile area of research in the fusion community — as plasma physics, for example, has always garnered more of the spotlight and more of the funding. That’s exactly why Peterson has stepped up. “The impacts of neutrons on fusion reactor design haven’t been a high priority for a long time,” he says. “I felt that some initiative needed to be taken,” and that prompted him to make the switch from plasma physics to neutronics. It has been his principal focus ever since — as a postdoc, a research scientist, and now as a faculty member.

A code to design by

The best way to get a neutron to transfer its energy is to make it collide with a light atom. Lithium, with an atomic number of three, or lithium-containing materials are normally good choices — and necessary for producing tritium fuel. The placement of lithium “blankets,” which are intended to absorb energy from neutrons and produce tritium, “is a critical part of the design of fusion reactors,” Peterson says. High-density materials, such as lead and tungsten, can be used, conversely, to block the passage of neutrons and other types of radiation. “You might want to layer these high- and low-density materials in a complicated way that isn’t immediately intuitive” he adds. Determining which materials to put where — and of what thickness and mass — amounts to a tricky optimization problem, which will affect the size, cost, and efficiency of a fusion power plant.

To that end, Peterson has developed modelling tools that can make analyses of these sorts easier and faster, thereby facilitating the design process. “This has traditionally been the step that takes the longest time and causes the biggest holdups,” he says. The models and algorithms that he and his colleagues are devising are general enough, moreover, to be compatible with a diverse range of fusion power plant concepts, including those that use magnets or lasers to confine the plasma.

Now that he’s become a professor, Peterson is in a position to introduce more people to nuclear engineering, and to neutronics in particular. “I love teaching and mentoring students, sharing the things I’m excited about,” he says. “I was inspired by all the professors I had in physics and nuclear engineering at MIT, and I hope to give back to the community in the same way.”

He also believes that if you are going to work on fusion, there is no better place to be than MIT, “where the facilities are second-to-none. People here are extremely innovative and passionate. And the sheer number of people who excel in their fields is staggering.” Great ideas can sometimes be sparked by off-the-cuff conversations in the hallway — something that happens more frequently than you expect, Peterson remarks. “All of these things taken together makes MIT a very special place.”

After 274 young women spent two-and-a-half hours working through 20 advanced math problems for the 16th annual Advantage Testing Foundation/Jane Street Math Prize for Girls (MP4G) contest held Oct. 4-6 at MIT, a six-way tie was announced. 

Hosted by the MIT Department of Mathematics and sponsored by the Advantage Testing Foundation and global trading firm Jane Street, MP4G is the largest math prize for girls in the world. The competitors, who came from across the United States and Canada, had scored high enough on the American Mathematics Competition exam to apply for and be accepted by MP4G. This year, MP4G received 891 applications to solve multistage problems in geometry, algebra, and trigonometry. This year's problems are listed on the MP4G website.

Because of the six-way tie, the $50,000 first-place prize and subsequent awards ($20,000 for second, $10,000 for third, $4,000 apiece for fourth and fifth and $2,000 for sixth place) was instead evenly divided, with each winner receiving $15,000. While each scored 15 out of 20, the winners were actually placed in order of how they answered the most difficult problems. 

In first place was Shruti Arun, 11th grade, Cherry Creek High School, Colorado, who last year placed fourth; followed by Angela Liu, 12th grade, home-schooled, California; Sophia Hou, 11th grade, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Virginia; Susie Lu, 11th grade, Stanford Online High School, Washington, who last year placed 19th; Katie He, 12th grade, the Frazer School, Florida; and Katherine Liu, 12th grade, Clements High School, Texas — with the latter two having tied for seventh place last year.

The next round of winners, all with a score of 14, took home $1,000 each: Angela Ho, 11th grade, Stevenson High School, Illinois; Hannah Fox, 12th grade, Proof School, California; Selena Ge, 9th grade, Lexington High School, Massachusetts; Alansha Jiang, 12th grade, Newport High School, Washington; Laura Wang, 9th grade, Lakeside School, Washington; Alyssa Chu, 12th grade, Rye Country Day School, New York; Emily Yu, 12th grade, Mendon High School, New York; and Ivy Guo, 12th grade, Blair High School, Maryland.

The $2,000 Youth Prize to the highest-scoring contestant in 9th grade or below was shared evenly by Selena Ge and Laura Wang. In total, the event awards $100,000 in monetary prize to the top 14 contestants (including tie scores). Honorable mention trophies were awarded to the next 25 winners.

“I knew there were a lot of really smart people there, so the chances of me getting first wasn’t particularly high,” Katie He told a Florida newspaper. “When I heard six ways, I was so excited though,” He says, “because that’s just really cool that we all get to be happy about our performances and celebrate together and share the same joy.”

The event featured a keynote lecture by Harvard University professor of mathematics Lauren Williams on the "Combinatorics of Hopping Particles;” talks by Po-Shen Loh, professor of math at Carnegie Mellon University, and Maria Klawe, president of Math for America; and a musical performance by the MIT Logarhythms. Last year’s winner, Jessica Wan, volunteered as a proctor. Now a first-year at MIT, Wan won MP4G in 2022 and 2019. Alumna and doctoral candidate Nitya Mani was on hand to note, during her speech at the awards ceremony, how much bigger the event has grown over the years.

The day before the competition, attendees gathered to attend campus tours, icebreaker events, and networking sessions around MIT, at the Boston Marriott Cambridge, and at Kresge Auditorium, where the awards ceremony took place. Contestants also met MP4G alumnae at the Women in STEM Ask Me Anything event.

Math Community and Outreach Officer Michael King described the event as a “virtuous circle” where alumni return to encourage participants and help to keep the event running. “It’s good for MIT, because it attracts top female students from around the country. The atmosphere, with hundreds of girls excited about math and supported by their families, was wonderful. I thought to myself, ‘This is possible, to have rooms of math people that aren’t 80 percent men.’ The more women in math, the more role models. This is what inspires people to enter a discipline. MP4G creates a community of role models.”

Chris Peterson SM ’13, director of communications and special projects at MIT Admissions and Student Financial Services, agrees. “Everyone sees and appreciates the competitive function that Math Prize performs to identify and celebrate these highly talented young mathematicians. What’s less visible, but equally or even more important, is the crucial community role it plays as an affinity community to build  relationships and a sense of belonging among these young women that will follow and empower them through the rest of their education and careers.”

Petersen also discussed life at MIT and the admissions process at the Art of Problem Solving’s recent free MIT Math Jam, as he has annually for the past decade. He was joined by MIT Math doctoral candidate Evan Chen ’18, a former deputy leader of the USA International Math Olympiad team.

Many alumnae returned to MIT to participate in a panel for attendees and their parents. For one panelist, MP4G is a family affair. Sheela Devadas, MP4G ’10 and ’11, is the sister of electrical engineering and computer science doctoral candidate and fellow MP4G alum Lalita; their mother, Sulochana, is MP4G’s program administrator. 

“One of the goals of MP4G is to inspire young mathematicians,” says Devadas. “Although it is a competition, there is a lot of camaraderie between the contestants as well, and opportunities to meet both current undergraduate STEM majors and older role models who have pursued math-based careers. This aligned with my experience at MIT as a math major, where the atmosphere felt both competitive and collaborative in a way that inspired us.”

“There are many structural barriers and interpersonal issues facing women in STEM-oriented careers,” she adds. “One issue that is sometimes overlooked, which I have sometimes run into, is that both in school and in the workplace, it can be challenging to get your peers to respect your mathematical skill rather than pressuring you to take on tasks like note-taking or scheduling that are seen as more 'female' (though those tasks are also valuable and necessary).” 

Another panelist, Jennifer Xiong ’23, talked about her time at MP4G, MIT, and her current role as a pharmaceutical researcher at Moderna.  

“MP4G is what made me want to attend MIT, where I met my first MIT friend,” she says. Later, as an MIT student, she volunteered with MP4G to help her stay connected with the program. “MP4G is exciting because it brings together young girls who are interested in solving hard problems, to MIT campus, where they can build community and foster their interests in math.”

Volunteer Ranu Boppana ’87, the wife of MP4G founding director and MIT Math Research Affiliate Ravi Boppana PhD ’86, appreciates watching how this program has helped inspire women to pursue STEM education. “I’m most struck by the fact that MIT is now gender-balanced for undergraduates, but also impressed with what a more diverse place it is in every way.”

The Boppanas were inspired to found MP4G because their daughter was a mathlete in middle school and high school, and often the only girl in many regional competitions. “Ravi realized that the girls needed a community of their own, and role models to help them visualize seeing themselves in STEM.”

“Each year, the best part of MP4G is seeing the girls create wonderful networks for themselves, as some are often the only girls they know interested in math at home. This event is also such a fabulous introduction to MIT for them. I think this event helps MIT recruit the most mathematically talented girls in the country.”

Ravi also recently created the YouTube channel Boppana Math, geared toward high school students. “My goal is to create videos that are accessible to bright high school students, such as the participants in the Math Prize for Girls,” says Ravi. “My most recent video, 'Hypergraphs and Acute Triangles,' won an Honorable Mention at this year’s Summer of Math Exposition.”

The full list of winners is posted on the Art of Problem Solving website. The top 45 students are invited to take the 2024 Math Prize for Girls Olympiad at their schools. Canada/USA Mathcamp also provides $500 merit scholarships to the top 35 MP4G students who enroll in its summer program. This reflects a $250 increase to the scholarships. Applications to compete in next year’s MP4G will open in March 2025. 

On Wednesday, Oct. 9, three student inventors affiliated with the Lemelson-MIT Program (LMIT) shared their stories of what inspired them to invent with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and employees of the U.S. Department of Education attending a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. 

The panel discussion, entitled “Spotlight on Latino Student Innovators & Aspiring STEM Leaders,” was part of a larger event (“Creando Futuros Brillantes”) sponsored by the White House Initiative for Hispanics.

Elias Escobar Argueta, a high school junior from Calistoga, California, spoke about his LMIT InvenTeam’s DulceTemperatura, a patent-pending invention designed to help farm workers keep cool and warm when working outdoors, and another device to help cool firefighters. Also participating were two former Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam students: Katia Avila Pinado from Pomona, California, who holds a patent for her team’s invention, Heart and Sole; and Lesly Rojas of Salem, Oregon, whose team developed an adaptive flow rate cup for people with dysphagia. Avila is now pursuing a degree in networks and digital technology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Rojas is pursuing a degree in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University.

Cristina Saenz, invention education manager with LMIT, also participated in the celebration and had an opportunity to speak with Secretary Cardona about the students’ achievements. Saenz notes, “We had this incredible opportunity for three young Latino inventors to amplify their experiences and share their inventions with members of the U.S. Department of Education. While this celebration of Hispanic Heritage enabled these three students to shine, one-in-four students in the U.S. school system are Latino who also need access and opportunities to showcase what they bring to their local and national communities. Si se puede!”

LMIT’s executive director, Stephanie Couch, says, “I am incredibly grateful to these students for sharing their stories of the power and promise of invention education. I hope that one day many more young women and people of color will be accessing invention education programs like ours, including learning how to protect their good ideas with a patent. These students offer glimpses into the life-changing nature of participation on an InvenTeam and/or LMIT’s other invention education offerings that are led by Dr. Saenz.” 

The InvenTeams initiative, now in its 21st year, has enabled 18 teams of high school students to earn U.S. patents for their projects. Intellectual property education is combined with invention education offerings as part of the Lemelson-MIT Program’s deliberate efforts to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations. LMIT’s ongoing efforts empower students from all backgrounds, equipping them with invaluable problem-solving skills that will serve them well throughout their academic journeys, professional pursuits, and personal lives. Their work with 3,883 students across 296 different teams nationwide these past 21 years includes:

• developing the Inventing Smart Solutions curriculum;
• connecting with intellectual property law firms to provide pro bono legal support;
• collaborating with industry-leading companies that provide technical guidance and mentoring;
• providing professional development for teachers on invention education;
• assisting teams with identifying resources within their communities’ innovation ecosystems to support ongoing invention efforts; and
• publishing case studies and research to inform the work of invention educators and policymakers and build support for engaging students in efforts to invent solutions to real-world problems.

LMIT is a national leader in efforts to prepare the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs. Its work focuses on the expansion of opportunities for people to learn ways inventors find and solve problems that matter to improve lives. Their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion aims to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations.

Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history’s most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy founded the Lemelson-MIT Program at MIT in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and administered by the MIT School of Engineering.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected MIT to lead a new Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Hub to support a partnership of eight New England universities committed to expanding science and technology entrepreneurship across the region, accelerating the translation of discoveries into new solutions that benefit society. NSF announced the five-year cooperative agreement of up to $15 million today.

The NSF I-Corps Hub: New England Region is expected to launch on Jan. 1, 2025. The seven institutions initially collaborating with MIT include Brown University, Harvard University, Northeastern University, Tufts University, University of Maine, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of New Hampshire.

Established by the NSF in 2011, the I-Corps program provides scientists and engineers from any discipline with hands-on educational experiences to advance their research from lab to impact.  There are more than 50,000 STEM researchers at the nearly 100 universities and medical schools in New England. Many of these institutions are located in underserved and rural areas of the region that face resource challenges in supporting deep-tech translational efforts. The eight institutions in the hub will offer I-Corps training while bringing unique strengths and resources to enhance a regional innovation ecosystem that broadens participation in deep-tech innovation.

“Now more than ever we need the innovative solutions that emerge from this type of collaboration to solve society’s greatest and most intractable challenges. Our collective sights are set on bolstering our regional and national innovation networks to accelerate the translation of fundamental research into commercialized technologies. MIT is eager to build on our ongoing work with NSF to further cultivate New England’s innovation hub,” says MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart, the Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management Science and professor of operations research, who is the principal investigator on the award.

The hub builds on 10 years of collaboration with other I-Corps Sites at institutions across the region and prior work from the MIT I-Corps Site program launched in 2014 and the I-Corps Node based at MIT established in 2018. More than 3,000 engineers and scientists in New England have participated in regional I-Corps programs. They have formed over 200 companies, which have raised $3.5 billion in grants and investments. 

“The goal of the I-Corps program is to deploy experiential education to help researchers reduce the time necessary to translate promising ideas from laboratory benches to widespread implementation that in turn impacts economic growth regionally and nationally,” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF assistant director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, in NSF’s announcement. “Each regional NSF I-Corps Hub provides training essential in entrepreneurship and customer discovery, leading to new products, startups, and jobs. In effect, we are investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs for our nation.”

One I-Corps success story comes from Shreya Dave PhD ’16, who participated in I-Corps training in 2016 with her colleagues to explore potential applications for a new graphene oxide filter technology developed through her research. Based on their learnings from the program and the evidence collected, they shifted from filters for desalination to applications in chemical processing and gained the confidence to launch Via Separations in 2017, focused on the tough tech challenge of industrial decarbonization. Via Separations, which was co-founded by Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Jeffrey Grossman and Chief Technical Officer Brent Keller, has reached commercialization and is now delivering products to the pulp and paper industry.

“NSF I-Corps helped us refine our vision, figure out if our technology could be used for different applications, and helped us figure out if we can manufacture our technology in a scalable fashion — taking it from an academic project to a real–scale commercial project,” says Dave, who is the CEO and co-founder of Via Separations. 

New England boasts a “highly developed ecosystem of startup resources, funders, founders, and talent,” says Roman Lubynsky, executive director of MIT’s current NSF I-Corps Node, who will serve as the director of the new hub. “However, innovation and entrepreneurship support has been unevenly distributed across the region. This new hub offers an exciting opportunity to collaborate with seven partner institutions to extend and further scale up this important work throughout the region.”

The I-Corps Hubs across the country form the backbone of the NSF National Innovation Network. This network connects universities, NSF researchers, entrepreneurs, regional communities, and federal agencies to help researchers bring their discoveries to the marketplace. Together, the hubs work to create a more inclusive and diverse innovation ecosystem, supporting researchers nationwide in transforming their ideas into real-world solutions.

The MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) is a project lead for one of two finalist missions recently selected for NASA's new Probe Explorers program. Working with collaborators at the University of Maryland and Goddard Space Flight Research Center, the team will produce a one-year concept study to launch the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) in 2032.

Erin Kara, associate professor of physics and astrophysicist at MIT, is the deputy principal investigator for AXIS. The MIT team includes MKI scientists Eric Miller, Mark Bautz, Catherine Grant, Michael McDonald, and Kevin Burdge. Says Kara, "I am honored to be working with this amazing team in ushering in a new era for X-ray astronomy."

The AXIS mission is designed to revolutionize the view scientists have of high-energy events and environments in the universe using new technologies capable of seeing even deeper into space and further back in time.

"If selected to move forward," explains Kara, "AXIS will answer some of the biggest mysteries in modern astrophysics, from the formation of supermassive black holes to the progenitors of the most energetic and explosive events in the universe to the effects of stars on exoplanets. Simply put, it's the next-generation observatory we need to transform our understanding of the universe."

Critical to AXIS's success is the CCD focal plane — an array of imaging devices that record the properties of the light coming into the telescope. If selected, MKI scientists will work with colleagues at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Stanford University to develop this high-speed camera, which sits at the heart of the telescope, connected to the X-ray Mirror Assembly and telescope tube. The work to create the array builds on previous imaging technology developed by MKI and Lincoln Laboratory, including instruments flying on the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Suzaku X-ray Observatory, and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Camera lead Eric Miller notes that "the advanced detectors that we will use provide the same excellent sensitivity as previous instruments, but operating up to 100 times faster to keep up with all of the X-rays focused by the mirror." As such, the development of the CCD focal plane will have significant impact in both scientific and technological realms. 

"Engineering the array over the next year," adds Kara, "will lay the groundwork not just for AXIS, but for future missions as well."

The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing has announced the launch of a new program to support postdocs conducting research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and particular disciplines. 

The Tayebati Postdoctoral Fellowship Program will focus on AI for addressing the most challenging problems in select scientific research areas, and on AI for music composition and performance. The program will welcome an inaugural cohort of up to six postdocs for a one-year term, with the possibility of renewal for a second term. 

Supported by a $20 million gift from Parviz Tayebati, an entrepreneur and executive with a broad technical background and experience with startup companies, the program will empower top postdocs by providing an environment that facilitates their academic and professional development and enables them to pursue ambitious discoveries. “I am proud to support a fellowship program that champions interdisciplinary research and fosters collaboration across departments. My hope is that this gift will inspire a new generation of scholars whose research advances knowledge and nurtures innovation that transcends traditional boundaries,” says Tayebati.

"Artificial intelligence holds tremendous potential to accelerate breakthroughs in science and ignite human creativity," says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the Schwarzman College of Computing and Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This new postdoc program is a remarkable opportunity to cultivate exceptional bilingual talent combining AI and another discipline. The program will offer fellows the chance to engage in research at the forefront of both AI and another field, collaborating with leading experts across disciplines. We are deeply thankful to Parviz for his foresight in supporting the development of researchers in this increasingly important area.”

Candidates accepted into the program will work on projects that encompass one of six disciplinary areas: biology/bioengineering, brain and cognitive sciences, chemistry/chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, music, and physics. Each fellow will have a faculty mentor in the disciplinary area as well as in AI.

The Tayebati Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is a key component of a larger focus of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing aimed at fostering innovative research in computing. As part of this focus, the college has three postdoctoral programs, each of which provides training and mentorship to fellows, broadens their research horizons, and helps them develop expertise in computing, including its intersection with other disciplines.

Other programs include MEnTorEd Opportunities in Research (METEOR), which was established by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2020. Recently expanded to span MIT through the college, the goal of METEOR is to support exceptional scholars in computer science and AI and to broaden participation in the field.

In addition, the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-cutting initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, offers researchers exploring how computing is reshaping society the opportunity to participate as a SERC postdoc. SERC postdocs engage in a number of activities throughout the year, including leading interdisciplinary teams of MIT undergraduate and graduate students, known as SERC Scholars, to work on research projects investigating such topics as generative AI and democracy, combating deepfakes, examining data ownership, and the societal impact of gamification, among others.

Last month, the MIT Office of Graduate Education celebrated National Student Parent Month with features on four MIT graduate student parents. These students’ professional backgrounds, experiences, and years at MIT highlight aspects of diversity in our student parent population.

Diana Grass is one of MIT’s most involved graduate student parents. Grass is a third-year PhD student in medical engineering and medical physics in the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, and the mother of two children. As co-founder and co-president of MIT’s Graduate First Generation and Low-Income student group (GFLI@MIT), Grass is a strong advocate for first-generation grad students and student parents.

Fifth-year civil and environmental engineering PhD student Fabio Castro is a new father. Prior to MIT, he was an engineer and logistics manager at an energy firm in Brazil, and volunteered with Doctors without Borders in South Sudan. He and his wife, Amanda, welcomed their daughter, Sofia, last fall.

First-year MIT Sloan MBA student Elizabeth Doherty shared her experience as a career changer and mother of two young children. Doherty began her career as a lower elementary school teacher, working in both public and private schools. After switching gears to work as a senior digital learning specialist at Bain & Co., she recognized the importance of company culture, which led her to pursue a master’s degree in business administration.

Matthew Webb is working on his second MIT degree as a second-year PhD student in the Center for Transportation and Logistics. He shared the ways in which his grad student experience is different now as a father of three, than when he was a master’s student in the Operations Research program without children.

All four student parents came from different professional backgrounds and departments, but one theme was consistent in all their stories: the support of the MIT families community. From pitching in to help new parents to coordinating play dates and sharing information, MIT’s student parents are there for one another.

For Doherty, family-friendliness was a top priority when she selected an MBA program. MIT stood out to her because of the family housing, the on-campus childcare, and the opportunities to meet other student families. Doherty felt affirmed in her decision to attend MIT when she enrolled and the MIT Sloan School of Management reached out with a welcoming note and a gift. “It highlighted how thoughtful MIT has been about creating a strong infrastructure for student parents,” she says.

Grass points to the importance her family placed on moving into an on-campus residence, as her family lacked community in their previous off-campus home. This move to MIT’s campus added convenience to the family’s daily routine, and helped them meet other student families.

Before returning to MIT for his PhD, Webb was unaware of the support offered to graduate student families. He was pleasantly surprised to discover the Office of Graduate Education’s resources and programming for families through an email his first semester. His wife Rachel and their three children also take advantage of the activities hosted by MIT Spouses and Partners Connect while Webb goes to class. Some favorites have included ice cream and bubble tea outings, “crafternoons,” and going on a tour of Fenway Park.

Castro remembers how his family housing neighbors showed up for him and his family when they needed it most. In anticipation of their first child’s birth, Castro and his wife, Amanda, arranged for Amanda’s parents to come to Cambridge to help them in the early weeks as first-time parents. When these plans unexpectedly fell through, their community in Westgate stepped up. For weeks, other MIT families came by to teach them how to care for their newborn, and dropped off meals at their door.

He was touched by these gestures — the support was a huge benefit of choosing to live on campus, and something that would not have happened had he lived in an off-campus apartment. “It’s something I’ll never forget,” Castro says. 

As the metal artist in residence and technical instructor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), Rhea Vedro operates in a synthesis of realms that broadens and enriches the student experience at MIT.

“Across MIT,” she says, “people in the arts, humanities, and sciences come together, and as soon as there’s opportunity to talk, sparks fly with all of the cross-pollination that is possible. It’s a rich place to be, and an exciting opportunity to work with our students in that way.”

In 2022, when Vedro read the job description for her current position at MIT, she says it resonated deeply with her interests and experiences. An outgrowth of MIT’s strong tradition of “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”), the position fused seamlessly with her own background.

“It was like I had written it myself. I couldn’t believe the position existed,” Vedro says.

Vedro’s relationship with metals had begun early. Even as a child growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, she collected minerals and bits of metal — and was in heaven when her godmother in New York City would take her to the Garment District, where she delightedly dug through wholesale bins of jewelry elements.

“I believe that people are called to different mediums,” she says. “Artists are often called to work with wood or clay or paper. And while I love all of those, metal has always been my home.”

After earning a master of fine arts in metals at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Vedro combined her art practice over the years with community work, as well as with an academic pursuit into metalsmithing history. “Through material culture, anthropology, and archeology, you can trace civilizations by how they related to this material.”

Vedro teaches classes 3.093 (Metalsmithing: Objects and Power), 3.095 (Introduction to Metalsmithing), and 4:A02 (DesignPlus: Exploring Design), where students learn techniques like soldering, casting, and etching, and explore metalsmithing through a cultural lens.

“In my class, we look at objects like the tool, the badge, the ring, the crown, the amulet, armor in relationship to the body and power,” Vedro says.

Vedro also supports the lab sections of class 3.094 (Materials in Human Experience), an experiential investigation into early techniques for developing cementitious materials and smelting iron, with an eye toward the future of these technologies.

Explaining her own artistic journey, which has taken her all over the world, Vedro says the “through-line” of her practice involves the idea of transformation, via the physical process of her hands-on work as a metalsmith, a fascination with materiality, and her community work to “transform lives through the art of making something.”

Such transformation is demonstrated in her ongoing commission by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, entitled Amulet, which invited the public to community workshops, and to Vedro’s “Workbench” positioned by the waterfront in East Boston, to use metal tools of the trade. Each participant made their own mark on sheets of metal, asked to act with an intention or wish for safe passage of a loved one or for one’s own journey. Vedro will fashion the sheets, bearing the “wishmarks” of so many community members into several 16-to-17-foot birds, positioning them to stand guard at Boston City Hall Plaza.

At MIT, students come to the DMSE’s Merton C. Flemings Materials Processing Laboratory to work on creative projects in fine metals and steel, and also to craft parts for highly technical research in a wide range of fields, from mechanical engineering to aeronautics and astronautics.

“Students will come proposing to make a custom battery housing, a coil for a project going into outer space, a foundry experiment, or to etch and polish one crystal of aluminum,” Vedro says. “These are very specific requests that are not artistic in their origin and rely upon the hands-on metalsmithing of my team, including Mike Tarkanian [DMSE senior lecturer], James Hunter, [DMSE lecturer], Shaymus Hudson [DSME technical instructor], and Christopher Di Perna, [DSME technical instructor]."

Whatever the students’ inspiration, Vedro says she is struck by how motivated they are to do their best work — even despite the setbacks and time required that are part of developing a new skill.

“Everyone here is intensely driven,” she says, adding that many students, perhaps because of their familiarity with the scientific process, “are really good at taking quote-unquote failures as part of their learning process.”

Throughout their exploration in the lab, otherwise known as the Forge/Foundry, many students discover the power of working with their hands.

“There is a zone you get into, where you are becoming one with what you’re doing and lose track of time, and you are only paying attention to how material is behaving under your hand,” Vedro says.

Sometimes the zone produces not only a fine piece of metalwork, but an inspiration about something unrelated, such as a new approach to a research project.

“It frees up the mind, just like when you’re sleeping and you process things you studied the night before,” Vedro says. “You can be working with your hands on something, and many other ideas come together.”

Asked whether 15 years ago she would have thought she’d be working at MIT, Vedro says, “Oh, no. My professional life has been such an incredible braid of different experiences. It’s a reminder to stay true to your unique journey, because you can be like me — in a place I would never have anticipated, where I feel energized every day to come in and see what will cross my path.”

A number of individuals with MIT ties have received honors from the American Physical Society (APS) for 2024 and 2025.

Awardees include Professor Frances Ross; Professor Vladan Vuletić, graduate student Jiliang Hu ’19, PhD ’24; as well as 10 alumni. New APS Fellows include Professor Joseph Checkelsky, Senior Researcher John Chiaverini, Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian, Professor Ruben Juanes, and seven alumni.

Frances M. Ross, the TDK Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, received the 2025 Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science  “for groundbreaking advances in in situ electron microscopy in vacuum and liquid environments.”

Ross uses transmission electron microscopy to watch crystals as they grow and react under different conditions, including both liquid and gaseous environments. The microscopy techniques developed over Ross’ research career help in exploring growth mechanisms during epitaxy, catalysis, and electrochemical deposition, with applications in microelectronics and energy storage. Ross’ research group continues to develop new microscopy instrumentation to enable deeper exploration of these processes.

Vladan Vuletić, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics, received the 2025 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science “for pioneering work on spin squeezing for optical atomic clocks, quantum nonlinear optics, and laser cooling to quantum degeneracy.” Vuletić’s research includes ultracold atoms, laser cooling, large-scale quantum entanglement, quantum optics, precision tests of physics beyond the Standard Model, and quantum simulation and computing with trapped neutral atoms.

His Experimental Atomic Physics Group is also affiliated with the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). In 2020, his group showed that the precision of current atomic clocks could be improved by entangling the atoms — a quantum phenomenon by which particles are coerced to behave in a collective, highly correlated state.

Jiliang Hu received the 2024 Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Biological Physics “for groundbreaking biophysical contributions to microbial ecology that bridge experiment and theory, showing how only a few coarse-grained features of ecological networks can predict emergent phases of diversity, dynamics, and invasibility in microbial communities.”

Hu is working in PhD advisor Professor Jeff Gore’s lab. He is interested in exploring the high-dimensional dynamics and emergent phenomena of complex microbial communities. In his first project, he demonstrated that multi-species communities can be described by a phase diagram as a function of the strength of interspecies interactions and the diversity of the species pool. He is now studying alternative stable states and the role of migration in the dynamics and biodiversity of metacommunities.

Alumni receiving awards:

Riccardo Betti PhD ’92 is the 2024 recipient of the John Dawson Award in Plasma Physics “for pioneering the development of statistical modeling to predict, design, and analyze implosion experiments on the 30kJ OMEGA laser, achieving hot spot energy gains above unity and record Lawson triple products for direct-drive laser fusion.”

Javier Mauricio Duarte ’10 received the 2024 Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics “for accelerating trigger technologies in experimental particle physics with novel real-time approaches by embedding artificial intelligence and machine learning in programmable gate arrays, and for critical advances in Higgs physics studies at the Large Hadron Collider in all-hadronic final states.”

Richard Furnstahl ’18 is the 2025 recipient of the Feshbach Prize Theoretical Nuclear Physics “for foundational contributions to calculations of nuclei, including applying the Similarity Renormalization Group to the nuclear force, grounding nuclear density functional theory in those forces, and using Bayesian methods to quantify the uncertainties in effective field theory predictions of nuclear observables.”

Harold Yoonsung Hwang ’93, SM ’93 is the 2024 recipient of the James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials “for pioneering work in oxide interfaces, dilute superconductivity in heterostructures, freestanding oxide membranes, and superconducting nickelates using pulsed laser deposition, as well as for significant early contributions to the physics of bulk transition metal oxides.”

James P. Knauer ’72 received the 2024 John Dawson Award in Plasma Physics “for pioneering the development of statistical modeling to predict, design, and analyze implosion experiments on the 30kJ OMEGA laser, achieving hot spot energy gains above unity and record Lawson triple products for direct-drive laser fusion.”

Sekazi Mtingwa ’71 is the 2025 recipient of the John Wheatley Award “for exceptional contributions to capacity building in Africa, the Middle East, and other developing regions, including leadership in training researchers in beamline techniques at synchrotron light sources and establishing the groundwork for future facilities in the Global South.

Michael Riordan ’68, PhD ’73 received the 2025 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, which “recognizes outstanding scholarly achievements in the history of physics.”

Charles E. Sing PhD ’12 received the 2024 John H. Dillon Medal “for pioneering advances in polyelectrolyte phase behavior and polymer dynamics using theory and computational modeling.”

David W. Taylor ’01 received the 2025 Jonathan F. Reichert and Barbara Wolff-Reichert Award for Excellence in Advanced Laboratory Instruction “for continuous physical measurement laboratory improvements, leveraging industrial and academic partnerships that enable innovative and diversified independent student projects, and giving rise to practical skillsets yielding outstanding student outcomes.”

Wennie Wang ’13 is the 2025 recipient of the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award “for outstanding contributions to the field of materials science, including pioneering research on defective transition metal oxides for energy sustainability, a commitment to broadening participation of underrepresented groups in computational materials science, and leadership and advocacy in the scientific community.”

APS Fellows

Joseph Checkelsky, the Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor of Physics, received the 2024 Division of Condensed Matter Physics Fellowship  “for pioneering contributions to the synthesis and study of quantum materials, including kagome and pyrochlore metals and natural superlattice compounds.”

Affiliated with the MIT Materials Research Laboratory and the MIT Center for Quantum Engineering, Checkelsky is working at the intersection of materials synthesis and quantum physics to discover new materials and physical phenomena to expand the boundaries of understanding of quantum mechanical condensed matter systems, as well as open doorways to new technologies by realizing emergent electronic and magnetic functionalities. Research in Checkelsky’s lab focuses on the study of exotic electronic states of matter through the synthesis, measurement, and control of solid-state materials. His research includes studying correlated behavior in topologically nontrivial materials, the role of geometrical phases in electronic systems, and novel types of geometric frustration.

John Chiaverini, a senior staff member in the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems group and an MIT principal investigator in RLE, was elected a 2024 Fellow of the American Physical Society in the Division of Quantum Information “for pioneering contributions to experimental quantum information science, including early demonstrations of quantum algorithms, the development of the surface-electrode ion trap, and groundbreaking work in integrated photonics for trapped-ion quantum computation.”  

Chiaverini is pursuing research in quantum computing and precision measurement using individual atoms. Currently, Chiaverini leads a team developing novel technologies for control of trapped-ion qubits, including trap-integrated optics and electronics; this research has the potential to allow scaling of trapped-ion systems to the larger numbers of ions needed for practical applications while maintaining high levels of control over their quantum states. He and the team are also exploring new techniques for the rapid generation of quantum entanglement between ions, as well as investigating novel encodings of quantum information that have the potential to yield higher-fidelity operations than currently available while also providing capabilities to correct the remaining errors.

Areg Danagoulian, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, received the 2024 Forum on Physics and Society Fellowship “for seminal technological contributions in the field of arms control and cargo security, which significantly benefit international security.”  

His current research interests focus on nuclear physics applications in societal problems, such as nuclear nonproliferation, technologies for arms control treaty verification, nuclear safeguards, and cargo security. Danagoulian also serves as the faculty co-director for MIT’s MISTI Eurasia program.

Ruben Juanes, professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences (CEE/EAPS) received the 2024 Division of Fluid Dynamics Fellowship “for fundamental advances — using experiments, innovative imaging, and theory — in understanding the role of wettability for controlling the dynamics of fluid displacement in porous media and geophysical flows, and exploiting this understanding to optimize.”

An expert in the physics of multiphase flow in porous media, Juanes uses a mix of theory, computational, and real-life experiments to establish a fundamental understanding of how different fluids such as oil, water, and gas move through rocks, soil, or underwater reservoirs to solve energy and environmental-driven geophysical problems. His major contributions have been in developing improved safety and effectiveness of carbon sequestration, advanced understanding of fluid interactions in porous media for energy and environmental applications, imaging and computational techniques for real-time monitoring of subsurface fluid flows, and insights into how underground fluid movement contributes to landslides, floods, and earthquakes.

Alumni receiving fellowships:

Constantia Alexandrou PhD ’85 is the 2024 recipient of the Division of Nuclear Physics Fellowship “for the pioneering contributions in calculating nucleon structure observables using lattice QCD.”

Daniel Casey PhD ’12 received the 2024 Division of Plasma Physics Fellowship “for outstanding contributions to the understanding of the stagnation conditions required to achieve ignition.”

Maria K. Chan PhD ’09 is the 2024 recipient of the Topical Group on Energy Research and Applications Fellowship “for contributions to methodological innovations, developments, and demonstrations toward the integration of computational modeling and experimental characterization to improve the understanding and design of renewable energy materials.”

David Humphreys ’82, PhD ’91 received the 2024 Division of Plasma Physics Fellowship “for sustained leadership in developing the field of model-based dynamic control of magnetically confined plasmas, and for providing important and timely contributions to the understanding of tokamak stability, disruptions, and halo current physics.

Eric Torrence PhD ’97 received the 2024 Division of Particles and Fields Fellowship “for significant contributions with the ATLAS and FASER Collaborations, particularly in the searches for new physics, measurement of the LHC luminosity, and for leadership in the operations of both experiments.”

Tiffany S. Santos ’02, PhD ’07 is the 2024 recipient of the Topical Group on Magnetism and Its Applications Fellowship “for innovative contributions in synthesis and characterization of novel ultrathin magnetic films and interfaces, and tailoring their properties for optimal performance, especially in magnetic data storage and spin-transport devices.”

Lei Zhou ’14, PhD ’19 received the 2024 Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics Fellowship “for outstanding and sustained contributions to the fields of metamaterials, especially for proposing metasurfaces as a bridge to link propagating waves and surface waves.”

What is it like to give birth on Mars? Can bioengineer TikTok stars win at the video game “Super Smash Brothers” while also answering questions about science? How do sheep, mouse, and human brains compare? These questions and others were asked last month when more than 50,000 visitors from across Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Greater Boston participated in the MIT Museum’s annual Cambridge Science Festival, a week-long celebration dedicated to creativity, ingenuity, and innovation. Running Monday, Sept. 23 through Sunday, Sept. 29, the 2024 edition was the largest in its history, with a dizzyingly diverse program spanning more than 300 events presented in more than 75 different venues, all free and open to the public.

Presented in partnership with the City of Cambridge and more than 250 collaborators across Greater Boston, this year’s festival comprised a wide range of interactive programs for adults, children, and families, including workshops, demos, keynote lectures, walking tours, professional networking opportunities, and expert panels. Aimed at scientists and non-scientists alike, the festival also collaborated with several local schools to offer visits from an astronaut for middle- and high-school students.

With support from dozens of local organizations, the festival was the first iteration to happen under the new leadership of Michael John Gorman, who was appointed director of the MIT Museum in January and began his position in July.

“A science festival like this has an incredible ability to unite a diverse array of people and ideas, while also showcasing Cambridge as an internationally recognized leader in science, technology, engineering, and math,” says Gorman. “I'm thrilled to have joined an institution that values producing events that foster such a strong sense of community, and was so excited to see the enthusiastic response from the tens of thousands of people who showed up and made the festival such a success.”

The 2024 Cambridge Science Festival was broad in scope, with events ranging from hands-on 3D-printing demos to concerts from the MIT Laptop Ensemble to participatory activities at the MIT Museum’s Maker Hub. This year’s programming also highlighted three carefully curated theme tracks that each encompassed more than 25 associated events:

1. “For the Win: Games, Puzzles, and the Science of Play” (Thursday) consisted of multiple evening events clustered around Kendall Square.
2. “Frontiers: A New Era of Space Exploration” (Friday and Saturday) featured programs throughout Boston and was co-curated by The Space Consortium, organizers of Massachusetts Space Week.
3. “Electric Skin: Wearable Tech and the Future of Fashion” (Saturday) offered both day and evening events at the intersection of science, fabric, and fashion, taking place at The Foundry and co-curated by Boston Fashion Week and Advanced Functional Fabrics of America.

One of the discussions tied to the games-themed “For the Win” track involved artist Jeremy Couillard speaking with MIT Lecturer Mikael Jakobsson about the larger importance of games as a construct for encouraging interpersonal interaction and creating meaningful social spaces. Starting this past summer, the List Visual Arts Center has been the home of Couillard’s first-ever institutional solo exhibition, which centers around “Escape from Lavender Island,” a dystopian third-person, open-world exploration game he released in 2023 on the Steam video-game platform.

For the “Frontiers” space theme, one of the headlining events, “Is Anyone Out There?”, tackled the latest cutting-edge research and theories related to the potential existence of extraterrestrial life. The panel of local astronomers and astrophysicists included Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science, professor of physics, and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT; Kim Arcand, an expert in astronomic visualization at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and Michael Hecht, a research scientist and associate director of research management at MIT’s Haystack Observatory. The researchers spoke about the tools they and their peers use to try to search for extraterrestrial life, and what discovering life beyond our planet might mean for humanity.

For the “Electric Skin” fashion track, events spanned a range of topics revolving around the role that technology will play in the future of the field, including sold-out workshops where participants learned how to laser-cut and engineer “structural garments.” A panel looking at generative technologies explored how designers are using AI to spur innovation in their companies. Onur Yüce Gün, director of computational design at New Balance, also spoke on a panel with Ziyuan “Zoey” Zhu from IDEO, MIT Media Lab research scientist and architect Behnaz Farahi, and Fiorenzo Omenetto, principal investigator and director of The Tufts Silk Lab and the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts University and a professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department and in the Department of Physics at Tufts.

Beyond the three themed tracks, the festival comprised an eclectic mix of interactive events and panels. Cambridge Public Library hosted a “Science Story Slam” with high-school students from 10 different states competing for $5,000 in prize money. Entrants shared 5-minute-long stories about their adventures in STEM, with topics ranging from probability to “astro-agriculture.” Judges included several MIT faculty and staff, as well as New York Times national correspondent Kate Zernike.

Elsewhere, the MIT Museum’s Gorman moderated a discussion on AI and democracy that included Audrey Tang, the former minister of digital affairs of Taiwan. The panelists explored how AI tools could combat the polarization of political discourse and increase participation in democratic processes, particularly for marginalized voices. Also in the MIT Museum, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research organized a “Decoding the Brain” event with demos involving real animal brains, while the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard ran a “Discovery After Dark” event to commemorate the institute’s 20th anniversary. Sunday’s Science Carnival featured more than 100 demos, events, and activities, including the ever-popular “Robot Petting Zoo.”

When it first launched in 2007, the Cambridge Science Festival was by many accounts the first large-scale event of its kind across the entire United States. Similar festivals have since popped up all over the country, including the World Science Festival in New York City, the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, the North Carolina Science Festival in Chapel Hill, and the San Diego Festival of Science and Engineering.  

More information about the festival is available online, including opportunities to participate in next year’s events. 

When you think about hands-free devices, you might picture Alexa and other voice-activated in-home assistants, Bluetooth earpieces, or asking Siri to make a phone call in your car. You might not imagine using your mouth to communicate with other devices like a computer or a phone remotely. 

Thinking outside the box, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Aarhus University researchers have now engineered “MouthIO,” a dental brace that can be fabricated with sensors and feedback components to capture in-mouth interactions and data. This interactive wearable could eventually assist dentists and other doctors with collecting health data and help motor-impaired individuals interact with a phone, computer, or fitness tracker using their mouths.

Resembling an electronic retainer, MouthIO is a see-through brace that fits the specifications of your upper or lower set of teeth from a scan. The researchers created a plugin for the modeling software Blender to help users tailor the device to fit a dental scan, where you can then 3D print your design in dental resin. This computer-aided design tool allows users to digitally customize a panel (called PCB housing) on the side to integrate electronic components like batteries, sensors (including detectors for temperature and acceleration, as well as tongue-touch sensors), and actuators (like vibration motors and LEDs for feedback). You can also place small electronics outside of the PCB housing on individual teeth.

Research by others at MIT has also led to another mouth-based touchpad, based on technology initially developed in the Media Lab. That device is available via Augmental, a startup deploying technology that lets people with movement impairments seamlessly interact with their personal computational devices.

The active mouth

“The mouth is a really interesting place for an interactive wearable,” says senior author Michael Wessely, a former CSAIL postdoc and senior author on a paper about MouthIO who is now an assistant professor at Aarhus University. “This compact, humid environment has elaborate geometries, making it hard to build a wearable interface to place inside. With MouthIO, though, we’ve developed an open-source device that’s comfortable, safe, and almost invisible to others. Dentists and other doctors are eager about MouthIO for its potential to provide new health insights, tracking things like teeth grinding and potentially bacteria in your saliva.”

The excitement for MouthIO’s potential in health monitoring stems from initial experiments. The team found that their device could track bruxism (the habit of grinding teeth) by embedding an accelerometer within the brace to track jaw movements. When attached to the lower set of teeth, MouthIO detected when users grind and bite, with the data charted to show how often users did each.

Wessely and his colleagues’ customizable brace could one day help users with motor impairments, too. The team connected small touchpads to MouthIO, helping detect when a user’s tongue taps their teeth. These interactions could be sent via Bluetooth to scroll across a webpage, for example, allowing the tongue to act as a “third hand” to help enable hands-free interaction.

"MouthIO is a great example how miniature electronics now allow us to integrate sensing into a broad range of everyday interactions,” says study co-author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and leader of the HCI Engineering Group at CSAIL. “I'm especially excited about the potential to help improve accessibility and track potential health issues among users."

Molding and making MouthIO

To get a 3D model of your teeth, you can first create a physical impression and fill it with plaster. You can then scan your mold with a mobile app like Polycam and upload that to Blender. Using the researchers’ plugin within this program, you can clean up your dental scan to outline a precise brace design. Finally, you 3D print your digital creation in clear dental resin, where the electronic components can then be soldered on. Users can create a standard brace that covers their teeth, or opt for an “open-bite” design within their Blender plugin. The latter fits more like open-finger gloves, exposing the tips of your teeth, which helps users avoid lisping and talk naturally.

This “do it yourself” method costs roughly $15 to produce and takes two hours to be 3D-printed. MouthIO can also be fabricated with a more expensive, professional-level teeth scanner similar to what dentists and orthodontists use, which is faster and less labor-intensive.

Compared to its closed counterpart, which fully covers your teeth, the researchers view the open-bite design as a more comfortable option. The team preferred to use it for beverage monitoring experiments, where they fabricated a brace capable of alerting users when a drink was too hot. This iteration of MouthIO had a temperature sensor and a monitor embedded within the PCB housing that vibrated when a drink exceeded 65 degrees Celsius (or 149 degrees Fahrenheit). This could help individuals with mouth numbness better understand what they’re consuming.

In a user study, participants also preferred the open-bite version of MouthIO. “We found that our device could be suitable for everyday use in the future,” says study lead author and Aarhus University PhD student Yijing Jiang. “Since the tongue can touch the front teeth in our open-bite design, users don’t have a lisp. This made users feel more comfortable wearing the device during extended periods with breaks, similar to how people use retainers.”

The team’s initial findings indicate that MouthIO is a cost-effective, accessible, and customizable interface, and the team is working on a more long-term study to evaluate its viability further. They’re looking to improve its design, including experimenting with more flexible materials, and placing it in other parts of the mouth, like the cheek and the palate. Among these ideas, the researchers have already prototyped two new designs for MouthIO: a single-sided brace for even higher comfort when wearing MouthIO while also being fully invisible to others, and another fully capable of wireless charging and communication.

Jiang, Mueller, and Wessely’s co-authors include PhD student Julia Kleinau, master’s student Till Max Eckroth, and associate professor Eve Hoggan, all of Aarhus University. Their work was supported by a Novo Nordisk Foundation grant and was presented at ACM’s Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Researchers from the Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP) interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, alongside collaborators from the National University of Singapore Tissue Engineering Programme, have developed a novel method to enhance the ability of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) to generate cartilage tissue by adding ascorbic acid during MSC expansion. The research also discovered that micro-magnetic resonance relaxometry (µMRR), a novel process analytical tool developed by SMART CAMP, can be used as a rapid, label-free process-monitoring tool for the quality expansion of MSCs.

Articular cartilage, a connective tissue that protects the bone ends in joints, can degenerate due to injury, age, or arthritis, leading to significant joint pain and disability. Especially in countries — such as Singapore — that have an active, aging population, articular cartilage degeneration is a growing ailment that affects an increasing number of people. Autologous chondrocyte implantation is currently the only Food and Drug Administration-approved cell-based therapy for articular cartilage injuries, but it is costly, time-intensive, and requires multiple treatments. MSCs are an attractive and promising alternative as they have shown good safety profiles for transplantation. However, clinical use of MSCs is limited due to inconsistent treatment outcomes arising from factors such as donor-to-donor variability, variation among cells during cell expansion, and non-standardized MSC manufacturing protocols.

The heterogeneity of MSCs can lead to variations in their biological behavior and treatment outcomes. While large-scale MSC expansions are required to obtain a therapeutically relevant number of cells for implantation, this process can introduce cell heterogeneity. Therefore, improved processes are essential to reduce cell heterogeneity while increasing donor cell numbers with improved chondrogenic potential — the ability of MSCs to differentiate into cartilage cells to repair cartilage tissue — to pave the way for more effective and consistent MSC-based therapies.

In a paper titled “Metabolic modulation to improve MSC expansion and therapeutic potential for articular cartilage repair,” published in the scientific journal Stem Cell Research and Therapy, CAMP researchers detailed their development of a priming strategy to enhance the expansion of quality MSCs by modifying the way cells utilize energy. The research findings have shown a positive correlation between chondrogenic potential and oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS), a process that harnesses the reduction of oxygen to create adenosine triphosphate — a source of energy that drives and supports many processes in living cells. This suggests that manipulating MSC metabolism is a promising strategy for enhancing chondrogenic potential.

Using novel PATs developed by CAMP, the researchers explored the potential of metabolic modulation in both short- and long-term harvesting and reseeding of cells. To enhance their chondrogenic potential, they varied the nutrient composition, including glucose, pyruvate, glutamine, and ascorbic acid (AA). As AA is reported to support OXPHOS and its positive impact on chondrogenic potential during differentiation — a process in which immature cells become mature cells with specific functions — the researchers further investigated its effects during MSC expansion.

The addition of AA to cell cultures for one passage during MSC expansion and prior to initiation of differentiation was found to improve chondrogenic differentiation, which is a critical quality attribute (CQA) for better articular cartilage repair. Longer-term AA treatment led to a more than 300-fold increase in the yield of MSCs with enhanced chondrogenic potential, and reduced cell heterogeneity and cell senescence — a process by which a cell ages and permanently stops dividing but does not die — when compared to untreated cells. AA-treated MSCs with improved chondrogenic potential showed a robust shift in metabolic profile to OXPHOS. This metabolic change correlated with μMRR measurements, which helps identify novel CQAs that could be implemented in MSC manufacturing for articular cartilage repair.

The research also demonstrates the potential of the process analytical tool developed by CAMP, micromagnetic resonance relaxometry (μMRR) — a miniature benchtop device that employs magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging on a microscopic scale — as a process-monitoring tool for the expansion of MSCs with AA supplementation. Originally used as a label-free malaria diagnosis method due to the presence of paramagnetic hemozoin particles, μMRR was used in the research to detect senescence in MSCs. This rapid, label-free method requires only a small number of cells for evaluation, which allows for MSC therapy manufacturing in closed systems — a system for protecting pharmaceutical products by reducing contamination risks from the external environment — while enabling intermittent monitoring of a limited lot size per production.

“Donor-to-donor variation, intrapopulation heterogeneity, and cellular senescence have impeded the success of MSCs as a standard of care therapy for articular cartilage repair. Our research showed that AA supplementation during MSC expansion can overcome these bottlenecks and enhance MSC chondrogenic potential,” says Ching Ann Tee, senior postdoc at SMART CAMP and first author of the paper. “By controlling metabolic conditions such as AA supplementation, coupled with CAMP’s process analytical tools such as µMRR, the yield and quality of cell therapy products could be significantly increased. This breakthrough could help make MSC therapy a more effective and viable treatment option and provide standards for improving the manufacturing pipeline.”

“This approach of utilizing metabolic modulation to improve MSC chondrogenic potential could be adapted into similar concepts for other therapeutic indications, such as osteogenic potential for bone repair or other types of stem cells. Implementing our findings in MSC manufacturing settings could be a significant step forward for patients with osteoarthritis and other joint diseases, as we can efficiently produce large quantities of high-quality MSCs with consistent functionality and enable the treatment of more patients,” adds Professor Laurie A. Boyer, principal investigator at SMART CAMP, professor of biology and biological engineering at MIT, and corresponding author of the paper.

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

For many decades, fusion has been touted as the ultimate source of abundant, clean electricity. Now, as the world faces the need to reduce carbon emissions to prevent catastrophic climate change, making commercial fusion power a reality takes on new importance. In a power system dominated by low-carbon variable renewable energy sources (VREs) such as solar and wind, “firm” electricity sources are needed to kick in whenever demand exceeds supply — for example, when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing and energy storage systems aren’t up to the task. What is the potential role and value of fusion power plants (FPPs) in such a future electric power system — a system that is not only free of carbon emissions but also capable of meeting the dramatically increased global electricity demand expected in the coming decades?

Working together for a year-and-a-half, investigators in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) have been collaborating to answer that question. They found that — depending on its future cost and performance — fusion has the potential to be critically important to decarbonization. Under some conditions, the availability of FPPs could reduce the global cost of decarbonizing by trillions of dollars. More than 25 experts together examined the factors that will impact the deployment of FPPs, including costs, climate policy, operating characteristics, and other factors. They present their findings in a new report funded through MITEI and entitled “The Role of Fusion Energy in a Decarbonized Electricity System.”

“Right now, there is great interest in fusion energy in many quarters — from the private sector to government to the general public,” says the study’s principal investigator (PI) Robert C. Armstrong, MITEI’s former director and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering, Emeritus. “In undertaking this study, our goal was to provide a balanced, fact-based, analysis-driven guide to help us all understand the prospects for fusion going forward.” Accordingly, the study takes a multidisciplinary approach that combines economic modeling, electric grid modeling, techno-economic analysis, and more to examine important factors that are likely to shape the future deployment and utilization of fusion energy. The investigators from MITEI provided the energy systems modeling capability, while the PSFC participants provided the fusion expertise.

Fusion technologies may be a decade away from commercial deployment, so the detailed technology and costs of future commercial FPPs are not known at this point. As a result, the MIT research team focused on determining what cost levels fusion plants must reach by 2050 to achieve strong market penetration and make a significant contribution to the decarbonization of global electricity supply in the latter half of the century.

The value of having FPPs available on an electric grid will depend on what other options are available, so to perform their analyses, the researchers needed estimates of the future cost and performance of those options, including conventional fossil fuel generators, nuclear fission power plants, VRE generators, and energy storage technologies, as well as electricity demand for specific regions of the world. To find the most reliable data, they searched the published literature as well as results of previous MITEI and PSFC analyses.

Overall, the analyses showed that — while the technology demands of harnessing fusion energy are formidable — so are the potential economic and environmental payoffs of adding this firm, low-carbon technology to the world’s portfolio of energy options.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding is the “societal value” of having commercial FPPs available. “Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C requires that the world invest in wind, solar, storage, grid infrastructure, and everything else needed to decarbonize the electric power system,” explains Randall Field, executive director of the fusion study and MITEI’s director of research. “The cost of that task can be far lower when FPPs are available as a source of clean, firm electricity.” And the benefit varies depending on the cost of the FPPs. For example, assuming that the cost of building a FPP is $8,000 per kilowatt (kW) in 2050 and falls to $4,300/kW in 2100, the global cost of decarbonizing electric power drops by $3.6 trillion. If the cost of a FPP is $5,600/kW in 2050 and falls to $3,000/kW in 2100, the savings from having the fusion plants available would be $8.7 trillion. (Those calculations are based on differences in global gross domestic product and assume a discount rate of 6 percent. The undiscounted value is about 20 times larger.)

The goal of other analyses was to determine the scale of deployment worldwide at selected FPP costs. Again, the results are striking. For a deep decarbonization scenario, the total global share of electricity generation from fusion in 2100 ranges from less than 10 percent if the cost of fusion is high to more than 50 percent if the cost of fusion is low.

Other analyses showed that the scale and timing of fusion deployment vary in different parts of the world. Early deployment of fusion can be expected in wealthy nations such as European countries and the United States that have the most aggressive decarbonization policies. But certain other locations — for example, India and the continent of Africa — will have great growth in fusion deployment in the second half of the century due to a large increase in demand for electricity during that time. “In the U.S. and Europe, the amount of demand growth will be low, so it’ll be a matter of switching away from dirty fuels to fusion,” explains Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a senior research scientist at MITEI. “But in India and Africa, for example, the tremendous growth in overall electricity demand will be met with significant amounts of fusion along with other low-carbon generation resources in the later part of the century.”

A set of analyses focusing on nine subregions of the United States showed that the availability and cost of other low-carbon technologies, as well as how tightly carbon emissions are constrained, have a major impact on how FPPs would be deployed and used. In a decarbonized world, FPPs will have the highest penetration in locations with poor diversity, capacity, and quality of renewable resources, and limits on carbon emissions will have a big impact. For example, the Atlantic and Southeast subregions have low renewable resources. In those subregions, wind can produce only a small fraction of the electricity needed, even with maximum onshore wind buildout. Thus, fusion is needed in those subregions, even when carbon constraints are relatively lenient, and any available FPPs would be running much of the time. In contrast, the Central subregion of the United States has excellent renewable resources, especially wind. Thus, fusion competes in the Central subregion only when limits on carbon emissions are very strict, and FPPs will typically be operated only when the renewables can’t meet demand.

An analysis of the power system that serves the New England states provided remarkably detailed results. Using a modeling tool developed at MITEI, the fusion team explored the impact of using different assumptions about not just cost and emissions limits but even such details as potential land-use constraints affecting the use of specific VREs. This approach enabled them to calculate the FPP cost at which fusion units begin to be installed. They were also able to investigate how that “threshold” cost changed with changes in the cap on carbon emissions. The method can even show at what price FPPs begin to replace other specific generating sources. In one set of runs, they determined the cost at which FPPs would begin to displace floating platform offshore wind and rooftop solar.

“This study is an important contribution to fusion commercialization because it provides economic targets for the use of fusion in the electricity markets,” notes Dennis G. Whyte, co-PI of the fusion study, former director of the PSFC, and the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “It better quantifies the technical design challenges for fusion developers with respect to pricing, availability, and flexibility to meet changing demand in the future.”

The researchers stress that while fission power plants are included in the analyses, they did not perform a “head-to-head” comparison between fission and fusion, because there are too many unknowns. Fusion and nuclear fission are both firm, low-carbon electricity-generating technologies; but unlike fission, fusion doesn’t use fissile materials as fuels, and it doesn’t generate long-lived nuclear fuel waste that must be managed. As a result, the regulatory requirements for FPPs will be very different from the regulations for today’s fission power plants — but precisely how they will differ is unclear. Likewise, the future public perception and social acceptance of each of these technologies cannot be projected, but could have a major influence on what generation technologies are used to meet future demand.

The results of the study convey several messages about the future of fusion. For example, it’s clear that regulation can be a potentially large cost driver. This should motivate fusion companies to minimize their regulatory and environmental footprint with respect to fuels and activated materials. It should also encourage governments to adopt appropriate and effective regulatory policies to maximize their ability to use fusion energy in achieving their decarbonization goals. And for companies developing fusion technologies, the study’s message is clearly stated in the report: “If the cost and performance targets identified in this report can be achieved, our analysis shows that fusion energy can play a major role in meeting future electricity needs and achieving global net-zero carbon goals.”

In a first for both universities, MIT undergraduates are engaged in research projects at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG), while MIT scholars are collaborating with UVG undergraduates on in-depth field studies in Guatemala.

These pilot projects are part of a larger enterprise, called ASPIRE (Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship). Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, this five-year, $15-million initiative brings together MIT, UVG, and the Guatemalan Exporters Association to promote sustainable solutions to local development challenges.

“This research is yielding insights into our understanding of how to design with and for marginalized people, specifically Indigenous people,” says Elizabeth Hoffecker, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE at MIT and director of the MIT Local Innovation Group.

The students’ work is bearing fruit in the form of publications and new products — directly advancing ASPIRE’s goals to create an innovation ecosystem in Guatemala that can be replicated elsewhere in Central and Latin America.

For the students, the project offers rewards both tangible and inspirational.

“My experience allowed me to find my interest in local innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Ximena Sarmiento García, a fifth-year undergraduate at UVG majoring in anthropology. Supervised by Hoffecker, Sarmiento García says, “I learned how to inform myself, investigate, and find solutions — to become a researcher.”

Sandra Youssef, a rising junior in mechanical engineering at MIT, collaborated with UVG researchers and Indigenous farmers to design a mobile cart to improve the harvest yield of snow peas. “It was perfect for me,” she says. “My goal was to use creative, new technologies and science to make a dent in difficult problems.”

Remote and effective

Kendra Leith, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE, and associate director for research at MIT D-Lab, shaped the MIT-based undergraduate research opportunities (UROPs) in concert with UVG colleagues. “Although MIT students aren’t currently permitted to travel to Guatemala, I wanted them to have an opportunity to apply their experience and knowledge to address real-world challenges,” says Leith. “The Covid pandemic prepared them and their counterparts at UVG for effective remote collaboration — the UROPs completed remarkably productive research projects over Zoom and met our goals for them.”

MIT students participated in some of UVG’s most ambitious ASPIRE research. For instance, Sydney Baller, a rising sophomore in mechanical engineering, joined a team of Indigenous farmers and UVG mechanical engineers investigating the manufacturing process and potential markets for essential oils extracted from thyme, rosemary, and chamomile plants.

“Indigenous people have thousands of years working with plant extracts and ancient remedies,” says Baller. “There is promising history there that would be important to follow up with more modern research.”

Sandra Youssef used computer-aided design and manufacturing to realize a design created in a hackathon by snow pea farmers. “Our cart had to hold 495 pounds of snow peas without collapsing or overturning, navigate narrow paths on hills, and be simple and inexpensive to assemble,” she says. The snow pea producers have tested two of Youssef’s designs, built by a team at UVG led by Rony Herrarte, a faculty member in the department of mechanical engineering.

From waste to filter

Two MIT undergraduates joined one of UVG’s long-standing projects: addressing pollution in Guatemala’s water. The research seeks to use chitosan molecules, extracted from shrimp shells, for bioremediation of heavy metals and other water contaminants. These shells are available in abundance, left as waste by the country’s shrimp industry.

Sophomores Ariana Hodlewsky, majoring in chemical engineering, and Paolo Mangiafico, majoring in brain and cognitive sciences, signed on to work with principal investigator and chemistry department instructor Allan Vásquez (UVG) on filtration systems utilizing chitosan.

“The team wants to find a cost-effective product rural communities, most at risk from polluted water, can use in homes or in town water systems,” says Mangiafico. “So we have been investigating different technologies for water filtration, and analyzing the Guatemalan and U.S. markets to understand the regulations and opportunities that might affect introduction of a chitosan-based product.”

“Our research into how different communities use water and into potential consumers and pitfalls sets the scene for prototypes UVG wants to produce,” says Hodlewsky.

Lourdes Figueroa, UVG ASPIRE project manager for technology transfer, found their assistance invaluable.

“Paolo and Ariana brought the MIT culture and mindset to the project,” she says. “They wanted to understand not only how the technology works, but the best ways of getting the technology out of the lab to make it useful.”

This was an “Aha!” moment, says Figueroa. “The MIT students made a major contribution to both the engineering and marketing sides by emphasizing that you have to think about how to guarantee the market acceptance of the technology while it is still under development.”

Innovation ecosystems

UVG’s three campuses have served as incubators for problem-solving innovation and entrepreneurship, in many cases driven by students from Indigenous communities and families. In 2022, Elizabeth Hoffecker, with eight UVG anthropology majors, set out to identify the most vibrant examples of these collaborative initiatives, which ASPIRE seeks to promote and replicate.

Hoffecker’s “innovation ecosystem diagnostic” revealed a cluster of activity centered on UVG’s Altiplano campus in the central highlands, which serves Mayan communities. Hoffecker and two of the anthropology students focused on four examples for a series of case studies, which they are currently preparing for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

“The caliber of their work was so good that it became clear to me that we could collaborate on a paper,” says Hoffecker. “It was my first time publishing with undergraduates.”

The researchers’ cases included novel production of traditional thread, and creation of a 3D phytoplankton kit that is being used to educate community members about water pollution in Lake Atitlán, a tourist destination that drives the local economy but is increasingly being affected by toxic algae blooms. Hoffecker singles out a project by Indigenous undergraduates who developed play-based teaching tools for introducing basic mathematical concepts.

“These connect to local Mayan ways of understanding and offer a novel, hands-on way to strengthen the math teaching skills of local primary school teachers in Indigenous communities,” says Hoffecker. “They created something that addresses a very immediate need in the community — lack of training.

Both of Hoffecker’s undergraduate collaborators are writing theses inspired by these case studies.

“My time with Elizabeth allowed me to learn how to conduct research from scratch, ask for help, find solutions, and trust myself,” says Sarmiento García. She finds the ASPIRE approach profoundly appealing. “It is not only ethical, but also deeply committed to applying results to the real lives of the people involved.”

“This experience has been incredibly positive, validating my own ability to generate knowledge through research, rather than relying only on established authors to back up my arguments,” says Camila del Cid, a fifth-year anthropology student. “This was empowering, especially as a Latin American researcher, because it emphasized that my perspective and contributions are important.”

Hoffecker says this pilot run with UVG undergrads produced “high-quality research that can inform evidence-based decision-making on development issues of top regional priority” — a key goal for ASPIRE. Hoffecker plans to “develop a pathway that other UVG students can follow to conduct similar research.”

MIT undergraduate research will continue. “Our students’ activities have been very valuable in Guatemala, so much so that the snow pea, chitosan, and essential oils teams would like to continue working with our students this year,” says Leith.  She anticipates a new round of MIT UROPs for next summer.

Youssef, for one, is eager to get to work on refining the snow pea cart. “I like the idea of working outside my comfort zone, thinking about things that seem unsolvable and coming up with a solution to fix some aspect of the problem,” she says.

Some of the most widely used drugs today, including penicillin, were discovered through a process called phenotypic screening. Using this method, scientists are essentially throwing drugs at a problem — for example, when attempting to stop bacterial growth or fixing a cellular defect — and then observing what happens next, without necessarily first knowing how the drug works. Perhaps surprisingly, historical data show that this approach is better at yielding approved medicines than those investigations that more narrowly focus on specific molecular targets.

But many scientists believe that properly setting up the problem is the true key to success. Certain microbial infections or genetic disorders caused by single mutations are much simpler to prototype than complex diseases like cancer. These require intricate biological models that are far harder to make or acquire. The result is a bottleneck in the number of drugs that can be tested, and thus the usefulness of phenotypic screening.

Now, a team of scientists led by the Shalek Lab at MIT has developed a promising new way to address the difficulty of applying phenotyping screening to scale. Their method allows researchers to simultaneously apply multiple drugs to a biological problem at once, and then computationally work backward to figure out the individual effects of each. For instance, when the team applied this method to models of pancreatic cancer and human immune cells, they were able to uncover surprising new biological insights, while also minimizing cost and sample requirements by several-fold — solving a few problems in scientific research at once.

Zev Gartner, a professor in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California at San Francisco, says this new method has great potential. “I think if there is a strong phenotype one is interested in, this will be a very powerful approach,” Gartner says.

The research was published Oct. 8 in Nature Biotechnology. It was led by Ivy Liu, Walaa Kattan, Benjamin Mead, Conner Kummerlowe, and Alex K. Shalek, the director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES) and the Health Innovation Hub at MIT, as well as the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry. It was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A “crazy” way to increase scale

Technological advances over the past decade have revolutionized our understanding of the inner lives of individual cells, setting the stage for richer phenotypic screens. However, many challenges remain.

For one, biologically representative models like organoids and primary tissues are only available in limited quantities. The most informative tests, like single-cell RNA sequencing, are also expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive.

That’s why the team decided to test out the “bold, maybe even crazy idea” to mix everything together, says Liu, a PhD student in the MIT Computational and Systems Biology program. In other words, they chose to combine many perturbations — things like drugs, chemical molecules, or biological compounds made by cells — into one single concoction, and then try to decipher their individual effects afterward.

They began testing their workflow by making different combinations of 316 U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs. “It’s a high bar: basically, the worst-case scenario,” says Liu. “Since every drug is known to have a strong effect, the signals could have been impossible to disentangle.”

These random combinations ranged from three to 80 drugs per pool, each of which was applied to lab-grown cells. The team then tried to understand the effects of the individual drug using a linear computational model.

It was a success. When compared with traditional tests for each individual drug, the new method yielded comparable results, successfully finding the strongest drugs and their respective effects in each pool, at a fraction of the cost, samples, and effort.

Putting it into practice

To test the method’s applicability to address real-world health challenges, the team then approached two problems that were previously unimaginable with past phenotypic screening techniques.

The first test focused on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the deadliest types of cancer. In PDAC, many types of signals come from the surrounding cells in the tumor's environment. These signals can influence how the tumor progresses and responds to treatments. So, the team wanted to identify the most important ones.

Using their new method to pool different signals in parallel, they found several surprise candidates. “We never could have predicted some of our hits,” says Shalek. These included two previously overlooked cytokines that actually could predict survival outcomes of patients with PDAC in public cancer data sets.

The second test looked at the effects of 90 drugs on adjusting the immune system’s function. These drugs were applied to fresh human blood cells, which contain a complex mix of different types of immune cells. Using their new method and single-cell RNA-sequencing, the team could not only test a large library of drugs, but also separate the drugs’ effects out for each type of cell. This enabled the team to understand how each drug might work in a more complex tissue, and then select the best one for the job.

“We might say there’s a defect in a T cell, so we’re going to add this drug, but we never think about, well, what does that drug do to all of the other cells in the tissue?” says Shalek. “We now have a way to gather this information, so that we can begin to pick drugs to maximize on-target effects and minimize side effects.”

Together, these experiments also showed Shalek the need to build better tools and datasets for creating hypotheses about potential treatments. “The complexity and lack of predictability for the responses we saw tells me that we likely are not finding the right, or most effective, drugs in many instances,” says Shalek.

Reducing barriers and improving lives

Although the current compression technique can identify the perturbations with the greatest effects, it’s still unable to perfectly resolve the effects of each one. Therefore, the team recommends that it act as a supplement to support additional screening. “Traditional tests that examine the top hits should follow,” Liu says.

Importantly, however, the new compression framework drastically reduces the number of input samples, costs, and labor required to execute a screen. With fewer barriers in play, it marks an exciting advance for understanding complex responses in different cells and building new models for precision medicine.

Shalek says, “This is really an incredible approach that opens up the kinds of things that we can do to find the right targets, or the right drugs, to use to improve lives for patients.”

No matter the outcome, the results of the 2024 United States presidential election are certain to have global impact. How are citizens and leaders in other parts of the world viewing this election? What’s at stake for their countries and regions?

This was the focus of “The 2024 US Presidential Election: The World is Watching,” a Starr Forum held earlier this month on the MIT campus.

The Starr Forum is a public event series hosted by MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS), and focused on leading issues of global interest. The event was moderated by Evan Lieberman, director of CIS and the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa.

Experts in African, Asian, European, and Latin American politics assembled to share ideas with one another and the audience.

Each offered informed commentary on their respective regions, situating their observations within several contexts including the countries’ style of government, residents’ perceptions of American democratic norms, and America’s stature in the eyes of those countries’ populations.

Perceptions of U.S. politics from across the globe

Katrina Burgess, professor of political economy at Tufts University and the director of the Henry J. Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, sought to distinguish the multiple political identities of members of the Latin American diaspora in America and their perceptions of America’s relationship with their countries.

“American democracy is no longer perceived as a standard bearer,” Burgess said. “While members of these communities see advantages in aligning themselves with one of the presidential candidates because of positions on economic relations, immigration, and border security, others have deeply-held views on fossil fuels and increased access to sustainable energy solutions.”

Prerna Singh, Brown University’s Mahatma Gandhi Professor of Political Science and International Studies, spoke about India’s status as the world’s largest democracy and described a country moving away from democratic norms.

“Indian leaders don’t confer with the press,” she said. “Indian leaders don’t debate like Americans.”

The ethnically and linguistically diverse India, Singh noted, has elected several women to its highest government posts, while the United States has yet to elect one. She described a brand of “exclusionary nationalism” that threatened to move India away from democracy and toward something like authoritarian rule. 

John Githongo, the Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at CIS for 2024-25, shared his findings on African countries’ views of the 2024 election.

“America’s soft power infrastructure in Africa is crumbling,” said Githongo, a Kenyan native. “Chinese investment in Africa is up significantly and China is seen by many as an ideal political and economic partner.”

Youth-led protests in Kenya, Githongo noted, occurred in response to a failure of promised democratic reforms. He cautioned against a potential return to a pre-Cold War posture in Africa, noting that the Biden administration was the first in some time to attempt to reestablish economic and political ties with African countries.

Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and the director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, described shifting political winds in Europe that appear similar to increased right-wing extremism and a brand of populist agitation being observed in America.

“We see the rise of the radical, antidemocratic right in Europe and it looks like shifts we’ve observed in the U.S.,” he noted. “Trump supporters in Germany, Poland, and Hungary are increasingly vocal.”

Ziblatt acknowledged the divisions in the historical transatlantic relationship between Europe and America as symptoms of broader challenges. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy supply issues, and national security apparatuses dependent on American support may continue to cause political ripples, he added.

Does America still have global influence?

Following each of their presentations, the guest speakers engaged in a conversation, taking questions from the audience. There was agreement among panelists that there’s less investment globally in the outcome of the U.S. election than may have been observed in past elections.

Singh noted that, from the perspective of the Indian media, India has bigger fish to fry.

Panelists diverged, however, when asked about the rise of political polarization and its connection with behaviors observed in American circles.

“This trend is global,” Burgess asserted. “There’s no causal relationship between American phenomena and other countries’ perceptions.”

“I think they’re learning from each other,” Ziblatt countered when asked about extremist elements in America and Europe. “There’s power in saying outrageous things.”

Githongo asserted a kind of “trickle-down” was at work in some African countries.

“Countries with right-leaning governments see those inclinations make their way to organizations like evangelical Christians,” he said. “Their influence mirrors the rise of right-wing ideology in other African countries and in America.”

Singh likened the continued splintering of American audiences to India’s caste system.

“I think where caste comes in is with the Indian diaspora,” she said. “Indian-American business and tech leaders tend to hail from high castes.” These leaders, she said, have outsized influence in their American communities and in India.

Linguist Irene Heim, professor emerita in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, has been named a co-recipient of the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy.

Heim shares the award with Hans Kamp, a professor of formal logics and philosophy of language at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. Heim and Kamp are being recognized for their independent work on the “conception and early development of dynamic semantics for natural language.”

The Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of philosophy, is awarded every three years by the Schock Foundation to distinguished international recipients proposed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. A prize ceremony and symposium will be held at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm Nov. 11-12. MIT will host a separate event on campus celebrating Heim’s achievement on Dec. 7.

A press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explains more about the research for which Heim and Kamp were recognized:

“Natural languages are highly context-dependent — how a sentence is interpreted often depends on the situation, but also on what has been uttered before. In one type of case, a pronoun depends on an earlier phrase in a separate clause. In the mid-1970s, some constructions of this type posed a hard problem for formal semantic theory.

“Around 1980, Hans Kamp and Irene Heim each separately developed similar solutions to this problem. Their theories brought far-reaching changes in the field. Both introduced a new level of representation between the linguistic expression and its worldly interpretation and, in both, this level has a new type of linguistic meaning. Instead of the traditional idea that a clause describes a worldly condition, meaning at this level consists in the way it contributes to updating information. Based on these fundamentally new ideas, the theories provide adequate interpretations of the problematic constructions.”

This is the first time the prize has been awarded for work done in linguistics. The work has had a transformative effect on three major subfields of linguistics: the study of linguistic mental representation (syntax), the study of their logical properties (semantics), and the study of the conditions on the use of linguistic expressions in conversation (pragmatics). Heim has published dozens of texts on semantics and syntax of language.

“I am struck again and again by how our field has progressed in the 50 years since I first entered it and the 40 years since my co-awardee and I contributed the work which won the award,” Heim said. “Those old contributions now look kind of simple-minded, in some spots even confused. But — like other influential ideas in this half-century of linguistics and philosophy of language — they have been influential not just because many people ran with them, but more so because many people picked them apart and explored ever more sophisticated and satisfying alternatives to them.”

Heim, a recognized leader in the fields of syntax and semantics, was born in Germany in 1954. She studied at the University of Konstanz and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where she earned an MA in philosophy while minoring in linguistics and mathematics. She later earned a PhD in linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California Los Angeles before joining MIT’s faculty in 1989. 

“I am proud to think of myself as Irene’s student,” says Danny Fox, linguistics section head and the Anshen-Chomsky Professor of Language and Thought. “Irene’s work has served as the foundation of so many areas of our field, and she is rightfully famous for it. But her influence goes even deeper than that. She has taught generations of researchers, primarily by example, how to think anew about entrenched ideas (including her own contributions), how much there is to gain from careful analysis of theoretical proposals, and at the same time, how not to entirely neglect our ambitious aspirations to move beyond this careful work and think about when it might be appropriate to take substantive risks.”

In the current AI zeitgeist, sequence models have skyrocketed in popularity for their ability to analyze data and predict what to do next. For instance, you’ve likely used next-token prediction models like ChatGPT, which anticipate each word (token) in a sequence to form answers to users’ queries. There are also full-sequence diffusion models like Sora, which convert words into dazzling, realistic visuals by successively “denoising” an entire video sequence. 

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have proposed a simple change to the diffusion training scheme that makes this sequence denoising considerably more flexible.

When applied to fields like computer vision and robotics, the next-token and full-sequence diffusion models have capability trade-offs. Next-token models can spit out sequences that vary in length. However, they make these generations while being unaware of desirable states in the far future — such as steering its sequence generation toward a certain goal 10 tokens away — and thus require additional mechanisms for long-horizon (long-term) planning. Diffusion models can perform such future-conditioned sampling, but lack the ability of next-token models to generate variable-length sequences.

Researchers from CSAIL want to combine the strengths of both models, so they created a sequence model training technique called “Diffusion Forcing.” The name comes from “Teacher Forcing,” the conventional training scheme that breaks down full sequence generation into the smaller, easier steps of next-token generation (much like a good teacher simplifying a complex concept).

Diffusion Forcing found common ground between diffusion models and teacher forcing: They both use training schemes that involve predicting masked (noisy) tokens from unmasked ones. In the case of diffusion models, they gradually add noise to data, which can be viewed as fractional masking. The MIT researchers’ Diffusion Forcing method trains neural networks to cleanse a collection of tokens, removing different amounts of noise within each one while simultaneously predicting the next few tokens. The result: a flexible, reliable sequence model that resulted in higher-quality artificial videos and more precise decision-making for robots and AI agents.

By sorting through noisy data and reliably predicting the next steps in a task, Diffusion Forcing can aid a robot in ignoring visual distractions to complete manipulation tasks. It can also generate stable and consistent video sequences and even guide an AI agent through digital mazes. This method could potentially enable household and factory robots to generalize to new tasks and improve AI-generated entertainment.

“Sequence models aim to condition on the known past and predict the unknown future, a type of binary masking. However, masking doesn’t need to be binary,” says lead author, MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) PhD student, and CSAIL member Boyuan Chen. “With Diffusion Forcing, we add different levels of noise to each token, effectively serving as a type of fractional masking. At test time, our system can “unmask” a collection of tokens and diffuse a sequence in the near future at a lower noise level. It knows what to trust within its data to overcome out-of-distribution inputs.”

In several experiments, Diffusion Forcing thrived at ignoring misleading data to execute tasks while anticipating future actions.

When implemented into a robotic arm, for example, it helped swap two toy fruits across three circular mats, a minimal example of a family of long-horizon tasks that require memories. The researchers trained the robot by controlling it from a distance (or teleoperating it) in virtual reality. The robot is trained to mimic the user’s movements from its camera. Despite starting from random positions and seeing distractions like a shopping bag blocking the markers, it placed the objects into its target spots.

To generate videos, they trained Diffusion Forcing on “Minecraft” game play and colorful digital environments created within Google’s DeepMind Lab Simulator. When given a single frame of footage, the method produced more stable, higher-resolution videos than comparable baselines like a Sora-like full-sequence diffusion model and ChatGPT-like next-token models. These approaches created videos that appeared inconsistent, with the latter sometimes failing to generate working video past just 72 frames.

Diffusion Forcing not only generates fancy videos, but can also serve as a motion planner that steers toward desired outcomes or rewards. Thanks to its flexibility, Diffusion Forcing can uniquely generate plans with varying horizon, perform tree search, and incorporate the intuition that the distant future is more uncertain than the near future. In the task of solving a 2D maze, Diffusion Forcing outperformed six baselines by generating faster plans leading to the goal location, indicating that it could be an effective planner for robots in the future.

Across each demo, Diffusion Forcing acted as a full sequence model, a next-token prediction model, or both. According to Chen, this versatile approach could potentially serve as a powerful backbone for a “world model,” an AI system that can simulate the dynamics of the world by training on billions of internet videos. This would allow robots to perform novel tasks by imagining what they need to do based on their surroundings. For example, if you asked a robot to open a door without being trained on how to do it, the model could produce a video that’ll show the machine how to do it.

The team is currently looking to scale up their method to larger datasets and the latest transformer models to improve performance. They intend to broaden their work to build a ChatGPT-like robot brain that helps robots perform tasks in new environments without human demonstration.

“With Diffusion Forcing, we are taking a step to bringing video generation and robotics closer together,” says senior author Vincent Sitzmann, MIT assistant professor and member of CSAIL, where he leads the Scene Representation group. “In the end, we hope that we can use all the knowledge stored in videos on the internet to enable robots to help in everyday life. Many more exciting research challenges remain, like how robots can learn to imitate humans by watching them even when their own bodies are so different from our own!”

Chen and Sitzmann wrote the paper alongside recent MIT visiting researcher Diego Martí Monsó, and CSAIL affiliates: Yilun Du, a EECS graduate student; Max Simchowitz, former postdoc and incoming Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor; and Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of EECS, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, vice president of robotics research at the Toyota Research Institute, and CSAIL member. Their work was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Singapore Defence Science and Technology Agency, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity via the U.S. Department of the Interior, and the Amazon Science Hub. They will present their research at NeurIPS in December.

With its latest space mission successfully launched, NASA is set to return for a close-up investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Yesterday at 12:06 p.m. EDT, the Europa Clipper lifted off via SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on a mission that will take a close look at Europa’s icy surface. Five years from now, the spacecraft will visit the moon, which hosts a water ocean covered by a water-ice shell. The spacecraft’s mission is to learn more about the composition and geology of the moon’s surface and interior and to assess its astrobiological potential. Because of Jupiter’s intense radiation environment, Europa Clipper will conduct a series of flybys, with its closest approach bringing it within just 16 miles of Europa’s surface. 

MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Research Scientist Jason Soderblom is a co-investigator on two of the spacecraft’s instruments: the Europa Imaging System and the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa. Over the past nine years, he and his fellow team members have been building imaging and mapping instruments to study Europa’s surface in detail to gain a better understanding of previously seen geologic features, as well as the chemical composition of the materials that are present. Here, he describes the mission's primary plans and goals.

Q: What do we currently know about Europa’s surface?

A: We know from NASA Galileo mission data that the surface crust is relatively thin, but we don’t know how thin it is. One of the goals of the Europa Clipper mission is to measure the thickness of that ice shell. The surface is riddled with fractures that indicate tectonism is actively resurfacing the moon. Its crust is primarily composed of water ice, but there are also exposures of non-ice material along these fractures and ridges that we believe include material coming up from within Europa.

One of the things that makes investigating the materials on the surface more difficult is the environment. Jupiter is a significant source of radiation, and Europa is relatively close to Jupiter. That radiation modifies the materials on the surface; understanding that radiation damage is a key component to understanding the composition.

This is also what drives the clipper-style mission and gives the mission its name: we clip by Europa, collect data, and then spend the majority of our time outside of the radiation environment. That allows us time to download the data, analyze it, and make plans for the next flyby.

Q: Did that pose a significant challenge when it came to instrument design?

A: Yes, and this is one of the reasons that we're just now returning to do this mission. The concept of this mission came about around the time of the Galileo mission in the late 1990s, so it's been roughly 25 years since scientists first wanted to carry out this mission. A lot of that time has been figuring out how to deal with the radiation environment.

There's a lot of tricks that we've been developing over the years. The instruments are heavily shielded, and lots of modeling has gone into figuring exactly where to put that shielding. We've also developed very specific techniques to collect data. For example, by taking a whole bunch of short observations, we can look for the signature of this radiation noise, remove it from the little bits of data here and there, add the good data together, and end up with a low-radiation-noise observation.

Q: You're involved with the two different imaging and mapping instruments: the Europa Imaging System (EIS) and the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE). How are they different from each other?

A: The camera system [EIS] is primarily focused on understanding the physics and the geology that's driving processes on the surface, looking for: fractured zones; regions that we refer to as chaos terrain, where it looks like icebergs have been suspended in a slurry of water and have jumbled around and mixed and twisted; regions where we believe the surface is colliding and subduction is occurring, so one section of the surface is going beneath the other; and other regions that are spreading, so new surface is being created like our mid-ocean ridges on Earth.

The spectrometer’s [MISE] primary function is to constrain the composition of the surface. In particular, we're really interested in sections where we think liquid water might have come to the surface. Understanding what material is from within Europa and what material is being deposited from external sources is also important, and separating that is necessary to understand the composition of those coming from Europa and using that to learn about the composition of the subsurface ocean.

There is an intersection between those two, and that's my interest in the mission. We have color imaging with our imaging system that can provide some crude understanding of the composition, and there is a mapping component to our spectrometer that allows us to understand how the materials that we're detecting are physically distributed and correlate with the geology. So there's a way to examine the intersection of those two disciplines — to extrapolate the compositional information derived from the spectrometer to much higher resolutions using the camera, and to extrapolate the geological information that we learn from the camera to the compositional constraints from the spectrometer.

Q: How do those mission goals align with the research that you've been doing here at MIT?

A: One of the other major missions that I've been involved with was the Cassini mission, primarily working with the Visual and Infrared Spectrometer team to understand the geology and composition of Saturn's moon Titan. That instrument is very similar to the MISE instrument, both in function and in science objective, and so there's a very strong connection between that and the Europa Clipper mission. For another mission, for which I’m leading the camera team, is working to retrieve a sample of a comet, and my primary function on that mission is understanding the geology of the cometary surface.

Q: What are you most excited about learning from the Europa Clipper mission?

A: I'm most fascinated with some of these very unique geologic features that we see on the surface of Europa, understanding the composition of the material that is involved, and the processes that are driving those features. In particular, the chaos terrains and the fractures that we see on the surface.

Q: It's going to be a while before the spacecraft finally reaches Europa. What work needs to be done in the meantime?

A: A key component of this mission will be the laboratory work here on Earth, expanding our spectral libraries so that when we collect a spectrum of Europa's surface, we can compare that to laboratory measurements. We are also in the process of developing a number of models to allow us to, for example, understand how a material might process and change starting in the ocean and working its way up through fractures and eventually to the surface. Developing these models now is an important piece before we collect these data, then we can make corrections and get improved observations as the mission progresses. Making the best and most efficient use of the spacecraft resources requires an ability to reprogram and refine observations in real-time.

Our brains constantly work to make predictions about what’s going on around us to ensure that we can attend to and consider the unexpected, for instance. A new study examines how this works during consciousness and also breaks down under general anesthesia. The results add evidence to the idea that conscious thought requires synchronized communication — mediated by brain rhythms in specific frequency bands — between basic sensory and higher-order cognitive regions of the brain.

Previously, members of the research team in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and at Vanderbilt University had described how brain rhythms enable the brain to remain prepared to attend to surprises. Cognition-oriented brain regions (generally at the front of the brain) use relatively low-frequency alpha and beta rhythms to suppress processing by sensory regions (generally toward the back of the brain) of stimuli that have become familiar and mundane in the environment (e.g., your co-worker’s music). When sensory regions detect a surprise (e.g., the office fire alarm), they use faster-frequency gamma rhythms to tell the higher regions about it, and the higher regions process that at gamma frequencies to decide what to do (e.g., exit the building).

The new results, published Oct. 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that when animals were under propofol-induced general anesthesia, a sensory region retained the capacity to detect simple surprises but communication with a higher cognitive region toward the front of the brain was lost, making that region unable to engage in its “top-down” regulation of the activity of the sensory region and keeping it oblivious to simple and more complex surprises alike.

What we've got here is failure to communicate

“What we are doing here speaks to the nature of consciousness,” says co-senior author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Propofol general anesthesia deactivates the top-down processes that that underlie cognition. It essentially disconnects communication between the front and back halves of the brain.”

Co-senior author Andre Bastos, an assistant professor in the psychology department at Vanderbilt and a former member of Miller’s MIT lab, adds that the study results highlight the key role of frontal areas in consciousness.

“These results are particularly important given the newfound scientific interest in the mechanisms of consciousness, and how consciousness relates to the ability of the brain to form predictions,” Bastos says.

The brain’s ability to predict is dramatically altered during anesthesia. It was interesting that the front of the brain, areas associated with cognition, were more strongly diminished in their predictive abilities than sensory areas. This suggests that prefrontal areas help to spark an “ignition” event that allows sensory information to become conscious. Sensory cortex activation by itself does not lead to conscious perception. These observations help us narrow down possible models for the mechanisms of consciousness.

Yihan Sophy Xiong, a graduate student in Bastos’ lab who led the study, says the anesthetic reduces the times in which inter-regional communication within the cortex can occur.

“In the awake brain, brain waves give short windows of opportunity for neurons to fire optimally — the ‘refresh rate’ of the brain, so to speak,” Xiong says. “This refresh rate helps organize different brain areas to communicate effectively. Anesthesia both slows down the refresh rate, which narrows these time windows for brain areas to talk to each other and makes the refresh rate less effective, so that neurons become more disorganized about when they can fire. When the refresh rate no longer works as intended, our ability to make predictions is weakened.”

Learning from oddballs

To conduct the research, the neuroscientists measured the electrical signals, “or spiking,” of hundreds of individual neurons and the coordinated rhythms of their aggregated activity (at alpha/beta and gamma frequencies), in two areas on the surface, or cortex, of the brain of two animals as they listened to sequences of tones. Sometimes the sequences would all be the same note (e.g., AAAAA). Sometimes there’d be a simple surprise that the researchers called a “local oddball” (e.g., AAAAB). But sometimes the surprise would be more complicated, or a “global oddball.” For example, after seeing a series of AAAABs, there’d all of a sudden be AAAAA, which violates the global but not the local pattern.

Prior work has suggested that a sensory region (in this case the temporoparietal area, or Tpt) can spot local oddballs on its own, Miller says. Detecting the more complicated global oddball requires the participation of a higher order region (in this case the frontal eye fields, or FEF).

The animals heard the tone sequences both while awake and while under propofol anesthesia. There were no surprises about the waking state. The researchers reaffirmed that top-down alpha/beta rhythms from FEF carried predictions to the Tpt and that Tpt would increase gamma rhythms when an oddball came up, causing FEF (and the prefrontal cortex) to respond with upticks of gamma activity as well.

But by several measures and analyses, the scientists could see these dynamics break down after the animals lost consciousness.

Under propofol, for instance, spiking activity declined overall but when a local oddball came along, Tpt spiking still increased notably but now spiking in FEF didn’t follow suit as it does during wakefulness.

Meanwhile, when a global oddball was presented during wakefulness, the researchers could use software to “decode” representation of that among neurons in FEF and the prefrontal cortex (another cognition-oriented region). They could also decode local oddballs in the Tpt. But under anesthesia the decoder could no longer reliably detect representation of local or global oddballs in FEF or the prefrontal cortex.

Moreover, when they compared rhythms in the regions amid wakeful versus unconscious states they found stark differences. When the animals were awake, oddballs increased gamma activity in both Tpt and FEF and alpha/beta rhythms decreased. Regular, non-oddball stimulation increased alpha/beta rhythms. But when the animals lost consciousness the increase in gamma rhythms from a local oddball was even greater in Tpt than when the animal was awake.

“Under propofol-mediated loss of consciousness, the inhibitory function of alpha/beta became diminished and/or eliminated, leading to disinhibition of oddballs in sensory cortex,” the authors wrote.

Other analyses of inter-region connectivity and synchrony revealed that the regions lost the ability to communicate during anesthesia.

In all, the study’s evidence suggests that conscious thought requires coordination across the cortex, from front to back, the researchers wrote.

“Our results therefore suggest an important role for prefrontal cortex activation, in addition to sensory cortex activation, for conscious perception,” the researchers wrote.

In addition to Xiong, Miller, and Bastos, the paper’s other authors are Jacob Donoghue, Mikael Lundqvist, Meredith Mahnke, Alex Major, and Emery N. Brown.

The National Institutes of Health, The JPB Foundation, and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory funded the study.

For two days at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, participants in the Kuggie Vallee Distinguished Lectures and Workshops celebrated the success of women in science and shared strategies to persist through, or better yet dissipate, the stiff headwinds women still face in the field.

“Everyone is here to celebrate and to inspire and advance the accomplishments of all women in science,” said host Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and director of the Picower Institute, as she welcomed an audience that included scores of students, postdocs, and other research trainees. “It is a great feeling to have the opportunity to showcase examples of our successes and to help lift up the next generation.”

Tsai earned the honor of hosting the event after she was named a Vallee Visiting Professor in 2022 by the Vallee Foundation. Foundation president Peter Howley, a professor of pathological anatomy at Harvard University, said the global series of lectureships and workshops were created to honor Kuggie Vallee, a former Lesley College professor who worked to advance the careers of women.

During the program Sept. 24-25, speakers and audience members alike made it clear that helping women succeed requires both recognizing their achievements and resolving to change social structures in which they face marginalization.

Inspiring achievements

Lectures on the first day featured two brain scientists who have each led acclaimed discoveries that have been transforming their fields.

Michelle Monje, a pediatric neuro-oncologist at Stanford University whose recognitions include a MacArthur Fellowship, described her lab’s studies of brain cancers in children, which emerge at specific times in development as young brains adapt to their world by wiring up new circuits and insulating neurons with a fatty sheathing called myelin. Monje has discovered that when the precursors to myelinating cells, called oligodendrocyte precursor cells, harbor cancerous mutations, the tumors that arise — called gliomas — can hijack those cellular and molecular mechanisms. To promote their own growth, gliomas tap directly into the electrical activity of neural circuits by forging functional neuron-to-cancer connections, akin to the “synapse” junctions healthy neurons make with each other. Years of her lab’s studies, often led by female trainees, have not only revealed this insidious behavior (and linked aberrant myelination to many other diseases as well), but also revealed specific molecular factors involved. Those findings, Monje said, present completely novel potential avenues for therapeutic intervention.

“This cancer is an electrically active tissue and that is not how we have been approaching understanding it,” she said.

Erin Schuman, who directs the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and has won honors including the Brain Prize, described her groundbreaking discoveries related to how neurons form and edit synapses along the very long branches — axons and dendrites — that give the cells their exotic shapes. Synapses form very far from the cell body where scientists had long thought all proteins, including those needed for synapse structure and activity, must be made. In the mid-1990s, Schuman showed that the protein-making process can occur at the synapse and that neurons stage the needed infrastructure — mRNA and ribosomes — near those sites. Her lab has continued to develop innovative tools to build on that insight, cataloging the stunning array of thousands of mRNAs involved, including about 800 that are primarily translated at the synapse, studying the diversity of synapses that arise from that collection, and imaging individual ribosomes such that her lab can detect when they are actively making proteins in synaptic neighborhoods.

Persistent headwinds

While the first day’s lectures showcased examples of women’s success, the second day’s workshops turned the spotlight on the social and systemic hindrances that continue to make such achievements an uphill climb. Speakers and audience members engaged in frank dialogues aimed at calling out those barriers, overcoming them, and dismantling them.

Susan Silbey, the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology and Anthropology at MIT and professor of behavioral and policy sciences in the MIT Sloan School of Management, told the group that as bad as sexual harassment and assault in the workplace are, the more pervasive, damaging, and persistent headwinds for women across a variety of professions are “deeply sedimented cultural habits” that marginalize their expertise and contributions in workplaces, rendering them invisible to male counterparts, even when they are in powerful positions. High-ranking women in Silicon Valley who answered the “Elephant in the Valley” survey, for instance, reported high rates of many demeaning comments and demeanor, as well as exclusion from social circles. Even U.S. Supreme Court justices are not immune, she noted, citing research showing that for decades female justices have been interrupted with disproportionate frequency during oral arguments at the court. Silbey’s research has shown that young women entering the engineering workforce often become discouraged by a system that appears meritocratic, but in which they are often excluded from opportunities to demonstrate or be credited for that merit and are paid significantly less.

“Women’s occupational inequality is a consequence of being ignored, having contributions overlooked or appropriated, of being assigned to lower-status roles, while men are pushed ahead, honored and celebrated, often on the basis of women’s work,” Silbey said.

Often relatively small in numbers, women in such workplaces become tokens — visible as different, but still treated as outsiders, Silbey said. Women tend to internalize this status, becoming very cautious about their work while some men surge ahead in more cavalier fashion. Silbey and speakers who followed illustrated the effect this can have on women’s careers in science. Kara McKinley, an assistant professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard, noted that while the scientific career “pipeline” in some areas of science is full of female graduate students and postdocs, only about 20 percent of natural sciences faculty positions are held by women. Strikingly, women are already significantly depleted in the applicant pools for assistant professor positions, she said. Those who do apply tend to wait until they are more qualified than the men they are competing against. 

McKinley and Silbey each noted that women scientists submit fewer papers to prestigious journals, with Silbey explaining that it’s often because women are more likely to worry that their studies need to tie up every loose end. Yet, said Stacie Weninger, a venture capitalist and president of the F-Prime Biomedical Research Initiative and a former editor at Cell Press, women were also less likely than men to rebut rejections from journal editors, thereby accepting the rejection even though rebuttals sometimes work.

Several speakers, including Weninger and Silbey, said pedagogy must change to help women overcome a social tendency to couch their assertions in caveats when many men speak with confidence and are therefore perceived as more knowledgeable.

At lunch, trainees sat in small groups with the speakers. They shared sometimes harrowing personal stories of gender-related difficulties in their young careers and sought advice on how to persist and remain resilient. Schuman advised the trainees to report mistreatment, even if they aren’t confident that university officials will be able to effect change, to at least make sure patterns of mistreatment get on the record. Reflecting on discouraging comments she experienced early in her career, Monje advised students to build up and maintain an inner voice of confidence and draw upon it when criticism is unfair.

“It feels terrible in the moment, but cream rises,” Monje said. “Believe in yourself. It will be OK in the end.”

Lifting each other up

Speakers at the conference shared many ideas to help overcome inequalities. McKinley described a program she launched in 2020 to ensure that a diversity of well-qualified women and non-binary postdocs are recruited for, and apply for, life sciences faculty jobs: the Leading Edge Symposium. The program identifies and names fellows — 200 so far — and provides career mentoring advice, a supportive community, and a platform to ensure they are visible to recruiters. Since the program began, 99 of the fellows have gone on to accept faculty positions at various institutions.

In a talk tracing the arc of her career, Weninger, who trained as a neuroscientist at Harvard, said she left bench work for a job as an editor because she wanted to enjoy the breadth of science, but also noted that her postdoc salary didn’t even cover the cost of child care. She left Cell Press in 2005 to help lead a task force on women in science that Harvard formed in the wake of comments by then-president Lawrence Summers widely understood as suggesting that women lacked “natural ability” in science and engineering. Working feverishly for months, the task force recommended steps to increase the number of senior women in science, including providing financial support for researchers who were also caregivers at home so they’d have the money to hire a technician. That extra set of hands would afford them the flexibility to keep research running even as they also attended to their families. Notably, Monje said she does this for the postdocs in her lab.

A graduate student asked Silbey at the end of her talk how to change a culture in which traditionally male-oriented norms marginalize women. Silbey said it starts with calling out those norms and recognizing that they are the issue, rather than increasing women’s representation in, or asking them to adapt to, existing systems.

“To make change, it requires that you do recognize the differences of the experiences and not try to make women exactly like men, or continue the past practices and think, ‘Oh, we just have to add women into it’,” she said.

Silbey also praised the Kuggie Vallee event at MIT for assembling a new community around these issues. Women in science need more social networks where they can exchange information and resources, she said.

“This is where an organ, an event like this, is an example of making just that kind of change: women making new networks for women,” she said.

Growing up in Taiwan, Jane-Jane Chen excelled at math and science, which, at that time, were promoted heavily by the government, and were taught at a high level. Learning rudimentary English as well, the budding scientist knew she wanted to come to the United States to continue her studies, after she earned a bachelor of science in agricultural chemistry from the National Taiwan University in Taipei.

But the journey to becoming a respected scientist, with many years of notable National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation-funded research findings, would require Chen to be uncommonly determined, to move far from her childhood home, to overcome cultural obstacles — and to have the energy to be a trailblazer — in a field where barriers to being a woman in science were significantly higher than they are today.

Today, Chen is looking back on her journey, and on her long career as a principal research scientist at the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), a position from which she recently retired after 45 dedicated years.

At MIT, Chen established herself as an internationally recognized authority in the field of blood cell development — specifically red blood cells, says Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. Helmholtz Professor and core faculty in IMES, professor of microbiology and immunobiology and health science and technology at Harvard Medical School, and one of the scientists Chen worked with most closely. 

“Red cells are essential because they carry oxygen to our cells and tissues, requiring iron in the form of a co-factor called heme,” Gehrke says. “Both insufficient heme availability and excess heme are detrimental to red cell development, and Dr. Chen explored the molecular mechanisms allowing cells to adapt to variable heme levels to maintain blood cell production.”

During her MIT career, Chen produced potent biochemistry research, working with heme-regulated eIF2 alpha kinase (which was discovered as the heme-regulated inhibitor of translation, HRI) and regulation of gene expression at translation relating to anemia, including:

• cloning of the HRI cDNA, enabling groundbreaking new discoveries of HRI in the erythroid system and, notably, most recently in the brain neuronal system upon mitochondrial stress and in cancers;
• elucidating the biochemistry of heme-regulation of HRI;
• generating universal HRI knockout mice as a valuable research tool to study HRI’s functions in vivo in the setting of the whole animal; and
• establishing HRI as a master translation regulator for erythropoiesis under stress and diseases.

“Dr. Chen’s signature discovery is the molecular cloning of the cDNA of the heme regulated inhibitor protein (HRI), a master regulatory protein in gene expression under stress and disease conditions,” Gehrke says, adding that Chen “subsequently devoted her career to defining a molecular and biochemical understanding of this key protein kinase” and that she “has also contributed several invited review articles on the subject of red cell development, and her papers are seminal contributions to her field.”

Forging her path

Shortly after graduating college, in 1973, Chen received a scholarship to come to California to study for her PhD in biochemistry at the School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. In Taiwan, Chen recalls, the demographic balance between male and female students was even, about 50 percent for each. Once she was in medical school in the United States, she found there were fewer female students, closer to 30 percent at that time, she recalls.

But she says she was fortunate to have important female mentors while at USC, including her PhD advisor, Mary Ellen Jones, a renowned biochemist who is notable for her discovery of carbamyl phosphate, a chemical substance that is key to the biosynthesis of both pyrimidine nucleotides, and arginine and urea. Jones, whom The New York Times called a “crucial researcher on DNA” and a foundational basic cancer researcher, had worked with eventual Nobel laureate Fritz Lipmann at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

When Chen arrived, while there were other Taiwanese students at USC, there were not many at the medical school. Chen says she bonded with a young female scientist and student from Hong Kong and with another female student who was Korean and Chinese, but who was born in America. Forming these friendships was crucial for blunting the isolation she could sometimes feel as a newcomer to America, particularly her connection with the American-born young woman: “She helped me a lot with getting used to the language,” and the culture, Chen says. “It was very hard to be so far away from my family and friends,” she adds. “It was the very first time I had left home. By coincidence, I had a very nice roommate who was not Chinese, but knew the Chinese language conversationally, so that was so lucky … I still have the letters that my parents wrote to me. I was the only girl, and the eldest child (Chen has three younger brothers), so it was hard for all of us.”

“Mostly, the culture I learned was in the lab,” Chen remembers. “I had to work a long day in the lab, and I knew it was such a great opportunity ­ — to go to seminars with professors to listen to speakers who had won, or would win, Nobel Prizes. My monthly living stipend was $300, so that had to stretch far. In my second year, more of my college friends had come to the USC and Caltech, and I began to have more interactions with other Taiwanese students who were studying here.”

Chen's first scientific discovery at Jones’ laboratory was that the fourth enzyme of the pyrimidine biosynthesis, dihydroorotate dehydrogenase, is localized in the inner membrane of the mitochondria. As it more recently turned out, this enzyme plays dual roles not only for pyrimidine biosynthesis, but also for cellular redox homeostasis, and has been demonstrated to be an important target for the development of cancer treatments.

Coming to MIT

After receiving her degree, Chen received a postdoctoral fellowship to work at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, in New Jersey, for nine months. In 1979, she married Zong-Long Liau, who was then working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, from where he also recently retired. She accepted a postdoctoral position to continue her scientific training and pursuit at the laboratory of Irving M. London at MIT, and Jane-Jane and Zong-Long have lived in the Boston area ever since, raising two sons.

Looking back at her career, Chen says she is most proud of “being an established woman scientist with decades of NIH findings, and for being a mother of two wonderful sons.” During her time at MIT and IMES, she has worked with many renowned scientists, including Gehrke and London, professor of biology at MIT, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), founding director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and a recognized expert in molecular regulation of hemoglobin synthesis. She says that she is also in debt to the colleagues and collaborators at HMS and Children’s Hospital Boston for their scientific interests and support at the time when her research branched into the field of hematology, far different from her expertise in biochemistry. All of them are HST-educated physician scientists, including Stuart H. Orkin, Nancy C. Andrews, Mark D. Fleming, and Vijay G. Sankaran.

“We will miss Dr. Chen’s sage counsel on all matters scientific and communal,” says Elazer R. Edelman, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science, and the director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR), who was the director of IMES when Chen retired in June. “For generations, she has been an inspiration and guide to generations of students and established leaders across multiple communities — a model for all.”

She says her life in retirement “is a work in progress” — but she is working on a scientific review article, so that she can have “my last words on the research topics of my lab for the past 40 years.” Chen is pondering writing a memoir “reflecting on the journey of my life thus far, from Taiwan to MIT.” She also plans to travel to Taiwan more frequently, to better nurture and treasure the relationships with her three younger brothers, one of whom lives in Los Angeles.

She says that in looking back, she is grateful to have participated in a special grant application that was awarded from the National Science Foundation, aimed at helping women scientists to get their careers back on track after having a family. And she says she also remembers the advice of a female scientist in Jones’ lab during her last year of graduate study, who had stepped back from her research for a while after having two children, “She was not happy that she had done that, and she told me: Never drop out, try to always keep your hands in the research, and the work. So that is what I did.”

One of MIT’s missions is helping to solve the world’s greatest problems — with a large focus on one of the most pressing topics facing the world today, climate change. The MIT Energy and Climate Club, (MITEC) formerly known as the MIT Energy Club, has been working since 2004 to inform and educate the entire MIT community about this urgent issue and other related matters.

MITEC, one of the largest clubs on campus, has hundreds of active members from every major, including both undergraduate and graduate students. With a broad reach across the Institute, MITEC is the hub for thought leadership and relationship-building across campus.

The club’s co-presidents Laurențiu Anton, doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and computer science; Rosie Keller, an MBA student in the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Thomas Lee, doctoral candidate in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, say that faculty, staff, and alumni are also welcome to join and interact with the continuously growing club.

While they closely collaborate on all aspects of the club, each of the co-presidents has a focus area to support the student managing directors and vice presidents for several of the club’s committees. Keller oversees the External Relations, Social, Launchpad, and Energy and Climate Hackathon leadership teams. Lee supports the leadership team for next spring’s Energy Conference. He also assists the club treasurer on budget and finance and guides the industry Sponsorships team. Anton oversees marketing, community and education as well as the Energy and Climate Night and Energy and Climate Career Fair leadership teams.

“We think of MITEC as the umbrella of all things related to energy and climate on campus. Our goal is to share actionable information and not just have discussions. We work with other organizations on campus, including the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, to bring awareness,” says Anton. “Our Community and Education team is currently working with the MIT ESI [Environmental Solutions Initiative] to create an ecosystem map that we’re excited to produce for the MIT community.”

To share their knowledge and get more people interested in solving climate and energy problems, each year MITEC hosts a variety of events including the MIT Energy and Climate Night, the MIT Energy and Climate Hack, the MIT Energy and Climate Career Fair, and the MIT Energy Conference to be held next spring March 3-4. The club also offers students the opportunity to gain valuable work experience while engaging with top companies, such as Constellation Energy and GE Vernova, on real climate and energy issues through their Launchpad Program.

Founded in 2006, the annual MIT Energy Conference is the largest student-run conference in North America focused on energy and climate issues, where hundreds of participants gather every year with the CEOs, policymakers, investors, and scholars at the forefront of the global energy transition.

“The 2025 MIT Energy Conference’s theme is ‘Breakthrough to Deployment: Driving Climate Innovation to Market’ — which focuses on the importance of both cutting-edge research innovation as well as large-scale commercial deployment to successfully reach climate goals,” says Lee.

Anton notes that the first of four MITEC flagship events the MIT Energy and Climate Night. This research symposium that takes place every year in the fall at the MIT Museum will be held on Nov. 8. The club invites a select number of keynote speakers and several dozen student posters. Guests are allowed to walk around and engage with students, and in return students get practice showcasing their research. The club’s career fair will take place in the spring semester, shortly after Independent Activities Period.

MITEC also provides members opportunities to meet with companies that are working to improve the energy sector, which helps to slow down, as well as adapt to, the effects of climate change.

“We recently went to Provincetown and toured Eversource’s battery energy storage facility. This helped open doors for club members,” says Keller. “The Provincetown battery helps address grid reliability problems after extreme storms on Cape Cod — which speaks to energy’s connection to both the mitigation and adaptation aspects of climate change,” adds Lee.

“MITEC is also a great way to meet other students at MIT that you might not otherwise have a chance to,” says Keller.

“We’d always welcome more undergraduate students to join MITEC. There are lots of leadership opportunities within the club for them to take advantage of and build their resumes. We also have good and growing collaboration between different centers on campus such as the Sloan Sustainability Initiative and the MIT Energy Initiative. They support us with resources, introductions, and help amplify what we're doing. But students are the drivers of the club and set the agendas,” says Lee.

All three co-presidents are excited to hear that MIT President Sally Kornbluth wants to bring climate change solutions to the next level, and that she recently launched The Climate Project at MIT to kick off the Institute’s major new effort to accelerate and scale up climate change solutions.

“We look forward to connecting with the new directors of the Climate Project at MIT and Interim Vice President for Climate Change Richard Lester in the near future. We are eager to explore how MITEC can support and collaborate with the Climate Project at MIT,” says Anton.

Lee, Keller, and Anton want MITEC to continue fostering solutions to climate issues. They emphasized that while individual actions like bringing your own thermos, using public transportation, or recycling are necessary, there’s a bigger picture to consider. They encourage the MIT community to think critically about the infrastructure and extensive supply chains behind the products everyone uses daily.

“It’s not just about bringing a thermos; it’s also understanding the life cycle of that thermos, from production to disposal, and how our everyday choices are interconnected with global climate impacts,” says Anton.

“Everyone should get involved with this worldwide problem. We’d like to see more people think about how they can use their careers for change. To think how they can navigate the type of role they can play — whether it’s in finance or on the technical side. I think exploring what that looks like as a career is also a really interesting way of thinking about how to get involved with the problem,” says Keller.

“MITEC’s newsletter reaches more than 4,000 people. We’re grateful that so many people are interested in energy and climate change,” says Anton.

A recent award from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) brings together researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Lehigh University (Lehigh) under the Multiobjective Engineering and Testing of Alloy Structures (METALS) program. The team will research novel design tools for the simultaneous optimization of shape and compositional gradients in multi-material structures that complement new high-throughput materials testing techniques, with particular attention paid to the bladed disk (blisk) geometry commonly found in turbomachinery (including jet and rocket engines) as an exemplary challenge problem.

“This project could have important implications across a wide range of aerospace technologies. Insights from this work may enable more reliable, reusable, rocket engines that will power the next generation of heavy-lift launch vehicles,” says Zachary Cordero, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and the project’s lead principal investigator. “This project merges classical mechanics analyses with cutting-edge generative AI design technologies to unlock the plastic reserve of compositionally graded alloys allowing safe operation in previously inaccessible conditions.”

Different locations in blisks require different thermomechanical properties and performance, such as resistance to creep, low cycle fatigue, high strength, etc. Large scale production also necessitates consideration of cost and sustainability metrics such as sourcing and recycling of alloys in the design.

“Currently, with standard manufacturing and design procedures, one must come up with a single magical material, composition, and processing parameters to meet ‘one part-one material’ constraints,” says Cordero. “Desired properties are also often mutually exclusive prompting inefficient design tradeoffs and compromises.”

Although a one-material approach may be optimal for a singular location in a component, it may leave other locations exposed to failure or may require a critical material to be carried throughout an entire part when it may only be needed in a specific location. With the rapid advancement of additive manufacturing processes that are enabling voxel-based composition and property control, the team sees unique opportunities for leap-ahead performance in structural components are now possible.

Cordero’s collaborators include Zoltan Spakovszky, the T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Aeronautics in AeroAstro; A. John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Faez Ahmed, ABS Career Development Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT; S. Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at CMU; and Natasha Vermaak, associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh.

The team’s expertise spans hybrid integrated computational material engineering and machine-learning-based material and process design, precision instrumentation, metrology, topology optimization, deep generative modeling, additive manufacturing, materials characterization, thermostructural analysis, and turbomachinery.

“It is especially rewarding to work with the graduate students and postdoctoral researchers collaborating on the METALS project, spanning from developing new computational approaches to building test rigs operating under extreme conditions,” says Hart. “It is a truly unique opportunity to build breakthrough capabilities that could underlie propulsion systems of the future, leveraging digital design and manufacturing technologies.”

This research is funded by DARPA under contract HR00112420303. The views, opinions, and/or findings expressed are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government and no official endorsement should be inferred.

Tomás Orellana, a 17-year-old high school student in Chile, had a vision: to create a kit of medicinal plants for Chilean school infirmaries. But first, he needed to understand the basic principles of pharmacology. That’s when Orellana turned to the internet and stumbled upon a gold mine of free educational resources and courses on the MIT OpenCourseWare website.

Right away, Orellana completed class HST.151 (Principles of Pharmacology), learning about the mechanisms of drug action, dose-response relations, pharmacokinetics, drug delivery systems, and more. He then shared this newly acquired knowledge with 16 members of his school science group so that together they could make Orellana’s vision a reality.

“I used the course to guide my classmates in the development of a phyto-medicinal school project, demonstrating in practice the innovation that the OpenCourseWare platform offers,” Orellana says in Spanish. “Thanks to the pharmacology course, I can collect and synthesize the information we need to learn to prepare the medicines for our project.”

OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, offers free educational resources on its website from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT curriculum, from introductory to advanced classes. A global model for open sharing in higher education, OpenCourseWare has an open license that allows the remix and reuse of its educational resources, which include video lectures, syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets, assignments, audiovisual content, and insights.

After completing the Principles of Pharmacology course, Orellana and members of his science group began extracting medicinal properties from plants, such as cedron, and studying them in an effort to determine which plants are best to grow in a school environment. Their goal, Orellana says, is to help solve students’ health problems during the school day, including menstrual, mental, intestinal, and respiratory issues.

“There is a tradition regarding the use of medicinal plants, but there is no scientific evidence that says that these properties really exist,” the 11th-grader explains. “What we want to do is know which plants are the best to grow in a school environment.”

Orellana’s science group discussed their scientific project on “Que Sucede,” a Chilean television show, and their interview will air soon. The group plans to continue working on their medicinal project during this academic year.

Next up on Orellana’s learning journey is the mysteries of the human brain. He plans to complete class 9.01 (Introduction to Neuroscience) through OpenCourseWare. His ultimate goal? To pursue a career in health sciences and become a professor so that he may continue to share knowledge — widely.

“I dream of becoming a university academic to have an even greater impact on current affairs in my country and internationally,” Orellana says. “All that will happen if I try hard enough.”

Orellana encourages learners to explore MIT Open Learning's free educational resources, including OpenCourseWare.

“Take advantage of MIT's free digital technologies and tools,” he says. “Keep an open mind as to how the knowledge can be applied.”

On Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it returned to Earth, killing all seven astronauts on board. The tragic incident compelled NASA to amp up their risk safety assessments and protocols. They knew whom to call: Curtis Smith PhD ’02, who is now the KEPCO Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.

The nuclear community has always been a leader in probabilistic risk analysis and Smith’s work in risk-related research had made him an established expert in the field. When NASA came knocking, Smith had been working for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). He pivoted quickly. For the next decade, Smith worked with NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance supporting their increased use of risk analysis. It was a software tool that Smith helped develop, SAPHIRE, that NASA would adopt to bolster its own risk analysis program.

At MIT, Smith’s focus is on both sides of system operation: risk and reliability. A research project he has proposed involves evaluating the reliability of 3D-printed components and parts for nuclear reactors.

Growing up in Idaho

MIT is a distance from where Smith grew up on the Shoshone-Bannock Native American reservation in Fort Hall, Idaho. His father worked at a chemical manufacturing plant, while his mother and grandmother operated a small restaurant on the reservation.

Southeast Idaho had a significant population of migrant workers and Smith grew up with a diverse group of friends, mostly Native American and Hispanic. “It was a largely positive time and set a worldview for me in many wonderful ways,” Smith remembers. When he was a junior in high school, the family moved to Pingree, Idaho, a small town of barely 500. Smith attended Snake River High, a regional school, and remembered the deep impact his teachers had. “I learned a lot in grade school and had great teachers, so my love for education probably started there. I tried to emulate my teachers,” Smith says.

Smith went to Idaho State University in Pocatello for college, a 45-minute drive from his family. Drawn to science, he decided he wanted to study a subject that would benefit humanity the most: nuclear engineering. Fortunately, Idaho State has a strong nuclear engineering program. Smith completed a master’s degree in the same field at ISU while working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the security department during the swing shift — 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. — at the FBI offices in Pocatello. “It was a perfect job while attending grad school,” Smith says.

His KEPCO Professor of the Practice appointment is the second stint for Smith at MIT: He completed his PhD in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) under the advisement of Professor George Apostolakis in 2002.

A career in risk analysis and management

After a doctorate at MIT, Smith returned to Idaho, conducting research in risk analysis for the NRC. He also taught technical courses and developed risk analysis software. “We did a whole host of work that supported the current fleet of nuclear reactors that we have,” Smith says.

He was 10 years into his career at INL when NASA recruited him, leaning on his expertise in risk analysis to translate it into space missions. “I didn’t really have a background in aerospace, but I was able to bring all the engineering I knew, conducting risk analysis for nuclear missions. It was really exciting and I learned a lot about aerospace,” Smith says.

Risk analysis uses statistics and data to answer complex questions involving safety. Among his projects: analyzing the risk involved in a Mars rover mission with a radioisotope-generated power source for the rover. Even if the necessary plutonium is encased in really strong material, calculations for risk have to factor in all eventualities, including the rocket blowing up.

When the Fukushima incident happened in 2011, the Department of Energy (DoE) was more supportive of safety and risk analysis research. Smith found himself in the center of the action again, supporting large DoE research programs. He then moved to become the director of the Nuclear Safety and Regulatory Research Division at the INL. Smith found he loved the role, mentoring and nurturing the careers of a diverse set of scientists. “It turned out to be much more rewarding than I had expected,” Smith says. Under his leadership, the division grew from 45 to almost 90 research staff and won multiple national awards.

Return to MIT

MIT NSE came calling in 2022, looking to fill the position of professor of the practice, an offer Smith couldn’t refuse. The department was looking to bulk up its risk and reliability offerings and Smith made a great fit. The DoE division he had been supervising had grown wings enough for Smith to seek out something new.

“Just getting back to Boston is exciting,” Smith says. The last go-around involved bringing the family to the city and included a lot of sleepless nights. Smith’s wife, Jacquie, is also excited about being closer to the New England fan base. The couple has invested in season tickets for the Patriots and look to attend as many sporting events as possible.

Smith is most excited about adding to the risk and reliability offerings at MIT at a time when the subject has become especially important for nuclear power. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring my knowledge and expertise from the last 30 years to the field,” he says. Being a professor of the practice of NSE carries with it a responsibility to unite theory and practice, something Smith is especially good at. “We always have to answer the question of, ‘How do I take the research and make that practical,’ especially for something important like nuclear power, because we need much more of these ideas in industry,” he says.

He is particularly excited about developing the next generation of nuclear scientists. “Having the ability to do this at a place like MIT is especially fulfilling and something I have been desiring my whole career,” Smith says.

MIT professors Laura Lewis and Jing Kong have been recognized with the MIT Postdoctoral Association’s Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring. The award is given annually to faculty or other principal investigators (PIs) whose current and former postdoctoral scholars say they stand out in their efforts to create a supportive work environment for postdocs and support postdocs’ professional development.

This year, the award identified exceptional mentors in two categories. Lewis, the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor in the Institute for Mechanical Engineering and Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), was recognized as an early-career mentor. Kong, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor In Engineering in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and EECS, was recognized as an established mentor.

“It’s a very diverse kind of mentoring that you need for a postdoc,” said Vipindev Adat Vasudevan, who chaired the Postdoctoral Association committee organizing the award. “Every postdoc has different requirements. Some of the people will be going to industry, some of the people are going for academia… so everyone comes with a different objective.”

Vasudevan presented the award at a luncheon hosted by the Office of the Vice President for Research on Sept. 25 in recognition of National Postdoc Appreciation Week. The annual luncheon, celebrating the postdoctoral community’s contributions to MIT, is attended by hundreds of postdocs and faculty.

“The award recognizes faculty members who go above and beyond to create a professional, supportive, and inclusive environment to foster postdocs’ growth and success,” said Ian Waitz, vice president for research, who spoke at the luncheon. He noted the vital role postdocs play in advancing MIT research, mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, and connecting with colleagues from around the globe, while working toward launching independent research careers of their own. 

“The best part of my job”

Nomination letters for Lewis spoke to her ability to create an inclusive and welcoming lab. In the words of one nominator, “She invests considerable time and effort in cultivating personalized mentoring relationships, ensuring each postdoc in her lab receives guidance and support tailored to their individual goals and circumstances.”

Other nominators commented on Lewis’ ability to facilitate collaborations that furthered postdocs’ research goals. Lewis encouraged them to work with other PIs to build their independence and professional development, and to develop their own research questions, they said. “I was never pushed to work on her projects — rather, she guided me towards finding and developing my own,” wrote one.

Lewis’ lab explores new ways to image the human brain, integrating engineering with neuroscience. Improving neuroimaging techniques can improve our understanding of the brain’s activity when asleep and awake, allowing researchers to understand sleep’s impact on brain health.

“I love working with my postdocs and trainees; it’s honestly the best part of my job,” Lewis says. “It’s important for any individual to be in an environment to help them grow toward what they want to do.”

Recognized as an early-career mentor, Lewis looks forward to seeing her postdocs’ career trajectories over time. Group members returning as collaborators come back with fresh ideas and creative approaches, she says, adding, “I view this mentoring relationship as lifelong.”

“No ego, no bias, just solid facts”

Kong’s nomination also speaks to the lifelong nature of the mentoring relationship. The 13 letters supporting Kong’s nomination came from past and current postdocs. Nearly all touched on Kong’s kindness and the culture of respect she maintains in the lab, alongside high expectations of scientific rigor.

“No ego, no bias, just solid facts and direct evidence,” wrote one nominator: “In discussions, she would ask you many questions that make you think ‘I should have asked that to myself’ or ‘why didn’t I think of this.’”

Kong was also praised for her ability to take the long view on projects and mentor postdocs through temporary challenges. One nominator wrote of a period when the results of a project were less promising than anticipated, saying, “Jing didn't push me to switch my direction; instead, she was always glad to listen and discuss the new results. Because of her encouragement and long-term support, I eventually got very good results on this project.”

Kong’s lab focuses on the chemical synthesis of nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes, with the goal of characterizing their structures and identifying applications. Kong says postdocs are instrumental in bringing new ideas into the lab.

“I learn a lot from each one of them. They always have a different perspective, and also, they each have their unique talents. So we learn from each other,” she says. As a mentor, she sees her role as developing postdocs’ individual talents, while encouraging them to collaborate with group members who have different strengths.

The collaborations that Kong facilitates extend beyond the postdocs’ time at MIT. She views the postdoctoral period as a key stage in developing a professional network: “Their networking starts from the first day they join the group. They already in this process establish connections with other group members, and also our collaborators, that will continue on for many years.”

About the award

The Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring has been awarded since 2022. With support from Ann Skoczenski, director of Postdoctoral Services in the Office of the VPR, and the Faculty Postdoctoral Advisory Committee, nominations are reviewed on four criteria:

• excellence in fostering and encouraging professional skills development and growth toward independence;
• ability to foster an inclusive work environment where postdoctoral mentees across a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives are empowered to engage in the mentee-mentor relationship;
• ability to support postdoctoral mentees in their pursuit of a chosen career path; and
• a commitment to a continued professional mentoring relationship with mentees, beyond the limit of the postdoctoral term.

The Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring provides a celebratory lunch for the recipient’s research group, as well as the opportunity to participate in a mentoring seminar or panel discussion for the postdoctoral community. Last year’s award was given to Jesse Kroll, the Peter de Florez Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, professor of chemical engineering, and director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory.

Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.

The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.

“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.

Creating I&E collaborations

In addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.

“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in the MIT D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.

Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.

Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.

In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.

After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.

“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem ... I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.

Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel.  “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.

In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”

Economic and societal benefits

Commercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.

Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.

“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce. 

Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.

“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.

J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.

But it's not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.

“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.

As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.

Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.

In 2021, Michael Short, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, approached professor of anthropology Manduhai Buyandelger with an unusual pitch: collaborating on a project to prototype a molten salt heat bank in Mongolia, Buyandelger’s country of origin and place of her scholarship. It was also an invitation to forge a novel partnership between two disciplines that rarely overlap. Developed in collaboration with the National University of Mongolia (NUM), the device was built to provide heat for people in colder climates, and in places where clean energy is a challenge. 

Buyandelger and Short teamed up to launch Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, an initiative intended to advance the heat bank idea in Mongolia, and ultimately demonstrate its potential as a scalable clean heat source in comparably challenging sites around the world. This project received funding from the inaugural MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Seed Awards program. In order to fund various components of the project, especially student involvement and additional staff, the project also received support from the MIT Global Seed Fund, New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), Experiential Learning Office, Vice Provost for International Activities, and d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.

As part of this initiative, the partners developed a special topic course in anthropology to teach MIT undergraduates about Mongolia’s unique energy and climate challenges, as well as the historical, social, and economic context in which the heat bank would ideally find a place. The class 21A.S01 (Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale) prepares MIT students for a January Independent Activities Period (IAP) trip to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, where they embed with Mongolian families, conduct research, and collaborate with their peers. Mongolian students also engaged in the project. Anthropology research scientist and lecturer Lauren Bonilla, who has spent the past two decades working in Mongolia, joined to co-teach the class and lead the IAP trips to Mongolia. 

With the project now in its third year and yielding some promising solutions on the ground, Buyandelger and Bonilla reflect on the challenges for anthropologists of advancing a clean energy technology in a developing nation with a unique history, politics, and culture. 

Q: Your roles in the molten salt heat bank project mark departures from your typical academic routine. How did you first approach this venture?

Buyandelger: As an anthropologist of contemporary religion, politics, and gender in Mongolia, I have had little contact with the hard sciences or building or prototyping technology. What I do best is listening to people and working with narratives. When I first learned about this device for off-the-grid heating, a host of issues came straight to mind right away that are based on socioeconomic and cultural context of the place. The salt brick, which is encased in steel, must be heated to 400 degrees Celsius in a central facility, then driven to people’s homes. Transportation is difficult in Ulaanbaatar, and I worried about road safety when driving the salt brick to gers [traditional Mongolian homes] where many residents live. The device seemed a bit utopian to me, but I realized that this was an amazing educational opportunity: We could use the heat bank as part of an ethnographic project, so students could learn about the everyday lives of people — crucially, in the dead of winter — and how they might respond to this new energy technology in the neighborhoods of Ulaanbaatar.

Bonilla: When I first went to Mongolia in the early 2000s as an undergraduate student, the impacts of climate change were already being felt. There had been a massive migration to the capital after a series of terrible weather events that devastated the rural economy. Coal mining had emerged as a vital part of the economy, and I was interested in how people regarded this industry that both provided jobs and damaged the air they breathed. I am trained as a human geographer, which involves seeing how things happening in a local place correspond to things happening at a global scale. Thinking about climate or sustainability from this perspective means making linkages between social life and environmental life. In Mongolia, people associated coal with national progress. Based on historical experience, they had low expectations for interventions brought by outsiders to improve their lives. So my first take on the molten salt project was that this was no silver bullet solution. At the same time, I wanted to see how we could make this a great project-based learning experience for students, getting them to think about the kind of research necessary to see if some version of the molten salt would work.

Q: After two years, what lessons have you and the students drawn from both the class and the Ulaanbaatar field trips?

Buyandelger: We wanted to make sure MIT students would not go to Mongolia and act like consultants. We taught them anthropological methods so they could understand the experiences of real people and think about how to bring people and new technologies together. The students, from engineering and anthropological and social science backgrounds, became critical thinkers who could analyze how people live in ger districts. When they stay with families in Ulaanbaatar in January, they not only experience the cold and the pollution, but they observe what people do for work, how parents care for their children, how they cook, sleep, and get from one place to another. This enables them to better imagine and test out how these people might utilize the molten salt heat bank in their homes.

Bonilla: In class, students learn that interventions like this often fail because the implementation process doesn’t work, or the technology doesn’t meet people’s real needs. This is where anthropology is so important, because it opens up the wider landscape in which you’re intervening. We had really difficult conversations about the professional socialization of engineers and social scientists. Engineers love to work within boxes, but don’t necessarily appreciate the context in which their invention will serve.

As a group, we discussed the provocative notion that engineers construct and anthropologists deconstruct. This makes it seem as if engineers are creators, and anthropologists are brought in as add-ons to consult and critique engineers’ creations. Our group conversation concluded that a project such as ours benefits from an iterative back-and-forth between the techno-scientific and humanistic disciplines.

Q: So where does the molten salt brick project stand?

Bonilla: Our research in Mongolia helped us produce a prototype that can work: Our partners at NUM are developing a hybrid stove that incorporates the molten salt brick. Supervised by instructor Nathan Melenbrink of MIT’s NEET program, our engineering students have been involved in this prototyping as well.

The concept is for a family to heat it up using a coal fire once a day and it warms their home overnight. Based on our anthropological research, we believe that this stove would work better than the device as originally conceived. It won’t eliminate coal use in residences, but it will reduce emissions enough to have a meaningful impact on ger districts in Ulaanbaatar. The challenge now is getting funding to NUM so they can test different salt combinations and stove models and employ local blacksmiths to work on the design.

This integrated stove/heat bank will not be the ultimate solution to the heating and pollution crisis in Mongolia. But it will be something that can inspire even more ideas. We feel with this project we are planting all kinds of seeds that will germinate in ways we cannot anticipate. It has sparked new relationships between MIT and Mongolian students, and catalyzed engineers to integrate a more humanistic, anthropological perspective in their work.

Buyandelger: Our work illustrates the importance of anthropology in responding to the unpredictable and diverse impacts of climate change. Without our ethnographic research — based on participant observation and interviews, led by Dr. Bonilla, — it would have been impossible to see how the prototyping and modifications could be done, and where the molten salt brick could work and what shape it needed to take. This project demonstrates how indispensable anthropology is in moving engineering out of labs and companies and directly into communities.

Bonilla: This is where the real solutions for climate change are going to come from. Even though we need solutions quickly, it will also take time for new technologies like molten salt bricks to take root and grow. We don’t know where the outcomes of these experiments will take us. But there’s so much that’s emerging from this project that I feel very hopeful about.

Imagine you’re tasked with sending a team of football players onto a field to assess the condition of the grass (a likely task for them, of course). If you pick their positions randomly, they might cluster together in some areas while completely neglecting others. But if you give them a strategy, like spreading out uniformly across the field, you might get a far more accurate picture of the grass condition.

Now, imagine needing to spread out not just in two dimensions, but across tens or even hundreds. That's the challenge MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers are getting ahead of. They've developed an AI-driven approach to “low-discrepancy sampling,” a method that improves simulation accuracy by distributing data points more uniformly across space.

A key novelty lies in using graph neural networks (GNNs), which allow points to “communicate” and self-optimize for better uniformity. Their approach marks a pivotal enhancement for simulations in fields like robotics, finance, and computational science, particularly in handling complex, multidimensional problems critical for accurate simulations and numerical computations.

“In many problems, the more uniformly you can spread out points, the more accurately you can simulate complex systems,” says T. Konstantin Rusch, lead author of the new paper and MIT CSAIL postdoc. “We've developed a method called Message-Passing Monte Carlo (MPMC) to generate uniformly spaced points, using geometric deep learning techniques. This further allows us to generate points that emphasize dimensions which are particularly important for a problem at hand, a property that is highly important in many applications. The model’s underlying graph neural networks lets the points 'talk' with each other, achieving far better uniformity than previous methods.”

Their work was published in the September issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Take me to Monte Carlo

The idea of Monte Carlo methods is to learn about a system by simulating it with random sampling. Sampling is the selection of a subset of a population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. Historically, it was already used in the 18th century,  when mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace employed it to estimate the population of France without having to count each individual.

Low-discrepancy sequences, which are sequences with low discrepancy, i.e., high uniformity, such as Sobol’, Halton, and Niederreiter, have long been the gold standard for quasi-random sampling, which exchanges random sampling with low-discrepancy sampling. They are widely used in fields like computer graphics and computational finance, for everything from pricing options to risk assessment, where uniformly filling spaces with points can lead to more accurate results. 

The MPMC framework suggested by the team transforms random samples into points with high uniformity. This is done by processing the random samples with a GNN that minimizes a specific discrepancy measure.

One big challenge of using AI for generating highly uniform points is that the usual way to measure point uniformity is very slow to compute and hard to work with. To solve this, the team switched to a quicker and more flexible uniformity measure called L2-discrepancy. For high-dimensional problems, where this method isn’t enough on its own, they use a novel technique that focuses on important lower-dimensional projections of the points. This way, they can create point sets that are better suited for specific applications.

The implications extend far beyond academia, the team says. In computational finance, for example, simulations rely heavily on the quality of the sampling points. “With these types of methods, random points are often inefficient, but our GNN-generated low-discrepancy points lead to higher precision,” says Rusch. “For instance, we considered a classical problem from computational finance in 32 dimensions, where our MPMC points beat previous state-of-the-art quasi-random sampling methods by a factor of four to 24.”

Robots in Monte Carlo

In robotics, path and motion planning often rely on sampling-based algorithms, which guide robots through real-time decision-making processes. The improved uniformity of MPMC could lead to more efficient robotic navigation and real-time adaptations for things like autonomous driving or drone technology. “In fact, in a recent preprint, we demonstrated that our MPMC points achieve a fourfold improvement over previous low-discrepancy methods when applied to real-world robotics motion planning problems,” says Rusch.

“Traditional low-discrepancy sequences were a major advancement in their time, but the world has become more complex, and the problems we're solving now often exist in 10, 20, or even 100-dimensional spaces,” says Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “We needed something smarter, something that adapts as the dimensionality grows. GNNs are a paradigm shift in how we generate low-discrepancy point sets. Unlike traditional methods, where points are generated independently, GNNs allow points to 'chat' with one another so the network learns to place points in a way that reduces clustering and gaps — common issues with typical approaches.”

Going forward, the team plans to make MPMC points even more accessible to everyone, addressing the current limitation of training a new GNN for every fixed number of points and dimensions.

“Much of applied mathematics uses continuously varying quantities, but computation typically allows us to only use a finite number of points,” says Art B. Owen, Stanford University professor of statistics, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The century-plus-old field of discrepancy uses abstract algebra and number theory to define effective sampling points. This paper uses graph neural networks to find input points with low discrepancy compared to a continuous distribution. That approach already comes very close to the best-known low-discrepancy point sets in small problems and is showing great promise for a 32-dimensional integral from computational finance. We can expect this to be the first of many efforts to use neural methods to find good input points for numerical computation.”

Rusch and Rus wrote the paper with University of Waterloo researcher Nathan Kirk, Oxford University’s DeepMind Professor of AI and former CSAIL affiliate Michael Bronstein, and University of Waterloo Statistics and Actuarial Science Professor Christiane Lemieux. Their research was supported, in part, by the AI2050 program at Schmidt Sciences, Boeing, the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and the United States Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator, the Swiss National Science Foundation, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and an EPSRC Turing AI World-Leading Research Fellowship. 

In the United States and around the world, democracy is under threat. Anti-democratic attitudes have become more prevalent, partisan polarization is growing, misinformation is omnipresent, and politicians and citizens sometimes question the integrity of elections. 

With this backdrop, the MIT Department of Political Science is launching an effort to establish a Strengthening Democracy Initiative. In this Q&A, department head David Singer, the Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, discusses the goals and scope of the initiative.

Q: What is the purpose of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative?

A: Well-functioning democracies require accountable representatives, accurate and freely available information, equitable citizen voice and participation, free and fair elections, and an abiding respect for democratic institutions. It is unsettling for the political science community to see more and more evidence of democratic backsliding in Europe, Latin America, and even here in the U.S. While we cannot single-handedly stop the erosion of democratic norms and practices, we can focus our energies on understanding and explaining the root causes of the problem, and devising interventions to maintain the healthy functioning of democracies.

MIT political science has a history of generating important research on many facets of the democratic process, including voting behavior, election administration, information and misinformation, public opinion and political responsiveness, and lobbying. The goals of the Strengthening Democracy Initiative are to place these various research programs under one umbrella, to foster synergies among our various research projects and between political science and other disciplines, and to mark MIT as the country’s leading center for rigorous, evidence-based analysis of democratic resiliency.

Q: What is the initiative’s research focus?

A: The initiative is built upon three research pillars. One pillar is election science and administration. Democracy cannot function without well-run elections and, just as important, popular trust in those elections. Even within the U.S., let alone other countries, there is tremendous variation in the electoral process: whether and how people register to vote, whether they vote in person or by mail, how polling places are run, how votes are counted and validated, and how the results are communicated to citizens.

The MIT Election Data and Science Lab is already the country’s leading center for the collection and analysis of election-related data and dissemination of electoral best practices, and it is well positioned to increase the scale and scope of its activities.

The second pillar is public opinion, a rich area of study that includes experimental studies of public responses to misinformation and analyses of government responsiveness to mass attitudes. Our faculty employ survey and experimental methods to study a range of substantive areas, including taxation and health policy, state and local politics, and strategies for countering political rumors in the U.S. and abroad. Faculty research programs form the basis for this pillar, along with longstanding collaborations such as the Political Experiments Research Lab, an annual omnibus survey in which students and faculty can participate, and frequent conferences and seminars.

The third pillar is political participation, which includes the impact of the criminal justice system and other negative interactions with the state on voting, the creation of citizen assemblies, and the lobbying behavior of firms on Congressional legislation. Some of this research relies on machine learning and AI to cull and parse an enormous amount of data, giving researchers visibility into phenomena that were previously difficult to analyze. A related research area on political deliberation brings together computer science, AI, and the social sciences to analyze the dynamics of political discourse in online forums and the possible interventions that can attenuate political polarization and foster consensus.

The initiative’s flexible design will allow for new pillars to be added over time, including international and homeland security, strengthening democracies in different regions of the world, and tackling new challenges to democratic processes that we cannot see yet.

Q: Why is MIT well-suited to host this new initiative?

A: Many people view MIT as a STEM-focused, highly technical place. And indeed it is, but there is a tremendous amount of collaboration across and within schools at MIT — for example, between political science and the Schwarzman College of Computing and the Sloan School of Management, and between the social science fields and the schools of science and engineering. The Strengthening Democracy Initiative will benefit from these collaborations and create new bridges between political science and other fields. It’s also important to note that this is a nonpartisan research endeavor. The MIT political science department has a reputation for rigorous, data-driven approaches to the study of politics, and its position within the MIT ecosystem will help us to maintain a reputation as an “honest broker,” and to disseminate path-breaking, evidence-based research and interventions to help democracies become more resilient.

Q: Will the new initiative have an educational mission?

A: Of course! The department has a long history of bringing in scores of undergraduate researchers via MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. The initiative will be structured to provide these students with opportunities to study various facets of the democratic process, and for faculty to have a ready pool of talented students to assist with their projects. My hope is to provide students with the resources and opportunities to test their own theories by designing and implementing surveys in the U.S. and abroad, and use insights and tools from computer science, applied statistics, and other disciplines to study political phenomena. As the initiative grows, I expect more opportunities for students to collaborate with state and local officials on improvements to election administration, and to study new puzzles related to healthy democracies.

Postdoctoral researchers will also play a prominent role by advancing research across the initiative’s pillars, supervising undergraduate researchers, and handling some of the administrative aspects of the work.

Q: This sounds like a long-term endeavor. Do you expect this initiative to be permanent?

A: Yes. We already have the pieces in place to create a leading center for the study of healthy democracies (and how to make them healthier). But we need to build capacity, including resources for a pool of researchers to shift from one project to another, which will permit synergies between projects and foster new ones. A permanent initiative will also provide the infrastructure for faculty and students to respond swiftly to current events and new research findings — for example, by launching a nationwide survey experiment, or collecting new data on an aspect of the electoral process, or testing the impact of a new AI technology on political perceptions. As I like to tell our supporters, there are new challenges to healthy democracies that were not on our radar 10 years ago, and no doubt there will be others 10 years from now that we have not imagined. We need to be prepared to do the rigorous analysis on whatever challenges come our way. And MIT Political Science is the best place in the world to undertake this ambitious agenda in the long term.

MIT and Lincoln Laboratory are participants in four microelectronics proposals selected for funding to the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub. The funding comes from the Microelectronics Commons, a $2 billion initiative of the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and innovation. The regional awards are among 33 projects announced as part of a $269 million federal investment.

U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and White House officials announced the awards during an event on Sept. 18, hosted by the NEMC Hub at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The NEMC Hub, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, leads a network of more than 200 member organizations across the region to enable the lab-to-fab transition of critical microelectronics technologies for the DoD. The NEMC Hub is one of eight regional hubs forming a nationwide chip network under the Microelectronics Commons and is executed through the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division and the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL).

"The $38 million in project awards to the NEMC Hub are a recognition of the capability, capacity, and commitment of our members," said Mark Halfman, NEMC Hub director. "We have a tremendous opportunity to grow microelectronics lab-to-fab capabilities across the Northeast region and spur the growth of game-changing technologies."

"We are very pleased to have Lincoln Laboratory be a central part of the vibrant ecosystem that has formed within the Microelectronics Commons program," said Mark Gouker, assistant head of the laboratory's Advanced Technology Division and NEMC Hub advisory group representative. "We have made strong connections to academia, startups, DoD contractors, and commercial sector companies through collaborations with our technical staff and by offering our microelectronics fabrication infrastructure to assist in these projects. We believe this tighter ecosystem will be important to future Microelectronics Commons programs as well as other CHIPS and Science Act programs."

The nearly $38 million award to the NEMC Hub is expected to support six collaborative projects, four of which will involve MIT and/or Lincoln Laboratory.

"These projects promise significant gains in advanced microelectronics technologies," said Ian A. Waitz, MIT's vice president for research. "We look forward to working alongside industry and government organizations in the NEMC Hub to strengthen U.S. microelectronics innovation, workforce and education, and lab-to-fab translation."

The projects selected for funding support key technology areas identified in the federal call for competitive proposals. MIT campus researchers will participate in a project advancing commercial leap-ahead technologies, titled "Advancing DoD High Power Systems: Transition of High Al% AlGaN from Lab to Fab," and another in the area of 5G/6G, called "Wideband, Scalable MIMO arrays for NextG Systems: From Antennas to Decoders."

Researchers both at Lincoln Laboratory and on campus will contribute to a quantum technology project called "Community‐driven Hybrid Integrated Quantum‐Photonic Integrated circuits (CHIQPI)."

Lincoln Laboratory researchers will also participate in the "Wideband Same‐Frequency STAR Array Platform Based on Heterogeneous Multi-Domain Self‐Interference Cancellation" project.

The anticipated funding for these four projects follows a $7.7 million grant awarded earlier this year to MIT from the NEMC Hub, alongside an agreement between MIT and Applied Materials, to add advanced nanofabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano.

The funding comes amid construction of the Compound Semiconductor Laboratory – Microsystem Integration Facility (CSL-MIF) at Lincoln Laboratory. The CSL-MIF will complement Lincoln Laboratory's existing Microelectronics Laboratory, which has remained the U.S. government's most advanced silicon-based research and fabrication facility for decades. When completed in 2028, the CSL-MIF is expected to play a vital role in the greater CHIPS and Science Act ecosystem.

"Lincoln Laboratory has a long history of developing advanced microelectronics to enable critical national security systems," said Melissa Choi, Lincoln Laboratory director. "We are excited to embark on these awarded projects, leveraging our microelectronics facilities and partnering with fellow hub members to be at the forefront of U.S. microelectronics innovation."

Officials who spoke at the Sept. 18 event emphasized the national security and economic imperatives to building a robust microelectronics workforce and innovation network.

"The Microelectronics Commons is an essential part of the CHIPS and Science Act's whole-of-government approach to strengthen the U.S. microelectronics ecosystem and secure lasting technical leadership in this critical sector," said Dev Shenoy, the principal director for microelectronics in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. "I believe in the incredible impact this work will have for American economies, American defense, and the American people."

"The secret sauce of what made the U.S. the lead innovator in the world for the last 100 years was the coming together of the U.S. government and the public sector, together with the private sector and teaming up with academia and research," said Amos Hochstein, special presidential coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security at the U.S. Department of State. "That is what enabled us to be the forefront of innovation and technology, and that is what we have to do again."

Liam Hines ’22 didn't move to Sarasota, Florida, until high school, but he’s a Floridian through and through. He jokes that he’s even got a floral shirt, what he calls a “Florida formal,” for every occasion.

Which is why it broke his heart when toxic red algae used to devastate the Sunshine State’s coastline, including at his favorite beach, Caspersen. The outbreak made headline news during his high school years, with the blooms destroying marine wildlife and adversely impacting the state’s tourism-driven economy.

In Florida, Hines says, environmental awareness is pretty high because everyday citizens are being directly impacted by climate change. After all, it’s hard not to worry when beautiful white sand beaches are covered in dead fish. Ongoing concerns about the climate cemented Hines’ resolve to pick a career that would have a strong “positive environmental impact.” He chose nuclear, as he saw it as “a green, low-carbon-emissions energy source with a pretty straightforward path to implementation.”

Undergraduate studies at MIT

Knowing he wanted a career in the sciences, Hines applied and got accepted to MIT for undergraduate studies in fall 2018. An orientation program hosted by the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) sold him on the idea of pursuing the field. “The department is just a really tight-knit community, and that really appealed to me,” Hines says.

During his undergraduate years, Hines realized he needed a job to pay part of his bills. “Instead of answering calls at the dorm front desk or working in the dining halls, I decided I’m going to become a licensed nuclear operator onsite,” he says. “Reactor operations offer so much hands-on experience with real nuclear systems. It doesn’t hurt that it pays better.” Becoming a licensed nuclear reactor operator is hard work, however, involving a year-long training process studying maintenance, operations, and equipment oversight. A bonus: The job, supervising the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, taught him the fundamentals of nuclear physics and engineering.

Always interested in research, Hines got an early start by exploring the regulatory challenges of advanced fusion systems. There have been questions related to licensing requirements and the safety consequences of the onsite radionuclide inventory. Hines’ undergraduate research work involved studying precedent for such fusion facilities and comparing them to experimental facilities such as the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

Doctoral focus on legal and regulatory frameworks

When scientists want to make technologies as safe as possible, they have to do two things in concert: First they evaluate the safety of the technology, and then make sure legal and regulatory structures take into account the evolution of these advanced technologies. Hines is taking such a two-pronged approach to his doctoral work on nuclear fission systems.

Under the guidance of Professor Koroush Shirvan, Hines is conducting systems modeling of various reactor cores that include graphite, and simulating operations under long time spans. He then studies radionuclide transport from low-level waste facilities — the consequences of offsite storage after 50 or 100 or even 10,000 years of storage. The work has to make sure to hit safety and engineering margins, but also tread a fine line. “You want to make sure you’re not over-engineering systems and adding undue cost, but also making sure to assess the unique hazards of these advanced technologies as accurately as possible,” Hines says.

On a parallel track, under Professor Haruko Wainwright’s advisement, Hines is applying the current science on radionuclide geochemistry to track radionuclide wastes and map their profile for hazards. One of the challenges fission reactors face is that existing low-level waste regulations were fine-tuned to old reactors. Regulations have not kept up: “Now that we have new technologies with new wastes, some of the hazards of the new waste are completely missed by existing standards,” Hines says. He is working to seal these gaps.

A philosophy-driven outlook

Hines is grateful for the dynamic learning environment at NSE. “A lot of the faculty have that go-getter attitude,” he points out, impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit on campus. “It’s made me confident to really tackle the things that I care about.”

An ethics class as an undergraduate made Hines realize there were discussions in class he could apply to the nuclear realm, especially when it came to teasing apart the implications of the technology — where the devices would be built and who they would serve. He eventually went on to double-major in NSE and philosophy.

The framework style of reading and reasoning involved in studying philosophy is particularly relevant in his current line of work, where he has to extract key points regarding nuclear regulatory issues. Much like philosophy discussions today that involve going over material that has been discussed for centuries and framing them through new perspectives, nuclear regulatory issues too need to take the long view.

“In philosophy, we have to insert ourselves into very large conversations. Similarly, in nuclear engineering, you have to understand how to take apart the discourse that’s most relevant to your research and frame it,” Hines says. This technique is especially necessary because most of the time the nuclear regulatory issues might seem like wading in the weeds of nitty-gritty technical matters, but they can have a huge impact on the public and public perception, Hines adds.

As for Florida, Hines visits every chance he can get. The red tide still surfaces but not as consistently as it once did. And since he started his job as a nuclear operator in his undergraduate days, Hines has progressed to senior reactor operator. This time around he gets to sign off on the checklists. “It’s much like when I was shift lead at Dunkin’ Donuts in high school,” Hines says, “everyone is kind of doing the same thing, but you get to be in charge for the afternoon.”

In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects when they aren’t really there? 

A new study from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) delves into this phenomenon, introducing an extensive, human-labeled dataset of 5,000 pareidolic images, far surpassing previous collections. Using this dataset, the team discovered several surprising results about the differences between human and machine perception, and how the ability to see faces in a slice of toast might have saved your distant relatives’ lives.

“Face pareidolia has long fascinated psychologists, but it’s been largely unexplored in the computer vision community,” says Mark Hamilton, MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL affiliate, and lead researcher on the work. “We wanted to create a resource that could help us understand how both humans and AI systems process these illusory faces.”

So what did all of these fake faces reveal? For one, AI models don’t seem to recognize pareidolic faces like we do. Surprisingly, the team found that it wasn’t until they trained algorithms to recognize animal faces that they became significantly better at detecting pareidolic faces. This unexpected connection hints at a possible evolutionary link between our ability to spot animal faces — crucial for survival — and our tendency to see faces in inanimate objects. “A result like this seems to suggest that pareidolia might not arise from human social behavior, but from something deeper: like quickly spotting a lurking tiger, or identifying which way a deer is looking so our primordial ancestors could hunt,” says Hamilton.

Another intriguing discovery is what the researchers call the “Goldilocks Zone of Pareidolia,” a class of images where pareidolia is most likely to occur. “There’s a specific range of visual complexity where both humans and machines are most likely to perceive faces in non-face objects,” William T. Freeman, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and principal investigator of the project says. “Too simple, and there’s not enough detail to form a face. Too complex, and it becomes visual noise.”

To uncover this, the team developed an equation that models how people and algorithms detect illusory faces.  When analyzing this equation, they found a clear “pareidolic peak” where the likelihood of seeing faces is highest, corresponding to images that have “just the right amount” of complexity. This predicted “Goldilocks zone” was then validated in tests with both real human subjects and AI face detection systems.

This new dataset, “Faces in Things,” dwarfs those of previous studies that typically used only 20-30 stimuli. This scale allowed the researchers to explore how state-of-the-art face detection algorithms behaved after fine-tuning on pareidolic faces, showing that not only could these algorithms be edited to detect these faces, but that they could also act as a silicon stand-in for our own brain, allowing the team to ask and answer questions about the origins of pareidolic face detection that are impossible to ask in humans. 

To build this dataset, the team curated approximately 20,000 candidate images from the LAION-5B dataset, which were then meticulously labeled and judged by human annotators. This process involved drawing bounding boxes around perceived faces and answering detailed questions about each face, such as the perceived emotion, age, and whether the face was accidental or intentional. “Gathering and annotating thousands of images was a monumental task,” says Hamilton. “Much of the dataset owes its existence to my mom,” a retired banker, “who spent countless hours lovingly labeling images for our analysis.”

The study also has potential applications in improving face detection systems by reducing false positives, which could have implications for fields like self-driving cars, human-computer interaction, and robotics. The dataset and models could also help areas like product design, where understanding and controlling pareidolia could create better products. “Imagine being able to automatically tweak the design of a car or a child’s toy so it looks friendlier, or ensuring a medical device doesn’t inadvertently appear threatening,” says Hamilton.

“It’s fascinating how humans instinctively interpret inanimate objects with human-like traits. For instance, when you glance at an electrical socket, you might immediately envision it singing, and you can even imagine how it would ‘move its lips.’ Algorithms, however, don’t naturally recognize these cartoonish faces in the same way we do,” says Hamilton. “This raises intriguing questions: What accounts for this difference between human perception and algorithmic interpretation? Is pareidolia beneficial or detrimental? Why don’t algorithms experience this effect as we do? These questions sparked our investigation, as this classic psychological phenomenon in humans had not been thoroughly explored in algorithms.”

As the researchers prepare to share their dataset with the scientific community, they’re already looking ahead. Future work may involve training vision-language models to understand and describe pareidolic faces, potentially leading to AI systems that can engage with visual stimuli in more human-like ways.

“This is a delightful paper! It is fun to read and it makes me think. Hamilton et al. propose a tantalizing question: Why do we see faces in things?” says Pietro Perona, the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, who was not involved in the work. “As they point out, learning from examples, including animal faces, goes only half-way to explaining the phenomenon. I bet that thinking about this question will teach us something important about how our visual system generalizes beyond the training it receives through life.”

Hamilton and Freeman’s co-authors include Simon Stent, staff research scientist at the Toyota Research Institute; Ruth Rosenholtz, principal research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, NVIDIA research scientist, and former CSAIL member; and CSAIL affiliates postdoc Vasha DuTell, Anne Harrington MEng ’23, and Research Scientist Jennifer Corbett. Their work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the CSAIL MEnTorEd Opportunities in Research (METEOR) Fellowship, while being sponsored by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and the United States Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator. The MIT SuperCloud and Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center provided HPC resources for the researchers’ results.

This work is being presented this week at the European Conference on Computer Vision.

A new, multidisciplinary MIT graduate program in music technology and computation will feature faculty, labs, and curricula from across the Institute.

The program is a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and the School of Engineering. Faculty for the program share appointments between the Music and Theater Arts Section, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

“The launch of a new graduate program in music technology strikes me as both a necessary and a provocative gesture — an important leap in an era being rapidly redefined by exponential growth in computation, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interactions of every conceivable kind,” says Jay Scheib,​​ head of the MIT Music and Theater Arts Section and the Class of 1949 Professor.

“Music plays an elegant role at the fore of a remarkable convergence of art and technology,” adds Scheib. “It’s the right time to launch this program and if not at MIT, then where?”

MIT’s practitioners define music technology as the field of scientific inquiry where they study, discover, and develop new computational approaches to music that include music information retrieval; artificial intelligence; machine learning; generative algorithms; interaction and performance systems; digital instrument design; conceptual and perceptual modeling of music; acoustics; audio signal processing; and software development for creative expression and music applications.

Eran Egozy, professor of the practice in music technology and one of the program leads, says MIT’s focus is technical research in music technology that always centers the humanistic and artistic aspects of making music.

“There are so many MIT students who are fabulous musicians,” says Egozy. “We'll approach music technology as computer scientists, mathematicians, and musicians.”

With the launch of this new program — an offering alongside those available in MIT’s Media Lab and elsewhere — Egozy sees MIT becoming the obvious destination for students interested in music and computation study, preparing high-impact graduates for roles in academia and industry, while also helping mold creative, big-picture thinkers who can tackle large challenges.

Investigating big ideas

The program will encompass two master’s degrees and a PhD:

• The Master of Science (MS) is a two-semester, thesis-based program available only to MIT undergraduates. One semester of fellowship is automatically awarded to all admitted students. The first class will enroll in fall 2025.
• The Master of Applied Science (MAS) is a two-semester, coursework-based program available to all students. One semester of fellowship funding is automatically awarded to all admitted students. Applications for this program will open in fall 2025.
• The PhD program is available to all students, who would apply to MIT’s School of Engineering.

Anna Huang, a new MIT assistant professor who holds a shared faculty position between the MIT Music and Theater Arts Section and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, is collaborating with Egozy to develop and launch the program. Huang arrived at MIT this fall after spending eight years with Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music-making.

“As a composer turned AI researcher who specializes in generative music technology, my long-term goal is to develop AI systems that can shed new light on how we understand, learn, and create music, and to learn from interactions between musicians in order to transform how we approach human-AI collaboration,” says Huang. “This new program will let us further investigate how musical applications can illuminate problems in understanding neural networks, for example.”

MIT’s new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, featuring enhanced music technology spaces, will also help transform music education with versatile performance venues and optimized rehearsal facilities.

A natural home for music technology

MIT’s world-class, top-ranked engineering program, combined with its focus on computation and its conservatory-level music education offerings, makes the Institute a natural home for the continued expansion of music technology education.

The collaborative nature of the new program is the latest example of interdisciplinary work happening across the Institute.

“I am thrilled that the School of Engineering is partnering with the MIT Music and Theater Arts Section on this important initiative, which represents the convergence of various engineering areas — such as AI and design — with music,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering, chief innovation and strategy officer, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of EECS. “I can’t wait to see the innovative projects the students will create and how they will drive this new field forward.”

“Everyone on campus knows that MIT is a great place to do music. But I want people to come to MIT because of what we do in music,” says Agustin Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS. “This outstanding collaboration with the Schwarzman College of Computing and the School of Engineering will make that dream a reality, by bringing together the world’s best engineers with our extraordinary musicians to create the next generation of music technologies.”

“The new master’s program offers students an unparalleled opportunity to explore the intersection of music and technology,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of EECS. “It equips them with a deep understanding of this confluence, preparing them to advance new approaches to computational models of music and be at the forefront of an evolving area.” 

Fifteen technologies developed either wholly or in part by MIT Lincoln Laboratory have been named recipients of 2024 R&D 100 Awards. The awards are given by R&D World, an online publication that serves research scientists and engineers worldwide. Dubbed the “Oscars of Innovation,” the awards recognize the 100 most significant technologies transitioned to use or introduced into the marketplace in the past year. An independent panel of expert judges selects the winners.

“The R&D 100 Awards are a significant recognition of the laboratory’s technical capabilities and its role in transitioning technology for real-world impact,” says Melissa Choi, director of Lincoln Laboratory. “It is exciting to see so many projects selected for this honor, and we are proud of everyone whose creativity, curiosity, and technical excellence made these and many other Lincoln Laboratory innovations possible.”

The awarded technologies have a wide range of applications. A handful of them are poised to prevent human harm — for example, by monitoring for heat stroke or cognitive injury. Others present new processes for 3D printing glass, fabricating silicon imaging sensors, and interconnecting integrated circuits. Some technologies take on long-held challenges, such as mapping the human brain and the ocean floor. Together, the winners exemplify the creativity and breadth of Lincoln Laboratory innovation. Since 2010, the laboratory has received 101 R&D 100 Awards.

This year’s R&D 100 Award–winning technologies are described below.

Protecting human health and safety

The Neuron Tracing and Active Learning Environment (NeuroTrALE) software uses artificial intelligence techniques to create high-resolution maps, or atlases, of the brain's network of neurons from high-dimensional biomedical data. NeuroTrALE addresses a major challenge in AI-assisted brain mapping: a lack of labeled data for training AI systems to build atlases essential for study of the brain’s neural structures and mechanisms. The software is the first end-to-end system to perform processing and annotation of dense microscopy data; generate segmentations of neurons; and enable experts to review, correct, and edit NeuroTrALE’s annotations from a web browser. This award is shared with the lab of Kwanghun (KC) Chung, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Many military and law enforcement personnel are routinely exposed to low-level blasts in training settings. Often, these blasts don’t cause immediate diagnosable injury, but exposure over time has been linked to anxiety, depression, and other cognitive conditions. The Electrooculography and Balance Blast Overpressure Monitoring (EYEBOOM) is a wearable system developed to monitor individuals’ blast exposure and notify them if they are at an increased risk of harm. It uses two body-worn sensors, one to capture continuous eye and body movements and another to measure blast energy. An algorithm analyzes these data to detect subtle changes in physiology, which, when combined with cumulative blast exposure, can be predictive of cognitive injury. Today, the system is in use by select U.S. Special Forces units. The laboratory co-developed EYEBOOM with Creare LLC and Lifelens LLC.

Tunable knitted stem cell scaffolds: The development of artificial-tissue constructs that mimic the natural stretchability and toughness of living tissue is in high demand for regenerative medicine applications. A team from Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering developed new forms of biocompatible fabrics that mimic the mechanical properties of native tissues while nurturing growing stem cells. These wearable stem-cell scaffolds can expedite the regeneration of skin, muscle, and other soft tissues to reduce recovery time and limit complications from severe burns, lacerations, and other bodily wounds.

Mixture deconvolution pipeline for forensic investigative genetic genealogy: A rapidly growing field of forensic science is investigative genetic genealogy, wherein investigators submit a DNA profile to commercial genealogy databases to identify a missing person or criminal suspect. Lincoln Laboratory’s software invention addresses a large unmet need in this field: the ability to deconvolve, or unravel, mixed DNA profiles of multiple unknown persons to enable database searching. The software pipeline estimates the number of contributors in a DNA mixture, the percentage of DNA present from each contributor, and the sex of each contributor; then, it deconvolves the different DNA profiles in the mixture to isolate two contributors, without needing to match them to a reference profile of a known contributor, as required by previous software.

Each year, hundreds of people die or suffer serious injuries from heat stroke, especially personnel in high-risk outdoor occupations such as military, construction, or first response. The Heat Injury Prevention System (HIPS) provides accurate, early warning of heat stroke several minutes in advance of visible symptoms. The system collects data from a sensor worn on a chest strap and employs algorithms for estimating body temperature, gait instability, and adaptive physiological strain index. The system then provides an individual’s heat-injury prediction on a mobile app. The affordability, accuracy, and user-acceptability of HIPS have led to its integration into operational environments for the military.

Observing the world

More than 80 percent of the ocean floor remains virtually unmapped and unexplored. Historically, deep sea maps have been generated either at low resolution from a large sonar array mounted on a ship, or at higher resolution with slow and expensive underwater vehicles. New autonomous sparse-aperture multibeam echo sounder technology uses a swarm of about 20 autonomous surface vehicles that work together as a single large sonar array to achieve the best of both worlds: mapping the deep seabed at 100 times the resolution of a ship-mounted sonar and 50 times the coverage rate of an underwater vehicle. New estimation algorithms and acoustic signal processing techniques enable this technology. The system holds potential for significantly improving humanitarian search-and-rescue capabilities and ocean and climate modeling. The R&D 100 Award is shared with the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.

FocusNet is a machine-learning architecture for analyzing airborne ground-mapping lidar data. Airborne lidar works by scanning the ground with a laser and creating a digital 3D representation of the area, called a point cloud. Humans or algorithms then analyze the point cloud to categorize scene features such as buildings or roads. In recent years, lidar technology has both improved and diversified, and methods to analyze the data have struggled to keep up. FocusNet fills this gap by using a convolutional neural network — an algorithm that finds patterns in images to recognize objects — to automatically categorize objects within the point cloud. It can achieve this object recognition across different types of lidar system data without needing to be retrained, representing a major advancement in understanding 3D lidar scenes.

Atmospheric observations collected from aircraft, such as temperature and wind, provide the highest-value inputs to weather forecasting models. However, these data collections are sparse and delayed, currently obtained through specialized systems installed on select aircraft. The Portable Aircraft Derived Weather Observation System (PADWOS) offers a way to significantly expand the quality and quantity of these data by leveraging Mode S Enhanced Surveillance (EHS) transponders, which are already installed on more than 95 percent of commercial aircraft and the majority of general aviation aircraft. From the ground, PADWOS interrogates Mode S EHS–equipped aircraft, collecting in milliseconds aircraft state data reported by the transponder to make wind and temperature estimates. The system holds promise for improving forecasts, monitoring climate, and supporting other weather applications.

Advancing computing and communications

Quantum networking has the potential to revolutionize connectivity across the globe, unlocking unprecedented capabilities in computing, sensing, and communications. To realize this potential, entangled photons distributed across a quantum network must arrive and interact with other photons in precisely controlled ways. Lincoln Laboratory's precision photon synchronization system for quantum networking is the first to provide an efficient solution to synchronize space-to-ground quantum networking links to sub-picosecond precision. Unlike other technologies, the system performs free-space quantum entanglement distribution via a satellite, without needing to locate complex entanglement sources in space. These sources are instead located on the ground, providing an easily accessible test environment that can be upgraded as new quantum entanglement generation technologies emerge.

Superconductive many-state memory and comparison logic: Lincoln Laboratory developed circuits that natively store and compare greater than two discrete states, utilizing the quantized magnetic fields of superconductive materials. This property allows the creation of digital logic circuitry that goes beyond binary logic to ternary logic, improving memory throughput without significantly increasing the number of devices required or the surface area of the circuits. Comparing their superconducting ternary-logic memory to a conventional memory, the research team found that the ternary memory could pattern match across the entire digital Library of Congress nearly 30 times faster. The circuits represent fundamental building blocks for advanced, ultrahigh-speed and low-power digital logic.

The Megachip is an approach to interconnect many small, specialized chips (called chiplets) into a single-chip-like monolithic integrated circuit. Capable of incorporating billions of transistors, this interconnected structure extends device performance beyond the limits imposed by traditional wafer-level packaging. Megachips can address the increasing size and performance demands made on microelectronics used for AI processing and high-performance computing, and in mobile devices and servers.

An in-band full-duplex (IBDF) wireless system with advanced interference mitigation addresses the growing congestion of wireless networks. Previous IBFD systems have demonstrated the ability for a wireless device to transmit and receive on the same frequency at the same time by suppressing self-interference, effectively doubling the device’s efficiency on the frequency spectrum. These systems, however, haven’t addressed interference from external wireless sources on the same frequency. Lincoln Laboratory's technology, for the first time, allows IBFD to mitigate multiple interference sources, resulting in a wireless system that can increase the number of devices supported, their data rate, and their communications range. This IBFD system could enable future smart vehicles to simultaneously connect to wireless networks, share road information, and self-drive — a capability not possible today.

Fabricating with novel processes

Lincoln Laboratory developed a nanocomposite ink system for 3D printing functional materials. Deposition using an active-mixing nozzle allows the generation of graded structures that transition gradually from one material to another. This ability to control the electromagnetic and geometric properties of a material can enable smaller, lighter, and less-power-hungry RF components while accommodating large frequency bandwidths. Furthermore, introducing different particles into the ink in a modular fashion allows the absorption of a wide range of radiation types. This 3D-printed shielding is expected to be used for protecting electronics in small satellites. This award is shared with Professor Jennifer Lewis’ research group at Harvard University.

The laboratory’s engineered substrates for rapid advanced imaging sensor development dramatically reduce the time and cost of developing advanced silicon imaging sensors. These substrates prebuild most steps of the back-illumination process (a method to increase the amount of light that hits a pixel) directly into the starting wafer, before device fabrication begins. Then, a specialized process allows the detector substrate and readout circuits to be mated together and uniformly thinned to microns in thickness at the die level rather than at the wafer level. Both aspects can save a project millions of dollars in fabrication costs by enabling the production of small batches of detectors, instead of a full wafer run, while improving sensor noise and performance. This platform has allowed researchers to prototype new imaging sensor concepts — including detectors for future NASA autonomous lander missions — that would have taken years to develop in a traditional process.

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, holds promise for fabricating complex glass structures that would be unattainable with traditional glass manufacturing techniques. Lincoln Laboratory’s low-temperature additive manufacturing of glass composites allows 3D printing of multimaterial glass items without the need for costly high-temperature processing. This low-temperature technique, which cures the glass at 250 degrees Celsius as compared to the standard 1,000 C, relies on simple components: a liquid silicate solution, a structural filler, a fumed nanoparticle, and an optional functional additive to produce glass with optical, electrical, or chemical properties. The technique could facilitate the widespread adoption of 3D printing for glass devices such as microfluidic systems, free-form optical lenses or fiber, and high-temperature electronic components.

The researchers behind each R&D 100 Award–winning technology will be honored at an awards gala on Nov. 21 in Palm Springs, California.

The degree to which a surgical patient’s subconscious processing of pain, or “nociception,” is properly managed by their anesthesiologist will directly affect the degree of post-operative drug side effects they’ll experience and the need for further pain management they’ll require. But pain is a subjective feeling to measure, even when patients are awake, much less when they are unconscious. 

In a new study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers describe a set of statistical models that objectively quantified nociception during surgery. Ultimately, they hope to help anesthesiologists optimize drug dose and minimize post-operative pain and side effects.

The new models integrate data meticulously logged over 18,582 minutes of 101 abdominal surgeries in men and women at MGH. Led by Sandya Subramanian PhD ’21, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California at San Francisco, the researchers collected and analyzed data from five physiological sensors as patients experienced a total of 49,878 distinct “nociceptive stimuli” (such as incisions or cautery). Moreover, the team recorded what drugs were administered, and how much and when, to factor in their effects on nociception or cardiovascular measures. They then used all the data to develop a set of statistical models that performed well in retrospectively indicating the body’s response to nociceptive stimuli.

The team’s goal is to furnish such accurate, objective, and physiologically principled information in real time to anesthesiologists who currently have to rely heavily on intuition and past experience in deciding how to administer pain-control drugs during surgery. If anesthesiologists give too much, patients can experience side effects ranging from nausea to delirium. If they give too little, patients may feel excessive pain after they awaken.

“Sandya’s work has helped us establish a principled way to understand and measure nociception (unconscious pain) during general anesthesia,” says study senior author Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Brown is also an anesthesiologist at MGH and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “Our next objective is to make the insights that we have gained from Sandya’s studies reliable and practical for anesthesiologists to use during surgery.”

Surgery and statistics

The research began as Subramanian’s doctoral thesis project in Brown’s lab in 2017. The best prior attempts to objectively model nociception have either relied solely on the electrocardiogram (ECG, an indirect indicator of heart-rate variability) or other systems that may incorporate more than one measurement, but were either based on lab experiments using pain stimuli that do not compare in intensity to surgical pain or were validated by statistically aggregating just a few time points across multiple patients’ surgeries, Subramanian says.

“There’s no other place to study surgical pain except for the operating room,” Subramanian says. “We wanted to not only develop the algorithms using data from surgery, but also actually validate it in the context in which we want someone to use it. If we are asking them to track moment-to-moment nociception during an individual surgery, we need to validate it in that same way.”

So she and Brown worked to advance the state of the art by collecting multi-sensor data during the whole course of actual surgeries and by accounting for the confounding effects of the drugs administered. In that way, they hoped to develop a model that could make accurate predictions that remained valid for the same patient all the way through their operation.

Part of the improvements the team achieved arose from tracking patterns of heart rate and also skin conductance. Changes in both of these physiological factors can be indications of the body’s primal “fight or flight” response to nociception or pain, but some drugs used during surgery directly affect cardiovascular state, while skin conductance (or “EDA,” electrodermal activity) remains unaffected. The study measures not only ECG but also backs it up with PPG, an optical measure of heart rate (like the oxygen sensor on a smartwatch), because ECG signals can sometimes be made noisy by all the electrical equipment buzzing away in the operating room. Similarly, Subramanian backstopped EDA measures with measures of skin temperature to ensure that changes in skin conductance from sweat were because of nociception and not simply the patient being too warm. The study also tracked respiration.

Then the authors performed statistical analyses to develop physiologically relevant indices from each of the cardiovascular and skin conductance signals. And once each index was established, further statistical analysis enabled tracking the indices together to produce models that could make accurate, principled predictions of when nociception was occurring and the body’s response.

Nailing nociception

In four versions of the model, Subramanian “supervised” them by feeding them information on when actual nociceptive stimuli occurred so that they could then learn the association between the physiological measurements and the incidence of pain-inducing events. In some of these trained versions she left out drug information and in some versions she used different statistical approaches (either “linear regression” or “random forest”). In a fifth version of the model, based on a “state space” approach, she left it unsupervised, meaning it had to learn to infer moments of nociception purely from the physiological indices. She compared all five versions of her model to one of the current industry standards, an ECG-tracking model called ANI.

Each model’s output can be visualized as a graph plotting the predicted degree of nociception over time. ANI performs just above chance but is implemented in real-time. The unsupervised model performed better than ANI, though not quite as well as the supervised models. The best performing of those was one that incorporated drug information and used a “random forest” approach. Still, the authors note, the fact that the unsupervised model performed significantly better than chance suggests that there is indeed an objectively detectable signature of the body’s nociceptive state even when looking across different patients.

“A state space framework using multisensory physiological observations is effective in uncovering this implicit nociceptive state with a consistent definition across multiple subjects,” wrote Subramanian, Brown, and their co-authors. “This is an important step toward defining a metric to track nociception without including nociceptive ‘ground truth’ information, most practical for scalability and implementation in clinical settings.”

Indeed, the next steps for the research are to increase the data sampling and to further refine the models so that they can eventually be put into practice in the operating room. That will require enabling them to predict nociception in real time, rather than in post-hoc analysis. When that advance is made, that will enable anesthesiologists or intensivists to inform their pain drug dosing judgements. Further into the future, the model could inform closed-loop systems that automatically dose drugs under the anesthesiologist’s supervision.

“Our study is an important first step toward developing objective markers to track surgical nociception,” the authors concluded. “These markers will enable objective assessment of nociception in other complex clinical settings, such as the ICU [intensive care unit], as well as catalyze future development of closed-loop control systems for nociception.”

In addition to Subramanian and Brown, the paper’s other authors are Bryan Tseng, Marcela del Carmen, Annekathryn Goodman, Douglas Dahl, and Riccardo Barbieri.

Funding from The JPB Foundation; The Picower Institute; George J. Elbaum ’59, SM ’63, PhD ’67; Mimi Jensen; Diane B. Greene SM ’78; Mendel Rosenblum; Bill Swanson; Cathy and Lou Paglia; annual donors to the Anesthesia Initiative Fund; the National Science Foundation; and an MIT Office of Graduate Education Collabmore-Rogers Fellowship supported the research.

The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry has long struggled with the issue of monitoring the characteristics of a drying mixture, a critical step in producing medication and chemical compounds. At present, there are two noninvasive characterization approaches that are typically used: A sample is either imaged and individual particles are counted, or researchers use a scattered light to estimate the particle size distribution (PSD). The former is time-intensive and leads to increased waste, making the latter a more attractive option.

In recent years, MIT engineers and researchers developed a physics and machine learning-based scattered light approach that has been shown to improve manufacturing processes for pharmaceutical pills and powders, increasing efficiency and accuracy and resulting in fewer failed batches of products. A new open-access paper, “Non-invasive estimation of the powder size distribution from a single speckle image,” available in the journal Light: Science & Application, expands on this work, introducing an even faster approach. 

“Understanding the behavior of scattered light is one of the most important topics in optics,” says Qihang Zhang PhD ’23, an associate researcher at Tsinghua University. “By making progress in analyzing scattered light, we also invented a useful tool for the pharmaceutical industry. Locating the pain point and solving it by investigating the fundamental rule is the most exciting thing to the research team.”

The paper proposes a new PSD estimation method, based on pupil engineering, that reduces the number of frames needed for analysis. “Our learning-based model can estimate the powder size distribution from a single snapshot speckle image, consequently reducing the reconstruction time from 15 seconds to a mere 0.25 seconds,” the researchers explain.

“Our main contribution in this work is accelerating a particle size detection method by 60 times, with a collective optimization of both algorithm and hardware,” says Zhang. “This high-speed probe is capable to detect the size evolution in fast dynamical systems, providing a platform to study models of processes in pharmaceutical industry including drying, mixing and blending.”

The technique offers a low-cost, noninvasive particle size probe by collecting back-scattered light from powder surfaces. The compact and portable prototype is compatible with most of drying systems in the market, as long as there is an observation window. This online measurement approach may help control manufacturing processes, improving efficiency and product quality. Further, the previous lack of online monitoring prevented systematical study of dynamical models in manufacturing processes. This probe could bring a new platform to carry out series research and modeling for the particle size evolution.

This work, a successful collaboration between physicists and engineers, is generated from the MIT-Takeda program. Collaborators are affiliated with three MIT departments: Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. George Barbastathis, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, is the article’s senior author.

Jennifer Meanwell carefully placed a pottery sherd — or broken fragment of ceramic — under the circular, diamond-coated blade of a benchtop saw.

“Cutting the sample is the first big step,” says Meanwell, a lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. She was leading a lab in making thin sections of pottery for petrographic analysis, a method used to examine ceramics and determine their composition, structure, and origins.

“You want a slice that’s thin enough to work with but thick enough to maintain its structure through the rest of the process.”

The lab was part of a summer intensive course at MIT for PhD students and early-career researchers in ceramic petrography, a specialized skill in archaeology. The course focuses on using optical microscopy to characterize pottery from ancient civilizations, revealing information about manufacturing techniques and provenance.

Twelve students from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia participated in the three-week course in June to develop advanced skills, enriching students’ understanding of ancient ceramics and their broader historical and cultural contexts. It included morning seminars in mineralogy and archaeological theory and hands-on laboratories to identify and characterize materials, understand how they were manufactured, and infer what they were most likely used for.

Meanwell and Senior Technical Instructor William Gilstrap taught the group how to examine pottery samples collected from around the world — Greece, Mexico, and the Middle East — using polarized light microscopes to examine the materials.

“Polarized light will transmit through a mineral at 30 microns in a predictable manner — it interacts with its structure, and the optical properties help us identify which mineral types they are,” says Gilstrap. By determining the minerals, researchers can link them to the geological landscape they came from. “This helps us know more about how people interacted with their environments, and perhaps, how people transferred knowledge on time and space.”

Hands-on training

The course builds on the two-semester-long class Materials in Ancient Societies, run by the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE), a consortium of eight Boston-area schools that provides training in archaeological and ethnographic materials. Few institutions globally teach ceramic petrography, and most provide short, one- to two-week courses.

Gilstrap highlighted the need for extended training. “It takes time to develop the skills to find the nuances in the structure as well as to learn mineralogy, geology, and the manufacturing techniques of ceramics,” Gilstrap says.

Students learn to reconstruct the production methods of past ceramics, from cooking pots to roof tiles, by examining the underlying structure of materials to determine how they were made. For example, they can identify whether a vessel was crafted by pinching, a technique in which a potter presses into a ball of clay to form indentations, or coiling, which involves stacking rope-like strands of clay to build up the vessel’s walls. This analysis can reveal production, transport, and consumption patterns.

“We can see where things are made. We can see where things ended up and direction of exchange. And that’s the basics of an economy,” says Gilstrap.

The course blends sciences and humanities, covering basic chemistry, geology, and anthropological theory. Students also learn how to make their own petrographic thin sections — slices of pottery impregnated in epoxy and mounted on glass slides. These sections are essential for microscopic analysis of the ceramic’s composition and structure. Most researchers, however, typically do not make their own thin sections. Instead, they send their samples to specialized labs, where the preparation process costs approximately $45 per sample.

“When you have 300 samples, that gets costly,” Gilstrap adds.

Applying new skills

This practical experience resonated with Jean Paul Rojas and Michelle Young, from Vanderbilt University’s anthropology department. As did all the students, they brought in their own slides for analysis. Theirs were made by a colleague two decades ago.

“These have never been petrographically analyzed, so it would be the first time looking at them and trying to identify the petro groups,” says Rojas, a PhD student in archaeology. His research focuses on human migration, exchange, and movement in the Caribbean, particularly the mineralogical origins of ceramics.

Before the MIT summer course, Rojas had little training in geology or mineralogy. Two weeks in, he joked, “I know what rocks are now.”

“Now I feel like I know how to really look at all these different minerals, the feldspars and the quartz and the plagioclase — the different types of feldspars — the micas, and I can identify them and make something useful out of it.”

Young is an assistant professor in Vanderbilt’s anthropology department and Rojas’ thesis advisor. She’s always had an interest in materials science and ceramics, and she’s collaborated with a petrographer in the past.

“But in order to truly understand the data, I needed an introduction into the technique,” Young says.

When she returns to Vanderbilt, she plans on including petrography as one of the techniques featured in a lab sciences course for non-science majors.

“I am hoping at some point that I will eventually publish on petrographic results, or at least use the technique as a very preliminary way of grouping different ceramics,” Young says.

Another summer course student, Anna Pineda, a PhD candidate from the Philippines studying at the Australian National University, is analyzing jar burial sites in the islands and archipelagos between Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. She’s particularly interested in understanding how mineral analysis techniques in geology can inform archaeology.

“When I talk to geologists, they can’t really get what I want to do unless they have an archeological background,” Pineda said. “It’s good to have a perspective from people who do archaeology.”

Pineda plans to incorporate knowledge gained from the course into her PhD research.

“Hopefully, I can get better results out of research on materials that have never been studied yet, using methods that aren’t commonly applied, in Island Southeast Asia.”

When she was a child, Mary Ellen Wiltrout PhD ’09 didn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a K-12 teacher. Growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, Wiltrout was studious with an early interest in science — and ended up pursuing biology as a career. 

But following her doctorate at MIT, she pivoted toward education after all. Now, as the director of blended and online initiatives and a lecturer with the Department of Biology, she’s shaping biology pedagogy at MIT and beyond.

Establishing MOOCs at MIT

To this day, E.C. Whitehead Professor of Biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator emeritus Tania Baker considers creating a permanent role for Wiltrout one of the most consequential decisions she made as department head.

Since launching the very first MITxBio massive online open course 7.00x (Introduction to Biology – the Secret of Life) with professor of biology Eric Lander in 2013, Wiltrout’s team has worked with MIT Open Learning and biology faculty to build an award-winning repertoire of MITxBio courses.

MITxBio courses are currently hosted on the learning platform edX, established by MIT and Harvard University in 2012, which today connects 86 million people worldwide to online learning opportunities. Within MITxBio, Wiltrout leads a team of instructional staff and students to develop online learning experiences for MIT students and the public while researching effective methods for learner engagement and course design.

“Mary Ellen’s approach has an element of experimentation that embodies a very MIT ethos: applying rigorous science to creatively address challenges with far-reaching impact,” says Darcy Gordon, instructor of blended and online initiatives.

Mentee to motivator

Wiltrout was inspired to pursue both teaching and research by the late geneticist Elizabeth “Beth” Jones at Carnegie Mellon University, where Wiltrout earned a degree in biological sciences and served as a teaching assistant in lab courses.

“I thought it was a lot of fun to work with students, especially at the higher level of education, and especially with a focus on biology,” Wiltrout recalls, noting she developed her love of teaching in those early experiences.

Though her research advisor at the time discouraged her from teaching, Jones assured Wiltrout that it was possible to pursue both.

Jones, who received her postdoctoral training with late Professor Emeritus Boris Magasanik at MIT, encouraged Wiltrout to apply to the Institute and join American Cancer Society and HHMI Professor Graham Walker’s lab. In 2009, Wiltrout earned a PhD in biology for thesis work in the Walker lab, where she continued to learn from enthusiastic mentors.

“When I joined Graham’s lab, everyone was eager to teach and support a new student,” she reflects. After watching Walker aid a struggling student, Wiltrout was further affirmed in her choice. “I knew I could go to Graham if I ever needed to.”

After graduation, Wiltrout taught molecular biology at Harvard for a few years until Baker facilitated her move back to MIT. Now, she’s a resource for faculty, postdocs, and students.

“She is an incredibly rich source of knowledge for everything from how to implement the increasingly complex tools for running a class to the best practices for ensuring a rigorous and inclusive curriculum,” says Iain Cheeseman, the Herman and Margaret Sokol Professor of Biology and associate head of the biology department.

Stephen Bell, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor of Biology and instructor of the Molecular Biology series of MITxBio courses, notes Wiltrout is known for staying on the “cutting edge of pedagogy.”

“She has a comprehensive knowledge of new online educational tools and is always ready to help any professor to implement them in any way they wish,” he says.

Gordon finds Wiltrout’s experiences as a biologist and learning engineer instrumental to her own professional development and a model for their colleagues in science education.

“Mary Ellen has been an incredibly supportive supervisor. She facilitates a team environment that centers on frequent feedback and iteration,” says Tyler Smith, instructor for pedagogy training and biology.

Prepared for the pandemic, and beyond

Wiltrout believes blended learning, combining in-person and online components, is the best path forward for education at MIT. Building personal relationships in the classroom is critical, but online material and supplemental instruction are also key to providing immediate feedback, formative assessments, and other evidence-based learning practices.

“A lot of people have realized that they can’t ignore online learning anymore,” Wiltrout noted during an interview on The Champions Coffee Podcast in 2023. That couldn’t have been truer than in 2020, when academic institutions were forced to suddenly shift to virtual learning.

“When Covid hit, we already had all the infrastructure in place,” Baker says. “Mary Ellen helped not just our department, but also contributed to MIT education’s survival through the pandemic.”

For Wiltrout’s efforts, she received a COVID-19 Hero Award, a recognition from the School of Science for staff members who went above and beyond during that extraordinarily difficult time.

“Mary Ellen thinks deeply about how to create the best learning opportunities possible,” says Cheeseman, one of almost a dozen faculty members who nominated her for the award.

Recently, Wiltrout expanded beyond higher education and into high schools, taking on several interns in collaboration with Empowr, a nonprofit organization that teaches software development skills to Black students to create a school-to-career pipeline. Wiltrout is proud to report that one of these interns is now a student at MIT in the class of 2028.

Looking forward, Wiltrout aims to stay ahead of the curve with the latest educational technology and is excited to see how modern tools can be incorporated into education.

“Everyone is pretty certain that generative AI is going to change education,” she says. “We need to be experimenting with how to take advantage of technology to improve learning.”

Ultimately, she is grateful to continue developing her career at MIT biology.

“It’s exciting to come back to the department after being a student and to work with people as colleagues to produce something that has an impact on what they’re teaching current MIT students and sharing with the world for further reach,” she says.

As for Wiltrout’s own daughter, she’s declared she would like to follow in her mother’s footsteps — a fitting symbol of Wiltrout’s impact on the future of education.

When Jared Bryan talks about his seismology research, it’s with a natural finesse. He’s a fifth-year PhD student working with MIT Assistant Professor William Frank on seismology research, drawn in by the lab’s combination of GPS observations, satellites, and seismic station data to understand the underlying physics of earthquakes. He has no trouble talking about seismic velocity in fault zones or how he first became interested in the field after summer internships with the Southern California Earthquake Center as an undergraduate student.

“It’s definitely like a more down-to-earth kind of seismology,” he jokingly describes it. It’s an odd comment. Where else could earthquakes be but on Earth? But it’s because Bryan finished a research project that has culminated in a new paper — published today in Nature Astronomy — involving seismic activity not on Earth, but on stars.

Building curiosity

PhD students in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) are required to complete two research projects as part of their general exam. The first is often in their main focus of research and the foundations of what will become their thesis work.

But the second project has a special requirement: It must be in a different specialty.

“Having that built into the structure of the PhD is really, really nice,” says Bryan, who hadn’t known about the special requirement when he decided to come to EAPS. “I think it helps you build curiosity and find what's interesting about what other people are doing.”

Having so many different, yet still related, fields of study housed in one department makes it easier for students with a strong sense of curiosity to explore the interconnected interactions of Earth science.

“I think everyone here is excited about a lot of different stuff, but we can’t do everything,” says Frank, the Victor P. Starr Career Development Professor of Geophysics. “This is a great way to get students to try something else that they maybe would have wanted to do in a parallel dimension, interact with other advisors, and see that science can be done in different ways.”

At first, Bryan was worried that the nature of the second project would be a restrictive diversion from his main PhD research. But Associate Professor Julien de Wit was looking for someone with a seismology background to look at some stellar observations he’d collected back in 2016. A star’s brightness was pulsating at a very specific frequency that had to be caused by changes in the star itself, so Bryan decided to help.

“I was surprised by how the kind of seismology that he was looking for was similar to the seismology that we were first doing in the ’60s and ’70s, like large-scale global Earth seismology,” says Bryan. “I thought it would be a way to rethink the foundations of the field that I had been studying applied to a new region.”

Going from earthquakes to starquakes is not a one-to-one comparison. While the foundational knowledge was there, movement of stars comes from a variety of sources like magnetism or the Coriolis effect, and in a variety of forms. In addition to the sound and pressure waves of earthquakes, they also have gravity waves, all of which happen on a scale much more massive.

“You have to stretch your mind a bit, because you can’t actually visit these places,” Bryan says. “It’s an unbelievable luxury that we have in Earth seismology that the things that we study are on Google Maps.”

But there are benefits to bringing in scientists from outside an area of expertise. De Wit, who served as Bryan’s supervisor for the project and is also an author on the paper, points out that they bring a fresh perspective and approach by asking unique questions.

“Things that people in the field would just take for granted are challenged by their questions,” he says, adding that Bryan was transparent about what he did and didn’t know, allowing for a rich exchange of information.

Tidal resonance locking

Bryan eventually found that the changes in the star’s brightness were caused by tidal resonance. Resonance is a physical occurrence where waves interact and amplify each other. The most common analogy is pushing someone on a swing set; when the person pushing does it at just the right time, it helps the person on the swing go higher.

“Tidal resonance is where you’re pushing at exactly the same frequency as they’re swinging, and the locking happens when both of those frequencies are changing,” Bryan explains. The person pushing the swing gets tired and pushes less often, while the chain of the swing change length. (Bryan jokes that here the analogy starts to break down.)

As a star changes over the course of its lifetime, tidal resonance locking can cause hot Jupiters, which are massive exoplanets that orbit very close to their host stars, to change orbital distances. This wandering migration, as they call it, explains how some hot Jupiters get so close to their host stars. They also found that the path they take to get there is not always smooth. It can speed up, slow down, or even regress.

An important implication from the paper is that tidal resonance locking could be used as an exoplanet detection tool, confirming de Wit’s hypothesis from the original 2016 observation that the pulsations had the potential to be used in such a way. If changes in the star’s brightness can be linked to this resonance locking, it may indicate planets that can’t be detected using current methods.

As below, so above

Most EAPS PhD students don’t advance their project beyond the requirements for the general exam, let alone get a paper out of it. At first, Bryan worried that continuing with it would end up being a distraction from his main work, but ultimately was glad that he committed to it and was able to contribute something meaningful to the emerging field of asteroseismology.

“I think it’s evidence that Jared is excited about what he does and has the drive and scientific skepticism to have done the extra steps to make sure that what he was doing was a real contribution to the scientific literature,” says Frank. “He’s a great example of success and what we hope for our students.”

While de Wit didn’t manage to convince Bryan to switch to exoplanet research permanently, he is “excited that there is the opportunity to keep on working together.”

Once he finishes his PhD, Bryan plans on continuing in academia as a professor running a research lab, shifting his focus onto volcano seismology and improving instrumentation for the field. He’s open to the possibility of taking his findings on Earth and applying them to volcanoes on other planetary bodies, such as those found on Venus and Jupiter’s moon Io.

“I’d like to be the bridge between those two things,” he says.

When Jared Bryan talks about his seismology research, it’s with a natural finesse. He’s a fifth-year PhD student working with MIT Assistant Professor William Frank on seismology research, drawn in by the lab’s combination of GPS observations, satellites, and seismic station data to understand the underlying physics of earthquakes. He has no trouble talking about seismic velocity in fault zones or how he first became interested in the field after summer internships with the Southern California Earthquake Center as an undergraduate student.

“It’s definitely like a more down-to-earth kind of seismology,” he jokingly describes it. It’s an odd comment. Where else could earthquakes be but on Earth? But it’s because Bryan finished a research project that has culminated in a new paper — published today in Nature Astronomy — involving seismic activity not on Earth, but on stars.

Building curiosity

PhD students in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) are required to complete two research projects as part of their general exam. The first is often in their main focus of research and the foundations of what will become their thesis work.

But the second project has a special requirement: It must be in a different specialty.

“Having that built into the structure of the PhD is really, really nice,” says Bryan, who hadn’t known about the special requirement when he decided to come to EAPS. “I think it helps you build curiosity and find what's interesting about what other people are doing.”

Having so many different, yet still related, fields of study housed in one department makes it easier for students with a strong sense of curiosity to explore the interconnected interactions of Earth science.

“I think everyone here is excited about a lot of different stuff, but we can’t do everything,” says Frank, the Victor P. Starr Career Development Professor of Geophysics. “This is a great way to get students to try something else that they maybe would have wanted to do in a parallel dimension, interact with other advisors, and see that science can be done in different ways.”

At first, Bryan was worried that the nature of the second project would be a restrictive diversion from his main PhD research. But Associate Professor Julien de Wit was looking for someone with a seismology background to look at some stellar observations he’d collected back in 2016. A star’s brightness was pulsating at a very specific frequency that had to be caused by changes in the star itself, so Bryan decided to help.

“I was surprised by how the kind of seismology that he was looking for was similar to the seismology that we were first doing in the ’60s and ’70s, like large-scale global Earth seismology,” says Bryan. “I thought it would be a way to rethink the foundations of the field that I had been studying applied to a new region.”

Going from earthquakes to starquakes is not a one-to-one comparison. While the foundational knowledge was there, movement of stars comes from a variety of sources like magnetism or the Coriolis effect, and in a variety of forms. In addition to the sound and pressure waves of earthquakes, they also have gravity waves, all of which happen on a scale much more massive.

“You have to stretch your mind a bit, because you can’t actually visit these places,” Bryan says. “It’s an unbelievable luxury that we have in Earth seismology that the things that we study are on Google Maps.”

But there are benefits to bringing in scientists from outside an area of expertise. De Wit, who served as Bryan’s supervisor for the project and is also an author on the paper, points out that they bring a fresh perspective and approach by asking unique questions.

“Things that people in the field would just take for granted are challenged by their questions,” he says, adding that Bryan was transparent about what he did and didn’t know, allowing for a rich exchange of information.

Tidal resonance locking

Bryan eventually found that the changes in the star’s brightness were caused by tidal resonance. Resonance is a physical occurrence where waves interact and amplify each other. The most common analogy is pushing someone on a swing set; when the person pushing does it at just the right time, it helps the person on the swing go higher.

“Tidal resonance is where you’re pushing at exactly the same frequency as they’re swinging, and the locking happens when both of those frequencies are changing,” Bryan explains. The person pushing the swing gets tired and pushes less often, while the chain of the swing change length. (Bryan jokes that here the analogy starts to break down.)

As a star changes over the course of its lifetime, tidal resonance locking can cause hot Jupiters, which are massive exoplanets that orbit very close to their host stars, to change orbital distances. This wandering migration, as they call it, explains how some hot Jupiters get so close to their host stars. They also found that the path they take to get there is not always smooth. It can speed up, slow down, or even regress.

An important implication from the paper is that tidal resonance locking could be used as an exoplanet detection tool, confirming de Wit’s hypothesis from the original 2016 observation that the pulsations had the potential to be used in such a way. If changes in the star’s brightness can be linked to this resonance locking, it may indicate planets that can’t be detected using current methods.

As below, so above

Most EAPS PhD students don’t advance their project beyond the requirements for the general exam, let alone get a paper out of it. At first, Bryan worried that continuing with it would end up being a distraction from his main work, but ultimately was glad that he committed to it and was able to contribute something meaningful to the emerging field of asteroseismology.

“I think it’s evidence that Jared is excited about what he does and has the drive and scientific skepticism to have done the extra steps to make sure that what he was doing was a real contribution to the scientific literature,” says Frank. “He’s a great example of success and what we hope for our students.”

While de Wit didn’t manage to convince Bryan to switch to exoplanet research permanently, he is “excited that there is the opportunity to keep on working together.”

Once he finishes his PhD, Bryan plans on continuing in academia as a professor running a research lab, shifting his focus onto volcano seismology and improving instrumentation for the field. He’s open to the possibility of taking his findings on Earth and applying them to volcanoes on other planetary bodies, such as those found on Venus and Jupiter’s moon Io.

“I’d like to be the bridge between those two things,” he says.

From a young age, Doğa Kürkçüoğlu heard his father, a math teacher, say that learning should be about understanding and real-world applications rather than memorization. But it wasn’t until he began exploring MIT OpenCourseWare in 2004 that Kürkçüoğlu experienced what it means to truly understand complex subject matter.

“MIT professors showed me how to look at a concept from different angles that I hadn’t before, and that helped me internalize information,” says Kürkçüoğlu, who turned to MIT OpenCourseWare to supplement what he was learning as an undergraduate studying physics. “Once I understood techniques and concepts, I was able to apply them in different disciplines. Even now, there are many equations I don’t have memorized exactly, but because I understand the underlying ideas, I can derive them myself in just a few minutes.”

Though there was a point in his life when friends and classmates thought he might pursue music, Kürkçüoğlu — a skilled violinist who currently plays in a jazz band on the side — always had a passion for math and physics and was determined to learn everything he could to pursue the career he imagined for himself.

“Even when I was 4 or 5 years old, if someone asked me, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I would say a scientist or mathematician,” says Kürkçüoğlu, who is now a staff scientist at Fermilab in the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center. Fermilab is the U.S. Department of Energy laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. “I feel lucky that I actually get to do the job I imagined as a little kid,” Kürkçüoğlu says.

OpenCourseWare and other resources from MIT Open Learning — including courses, lectures, written guides, and problem sets — played an important role in Kürkçüoğlu’s learning journey and career. He turned to these open educational resources throughout his undergraduate studies at Marmara University in Turkey. When he completed his degree in 2008, Kürkçüoğlu set his sights on a PhD. He says he felt ready to dive right into doctoral-level research thanks to so many MIT OpenCourseWare lectures, courses, and study guides. He started a PhD program at Georgia Tech, where his research focused on theoretical condensed matter physics with ultra-cold atoms.

“Without OpenCourseWare, I could not have done that,” he says, adding that he considers himself “an honorary MIT graduate.”

Memorable courses include particle physics with Iain W. Stewart, the Otto (1939) and Jane Morningstar Professorship in Science Professor of Physics and director of the Center for Theoretical Physics; and Statistical Mechanics of Fields with Mehran Kardar, professor of physics. Learning from Kardar felt especially apt, because Kürkçüoğlu’s undergraduate advisor, Nihat Berker, was Kardar’s PhD advisor. Berker is also emeritus professor of physics at MIT.

Once he completed his PhD in 2015, Kürkçüoğlu spent time as an assistant professor at Georgia Southern University and a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He joined Fermilab in 2020. There, he works on quantum theory and quantum algorithms. He enjoys the research-focused atmosphere of a national laboratory, where teams of scientists are working toward tangible goals.

When he was teaching, though, he encouraged his students to check out Open Learning resources.

“I would tell them, first of all, to have fun. Learning should be fun — another idea that my father always encouraged as a math teacher. With OpenCourseWare, you can get a new perspective on something you already know about, or open a course that can expand your horizons,” Kürkçüoğlu says. “Depending on where you start, it might take you an hour, a week, or a month to fully understand something. Once you understand, it’s yours. It is a different kind of joy to actually, truly understand.”

Ever been asked a question you only knew part of the answer to? To give a more informed response, your best move would be to phone a friend with more knowledge on the subject.

This collaborative process can also help large language models (LLMs) improve their accuracy. Still, it’s been difficult to teach LLMs to recognize when they should collaborate with another model on an answer. Instead of using complex formulas or large amounts of labeled data to spell out where models should work together, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have envisioned a more organic approach.

Their new algorithm, called “Co-LLM,” can pair a general-purpose base LLM with a more specialized model and help them work together. As the former crafts an answer, Co-LLM reviews each word (or token) within its response to see where it can call upon a more accurate answer from the expert model. This process leads to more accurate replies to things like medical prompts and math and reasoning problems. Since the expert model is not needed at each iteration, this also leads to more efficient response generation.

To decide when a base model needs help from an expert model, the framework uses machine learning to train a “switch variable,” or a tool that can indicate the competence of each word within the two LLMs’ responses. The switch is like a project manager, finding areas where it should call in a specialist. If you asked Co-LLM to name some examples of extinct bear species, for instance, two models would draft answers together. The general-purpose LLM begins to put together a reply, with the switch variable intervening at the parts where it can slot in a better token from the expert model, such as adding the year when the bear species became extinct.

“With Co-LLM, we’re essentially training a general-purpose LLM to ‘phone’ an expert model when needed,” says Shannon Shen, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL affiliate who’s a lead author on a new paper about the approach. “We use domain-specific data to teach the base model about its counterpart’s expertise in areas like biomedical tasks and math and reasoning questions. This process automatically finds the parts of the data that are hard for the base model to generate, and then it instructs the base model to switch to the expert LLM, which was pretrained on data from a similar field. The general-purpose model provides the ‘scaffolding’ generation, and when it calls on the specialized LLM, it prompts the expert to generate the desired tokens. Our findings indicate that the LLMs learn patterns of collaboration organically, resembling how humans recognize when to call upon an expert to fill in the blanks.”

A combination of flexibility and factuality

Imagine asking a general-purpose LLM to name the ingredients of a specific prescription drug. It may reply incorrectly, necessitating the expertise of a specialized model.

To showcase Co-LLM’s flexibility, the researchers used data like the BioASQ medical set to couple a base LLM with expert LLMs in different domains, like the Meditron model, which is pretrained on unlabeled medical data. This enabled the algorithm to help answer inquiries a biomedical expert would typically receive, such as naming the mechanisms causing a particular disease.

For example, if you asked a simple LLM alone to name the ingredients of a specific prescription drug, it may reply incorrectly. With the added expertise of a model that specializes in biomedical data, you’d get a more accurate answer. Co-LLM also alerts users where to double-check answers.

Another example of Co-LLM’s performance boost: When tasked with solving a math problem like “a3 · a2 if a=5,” the general-purpose model incorrectly calculated the answer to be 125. As Co-LLM trained the model to collaborate more with a large math LLM called Llemma, together they determined that the correct solution was 3,125.

Co-LLM gave more accurate replies than fine-tuned simple LLMs and untuned specialized models working independently. Co-LLM can guide two models that were trained differently to work together, whereas other effective LLM collaboration approaches, such as “Proxy Tuning,” need all of their component models to be trained similarly. Additionally, this baseline requires each model to be used simultaneously to produce the answer, whereas MIT’s algorithm simply activates its expert model for particular tokens, leading to more efficient generation.

When to ask the expert

The MIT researchers’ algorithm highlights that imitating human teamwork more closely can increase accuracy in multi-LLM collaboration. To further elevate its factual precision, the team may draw from human self-correction: They’re considering a more robust deferral approach that can backtrack when the expert model doesn’t give a correct response. This upgrade would allow Co-LLM to course-correct so the algorithm can still give a satisfactory reply.

The team would also like to update the expert model (via only training the base model) when new information is available, keeping answers as current as possible. This would allow Co-LLM to pair the most up-to-date information with strong reasoning power. Eventually, the model could assist with enterprise documents, using the latest information it has to update them accordingly. Co-LLM could also train small, private models to work with a more powerful LLM to improve documents that must remain within the server.

“Co-LLM presents an interesting approach for learning to choose between two models to improve efficiency and performance,” says Colin Raffel, associate professor at the University of Toronto and an associate research director at the Vector Institute, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Since routing decisions are made at the token-level, Co-LLM provides a granular way of deferring difficult generation steps to a more powerful model. The unique combination of model-token-level routing also provides a great deal of flexibility that similar methods lack. Co-LLM contributes to an important line of work that aims to develop ecosystems of specialized models to outperform expensive monolithic AI systems.”

Shen wrote the paper with four other CSAIL affiliates: PhD student Hunter Lang ’17, MEng ’18; former postdoc and Apple AI/ML researcher Bailin Wang; MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science Yoon Kim, and professor and Jameel Clinic member David Sontag PhD ’10, who are both part of MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Their research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, The National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and Amazon. Their work was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Imagine if the windows of your home didn’t transmit heat. They’d keep the heat indoors in winter and outdoors on a hot summer’s day. Your heating and cooling bills would go down; your energy consumption and carbon emissions would drop; and you’d still be comfortable all year ’round.

AeroShield, a startup spun out of MIT, is poised to start manufacturing such windows. Building operations make up 36 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and today’s windows are a major contributor to energy inefficiency in buildings. To improve building efficiency, AeroShield has developed a window technology that promises to reduce heat loss by up to 65 percent, significantly reducing energy use and carbon emissions in buildings, and the company just announced the opening of a new facility to manufacture its breakthrough energy-efficient windows.

“Our mission is to decarbonize the built environment,” says Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, co-founder and CEO of AeroShield. “The availability of affordable, thermally insulating windows will help us achieve that goal while also reducing homeowner’s heating and cooling bills.” According to the U.S. Department of Energy, for most homeowners, 30 percent of that bill results from window inefficiencies.

Technology development at MIT

Research on AeroShield’s window technology began a decade ago in the MIT lab of Evelyn Wang, Ford Professor of Engineering, now on leave to serve as director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). In late 2014, the MIT team received funding from ARPA-E, and other sponsors followed, including the MIT Energy Initiative through the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design in 2016.

The work focused on aerogels, remarkable materials that are ultra-porous, lighter than a marshmallow, strong enough to support a brick, and an unparalleled barrier to heat flow. Aerogels were invented in the 1930s and used by NASA and others as thermal insulation. The team at MIT saw the potential for incorporating aerogel sheets into windows to keep heat from escaping or entering buildings. But there was one problem: Nobody had been able to make aerogels transparent.

An aerogel is made of transparent, loosely connected nanoscale silica particles and is 95 percent air. But an aerogel sheet isn’t transparent because light traveling through it gets scattered by the silica particles.

After five years of theoretical and experimental work, the MIT team determined that the key to transparency was having the silica particles both small and uniform in size. This allows light to pass directly through, so the aerogel becomes transparent. Indeed, as long as the particle size is small and uniform, increasing the thickness of an aerogel sheet to achieve greater thermal insulation won’t make it less clear.

Teams in the MIT lab looked at various applications for their super-insulating, transparent aerogels. Some focused on improving solar thermal collectors by making the systems more efficient and less expensive. But to Strobach, increasing the thermal efficiency of windows looked especially promising and potentially significant as a means of reducing climate change.

The researchers determined that aerogel sheets could be inserted into the gap in double-pane windows, making them more than twice as insulating. The windows could then be manufactured on existing production lines with minor changes, and the resulting windows would be affordable and as wide-ranging in style as the window options available today. Best of all, once purchased and installed, the windows would reduce electricity bills, energy use, and carbon emissions.

The impact on energy use in buildings could be considerable. “If we only consider winter, windows in the United States lose enough energy to power over 50 million homes,” says Strobach. “That wasted energy generates about 350 million tons of carbon dioxide — more than is emitted by 76 million cars.” Super-insulating windows could help home and building owners reduce carbon dioxide emissions by gigatons while saving billions in heating and cooling costs.

The AeroShield story

In 2019, Strobach and her MIT colleagues — Aaron Baskerville-Bridges MBA ’20, SM ’20 and Kyle Wilke PhD ’19 — co-founded AeroShield to further develop and commercialize their aerogel-based technology for windows and other applications. And in the subsequent five years, their hard work has attracted attention, recently leading to two major accomplishments.

In spring 2024, the company announced the opening of its new pilot manufacturing facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, where the team will be producing, testing, and certifying their first full-size windows and patio doors for initial product launch. The 12,000 square foot facility will significantly expand the company’s capabilities, with cutting-edge aerogel R&D labs, manufacturing equipment, assembly lines, and testing equipment. Says Strobach, “Our pilot facility will supply window and door manufacturers as we launch our first products and will also serve as our R&D headquarters as we develop the next generation of energy-efficient products using transparent aerogels.”

Also in spring 2024, AeroShield received a $14.5 million award from ARPA-E’s “Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential” (SCALEUP) program, which provides new funding to previous ARPA-E awardees that have “demonstrated a viable path to market.” That funding will enable the company to expand its production capacity to tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of units per year.

Strobach also cites two less-obvious benefits of the SCALEUP award.

First, the funding is enabling the company to move more quickly on the scale-up phase of their technology development. “We know from our fundamental studies and lab experiments that we can make large-area aerogel sheets that could go in an entry or patio door,” says Elise. "The SCALEUP award allows us to go straight for that vision. We don’t have to do all the incremental sizes of aerogels to prove that we can make a big one. The award provides capital for us to buy the big equipment to make the big aerogel.”

Second, the SCALEUP award confirms the viability of the company to other potential investors and collaborators. Indeed, AeroShield recently announced $5 million of additional funding from existing investors Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and MassVentures, as well as new investor MassMutual Ventures. Strobach notes that the company now has investor, engineering, and customer partners.

She stresses the importance of partners in achieving AeroShield’s mission. “We know that what we’ve got from a fundamental perspective can change the industry,” she says. “Now we want to go out and do it. With the right partners and at the right pace, we may actually be able to increase the energy efficiency of our buildings early enough to help make a real dent in climate change.”

One of the brain’s most celebrated qualities is its adaptability. Changes to neural circuits, whose connections are continually adjusted as we experience and interact with the world, are key to how we learn. But to keep knowledge and memories intact, some parts of the circuitry must be resistant to this constant change.

“Brains have figured out how to navigate this landscape of balancing between stability and flexibility, so that you can have new learning and you can have lifelong memory,” says neuroscientist Mark Harnett, an investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. In the Aug. 27 issue of the journal Cell Reports, Harnett and his team show how individual neurons can contribute to both parts of this vital duality. By studying the synapses through which pyramidal neurons in the brain’s sensory cortex communicate, they have learned how the cells preserve their understanding of some of the world’s most fundamental features, while also maintaining the flexibility they need to adapt to a changing world.

Visual connections

Pyramidal neurons receive input from other neurons via thousands of connection points. Early in life, these synapses are extremely malleable; their strength can shift as a young animal takes in visual information and learns to interpret it. Most remain adaptable into adulthood, but Harnett’s team discovered that some of the cells’ synapses lose their flexibility when the animals are less than a month old. Having both stable and flexible synapses means these neurons can combine input from different sources to use visual information in flexible ways.

Postdoc Courtney Yaeger took a close look at these unusually stable synapses, which cluster together along a narrow region of the elaborately branched pyramidal cells. She was interested in the connections through which the cells receive primary visual information, so she traced their connections with neurons in a vision-processing center of the brain’s thalamus called the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN).

The long extensions through which a neuron receives signals from other cells are called dendrites, and they branch of from the main body of the cell into a tree-like structure. Spiny protrusions along the dendrites form the synapses that connect pyramidal neurons to other cells. Yaeger’s experiments showed that connections from the dLGN all led to a defined region of the pyramidal cells — a tight band within what she describes as the trunk of the dendritic tree.

Yaeger found several ways in which synapses in this region — formally known as the apical oblique dendrite domain — differ from other synapses on the same cells. “They’re not actually that far away from each other, but they have completely different properties,” she says.

Stable synapses

In one set of experiments, Yaeger activated synapses on the pyramidal neurons and measured the effect on the cells’ electrical potential. Changes to a neuron’s electrical potential generate the impulses the cells use to communicate with one another. It is common for a synapse’s electrical effects to amplify when synapses nearby are also activated. But when signals were delivered to the apical oblique dendrite domain, each one had the same effect, no matter how many synapses were stimulated. Synapses there don’t interact with one another at all, Harnett says. “They just do what they do. No matter what their neighbors are doing, they all just do kind of the same thing.”

The team was also able to visualize the molecular contents of individual synapses. This revealed a surprising lack of a certain kind of neurotransmitter receptor, called NMDA receptors, in the apical oblique dendrites. That was notable because of NMDA receptors’ role in mediating changes in the brain. “Generally when we think about any kind of learning and memory and plasticity, it’s NMDA receptors that do it,” Harnett says. “That is the by far most common substrate of learning and memory in all brains.”

When Yaeger stimulated the apical oblique synapses with electricity, generating patterns of activity that would strengthen most synapses, the team discovered a consequence of the limited presence of NMDA receptors. The synapses’ strength did not change. “There’s no activity-dependent plasticity going on there, as far as we have tested,” Yaeger says.

That makes sense, the researchers say, because the cells’ connections from the thalamus relay primary visual information detected by the eyes. It is through these connections that the brain learns to recognize basic visual features like shapes and lines.

“These synapses are basically a robust, high-fidelity readout of this visual information,” Harnett explains. “That’s what they’re conveying, and it’s not context-sensitive. So it doesn’t matter how many other synapses are active, they just do exactly what they’re going to do, and you can’t modify them up and down based on activity. So they’re very, very stable.”

“You actually don’t want those to be plastic,” adds Yaeger. "Can you imagine going to sleep and then forgetting what a vertical line looks like? That would be disastrous.” 

By conducting the same experiments in mice of different ages, the researchers determined that the synapses that connect pyramidal neurons to the thalamus become stable a few weeks after young mice first open their eyes. By that point, Harnett says, they have learned everything they need to learn. On the other hand, if mice spend the first weeks of their lives in the dark, the synapses never stabilize — further evidence that the transition depends on visual experience.

The team’s findings not only help explain how the brain balances flexibility and stability; they could help researchers teach artificial intelligence how to do the same thing. Harnett says artificial neural networks are notoriously bad at this: when an artificial neural network that does something well is trained to do something new, it almost always experiences “catastrophic forgetting” and can no longer perform its original task. Harnett’s team is exploring how they can use what they’ve learned about real brains to overcome this problem in artificial networks.

A collaboration between four MIT groups, led by principal investigators Laura L. Kiessling, Jeremiah A. Johnson, Alex K. Shalek, and Darrell J. Irvine, in conjunction with a group at Georgia Tech led by M.G. Finn, has revealed a new strategy for enabling immune system mobilization against cancer cells. The work, which appears today in ACS Nano, produces exactly the type of anti-tumor immunity needed to function as a tumor vaccine — both prophylactically and therapeutically.

Cancer cells can look very similar to the human cells from which they are derived. In contrast, viruses, bacteria, and fungi carry carbohydrates on their surfaces that are markedly different from those of human carbohydrates. Dendritic cells — the immune system’s best antigen-presenting cells — carry proteins on their surfaces that help them recognize these atypical carbohydrates and bring those antigens inside of them. The antigens are then processed into smaller peptides and presented to the immune system for a response. Intriguingly, some of these carbohydrate proteins can also collaborate to direct immune responses. This work presents a strategy for targeting those antigens to the dendritic cells that results in a more activated, stronger immune response.

Tackling tumors’ tenacity

The researchers’ new strategy shrouds the tumor antigens with foreign carbohydrates and co-delivers them with single-stranded RNA so that the dendritic cells can be programmed to recognize the tumor antigens as a potential threat. The researchers targeted the lectin (carbohydrate-binding protein) DC-SIGN because of its ability to serve as an activator of dendritic cell immunity. They decorated a virus-like particle (a particle composed of virus proteins assembled onto a piece of RNA that is noninfectious because its internal RNA is not from the virus) with DC-binding carbohydrate derivatives. The resulting glycan-costumed virus-like particles display unique sugars; therefore, the dendritic cells recognize them as something they need to attack.

“On the surface of the dendritic cells are carbohydrate binding proteins called lectins that combine to the sugars on the surface of bacteria or viruses, and when they do that they penetrate the membrane,” explains Kiessling, the paper’s senior author. “On the cell, the DC-SIGN gets clustered upon binding the virus or bacteria and that promotes internalization. When a virus-like particle gets internalized, it starts to fall apart and releases its RNA.” The toll-like receptor (bound to RNA) and DC-SIGN (bound to the sugar decoration) can both signal to activate the immune response.

Once the dendritic cells have sounded the alarm of a foreign invasion, a robust immune response is triggered that is significantly stronger than the immune response that would be expected with a typical untargeted vaccine. When an antigen is encountered by the dendritic cells, they send signals to T cells, the next cell in the immune system, to give different responses depending on what pathways have been activated in the dendritic cells.

Advancing cancer vaccine development

The activity of a potential vaccine developed in line with this new research is twofold. First, the vaccine glycan coat binds to lectins, providing a primary signal. Then, binding to toll-like receptors elicits potent immune activation.

The Kiessling, Finn, and Johnson groups had previously identified a synthetic DC-SIGN binding group that directed cellular immune responses when used to decorate virus-like particles. But it was unclear whether this method could be utilized as an anticancer vaccine. Collaboration between researchers in the labs at MIT and Georgia Tech demonstrated that in fact, it could.

Valerie Lensch, a chemistry PhD student from MIT’s Program in Polymers and Soft Matter and a joint member of the Kiessling and Johnson labs, took the preexisting strategy and tested it as an anticancer vaccine, learning a great deal about immunology in order to do so.

“We have developed a modular vaccine platform designed to drive antigen-specific cellular immune responses,” says Lensch. “This platform is not only pivotal in the fight against cancer, but also offers significant potential for combating challenging intracellular pathogens, including malaria parasites, HIV, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This technology holds promise for tackling a range of diseases where vaccine development has been particularly challenging.”

Lensch and her fellow researchers conducted in vitro experiments with extensive iterations of these glycan-costumed virus-like particles before identifying a design that demonstrated potential for success. Once that was achieved, the researchers were able to move on to an in vivo model, an exciting milestone for their research.

Adele Gabba, a postdoc in the Kiessling Lab, conducted the in vivo experiments with Lensch, and Robert Hincapie, who conducted his PhD studies with Professor M.G. Finn at Georgia Tech, built and decorated the virus-like particles with a series of glycans that were sent to him from the researchers at MIT.

“We are discovering that carbohydrates act like a language that cells use to communicate and direct the immune system,” says Gabba. “It's thrilling that we have begun to decode this language and can now harness it to reshape immune responses.”

“The design principles behind this vaccine are rooted in extensive fundamental research conducted by previous graduate student and postdoctoral researchers over many years, focusing on optimizing lectin engagement and understanding the roles of lectins in immunity,” says Lensch. “It has been exciting to witness the translation of these concepts into therapeutic platforms across various applications.”

It was 1978, over a decade before the word “sustainable” would infiltrate environmental nomenclature, and Ronald Prinn, MIT professor of atmospheric science, had just founded the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE). Today, AGAGE provides real-time measurements for well over 50 environmentally harmful trace gases, enabling us to determine emissions at the country level, a key element in verifying national adherence to the Montreal Protocol and the Paris Accord. This, Prinn says, started him thinking about doing science that informed decision making.

Much like global interest in sustainability, Prinn’s interest and involvement continued to grow into what would become three decades worth of achievements in sustainability science. The Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change, respectively founded and co-founded by Prinn, have recently joined forces to create the MIT School of Science’s new Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), led by former CGCS postdoc turned MIT professor, Noelle Selin.

As he prepares to pass the torch, Prinn reflects on how far sustainability has come, and where it all began.

Q: Tell us about the motivation for the MIT centers you helped to found around sustainability.

A: In 1990 after I founded the Center for Global Change Science, I also co-founded the Joint Program on the Science and Policy Global Change with a very important partner, [Henry] “Jake” Jacoby. He’s now retired, but at that point he was a professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Together, we determined that in order to answer questions related to what we now call sustainability of human activities, you need to combine the natural and social sciences involved in these processes. Based on this, we decided to make a joint program between the CGCS and a center that he directed, the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR).

It was called the “joint program” and was joint for two reasons — not only were two centers joining, but two disciplines were joining. It was not about simply doing the same science. It was about bringing a team of people together that could tackle these coupled issues of environment, human development and economy. We were the first group in the world to fully integrate these elements together.

Q: What has been your most impactful contribution and what effect did it have on the greater public’s overall understanding?

A: Our biggest contribution is the development, and more importantly, the application of the Integrated Global System Modeling [IGSM] framework, looking at human development in both developing countries and developed countries that had a significant impact on the way people thought about climate issues. With IGSM, we were able to look at the interactions among human and natural components, studying the feedbacks and impacts that climate change had on human systems; like how it would alter agriculture and other land activities, how it would alter things we derive from the ocean, and so on.

Policies were being developed largely by economists or climate scientists working independently, and we started showing how the real answers and analysis required a coupling of all of these components. We showed, and I think convincingly, that what people used to study independently, must be coupled together, because the impacts of climate change and air pollution affected so many things.

To address the value of policy, despite the uncertainty in climate projections, we ran multiple runs of the IGSM with and without policy, with different choices for uncertain IGSM variables. For public communication, around 2005, we introduced our signature Greenhouse Gamble interactive visualization tools; these have been renewed over time as science and policies evolved.

Q: What can MIT provide now at this critical juncture in understanding climate change and its impact?

A: We need to further push the boundaries of integrated global system modeling to ensure full sustainability of human activity and all of its beneficial dimensions, which is the exciting focus that the CS3 is designed to address. We need to focus on sustainability as a central core element and use it to not just analyze existing policies but to propose new ones. Sustainability is not just climate or air pollution, it's got to do with human impacts in general. Human health is central to sustainability, and equally important to equity. We need to expand the capability for credibly assessing what the impact policies have not just on developed countries, but on developing countries, taking into account that many places around the world are at artisanal levels of their economies. They cannot be blamed for anything that is changing climate and causing air pollution and other detrimental things that are currently going on. They need our help. That's what sustainability is in its full dimensions.

Our capabilities are evolving toward a modeling system so detailed that we can find out detrimental things about policies even at local levels before investing in changing infrastructure. This is going to require collaboration among even more disciplines and creating a seamless connection between research and decision making; not just for policies enacted in the public sector, but also for decisions that are made in the private sector. 

In 2020, more than 278,000 people died from substance use disorder with over 91,000 of those from overdoses. Just three years later, deaths from overdoses alone rose by over 25,000. Despite its magnitude, the substance use disorder crisis still faces fundamental challenges: a prevailing societal stigma, lack of knowledge around its origin in the brain, and the slow pace of innovation in comparison to other diseases.

Work at MIT is contributing to meaningful innovations in the field of substance use disorder, according to Hanna Adeyema MBA '13, director of MIT Bootcamps at MIT Open Learning, and Carolina Haass-Koffler, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.

Adeyema is leading an upcoming MIT Bootcamps Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Ventures program. She was the chief operating officer and co-founder of Tenacity, a startup based on research from the MIT Media Lab founded to reduce burnout for call center workers. Haass-Koffler is a translational investigator who coalesces preclinical and clinical research towards examining biobehavioral mechanisms of addiction and developing novel medications. She was a finalist for the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition, an award supporting female entrepreneurs in biotech and the winner of the 2024 Brown Biomedical Innovation to Impact translational commercial development program that supports innovative proof-of-concept projects. In 2023, Haass-Koffler produced a substance use disorder 101 course for the SUD Ventures program and secured non-dilutive funding from the NIH toward work in innovation in this area. Here, Adeyema and Haass-Koffler join in a discussion about the substance use disorder crisis and the future of innovation in this field.

Q: What are the major obstacles to making meaningful advances in substance use disorder research and treatment and/or innovation?

Adeyema: The complexity of the substance use disorder market and the incredible amount of knowledge required to innovate is a major obstacle to bringing research from the bench to market. Innovators must not only understand their technical domain in great detail, but also federal regulations, state regulations, and payers in the health care sector. On top of this, they must know how to pitch to specialized investors, how to sell to hospitals, and understand how to interact with vulnerable populations — often all at the same time.

Given this, solving the substance use disorder epidemic will require a multidisciplinary approach — from health care innovators to researchers to government officials and everyone in between. MIT is the right place to address innovation in the substance use disorder space because we have all of those talented people here and we know how to collaborate to solve societal problems at scale. An example of how we are working together in this way is the collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Drug Abuse to create the SUD Ventures program. The goal of this program is to fuel the next generation of innovation in substance use disorder with practical applications and a pipeline to securing non-dilutive government funding from Small Business Innovation Research grants.

Haass-Kolffer: Before even mentioning substance use disorder, there are a number of barriers in health care that already exist, such as health insurance reimbursement, limited availability of resources, shortage of clinicians, and more. Specifically in substance use disorder, there are additional barriers affecting patients, clinicians, and innovators. Barriers on the clinical side include, but are not limited to, lack of resources available to providers and lack of time for physicians to include additional substance use disorder assessments in the few minutes that they spend with a patient during a clinical visit. Then on the patient side, the population is often composed of individuals from low socio-economic groups, which adds issues related to stigma, confidentiality and lack of referral network, and generally hinder development of novel substance use disorder treatment interventions. 

At a high level, we lack the integration of substance use disorder prevention, diagnostic, and treatment in health care settings. Without a more holistic integration, advancing substance use disorder research and innovation will continue to be extremely challenging. By creating a collaborative program where we can connect researchers, clinicians, and engineers, we have the opportunity to bring together a dynamic community of peers to tackle the biggest challenges in providing treatment of this debilitating disorder.

Q: How does the SUD Ventures program approach substance use disorder innovation differently?

Adeyema: Traditionally, innovation programs in the substance use disorder space focus on entrepreneurship and business courses for researchers and inventors. These courses focus on knowledge, rather than skills and practical application, and omit an important piece of building a business — it takes an entire ecosystem to build a successful startup, particularly in the health care space.

Our program will bring together the top U.S.-based substance use disorder researchers and experts in other disciplines. We hope to tap into MIT’s engineering excellence, clinical expertise from places like Massachusetts General Hospital, and other academic institutions like Harvard University and Brown University, which is a major center for substance use disorder research. With the vibrant entrepreneurship and biomedical expertise in the Boston ecosystem, we are excited to see how we can bring these incredible forces together. Participants will work together in teams to develop solutions in specific topic areas in substance use disorder. They are guided by MIT-trained entrepreneurs who have successfully funded and scaled companies in the health care space, and have access to a strong group of mentors like Nathaniel Sims, associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and the Newbower/Eitan MGH Endowed Chair in Biomedical Technology Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital.

We recognize the field has many idiosyncratic challenges, and it is also changing very, very fast. To shed light on the most recent and unique roadblocks, the SUD Ventures program will rely on industry case studies delivered by practitioners. These cases will be updated each year to contribute to a body of knowledge participants have access to not only during the program, but also after.

Q: Looking forward, what is the future of innovation in the substance use disorder field, and what are the promising innovations/therapies on the horizon?

Haass-Koffler: The opportunities to develop technologies to treat substance use disorder are infinite. Historically, the approach has been centered on neurobiology, focusing predominantly on the brain. However, substance use disorder is a complex disorder and lacks measurable biomarkers, which complicates its diagnosis and management. Given the brain's connections with other bodily systems, targeting interventions beyond the central nervous system offers a promising avenue for more effective treatment.

To improve the efficiency of treatment by both researchers and clinicians, we need technological advancements that can probe brain function and monitor treatment responses with greater precision. Innovations in this area could lead to more tailored therapeutic approaches, enable earlier diagnosis, and improve overall patient care.

Just as glucose monitoring changed lives by managing insulin delivery in diabetes, there is a significant opportunity to create similar tools for monitoring medication responses, drug cravings, and preventing adverse events in patients with substance use disorder, affecting their lives tremendously. The future for the substance use disorder crisis is two-fold: it’s about saving lives by preventing overdoses today and improving quality of life by supporting patients throughout their extended treatment journeys. We are innovating and improving on both fronts of the crisis, and I am optimistic about the progress we will continue to make in treating this disease in the next couple of years. With government and political support, we are improving people’s lives and improving society.

The program and its research are supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Cynthia Breazeal, a professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning, serves as the principal investigator (PI) on the grant.

Every year since 1991, MIT has welcomed outstanding visiting scholars to campus through the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program. The Institute aspires to attract candidates who are, in King’s words, “trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom.”

MLK Scholars enhance the intellectual and cultural life of the Institute through teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and through active research collaborations with faculty. They work within MIT’s academic departments, but also across fields such as medicine, the arts, law, and public service. The program honors King’s life and legacy by expanding and extending the reach of our community.

“The MLK Scholars program is a jewel — a source of deep pride for the Institute,” says Karl Reid ’84, SM ’85, MIT’s vice president for equity and inclusion. “Scholars who come to us broaden the perspectives of our students in the classroom, and they help power innovations in our labs. Overall, they make us better. It is an honor to advance this program through partnerships with faculty and students across the Institute.”

Headquartered in the Institute Community and Equity Office, the MLK Scholars Program is also working closely with MIT’s new Vice Provost for Faculty, Institute Professor Paula Hammond. “These individuals bring so much strength to us. We want to expand the program’s reach and engagement,” she says. “We want to cast a wide net when we recruit new scholars, and we want to make the most of our time together when they are here with us on campus.”

This year’s cohort of MLK Scholars joins a group of more than 160 professors, practitioners, and experts — all of whom are featured on the program’s new website: https://mlkscholars.mit.edu/. 

The 2024-2025 MLK Scholars:

Janine Dawkins is the former chief technical director for Jamaica’s Ministry of Transport and Mining. She holds an MS and PhD in in civil engineering from Georgia Tech. Hosted by professor of cities and transportation planning Jinhua Zhao, Dawkins brings a wealth of experience in transportation engineering and planning, government administration, and public policy. One of her areas of focus is identifying a balanced approach to traffic compliance.

Joining MIT in January 2025, Leslie Jonas, an elder member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, is an Indigenous land and water conservationist with a focus on weaving traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). She is a founding board member of Native Land Conservancy Inc. in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and earned a MS in community economic development from Southern New Hampshire University. Her work is focused on involving and educating communities about environmental justice, cultural respect, responsible stewardship and land-management practices, as well as the impact of climate change on coastal areas and Indigenous communities. Her faculty hosts are Christine Walley and Bettina Stoetzer, both from MIT Anthropology. In addition to her ongoing collaboration on an MIT Sea Grant project, “Sustainable Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation: Weaving Traditional Ecological Knowledge and STEAM,” she will help foster relationships between MIT and local Indigenous communities.

Meleko Mokgosi is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Yale University School of Art. He is hosted by Danielle Wood, an associate professor with joint appointments in the Media Lab and Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Mokgosi will join Wood’s Space Enabled Research Group in the MIT Media Lab. His expertise in post-colonial studies and critical theory align with the group’s mission to “advance justice in Earth’s complex systems using designs enabled by space.” In collaboration with Wood, Mokgosi will use art to explore the meaning of African space activities. He earned his MFA in interdisciplinary studio program from University of California in Los Angeles.

Donna Nelson, a 2010-2011 MLK visiting professor previously hosted in the Department of Chemical Engineering, returns to the program sponsored by Wesley Harris, the Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as her faculty host. She is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma. Her two areas of focus are on fentanyl data standardization and dissemination and using mindset and personality surveys as performance predictors in her work in STEM education research. Her visiting appointment begins in January 2025. Nelson earned her PhD in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin.

Justin Wilkerson is currently a tenured associate professor and the Sallie and Don Davis ’61 Career Development Professor in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research interests include micromechanics and multiscale modeling. He brings to MIT a specialized knowledge in the thermomechanical behavior of materials subject to extreme environments as a function of their composition and microstructure. Zachary Cordero and Raul Radovitzky, both from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, are his faculty hosts. Wilkerson earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University and received the 2023 National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Four members of the 2023–24 MLK Visiting Scholars cohort are extending their visit with MIT for an additional year:

Morgane Konig continues her visiting appointment within MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP). Her faculty hosts are David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics, and Alan Guth, the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, both from the Department of Physics. Konig will build on the substantial progress she has achieved in various research projects, including those on early-universe inflation and late-universe signatures. These efforts could offer valuable insights to the scientific community regarding the enigmatic nature of dark matter and dark energy. Konig will organize a series of workshops to connect African physicists with the global scientific community to provide a platform for collaboration and intellectual exchange.

Angelica Mayolo-Obregon returns for a second year co-hosted by John Fernandez, a professor of building technology in the Department of Architecture and director of MIT's Environmental Solutions Initiative, and by J. Phillip Thompson, an associate professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (and former MLK Scholar). Mayolo-Obregon will continue to lead the Afro-Interamerican Forum on Climate Change (AIFCC), a forum that elevates the voices of Afro-descendant peoples in addressing climate action and biodiversity conservation and expand its network.

Jean-Luc Pierite, a member of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana and the president of the board of directors of North American Indian Center of Boston, is hosted by Janelle Knox-Hayes, a professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of the Resilient Communities Lab. Along with Leslie Jonas, Pierite will continue his work on the ongoing project, “Sustainable Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation: Weaving Traditional Ecological Knowledge and STEAM.” He will lead two full practica projects on the integration of Indigenous knowledge in restoration projects along Mill Creek with the City of Chelsea and creating an urban greenhouse model that partners with Indigenous communities.

Christine Taylor-Butler ’81 will build on her existing partnerships on campus and in the local communities in promoting STEAM literacy for children. Hosted by Graham Jones, associate professor in MIT Anthropology, she will complete The Lost Tribes series and explore opportunities to create augmented experiences for the book series. Building on a successful Independent Activities Period (IAP) workshop in January 2024, she will develop a more comprehensive IAP course in 2025 that will equip students to simplify complex material and make it accessible to a wider range of reading levels. 

For questions and more information about the MLK Scholars program, please contact Beatriz Cantada or visit the program website.

In 2024, eight faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. They include the following:

Dwaipayan Banerjee is an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. His work foregrounds the intellectual labor of South Asian scientists, engineers and medical practitioners, challenging conventional understandings of science, technology, and medicine. Banerjee has published two books, “Enduring Cancer” and “Hematologies,” with a third, “Computing in the Time of Decolonization,” under review at Princeton University Press. His research spans the politics of health, pandemics, and computing, all through a lens that critically examines global inequalities in scientific and technological practice. Drawing upon his research, Banerjee's teaching philosophy emphasizes global perspectives and interdisciplinary inquiry, with courses like STS.012 (Science in Action) and 21A.504J/STS.086J/WGS.276J (Cultures of Computing) being highly popular at MIT. He has also played a pivotal role in various editorial boards, MIT committees, and advising PhD students, further solidifying his impact on both the academic and global community.

Kevin Dorst PhD ‘19 is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He works at the border between philosophy and the behavioral sciences, combining mathematical, computational, and empirical methods to study the causes of bias and polarization — and argues that people are more rational than you’d think. He earned his PhD from MIT in 2019, and then was a junior research fellow at Magdalen College at Oxford University and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, before returning to MIT in 2022. He currently holds a visiting Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

Paloma Duong is an associate professor in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. At the intersection of cultural studies, media theory, and critical theory, she researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. Her most recent book is “Portable Postsocialisms: Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History,” a study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Art Margins, and Cuban Counterpoints: Public Scholarship about a Changing Cuba.

Amy Moran-Thomas is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied — often inequitably — by people in their ordinary lives. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012. Her first book, “Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (University of California Press, 2019),” offers an anthropological account of diabetes care technologies in use and the lives they shape in global perspective. The book received an award from the caregivers in Belize whose work it describes, alongside others. In 2024-26, she is co-leading a climate and health humanities project funded by an ACLS Digital Seed Grant, “Sugar Atlas: Counter-Mapping Diabetes from the Caribbean,” together with co-PIs Tonya Haynes and Nicole Charles. Also working on a book about embodied histories of energy, Moran-Thomas is interested in how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing fairer health technologies. More broadly, her research explores the material culture of chronic conditions; embodied aspects of planetary health; intergenerational dilemmas of responsibility; and writing public anthropology.

Justin Reich is an associate professor in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, which aspires to design, implement and research the future of teacher learning. He is the author of “Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools” and “Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education” from Harvard University Press. He is the host of the TeachLab podcast, and five open online courses on EdX including 0.504x (Sorting Truth from Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning) and 0.503x (Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices). He is a former fellow and faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Bettina Stoetzer is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization, and social justice in Europe and the U.S. Bettina’s award-winning book, “Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2022),” draws on fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as ecologists, nature enthusiasts and other Berlin residents to illustrate how human-environment relations become a key register through which urban citizenship is articulated in Europe. She is also the author of a 2004 book on feminism and anti-racism, "InDifferenzen: Feministische Theorie in der Antirassistischen Kritik" (“InDifferences: Feminist Theory in Antiracist Criticism, argument"). She co-edited “Shock and Awe: War on Words” with Bregje van Eekelen, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Anna Tsing (New Pacific Press, 2004). She is currently working on a new project on wildlife mobility, climate change, and border politics in the U.S. and Germany. At MIT, she teaches classes on cities, race and migration, environmental justice, gender, and climate change. She received her MA in sociology, anthropology and media studies from the University of Goettingen and completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2011.

Ariel White is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She 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. In other projects, she and her co-authors have examined how local election officials treat constituents of different ethnicities, how media shapes public conversations, and whether parties face electoral penalties when nominating minority candidates. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Science, and elsewhere.

Bernardo Zacka is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. He is a political theorist with an interest in ethnographic methods. His research focuses on how the state is experienced by those who interact with it and those who act in its name. His first book, “When the State Meets the Street (Harvard University Press, 2017),” probes the everyday moral life of street-level bureaucrats. His second book project, “Institutional Atmospherics,” looks at several episodes in the 20th century when welfare agencies turned to architecture and interior design to try to repair their relationship to citizens, and recovers from that history a more ambitious conception of what an interface between state and society can and should do. He received his PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and is currently on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Placebos are inert treatments, generally not expected to impact biological pathways or improve a person’s physical health. But time and again, some patients report that they feel better after taking a placebo. Increasingly, doctors and scientists are recognizing that rather than dismissing placebos as mere trickery, they may be able to help patients by harnessing their power.

To maximize the impact of the placebo effect and design reliable therapeutic strategies, researchers need a better understanding of how it works. Now, with a new animal model developed by scientists at the McGovern Institute at MIT, they will be able to investigate the neural circuits that underlie placebos’ ability to elicit pain relief.

“The brain and body interaction has a lot of potential, in a way that we don't fully understand,” says Fan Wang, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and investigator at the McGovern Institute. “I really think there needs to be more of a push to understand placebo effect, in pain and probably in many other conditions. Now we have a strong model to probe the circuit mechanism.”

Context-dependent placebo effect

In the Sept. 5, 2024, issue of the journal Current Biology, Wang and her team report that they have elicited strong placebo pain relief in mice by activating pain-suppressing neurons in the brain while the mice are in a specific environment, thereby teaching the animals that they feel better when they are in that context. Following their training, placing the mice in that environment alone is enough to suppress pain. The team’s experiments — which were funded by the National Institutes of Health, the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center, and the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics within MIT’s Yang Tan Collective — show that this context-dependent placebo effect relieves both acute and chronic pain.

Context is critical for the placebo effect. While a pill can help a patient feel better when they expect it to, even if it is made only of sugar or starch, it seems to be not just the pill that sets up those expectations, but the entire scenario in which the pill is taken. For example, being in a hospital and interacting with doctors can contribute to a patient’s perception of care, and these social and environmental factors can make a placebo effect more probable.

MIT postdocs Bin Chen and Nitsan Goldstein used visual and textural cues to define a specific place. Then they activated pain-suppressing neurons in the brain while the animals were in this “pain-relief box.” Those pain-suppressing neurons, which Wang’s lab discovered a few years ago, are located in an emotion-processing center of the brain called the central amygdala. By expressing light-sensitive channels in these neurons, the researchers were able to suppress pain with light in the pain-relief box and leave the neurons inactive when mice were in a control box.

Animals learned to prefer the pain-relief box to other environments. And when the researchers tested their response to potentially painful stimuli after they had made that association, they found the mice were less sensitive while they were there. “Just by being in the context that they had associated with pain suppression, we saw that reduced pain—even though we weren't actually activating those [pain-suppressing] neurons,” Goldstein explains.

Acute and chronic pain relief

Some scientists have been able to elicit placebo pain relief in rodents by treating the animals with morphine, linking environmental cues to the pain suppression caused by the drugs similar to the way Wang’s team did by directly activating pain-suppressing neurons. This drug-based approach works best for setting up expectations of relief for acute pain; its placebo effect is short-lived and mostly ineffective against chronic pain. So Wang, Chen, and Goldstein were particularly pleased to find that their engineered placebo effect was effective for relieving both acute and chronic pain.

In their experiments, animals experiencing a chemotherapy-induced hypersensitivity to touch exhibited a preference for the pain relief box as much as animals who were exposed to a chemical that induces acute pain, days after their initial conditioning. Once there, their chemotherapy-induced pain sensitivity was eliminated; they exhibited no more sensitivity to painful stimuli than they had prior to receiving chemotherapy.

One of the biggest surprises came when the researchers turned their attention back to the pain-suppressing neurons in the central amygdala that they had used to trigger pain relief. They suspected that those neurons might be reactivated when mice returned to the pain-relief box. Instead, they found that after the initial conditioning period, those neurons remained quiet. “These neurons are not reactivated, yet the mice appear to be no longer in pain,” Wang says. “So it suggests this memory of feeling well is transferred somewhere else.”

Goldstein adds that there must be a pain-suppressing neural circuit somewhere that is activated by pain-relief-associated contexts — and the team’s new placebo model sets researchers up to investigate those pathways. A deeper understanding of that circuitry could enable clinicians to deploy the placebo effect — alone or in combination with active treatments — to better manage patients’ pain in the future.

Faculty, researchers, and staff receive many external awards throughout the year. The School of Engineering periodically highlights the honors, prizes, and medals won by community members working in academic departments, labs, and centers. Spring 2024 honorees include the following:

• Lallit Anand, the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was named a 2024 Society of Engineering Fellow. Fellows are awarded to individuals who are distinguished in a relevant field and who have made meaningful contributions to the Society and the technical community.
   
• Adam Belay, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received a Google Research Scholar Award, awarded to professors based on merit to support their cutting-edge research.
   
• Michael Birnbaum, associate professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, received the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, given annually to a faculty member whose contributions to education have been characterized by dedication, care, and creativity.
   
• Tamara Broderick, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was named a 2024 Class of Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow for her significant contributions to theoretical modeling and computational methodology at the intersection of Bayesian Statistical Machine Learning and Bayesian nonparametric theory and applications.
   
• Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was named a 2024 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in medical and biological engineering.
   
• Tal Cohen, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the Arthur C Smith Award, presented to a member of the MIT faculty for meaningful contributions and devotion to undergraduate student life and learning at MIT.
   
• Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the Intel 2023 Outstanding Researcher Award. The annual award program recognizes the exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research that help further Intel’s mission of creating world-changing technology that improves the lives of everyone on the planet.
   
• Betar Gallant, Class of 1922 Career Development Professor and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Electrochemical Society's Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award (245th meeting). The award recognizes outstanding scientific and/or engineering work in fundamental or applied electrochemistry or solid-state science and technology by a young scientist or engineer.
   
• Marzyeh Ghassemi, the Germeshausen Career Development Professor and associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, received a Google Research Scholar Award, which are awarded to professors based on merit to support their cutting-edge research.
   
• Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Department of Biological Engineering, was named to the inaugural Time100 Health, a list of the world’s most influential people in health.
   
• Jack Hare, assistant professor and the Gale (1929) Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.
   
• Marija Ilić, senior research scientist and adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the IEEE PES Prabha S. Kundur Power System Dynamics and Control Award, which is awarded annually to leading society members and industry principals for their notable contributions to IEEE Power & Energy Society and the power and energy industry.
   
• Piotr Indyk, the Thonas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
   
• Linda Kaelbling, the Panasonic Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.
   
• Douglas Lauffenburger, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Biological Engineering, was awarded the Ernst Dieter Gilles Prize, which honors outstanding scientific achievements in the field of systems theory, system dynamics, control engineering, and systems biology.
   
• William Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was elected to the 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows. Election as a fellow honors members whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications in service to society have distinguished them among their peers and colleagues.
   
• Maggie Qi, assistant professor and the Joseph R. Mares ’24 Career Development Professor, received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
   
• Manish Raghavan, the Drew Houston (2005) Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received a Google Research Scholar Award, awarded to professors based on merit to support their cutting-edge research.
   
• Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.
   
• Daniela Rus, an Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
   
• Julian Shun, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2023 Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, which honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.
   
• Michael Short, associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, received the Capers (1976) and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising, which recognizes leaders in engineering and applied sciences who, as exemplary mentors and advisors, have significantly and consistently supported the personal and professional development of others.
   
• Jessica Stark, the Underwood-Prescott Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, received the V Foundation's Women Scientists Innovation Award for Cancer Research, awarded to women scientists to advance their innovative work in the cancer field. The award helps to address the significant funding disparities for women in science.
   
• Greg Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering, was elected to Academia Europaea. The object of Academia Europaea is the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages.
   
• Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to undergraduate and/or graduate education by members of its faculty and teaching staff (lecturer or instructor).
   
• Caroline Uhler, an Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was named a 2024 Class of Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow for her interdisciplinary excellence, merging mathematical statistics and computational biology in innovative and impactful ways.
   
• Franz-Josef Ulm, the Class of 1992 Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the 2024 Paul Gray Public Service Award, which recognizes a member of the MIT faculty who exemplifies building “a better world” through his or her teaching, research, advising, and service.
   
• Martin Wainwright, a Cecil H. Green Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded annually to individuals making their mark in the social sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts.
   
• Ryan Williams, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was awarded the 2024 Gödel Prize, awarded for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science.
   
• Lizhong Zheng, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.

The School of Engineering also recognizes administration staff with yearly awards each spring.

The Ellen J. Mandigo Award recognizes staff who have demonstrated, over an extended period of time, the qualities that Mandigo possessed in abundance during her long career at MIT: intelligence, skill, hard work, and dedication to the Institute. The 2024 recipients are:

• Ted Equi in MIT Leaders for Global Operations;
• Carol Niemi in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and
• Gwen Wilcox in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

The Infinite Mile Award recognizes and rewards members of the MIT School of Engineering’s administrative, support, sponsored research, and, when appropriate, academic staff in the categories of excellence, diversity and community, and institutional cooperation. This year's honorees are:

• Marygrace Aboudou in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; 
• Amanda Beyer-Purvis in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science;
• Mahia Brown in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering;
• Steven Derocher in MIT Leaders for Global Operation/System Design and Management;
• Tia Giurleo in the Dean’s Office of the MIT School of Engineering;
• Linda Gjerasi in the Department of Mechanical Engineering;
• Suxin Hu in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics;
• Alexis Runstadler in the Department of Biological Engineering;
• Rebecca Shepardson in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering;
• Michael Skocay in the Department of Mechanical Engineering;
• Justin Snow in the Masters in Supply Chain Management Program; and
• Christina Spinelli in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Climate anxiety affects nearly half of young people aged 16-25. Students like second-year Rachel Mohammed find hope and inspiration through her involvement in innovative climate solutions, working alongside peers who share her determination. “I’ve met so many people at MIT who are dedicated to finding climate solutions in ways that I had never imagined, dreamed of, or heard of. That is what keeps me going, and I’m doing my part,” she says.

Hydrogen-fueled engines

Hydrogen offers the potential for zero or near-zero emissions, with the ability to reduce greenhouse gases and pollution by 29 percent. However, the hydrogen industry faces many challenges related to storage solutions and costs.

Mohammed leads the hydrogen team on MIT’s Electric Vehicle Team (EVT), which is dedicated to harnessing hydrogen power to build a cleaner, more sustainable future. EVT is one of several student-led build teams at the Edgerton Center focused on innovative climate solutions. Since its founding in 1992, the Edgerton Center has been a hub for MIT students to bring their ideas to life.

Hydrogen is mostly used in large vehicles like trucks and planes because it requires a lot of storage space. EVT is building their second iteration of a motorcycle based on what Mohammed calls a “goofy hypothesis” that you can use hydrogen to power a small vehicle. The team employs a hydrogen fuel cell system, which generates electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen. However, the technology faces challenges, particularly in storage, which EVT is tackling with innovative designs for smaller vehicles.

Presenting at the 2024 World Hydrogen Summit reaffirmed Mohammed’s confidence in this project. “I often encounter skepticism, with people saying it’s not practical. Seeing others actively working on similar initiatives made me realize that we can do it too,” Mohammed says.

The team’s first successful track test last October allowed them to evaluate the real-world performance of their hydrogen-powered motorcycle, marking a crucial step in proving the feasibility and efficiency of their design.

MIT’s Sustainable Engine Team (SET), founded by junior Charles Yong, uses the combustion method to generate energy with hydrogen. This is a promising technology route for high-power-density applications, like aviation, but Yong believes it hasn’t received enough attention. Yong explains, “In the hydrogen power industry, startups choose fuel cell routes instead of combustion because gas turbine industry giants are 50 years ahead. However, these giants are moving very slowly toward hydrogen due to its not-yet-fully-developed infrastructure. Working under the Edgerton Center allows us to take risks and explore advanced tech directions to demonstrate that hydrogen combustion can be readily available.”

Both EVT and SET are publishing their research and providing detailed instructions for anyone interested in replicating their results.

The MIT community and visitors have a new reason to drop by MIT.nano: six artworks by Brazilian artist and sculptor Denise Milan. Located in the open-air stairway connecting the first- and second-floor galleries within the nanoscience and engineering facility, the works center around the stone as a microcosm of nature. From Milan’s “Mist of the Earth” series, evocative of mandalas, the project asks viewers to reflect on the environmental changes that result from human-made development.

Milan is the inaugural artist in “Encounters,” a series presented by STUDIO.nano, a new initiative from MIT.nano that encourages the exploration of platforms and pathways at the intersection of technology, science, and art. Encounters welcomes proposals from artists, scientists, engineers, and designers from outside of the MIT community looking to collaborate with MIT.nano researchers, facilities, ongoing projects, and unique spaces.

“Life is in the art of the encounter,” remarked Milan, quoting Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, during a reception at MIT.nano. “And for an artist to be in a place like this, MIT.nano, what could be better? I love the curiosity of scientists. They are very much like artists ... art and science are both tools for making imagination blossom.” What followed was a freewheeling conversation between attendees that spanned topics ranging from the cyclical nature of birth, death, and survival in the cosmos to musings on the elemental sources of creativity and the similarities in artistic and scientific practice to a brief lesson on time crystals by Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek, the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT.

Milan was joined in her conversation by MIT.nano Director Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies; Ardalan SadeghiKivi MArch ’22, who moderated the discussion; Samantha Farrell, manager of STUDIO.nano programming; and Naomi Moniz, professor emeritus at Georgetown University, who connected Milan and her work with MIT.nano.

“In addition to the technical community, we [at MIT.nano] have been approached by countless artists and thinkers in the humanities who, to our delight, are eager to learn about the wonders of the nanoscale and how to use the tools of MIT.nano to explore and expand their own artistic practice,” said Bulović.

These interactions have spurred collaborative projects across disciplines, art exhibitions, and even MIT classes. For the past four years MIT.nano has hosted 4.373/4.374 (Creating Art, Thinking Science), an undergraduate and graduate class offered by the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) Program. To date, the class has brought 35 students into MIT.nano’s labs and resulted in 40 distinct projects and 60 pieces of art, many of which are on display in MIT.nano’s galleries.

With the launch of STUDIO.nano, MIT.nano will look to expand its exhibition programs, including supporting additional digital media and augmented/virtual reality projects; providing tools and spaces for development of new classes envisioned by MIT academic departments; and introducing programming such as lectures related to the studio's activities.

Milan’s work will be a permanent installation at MIT.nano, where she hopes it will encourage individuals to pursue their creative inspiration, regardless of discipline. “To exist or to disappear?” Milan asked. “If it’s us, an idea, or a dream — the question is how much of an assignment you have with your own imagination.”

To the untrained eye, a medical image like an MRI or X-ray appears to be a murky collection of black-and-white blobs. It can be a struggle to decipher where one structure (like a tumor) ends and another begins. 

When trained to understand the boundaries of biological structures, AI systems can segment (or delineate) regions of interest that doctors and biomedical workers want to monitor for diseases and other abnormalities. Instead of losing precious time tracing anatomy by hand across many images, an artificial assistant could do that for them.

The catch? Researchers and clinicians must label countless images to train their AI system before it can accurately segment. For example, you’d need to annotate the cerebral cortex in numerous MRI scans to train a supervised model to understand how the cortex’s shape can vary in different brains.

Sidestepping such tedious data collection, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Harvard Medical School have developed the interactive “ScribblePrompt” framework: a flexible tool that can help rapidly segment any medical image, even types it hasn’t seen before. 

Instead of having humans mark up each picture manually, the team simulated how users would annotate over 50,000 scans, including MRIs, ultrasounds, and photographs, across structures in the eyes, cells, brains, bones, skin, and more. To label all those scans, the team used algorithms to simulate how humans would scribble and click on different regions in medical images. In addition to commonly labeled regions, the team also used superpixel algorithms, which find parts of the image with similar values, to identify potential new regions of interest to medical researchers and train ScribblePrompt to segment them. This synthetic data prepared ScribblePrompt to handle real-world segmentation requests from users.

“AI has significant potential in analyzing images and other high-dimensional data to help humans do things more productively,” says MIT PhD student Hallee Wong SM ’22, the lead author on a new paper about ScribblePrompt and a CSAIL affiliate. “We want to augment, not replace, the efforts of medical workers through an interactive system. ScribblePrompt is a simple model with the efficiency to help doctors focus on the more interesting parts of their analysis. It’s faster and more accurate than comparable interactive segmentation methods, reducing annotation time by 28 percent compared to Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM) framework, for example.”

ScribblePrompt’s interface is simple: Users can scribble across the rough area they’d like segmented, or click on it, and the tool will highlight the entire structure or background as requested. For example, you can click on individual veins within a retinal (eye) scan. ScribblePrompt can also mark up a structure given a bounding box.

Then, the tool can make corrections based on the user’s feedback. If you wanted to highlight a kidney in an ultrasound, you could use a bounding box, and then scribble in additional parts of the structure if ScribblePrompt missed any edges. If you wanted to edit your segment, you could use a “negative scribble” to exclude certain regions.

These self-correcting, interactive capabilities made ScribblePrompt the preferred tool among neuroimaging researchers at MGH in a user study. 93.8 percent of these users favored the MIT approach over the SAM baseline in improving its segments in response to scribble corrections. As for click-based edits, 87.5 percent of the medical researchers preferred ScribblePrompt.

ScribblePrompt was trained on simulated scribbles and clicks on 54,000 images across 65 datasets, featuring scans of the eyes, thorax, spine, cells, skin, abdominal muscles, neck, brain, bones, teeth, and lesions. The model familiarized itself with 16 types of medical images, including microscopies, CT scans, X-rays, MRIs, ultrasounds, and photographs.

“Many existing methods don't respond well when users scribble across images because it’s hard to simulate such interactions in training. For ScribblePrompt, we were able to force our model to pay attention to different inputs using our synthetic segmentation tasks,” says Wong. “We wanted to train what’s essentially a foundation model on a lot of diverse data so it would generalize to new types of images and tasks.”

After taking in so much data, the team evaluated ScribblePrompt across 12 new datasets. Although it hadn’t seen these images before, it outperformed four existing methods by segmenting more efficiently and giving more accurate predictions about the exact regions users wanted highlighted.

“​​Segmentation is the most prevalent biomedical image analysis task, performed widely both in routine clinical practice and in research — which leads to it being both very diverse and a crucial, impactful step,” says senior author Adrian Dalca SM ’12, PhD ’16, CSAIL research scientist and assistant professor at MGH and Harvard Medical School. “ScribblePrompt was carefully designed to be practically useful to clinicians and researchers, and hence to substantially make this step much, much faster.”

“The majority of segmentation algorithms that have been developed in image analysis and machine learning are at least to some extent based on our ability to manually annotate images,” says Harvard Medical School professor in radiology and MGH neuroscientist Bruce Fischl, who was not involved in the paper. “The problem is dramatically worse in medical imaging in which our ‘images’ are typically 3D volumes, as human beings have no evolutionary or phenomenological reason to have any competency in annotating 3D images. ScribblePrompt enables manual annotation to be carried out much, much faster and more accurately, by training a network on precisely the types of interactions a human would typically have with an image while manually annotating. The result is an intuitive interface that allows annotators to naturally interact with imaging data with far greater productivity than was previously possible.”

Wong and Dalca wrote the paper with two other CSAIL affiliates: John Guttag, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of EECS at MIT and CSAIL principal investigator; and MIT PhD student Marianne Rakic SM ’22. Their work was supported, in part, by Quanta Computer Inc., the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, the Wistron Corp., and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health, with hardware support from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.

Wong and her colleagues’ work will be presented at the 2024 European Conference on Computer Vision and was presented as an oral talk at the DCAMI workshop at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference earlier this year. They were awarded the Bench-to-Bedside Paper Award at the workshop for ScribblePrompt’s potential clinical impact.

Sarah Sterling, director of the Cryo-Electron Microscopy, or Cryo-EM, core facility, often compares her job to running a small business. Each day brings a unique set of jobs ranging from administrative duties and managing facility users to balancing budgets and maintaining equipment.

Although one could easily be overwhelmed by the seemingly never-ending to-do list, Sterling finds a great deal of joy in wearing so many different hats. One of her most essential tasks involves clear communication with users when the delicate instruments in the facility are unusable because of routine maintenance and repairs.

“Better planning allows for better science,” Sterling says. “Luckily, I’m very comfortable with building and fixing things. Let’s troubleshoot. Let’s take it apart. Let’s put it back together.”

Out of all her duties as a core facility director, she most looks forward to the opportunities to teach, especially helping students develop research projects.

“Undergraduate or early-stage graduate students ask the best questions,” she says. “They’re so curious about the tiny details, and they’re always ready to hit the ground running on their projects.”

A non-linear scientific journey

When Sterling enrolled in Russell Sage College, a women’s college in New York, she was planning to pursue a career as a physical therapist. However, she quickly realized she loved her chemistry classes more than her other subjects. She graduated with a bachelor of science degree in chemistry and immediately enrolled in a master’s degree program in chemical engineering at the University of Maine.

Sterling was convinced to continue her studies at the University of Maine with a dual PhD in chemical engineering and biomedical sciences. That decision required the daunting process of taking two sets of core courses and completing a qualifying exam in each field. 

“I wouldn’t recommend doing that,” she says with a laugh. “To celebrate after finishing that intense experience, I took a year off to figure out what came next.”

Sterling chose to do a postdoc in the lab of Eva Nogales, a structural biology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Nogales was looking for a scientist with experience working with lipids, a class of molecules that Sterling had studied extensively in graduate school.

At the time Sterling joined, the Nogales Lab was at the forefront of implementing an exciting structural biology approach: cryo-EM.

“When I was interviewing, I’d never even seen the type of microscope required for cryo-EM, let alone performed any experiments,” Sterling says. “But I remember thinking ‘I’m sure I can figure this out.’”

Cryo-EM is a technique that allows researchers to determine the three-dimensional shape, or structure, of the macromolecules that make up cells. A researcher can take a sample of their macromolecule of choice, suspend it in a liquid solution, and rapidly freeze it onto a grid to capture the macromolecules in random positions — the “cryo” part of the name. Powerful electron microscopes then collect images of the macromolecule — the EM part of cryo-EM. 

The two-dimensional images of the macromolecules from different angles can be combined to produce a three-dimensional structure. Structural information like this can reveal the macromolecule’s function inside cells or inform how it differs in a disease state. The rapidly expanding use of cryo-EM has unlocked so many mechanistic insights that the researchers who developed the technology were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 

The MIT.nano facility opened its doors in 2018. The open-access, state-of-the-art facility now has more than 160 tools and more than 1,500 users representing nearly every department at MIT. The Cryo-EM facility lives in the basement of the MIT.nano building and houses multiple electron microscopes and laboratory space for cryo-specimen preparation.

Thanks to her work at UC Berkeley, Sterling’s career trajectory has long been intertwined with the expanding use of cryo-EM in research. Sterling anticipated the need for experienced scientists to run core facilities in order to maintain the electron microscopes needed for cryo-EM, which range in cost from a staggering $1 million to $10 million each.

After completing her postdoc, Sterling worked at the Harvard University cryo-EM core facility for five years. When the director position for the MIT.nano Cryo-EM facility opened, she decided to apply.

“I like that the core facility at MIT was smaller and more frequently used by students,” Sterling says. “There’s a lot more teaching, which is a challenge sometimes, but it’s rewarding to impact someone’s career at such an early stage.”

A focus on users

When Sterling arrived at MIT, her first initiative was to meet directly with all the students in research labs that use the core facility to learn what would make using the facility a better experience. She also implemented clear and standard operating procedures for cryo-EM beginners.

“I think being consistent and available has really improved users’ experiences,” Sterling says.

The users themselves report that her initiatives have proven highly successful — and have helped them grow as scientists.

“Sterling cultivates an environment where I can freely ask questions about anything to support my learning,” says Bonnie Su, a frequent Cryo-EM facility user and graduate student from the Vos lab.

But Sterling does not want to stop there. Looking ahead, she hopes to expand the facility by acquiring an additional electron microscope to allow more users to utilize this powerful technology in their research. She also plans to build a more collaborative community of cryo-EM scientists at MIT with additional symposia and casual interactions such as coffee hours.

Under her management, cryo-EM research has flourished. In the last year, the Cryo-EM core facility has supported research resulting in 12 new publications across five different departments at MIT. The facility has also provided access to 16 industry and non-MIT academic entities. These studies have revealed important insights into various biological processes, from visualizing how large protein machinery reads our DNA to the protein aggregates found in neurodegenerative disorders.

If anyone wants to conduct cryo-EM experiments or learn more about the technique, Sterling encourages anyone in the MIT community to reach out.

“Come visit us!” she says. “We give lots of tours, and you can stop by to say hi anytime.”

The idea of electrically stimulating a brain region called the central thalamus has gained traction among researchers and clinicians because it can help arouse subjects from unconscious states induced by traumatic brain injury or anesthesia, and can boost cognition and performance in awake animals. But the method, called CT-DBS, can have a side effect: seizures. A new study by researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) who were testing the method in awake mice quantifies the probability of seizures at different stimulation currents and cautions that they sometimes occurred even at low levels.

“Understanding production and prevalence of this type of seizure activity is important because brain stimulation-based therapies are becoming more widely used,” says co-senior author Emery N. Brown, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Center for Brains Minds and Machines (CBMM) at MIT.

In the brain, the seizures associated with CT-DBS occur as “electrographic seizures,” which are bursts of voltage among neurons across a broad spectrum of frequencies. Behaviorally, they manifest as “absence seizures” in which the subject appears to take on a blank stare and freezes for about 10-20 seconds.

In their study, the researchers were hoping to determine a CT-DBS stimulation current — in a clinically relevant range of under 200 microamps — below which seizures could be reliably avoided.

In search of that ideal current, they developed a protocol of starting brief bouts of CT-DBS at 1 microamp and then incrementally ramping the current up to 200 microamps until they found a threshold where an electrographic seizure occurred. Once they found that threshold, then they tested a longer bout of stimulation at the next lowest current level in hopes that an electrographic seizure wouldn’t occur. They did this for a variety of different stimulation frequencies. To their surprise, electrographic seizures still occurred 2.2 percent of the time during those longer stimulation trials (i.e. 22 times out of 996 tests) and in 10 out of 12 mice. At just 20 microamps, mice still experienced seizures in three out of 244 tests, a 1.2 percent rate.

“This is something that we needed to report because this was really surprising,” says co-lead author Francisco Flores, a research affiliate in The Picower Institute and CBMM, and an instructor in anesthesiology at MGH, where Brown is also an anesthesiologist. Isabella Dalla Betta, a technical associate in The Picower Institute, co-led the study published in Brain Stimulation.

Stimulation frequency didn’t matter for seizure risk but the rate of electrographic seizures increased as the current level increased. For instance, it happened in 5 out of 190 tests at 50 microamps, and two out of 65 tests at 100 microamps. The researchers also found that when an electrographic seizure occurred, it did so more quickly at higher currents than at lower levels. Finally, they also saw that seizures happened more quickly if they stimulated the thalamus on both sides of the brain, versus just one side. Some mice exhibited behaviors similar to absence seizure, though others became hyperactive.

It is not clear why some mice experienced electrographic seizures at just 20 microamps while two mice did not experience the seizures even at 200. Flores speculated that there may be different brain states that change the predisposition to seizures amid stimulation of the thalamus. Notably, seizures are not typically observed in humans who receive CT-DBS while in a minimally conscious state after a traumatic brain injury or in animals who are under anesthesia. Flores said the next stage of the research would aim to discern what the relevant brain states may be.

In the meantime, the study authors wrote, “EEG should be closely monitored for electrographic seizures when performing CT-DBS, especially in awake subjects.”

The paper’s co-senior author is Matt Wilson, Sherman Fairchild Professor in The Picower Institute, CBMM, and the departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In addition to Dalla Betta, Flores, Brown and Wilson, the study’s other authors are John Tauber, David Schreier, and Emily Stephen.

Support for the research came from The JPB Foundation, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory; George J. Elbaum ’59, SM ’63, PhD ’67, Mimi Jensen, Diane B. Greene SM ’78, Mendel Rosenblum, Bill Swanson, annual donors to the Anesthesia Initiative Fund; and the National Institutes of Health.

Asked to describe his work for a lay audience, Allan Shtofenmakher responds with an unexpected question: “Have you ever seen the movie 'Wall-E?'” Recalling that the 2008 Disney-Pixar movie’s view of Earth from space was “brown and dusty and just surrounded by tons and tons of space junk,” he cautions, “If we’re not good stewards of our local space environment, we could actually end up in a situation like that — where we can’t get anything into space because it’s so cluttered and dirty.”

Shtofenmakher, a PhD student, works in MIT’s Dynamics, Infrastructure Networks, and Mobility (DINaMo) research group under the guidance of Hamsa Balakrishnan, the William E. Leonhard Professor of aeronautics and astronautics (AeroAstro) and associate dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. “A lot of my work,” he continues, “is trying to keep space sustainable.” When satellites or spent rocket bodies crash into each other, they create space debris moving in different directions at very high speeds. “Then they’ll create even more junk that can crash into each other … and you end up with a completely unsustainable space environment.”

Shtofenmakher’s research interests reside at the intersection of space situational awareness and control of multi-agent systems, with a focus on tracking orbital debris using in-space satellite sensors. He is experimenting with techniques such as mixed-integer programming and multi-agent reinforcement learning to maximize our awareness of — and ability to avoid — rogue objects orbiting the Earth at speeds 10 times faster than a bullet. “My goal is to leverage the cameras on the thousands of active Earth-orbiting satellites to keep the space around Earth clean and sustainable for generations of space explorers to come,” he says.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of California at Irvine, and a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, Shtofenmakher worked as a spacecraft systems engineer on several small satellite programs. “I decided to return to graduate school to solve some of the challenges associated with distributed satellite networks,” he says, “and I chose MIT AeroAstro for its wealth of expertise in both satellite systems and multi-agent systems.”

“A lot of my work had been broader and more general in aerospace engineering, and I wanted to become good at something. That something was controls and optimization."

A life-changing conversation

When Shtofenmakher was originally applying to PhD programs, he says, “I wanted to work with actual spacecraft and hardware … on what are called CubeSats, which are these really small, student-built satellites that can be sent into space for cheap to do something cool and novel.” He received a call from Balakrishnan, whose research had focused primarily on air traffic control and optimization but was now shifting into space research. Reviewing his graduate school application, she thought Shtofenmakher’s expertise would be helpful in her lab.

“What Hamsa specializes in (among other things) is multi-agent optimization,” he explains. “If you have a fleet of drones that are trying to simultaneously accomplish a bunch of different tasks, how do you distribute them in such a way that you minimize fuel across the fleet?”

It’s a different flavor of controls and optimization, he explains, than controlling individual CubeSats — but he is learning skills and using techniques that will enable him to work on applications on land (self-driving cars), in the air (autonomous drone networks), and in space (distributed satellite systems) when he completes his degree.   

Critical fellowship support

In his second year at MIT, Shtofenmakher was awarded an endowed fellowship in honor of the late Arthur Gelb ScD ’61, an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and former member of the MIT Corporation. “Getting the Art Gelb Fellowship,” he says, “meant that I suddenly had the flexibility to work on exactly what I wanted to work on.” Without the funding provided by the fellowship, he points out, he might have spent 20 hours a week working as a research assistant on an unrelated topic rather than dedicating his time to pursuing his own research interests.

Shtofenmakher regrets that he never met Gelb, who passed away in 2023, because he sensed that they shared some common history: Both were the children of immigrants who worked hard and valued education. Growing up in California, he says, “My parents both worked more than full time so that we could finally land on our feet. I modeled my work ethic after theirs so that I could get a good education, which is the number one thing that they wanted for me.”

Work and life

Still a hard worker, Shtofenmakher now also sees the value of work-life balance, serving as co-president of AeroAstro’s department Resources for Easing Friction and Stress (dREFS), through which he advocates for graduate student mental health and helps students establish healthy boundaries with their research advisors. With support from the department, he and classmates converted a storage area into the AeroAstro graduate student lounge, which now offers couches, a flat-screen TV to watch soccer and other events, and a place, he says, “where people can just chill.”

Also adding to Shtofenmakher’s quality of life at MIT are sailing and skateboarding along the Charles River and spending time with fellow students. “I know I can just message any one of them, and we can walk to the Banana Lounge, or go down to the ping-pong table in the basement, or just grab food or drinks after work.” He has also developed an interest in bar tending, which aligns well with science. Mixology, he laughs, “is the closest I can get to art with my double left brain.”

Sam Madden, the College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing at MIT, has been named the new faculty head of computer science in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), effective Aug. 1.

Madden succeeds Arvind, a longtime MIT professor and prolific computer scientist, who passed away in June.

“Sam’s research leadership and commitment to excellence, along with his thoughtful and supportive approach, makes him a natural fit to help lead the department going forward. In light of Arvind’s passing, we are particularly grateful that Sam has agreed to take on this role on such short notice,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“Sam’s exceptional research contributions in database management systems, coupled with his deep understanding of both academia and industry, make him an excellent fit for faculty head of computer science. The EECS department and broader School of Engineering will greatly benefit from his expertise and passion," adds Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of engineering, and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Madden joins the leadership of EECS, which jointly reports to the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the School of Engineering. The largest academic department at MIT, EECS was reorganized in 2019 as part of the formation of the college into three overlapping sub-units in electrical engineering (EE), computer science (CS), and artificial intelligence and decision-making (AI+D). The restructuring has enabled each of the three sub-units to concentrate on faculty recruitment, mentoring, promotion, academic programs, and community building in coordination with the others.

“I am delighted that Sam has agreed to step up to take on this important leadership role. His unique combination of academic excellence and forward-looking focus will be invaluable for us,” says Asu Ozdaglar, MathWorks Professor and head of EECS, who also serves as the deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “I am confident that he will offer exceptional leadership in his new role and further strengthen EECS for our students and the MIT community.”

A member of the MIT faculty since 2004, Madden is a professor in EECS and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was recognized as the inaugural College of Computing Distinguished Professor of Computing in 2020 for being an outstanding faculty member, leader, and innovator.

Madden’s research interest is in database systems, focusing on database analytics and query processing, ranging from clouds to sensors to modern high-performance server architectures. He co-directs the Data Systems for AI Lab initiative and the Data Systems Group, investigating issues related to systems and algorithms for data focusing on applying new methodologies for processing data, including applying machine learning methods to data systems and engineering data systems for applying machine learning at scale.

He was named one of MIT Technology Review's “Top 35 Under 35” in 2005 and an ACM Fellow in 2020. He is the recipient of several awards, including an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, and "test of time" awards from VLDB, SIGMOD, SIGMOBILE, and SenSys. He is also the co-founder and chief scientist at Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which develops technology to make roads safer and drivers better.

Mathieu Le Provost, a postdoc in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, passed away unexpectedly on July 30 while traveling in France. 

Le Provost joined AeroAstro in 2023 and was a member of the Uncertainty Quantification Group, led by Professor Youssef Marzouk. Marzouk and Le Provost connected in 2020 when Le Provost reached out over email, eager to explore potential research collaborations. Although the Covid-19 pandemic prevented them from meeting in person, Marzouk, le Provost, and colleagues Ricardo Baptista PhD CSE ’22 and Le Provost’s University of California Los Angeles advisor Jeff Eldredge began working together remotely. “I admired and learned from Mathieu’s determination to take on new fields head on. When we came across an interesting idea, he quickly implemented computational methods and found novel ways to improve on the efficiency of existing approaches,” recalls Baptista.

Prior to coming to MIT, Le Provost earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from UCLA in 2022, his master’s in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2017, and his French engineering diploma (equivalent to an MS in mechanical and aeronautical engineering) from the Ecole nationale supérieure de Mécanique et d'Aérotechnique, also in 2017.

In June 2023, Le Provost officially joined the Uncertainty Quantification Group as a postdoc. “It feels like much longer ago, because Mathieu did so much in a short time. He was a pillar of our group, due to his openness, personal warmth, and generosity; his appetite for new research problems; and his deep thinking,” says Marzouk. “Mathieu was independent and self-propelled: every time we met, he’d share new ideas that were exciting and creative. And so many other students and postdocs wanted to work with him. He quickly built up a rich network of collaborators and a full plate of projects.”

A natural collaborator and a fierce friend

Le Provost’s contributions extended beyond his own research. He was a natural collaborator who brought people from different disciplines and departments together, making fast friends with the astrophysicists across the hall from his group. Matthew Levine, friend and postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, notes the ways Le Provost brought people together. “In our subgroup reading group that I led, Matthieu was often ready to volunteer. And even when it wasn’t his turn, we could count him to be engaged and thoughtful. We all learned more thanks to him being himself,” says Levine.

Jan Glaubitz, another postdoc in the Uncertainty Quantification Group, remembers Le Provost’s deep connections with his loved ones. “He was always eager to stay connected with those he cared about. He celebrated his 29th birthday last August at The Mad Monkfish near campus. What struck me was the number of people who traveled across the country, from places as far as California, just to be with Mathieu on his special day. It was a testament to how deeply he was valued by those around him,” says Glaubitz.

A taste for adventure

Le Provost will be remembered as a passionate hiker with a love for the outdoors. “Mathieu was always joyful and ready for an adventure,” says Baptista. “At our last meeting in Marseille, we swam and dived together in the ocean for an entire afternoon. It was difficult for me to keep up with Mathieu’s infectious energy and willingness to continue swimming. I believe this is how Mathieu approached many problems. He dived deep, even into cold water, but came out stronger and brought along others for a joyous adventure.”

Alongside his academic achievements, Mathieu also had a creative side, which he expressed through pottery. “He often spoke passionately about his pottery classes, which offered him a different kind of fulfillment and relaxation. He was even successful enough to sell some of his pieces at a public market at MIT, which I know brought him a lot of pride.” recalls Glaubitz.

His enthusiasm for discovery was infectious, and his colleagues were inspired by his relentless pursuit of both knowledge and of a good meal. Olivier Zahm, a close colleague of Le Provost’s in the Uncertainty Quantification Group, recalls Le Provost’s “contagious taste for adventure, meeting people, and discovery — but also his taste for crèpes, Spritz, and chocolate mousse.”

Remembrances

A creative and dedicated researcher, Le Provost will be deeply missed by the countless friends across labs and departments that he made during his time at MIT. “Research is a passion-based profession that demands a lot from us, but which in return offers the opportunity to meet brilliant, extraordinary people, who very often become close friends,” says Zahm.

“I feel very lucky that Mathieu came into my life, and I know that everyone else who knew him at MIT feels the same,” says Marzouk. “We are devastated that he left us much too soon. But we will remember him and think of him always.”

Imagine how a phone call works: Your voice is converted into electronic signals, shifted up to higher frequencies, transmitted over long distances, and then shifted back down so it can be heard clearly on the other end. The process enabling this shifting of signal frequencies is called frequency mixing, and it is essential for communication technologies like radio and Wi-Fi. Frequency mixers are vital components in many electronic devices and typically operate using frequencies that oscillate billions (GHz, gigahertz) to trillions (THz, terahertz) of times per second. 

Now imagine a frequency mixer that works at a quadrillion (PHz, petahertz) times per second — up to a million times faster. This frequency range corresponds to the oscillations of the electric and magnetic fields that make up light waves. Petahertz-frequency mixers would allow us to shift signals up to optical frequencies and then back down to more conventional electronic frequencies, enabling the transmission and processing of vastly larger amounts of information at many times higher speeds. This leap in speed isn’t just about doing things faster; it’s about enabling entirely new capabilities.

Lightwave electronics (or petahertz electronics) is an emerging field that aims to integrate optical and electronic systems at incredibly high speeds, leveraging the ultrafast oscillations of light fields. The key idea is to harness the electric field of light waves, which oscillate on sub-femtosecond (10^-15 seconds) timescales, to directly drive electronic processes. This allows for the processing and manipulation of information at speeds far beyond what is possible with current electronic technologies. In combination with other petahertz electronic circuitry, a petahertz electronic mixer would allow us to process and analyze vast amounts of information in real time and transfer larger amounts of data over the air at unprecedented speeds. The MIT team’s demonstration of a lightwave-electronic mixer at petahertz-scale frequencies is a first step toward making communication technology faster, and progresses research toward developing new, miniaturized lightwave electronic circuitry capable of handling optical signals directly at the nanoscale.

In the 1970s, scientists began exploring ways to extend electronic frequency mixing into the terahertz range using diodes. While these early efforts showed promise, progress stalled for decades. Recently, however, advances in nanotechnology have reignited this area of research. Researchers discovered that tiny structures like nanometer-length-scale needle tips and plasmonic antennas could function similarly to those early diodes but at much higher frequencies.

A recent open-access study published in Science Advances by Matthew Yeung, Lu-Ting Chou, Marco Turchetti, Felix Ritzkowsky, Karl K. Berggren, and Phillip D. Keathley at MIT has demonstrated a significant step forward. They developed an electronic frequency mixer for signal detection that operates beyond 0.350 PHz using tiny nanoantennae. These nanoantennae can mix different frequencies of light, enabling analysis of signals oscillating orders of magnitude faster than the fastest accessible to conventional electronics. Such petahertz electronic devices could enable developments that ultimately revolutionize fields that require precise analysis of extremely fast optical signals, such as spectroscopy and imaging, where capturing femtosecond-scale dynamics is crucial (a femtosecond is one-millionth of one-billionth of a second).

The team’s study highlights the use of nanoantenna networks to create a broadband, on-chip electronic optical frequency mixer. This innovative approach allows for the accurate readout of optical wave forms spanning more than one octave of bandwidth. Importantly, this process worked using a commercial turnkey laser that can be purchased off the shelf, rather than a highly customized laser.

While optical frequency mixing is possible using nonlinear materials, the process is purely optical (that is, it converts light input to light output at a new frequency). Furthermore, the materials have to be many wavelengths in thickness, limiting the device size to the micrometer scale (a micrometer is one-millionth of a meter).  In contrast, the lightwave-electronic method demonstrated by the authors uses a light-driven tunneling mechanism that offers high nonlinearities for frequency mixing and direct electronic output using nanometer-scale devices (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter).

While this study focused on characterizing light pulses of different frequencies, the researchers envision that similar devices will enable one to construct circuits using light waves. This device, with bandwidths spanning multiple octaves, could provide new ways to investigate ultrafast light-matter interactions, accelerating advancements in ultrafast source technologies. 

This work not only pushes the boundaries of what is possible in optical signal processing but also bridges the gap between the fields of electronics and optics. By connecting these two important areas of research, this study paves the way for new technologies and applications in fields like spectroscopy, imaging, and communications, ultimately advancing our ability to explore and manipulate the ultrafast dynamics of light.

The research was initially supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Ongoing research into harmonic mixing is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Matthew Yeung acknowledges fellowship support from MathWorks, the U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and MPS-Ascend Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Lu-Ting Chou acknowledges financial support from the China's Ministry of Education for the Overseas Internship Program from the Chinese National Science and Technology Council for the doctoral fellowship program. This work was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano.

Exoplanets form in protoplanetary disks, a collection of space dust and gas orbiting a star. The leading theory of planetary formation, called core accretion, occurs when grains of dust in the disk collect and grow to form a planetary core, like a snowball rolling downhill. Once it has a strong enough gravitational pull, other material collapses around it to form the atmosphere.

A secondary theory of planetary formation is gravitational collapse. In this scenario, the disk itself becomes gravitationally unstable and collapses to form the planet, like snow being plowed into a pile. This process requires the disk to be massive, and until recently there were no known viable candidates to observe; previous research had detected the snow pile, but not what made it.

But in a new paper published today in Nature, MIT Kerr-McGee Career Development Professor Richard Teague and his colleagues report evidence that the movement of the gas surrounding the star AB Aurigae behaves as one would expect in a gravitationally unstable disk, matching numerical predictions. Their finding is akin to detecting the snowplow that made the pile. This indicates that gravitational collapse is a viable method of planetary formation. Here, Teague, who studies the formation of planetary systems in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), answers a few questions about the new work.

Q: What made the AB Aurigae system a good candidate for observation?

A: There have been plenty of observations that have suggested some interesting dynamics going on the system. Groups have seen spiral arms within the disk; people have found hot spots, which some groups have interpreted as a planet; others have explained as some other instability. But it was really a disk that we knew there was lots of interesting motions going on. The data that we had previously was enough to see that it was interesting, but not really good enough to detail what was going on.

Q: What is gravitational instability when it comes to protoplanetary disks?

A: Gravitational instabilities are where the gravity from the disk itself is strong enough to perturb motions within the disk. Usually, we assume that the gravitational potential is dominated by the central star, which is the case when the mass of the disk is less than 10 percent of the stellar mass (which is most of the time). When the disk mass gets too large, gravitational potential will affect it in different ways and drive these very large spiral arms in the disk. These can have lots of different effects: They can trap the gas, they can heat it up, they can allow for angular momentum to be transported very rapidly within the disk. If it’s unstable, the disk can fragment and collapse directly to form a planet in an incredibly short period of time. Rather than the tens of thousands of years that it would take for a core accretion to happen, this would happen at a fraction of that time.

Q: How does this discovery challenge conventional wisdom around planetary formation?

A: It shows that this alternative path of forming planets via direct collapse is a way that we can form planets. This is particularly important because we’re finding more and more evidence of very large planets — say, Jupiter mass or larger — that are sitting very far away from their star. Those sorts of planets are incredibly hard to form with core accretion, because you typically need them close to the star where things happen quickly. So to form something so massive, so far away from the star is a real challenge. If we're able to show that there are sources that are massive enough that they're gravitationally unstable, this solves that problem. It's a way that perhaps newer systems can be formed, because they've always been a bit of a challenge to understand how they came about with core accretion.

The members of the MIT First Nations Launch team had never built a drone before when they faced the 2024 NASA First Nations Launch High-Power Rocket Competition. This year’s challenge invited teams to design, build, and launch a high-power rocket carrying a scientific payload that deploys mid-air and safely returns to the ground, integrating Indigenous methodologies.

The eight-student team of all Indigenous students earned the compatition's grand prize, as well as first place in the written portion.

Deploying a drone from a rocket

Building even the simplest drone demands precise calculations of weight, power, and functionality. But this drone had extra layers of complexity. It needed to fold inside the 7.5-inch diameter rocket and deploy to a full 16 x 16-inch configuration. Team captain and rising junior Hailey Polson explains: “The arms of the drone, which hold the propellers, need to lock in place. Once it unfolds, you don't want it to re-fold while you’re trying to fly it around. Therefore, you need to have some kind of locking mechanism, as well as a mechanism to ensure it extends and unfolds properly.”

Deploying the drone from the rocket presented a significant challenge. The competition required that the drone’s separation from the rocket could not rely on gravity. To ensure successful deployment, the students planned to use a black powder charge to push the drone from an interior rail, but they had no prior experience testing explosives to see if it would work as intended. So, the team enlisted the expertise of their friends from the MIT Rocket Team, who helped conduct black powder testing in the MIT blast chamber.

Despite all these difficulties, the team decided to rise to the challenges of the competition yet again by designing their own parachute release mechanism, while many teams opted for commercial ones. They used an Arduino controller, a servo, and a special snap shackle. “We tested around 15 different ones because it’s pretty difficult to find something that a servo motor can easily pull and actually release in the correct way,” Polson says.

Once the parachute is released, the drone must be piloted to a safe landing. Nicole McGaa ’24 and second-year student Alex Zhindon-Romero took the FAA Part 107 drone pilot exam so they could legally pilot the drone.

The advantages of an all-indigenous team

According to a 2021 report from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Native Americans formed only 0.6 percent of the STEM workforce.

Polson grew up on the Cherokee Nation Reservation of Claremore, Oklahoma, where she enjoyed being surrounded by other people in her tribe and celebrating her rich culture. “I want to set an example for other people from my background that they can attend MIT, be a rocket scientist, and do basically anything they want and still feel connected to their community.”

Polson planned to join an Edgerton Center build team when she came to MIT, “but I never imagined there would be enough interest for an all-Indigenous build team,” she says. “It's special because any build team forms a unique bond between the members and fosters a great sense of community. However, having that extra layer of shared values, aspirations, and backgrounds has really gone a long way in driving us towards the same goals. We are not only committed to excellence in engineering and achieving the tasks they ask of us, but also to helping each other and finding excellence within ourselves as engineers.”

The MIT First Nations Launch team was formed in 2022 to participate in the annual NASA Artemis student challenge. The team uses Indigenous methodologies and structures to learn and understand how engineers can shape the world through aerospace and beyond. Polson describes their Indigenous approach as “prioritizing both the human aspect, focusing on the interactions between our teammates, and making sure that they are getting everything they need out of this, as well as on the impacts beyond that, with outreach, education, and the environment.”

Professor J. Kim Vandiver, director of the Edgerton Center, says, “We non-Native American engineers have a lot to learn from these students. I am particularly drawn to their more holistic view of life and the interconnectedness of everything we do and the world in which we live.”

The start and finish of a degree program are pivotal moments in the lives of MIT's graduate students. In her first three years in MIT’s Department of Political Science, professor Mariya Grinberg’s mentorship has helped numerous students start their graduate journeys with confidence and direction. Nuh Gedik, who joined the Department of Physics in 2008, looks to the finish line: he finds joy in seeing his students reach personal and professional success at the end of their PhDs. Both were recently honored as “Committed to Caring” for their support of graduate students. 

Mariya Grinberg: Commitment to intellectual growth

When Mariya Grinberg joined the MIT Security Studies Program as a faculty member in 2021, the department was in a state of flux. The Covid-19 pandemic was in full swing, several core faculty members were nearing retirement, and the program had welcomed the largest cohort of PhD students in its history. As Grinberg entered the community, she embraced these challenges, meeting and exceeding her expected duties as an advisor.

In her role as assistant professor of political science, Grinberg’s research interests center on the question of how time and uncertainty shape the strategic decisions of states, focusing on economic statecraft, military planning, and questions of state sovereignty.

As a junior faculty member, Grinberg shoulders one of the largest advising loads in the department. Despite this, multiple nominators praised Grinberg for her prompt and discerning feedback. Students note her efforts in reading through and commenting on many rounds of paper drafts, supplemented by hour-long brainstorming sessions at her whiteboard. “It's rare that someone can become both your most incisive critic and staunchest advocate,” a nominator noted. “I never took it for granted.”

Throughout these sessions, Grinberg delivers her advice with both confidence and empathy. One nominator shared how meetings put them at ease: “Normally, I am quite anxious about meeting with faculty, but I never felt that way during my meetings with Mariya.”

Grinberg believes that failure is an integral part of the learning process and encourages her students to embrace and learn from setbacks. She acknowledges that the pressure to accomplish tasks within time constraints often leaves little room for failure, which can lead to decision paralysis. Grinberg reassures her students that investing time in a dissertation idea, even if it turns out to be non-viable, is not time wasted.

When asked about her philosophy on mentorship, Grinberg emphasizes that the advice of mentors is just that — advice. It represents their best effort to steer students in what they perceive to be a fruitful direction, but it does not mean the advice is invariably correct. Grinberg encourages students to critically evaluate any feedback and make their own judgments that may not align with their advisor's thoughts.

Grinberg shares a concept she first learned from a creative writing professor: “When someone tells you there is something wrong with your work, 90 percent of the time they are right. When someone tells you how to fix it, 90 percent of the time they are wrong.”

Nuh Gedik: Mentoring the next generation of scientists

Gedik is the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT. His group investigates quantum materials by using advanced optical and electron-based spectroscopies. Gedik employs these techniques to study topological insulators, high-temperature superconductors, and atomically layered materials.

When asked about what keeps him motivated, Gedik says that he is driven by the professional development of his students. Gedik prioritizes the growth of his students above all else, and believes that academic output follows naturally with personal and professional growth. One nominator shared one of Gedik’s favorite sayings: “Finding a job for you is my job.”

As a result of this mindset, the alumni of Gedik’s group have achieved spectacular professional success, including members who are now faculty at top universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia universities. Several group members are also in leadership roles at companies like Intel, Meta, or ASML.

Alongside his academic pursuits, Gedik is deeply committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within his research group and the broader academic community. He dedicates regular portions of the weekly group meetings to discussing literature and practices related to these topics. Not only do these discussions educate the group on important issues, but they also help lab members integrate inclusive practices into their day-to-day endeavors.

By integrating inclusive principles into his teaching and mentoring, Gedik creates a culture where students are supported personally and academically. In fact, a nominator shared that many of these practices stem from the professional development courses that Gedik voluntarily attends. His proactive approach not only benefits his current students, but also sets a standard that influences others as well.

In addition to his efforts within the lab, Gedik is proactive in scientific outreach and mentorship within the broader community. He attends annual science fairs in educationally under-resourced communities, aiming to inspire the younger generation to pursue careers in STEM. One nominator praises these fairs for “igniting interest in science and technology among diverse audiences,” with a particular focus on inspiring the younger generation.

The field of mechatronics is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, occupying the intersection of mechanical systems, electronics, controls, and computer science. Mechatronics engineers work in a variety of industries — from space exploration to semiconductor manufacturing to product design — and specialize in the integrated design and development of intelligent systems. For students wanting to learn mechatronics, it might come as a surprise that one of the most powerful teaching tools available for the subject matter is simply a pen and a piece of paper.

“Students have to be able to work out things on a piece of paper, and make sketches, and write down key calculations in order to be creative,” says MIT professor of mechanical engineering David Trumper, who has been teaching class 2.737 (Mechatronics) since he joined the Institute faculty in the early 1990s. The subject is electrical and mechanical engineering combined, he says, but more than anything else, it’s design.

“If you just do electronics, but have no idea how to make the mechanical parts work, you can’t find really creative solutions. You have to see ways to solve problems across different domains,” says Trumper. “MIT students tend to have seen lots of math and lots of theory. The hands-on part is really critical to build that skill set; with hands-on experiences they’ll be more able to imagine how other things might work when they’re designing them.”

Audrey Cui ’24, now a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, confirms that Trumper “really emphasizes being able to do back-of-the-napkin calculations.” This simplicity is by design, and the critical thinking it promotes is essential for budding designers.

“Sitting behind a computer terminal, you’re using some existing tool in the menu system and not thinking creatively,” says Trumper. “To see the trade-offs, and get the clutter out of your thinking, it helps to work with a really simple tool — a piece of paper and, hopefully, multicolored pens to code things — you can design so much more creatively than if you’re stuck behind a screen. The ability to sketch things is so important.”

Trumper studies precision mechatronics, broadly, with a particular interest in mechatronic systems for demanding resolutions. Examples include projects that employ magnetic levitation, linear motors for driving precision manufacturing for semiconductors, and spacecraft attitude control. His work also explores lathes, milling applications, and even bioengineering platforms.

Class 2.737, which is offered every two years, is lab-based. Sketches and concepts come to life in focused experiences designed to expose students to key principles in a hands-on way and are very much informed by what Trumper has found important in his research. The two-week-long lab explorations range from controlling a motor to evaluating electronic scales to vibration isolations systems built on a speaker. One year, students constructed a working atomic force microscope.

“The touch and sense of how things actually work is really important,” Trumper says. “As a designer, you have to be able to imagine. If you think of some new configuration of a motor, you need to imagine how it would work and see it working, so you can do design iterations in your imagined space — to make that real requires that you’ve had experience with the actual thing.”

He says his former late colleague, Woodie Flowers SM ’68, MEng ’71, PhD ’73, used to call it “running the movie.” Trumper explains, “once you have the image in your mind, you can more easily picture what’s going on with the problem — what’s getting hot, where’s the stress, what do I like and not like about this design. If you can do that with a piece of paper and your imagination, now you design new things pretty creatively.”

Flowers had been the Pappalardo Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the time of his passing in October 2019. He is remembered for pioneering approaches to education, and was instrumental in shaping MIT’s hands-on approach to engineering design education.

Class 2.737 tends to attract students who like to design and build their own things. “I want people who are heading toward being hardware geeks,” says Trumper, laughing. “And I mean that lovingly.” He says his most important objective for this class is that students learn real tools that they will find useful years from now in their own engineering research or practice.

“Being able to see how multiple pieces fit in together and create one whole working system is just really empowering to me as an aspiring engineer,” says Cui.

For fellow 2.737 student Zach Francis, the course offered foundations for the future along with a meaningful tie to the past. “This class reminded me about what I enjoy about engineering. You look at it when you’re a young kid and you're like ‘that looks like magic!’ and then as an adult you can now make that. It's the closest thing I've been to a wizard, and I like that a lot.” 

Charalampos (Haris) Sampalis was well established in his career as a product manager at a telecommunications company in Greece. Yet, as someone who enjoys learning, he was on a mission to acquire more knowledge and develop new skills. That’s how he discovered MIT Open Learning resources.

With a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Crete and a master’s in innovation management and entrepreneurship from Hellenic Open University — the only online/distance learning university in Greece — Sampalis had developed expertise in product management and digital strategy. In 2016, he turned to MITx within MIT Open Learning and found a wealth of knowledge and a community of learners who broadened his horizons.

“I’m a person who likes to be constantly absorbing educational information,” Sampalis says. “I strongly believe that education shouldn’t be under boundaries, or strictly belong to specific periods in our lives. I started with computer science, and it grew from there, following programs on a regular basis that may help me expand my horizons and strengthen my skills.”

Sampalis built his life and career in Athens, which makes MIT Open Learning’s digital resources more valuable. He completed courses in computer science, including 6.00.1x (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python), 11.155x (Design Thinking for Leading and Learning) and Becoming an Entrepreneur back in 2016 and 2017 through MITx, which offers hundreds of high-quality massive open online courses adapted from the MIT classroom for learners worldwide. Sampalis has also enrolled in Management in Engineering: Strategy and Leadership and Management in Engineering: Accounting and Planning, which are part of the MITx MicroMasters Program in Principles of Manufacturing.

“I really appreciate the fact that an established institution like MIT was offering programs online,” he says. “I work full time and it’s not easy at this period of my life to leave everything behind and move to another continent for education — something I might have done at another time in my life. So, this is a model that allows me to access MIT resources and grow myself as part of a community that shares similar interests and seeks further collaborations, even locally where I live, something that makes the overall experience really unique.” 

In 2022, Sampalis applied for and completed the MIT Innovation Leadership Bootcamp. Part of MIT Open Learning, MIT Bootcamps are intensive and immersive educational programs for the global community of innovators, entrepreneurs, and changemakers. The Innovation Leadership Bootcamp was offered online, and Sampalis jumped at the opportunity. 

“I was in collaborative mode, having daily interactions with a diverse group of individuals scattered around the world, and that took place during an intensive 10-week period of my life that really taught me a lot,” says Sampalis. “Working with a global team was extremely engaging. It was a highly motivating, even transformative experience.”

MITx and MIT Bootcamps are both hands-on and interactive experiences offered by MIT Open Learning, which is exactly what appealed to Sampalis. One of the best parts, he says, is that community and collaborations with those he met through MIT continued even after the boot camp concluded. Participants remain in touch not only with their cohort, but with a broader community of over 1,800 other participants from around the world, and have access to continued coaching and mentorship.

Overall, the community of learners has been a highlight of Sampalis’ MIT Open Learning experience.

“What is so beneficial is not just that I get a certificate from MIT and access to a highly valuable repository of knowledge resources, but the fact that I have been exposed to the full umbrella of what Open Learning has to offer — and I share that with other learners,” he says. “I’m part of MIT now. I continue to learn for myself, and I also try to give back, by supporting Open Learning and sharing my story and resources.”

As a mechanical engineering and theater double major, senior Alayo Oloko often finds herself at the western end of MIT’s campus in Building W97, where the academic program in theater at MIT is based.

During her time as an actor, designer, and technical crew member in student-driven theater at MIT, Oloko has overseen the chaos of “tech week,” where design decisions and rehearsals come together on a pressure-cooker timeline. She calls theater a team sport: “If you mess something up or you drop the ball, it doesn’t just impact you. It impacts the entire production and the entire end product,” she recounts.

But just like team sports, theater is, at its heart, a kind of play, whether under the limelight, backstage, or in the classroom. “We’re always laughing during rehearsals or technical meetings because you’re always surrounded by a bunch of other creative people. And you’re bouncing ideas off each other as you’re all bonded together by a common goal,” says Oloko.

Designing for theater

In the theater world, a team of designers, makers, and actors often bring a writer’s script to the stage with the help of a director. Traditionally, design responsibilities in theater are taken on by different people — set, sound, lighting, and costume designers form the core of the design team. Just as in a sport, each team member is entrusted with bringing out their best while cooperating with the whole team.

Whether it’s a rendition of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” or a more contemporary script, each theater designer has an opportunity to contribute something unique: a design informed by their personal experience. “If you feel it personally, an audience will also feel it personally,” says Sara Brown, professional set designer, professor of theater at MIT, and a member of the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Faculty Advisory Council.

Theater designers can invoke their personal experiences to create worlds with “friction,” a metaphor for the emotional work of individuals needed to grapple with new ideas presented in an artistic piece. “It is a world that has friction that then the actors have to deal with, or a director has to manage, or an audience has to manage,” explains Brown.

This integration of personal experience in design proves critical for a cultural function of theater — to invite an audience to feel represented or empathize with different perspectives, and furthermore, to reflect the intricacies of real life.

However, digging into one’s personal experience can be challenging for young designers. As with children roughhousing or building sandcastles, play is an opportunity to experiment in a safe environment and build social and emotional skills, yet it is not effortless.

Play in practice — exploring sound

Although professional theater production is notoriously high-stakes in practice, subject to constraints such as strict timelines and budgets, the classroom setting, by contrast, allows students to set aside real-world concerns and better embrace the imaginative and expressive process of play.

“We call them plays for a reason. It's not only sort of a play on words,” says Christian Frederickson, sound designer and technical instructor in music and theater at MIT. “The process of learning it should be fun,” he adds.

As a sound designer, Frederickson creates audio cues and music to accompany a live performance, making decisions on where to place these cues in time, and when it’s better to let silence speak.

“Sound design for theater is not creating or not trying to duplicate reality. It’s looking for ways to help the storytelling in — at least for me — the most direct and elegant way possible, and in our contemporary world there’s a lot of noise. If we try to duplicate that in the theater, we get a mess. So it’s about refining and looking for the most direct way to tell a story or help the audience have an emotional experience,” he says.

The first lesson in Frederickson’s class involves getting to know one’s personal style. In his courses 21T.223 (Sound Design) and 21T.232 (Producing Podcasts), Frederickson introduces students to the fields through a “game” he calls Everything is an Instrument. “The reason I call it a ‘game’ is that I think it’s fun, and I think my students think it’s fun because there are no particular rules,” he says.

In the game, Frederickson and his students take a short recording of a “mundane everyday object” such as a metal water bottle or sheet of paper. After demonstrating the capabilities of Adobe Audition (a digital audio workstation), he lets students loose to manipulate the audio sample and begin finding their own styles.

“If there are 20 students in the class, we get 20 completely different results from the same sample material,” Frederickson says. “I can tell this student makes these really sparse, interesting, textural pieces, and then this person is always trying to turn their sample into something from musical theater.”

Trained as a musician, Frederickson considers his sound designs to have a musical quality, though he may be composing with the sound of helicopters and explosions instead of instruments. By playing the game, students tap into their personal interests and experience to inform their sound designs, influencing the play.

Responding and resonating with design

“[Theater design] is not just asking you to fit yourself to a task. It’s actually asking you to bring yourself to that task,” says Sara Brown. This, to Brown, sets theater design apart from other design philosophies. To unlock one’s personal experience, Brown asks designers to consider “first and foremost, how do you intersect with the material physically, personally?”

Like in Frederickson’s game Everything is an Instrument, Brown introduces her classes to theater design by way of playing with mundane materials. During one of the first in-class exercises for class 21T.220 (Set Design), students in small teams rummage through bins full of scrap paper, fabric, and matboard, prompted by an evocative word to guide their vision and hands.

Set designers work from scripts and references to develop a plan for the overall set — everything from the type of flooring to adding walls and platforms. One traditional method of communicating a set design is to create a physical model. Working with a scale model of W97’s black box theater space, students place their scrap materials into the model; evaluating their designs, these begin to take shape. Brown elaborates: “we start to see that when you make design decisions, you’re making design decisions in response to a reality.”

The unpretentious choice of materials and use of a prompt inspire set design students like rising seniors Verose Agbing and Alayo Oloko to make design choices without hesitation, thwarting the dreaded “blank-page anxiety” caused by overthinking. 

For Oloko, this “quick-and-dirty prototyping” is essential to see if something works. “If it does, that’s great. If it doesn’t, OK, it didn’t take too much time,” she says.

But Brown’s mention of “reality” is not to be confused with “real life.” In fact, Brown encourages students to shed any notions of real-life constraints. Also involved with student theater outside of the classroom, Oloko prompts: “imagine what you could do if you could go crazy and then figure out which parts of that work within it … In your initial design, if you’re limiting yourself by budget, you might overconstrain yourself without even realizing it.”

“My catchphrase in the class became ‘this is not OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] certified’ because … in the beginning, I was definitely stuck on that notion of being able to stick with real life,” says Agbing. Inspired by modern and experimental theater sets, Agbing recounts gradually letting go of these preconceptions, finding software an even more rewarding and flexible platform for theater design projects.

Set design students learn Vectorworks, an architecture modeling program, in conjunction with Twinmotion, a 3D visualization program, in a modern approach to theater design. “With the software, I was able to create this beautiful blend of … contrasting lighting and being able to manipulate that intensity was really important,” observes Agbing. 

How play connects us

While MIT Theater takes this playful approach to design, it doesn’t mean its objectives are only fun and games. “I don’t think that the stakes are lower in theater by any means,” says Frederickson. As an educator, he sees theater at MIT as a safe setting for students to “explore individual expression” and “develop design skills that you didn’t know that you needed or were going to use.”

As theater aims not to replicate reality, it is a chance to “play pretend” for both designers and audiences to consider difficult ideas at a distance. The immersion into a fictionalized world is an opportunity for audiences to feel represented, entertain new ideas, and cultivate empathy. For theater designers, the process of designing a performance allows for the exploration of multifaceted personal experiences which may be challenging or complex.

Echoing Frederickson’s sentiment, technical instructor and video designer Josh Higgason — who offers courses in Lighting Design (21T.221) and Interactive Design and Projection for Live Performance (21T.320) — finds that with his students, “there’s a lot of learning of how to have empathy, how to have connection, how to foster connection, and how to talk about difficult things when we first start.”

By the end of the term, equipped with the tools to thoughtfully express “big ideas and big emotions,” theater designers and audiences become members of a larger community more able to handle friction and bridge differences. Higgason reflects: “One of [theater’s] many purposes is to try and tell stories of people and individuals. But it also gets to stand in for these bigger, universal stories or these bigger, universal experiences.”

Computer graphics and geometry processing research provide the tools needed to simulate physical phenomena like fire and flames, aiding the creation of visual effects in video games and movies as well as the fabrication of complex geometric shapes using tools like 3D printing.

Under the hood, mathematical problems called partial differential equations (PDEs) model these natural processes. Among the many PDEs used in physics and computer graphics, a class called second-order parabolic PDEs explain how phenomena can become smooth over time. The most famous example in this class is the heat equation, which predicts how heat diffuses along a surface or in a volume over time.

Researchers in geometry processing have designed numerous algorithms to solve these problems on curved surfaces, but their methods often apply only to linear problems or to a single PDE. A more general approach by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) tackles a general class of these potentially nonlinear problems. 

In a paper recently published in the Transactions on Graphics journal and presented at the SIGGRAPH conference, they describe an algorithm that solves different nonlinear parabolic PDEs on triangle meshes by splitting them into three simpler equations that can be solved with techniques graphics researchers already have in their software toolkit. This framework can help better analyze shapes and model complex dynamical processes.

“We provide a recipe: If you want to numerically solve a second-order parabolic PDE, you can follow a set of three steps,” says lead author Leticia Mattos Da Silva SM ’23, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and CSAIL affiliate. “For each of the steps in this approach, you’re solving a simpler problem using simpler tools from geometry processing, but at the end, you get a solution to the more challenging second-order parabolic PDE.”

To accomplish this, Da Silva and her coauthors used Strang splitting, a technique that allows geometry processing researchers to break the PDE down into problems they know how to solve efficiently.

First, their algorithm advances a solution forward in time by solving the heat equation (also called the “diffusion equation”), which models how heat from a source spreads over a shape. Picture using a blow torch to warm up a metal plate — this equation describes how heat from that spot would diffuse over it. 
This step can be completed easily with linear algebra.

Now, imagine that the parabolic PDE has additional nonlinear behaviors that are not described by the spread of heat. This is where the second step of the algorithm comes in: it accounts for the nonlinear piece by solving a Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) equation, a first-order nonlinear PDE. 

While generic HJ equations can be hard to solve, Mattos Da Silva and coauthors prove that their splitting method applied to many important PDEs yields an HJ equation that can be solved via convex optimization algorithms. Convex optimization is a standard tool for which researchers in geometry processing already have efficient and reliable software. In the final step, the algorithm advances a solution forward in time using the heat equation again to advance the more complex second-order parabolic PDE forward in time.


Among other applications, the framework could help simulate fire and flames more efficiently. “There’s a huge pipeline that creates a video with flames being simulated, but at the heart of it is a PDE solver,” says Mattos Da Silva. For these pipelines, an essential step is solving the G-equation, a nonlinear parabolic PDE that models the front propagation of the flame and can be solved using the researchers’ framework.

The team’s algorithm can also solve the diffusion equation in the logarithmic domain, where it becomes nonlinear. Senior author Justin Solomon, associate professor of EECS and leader of the CSAIL Geometric Data Processing Group, previously developed a state-of-the-art technique for optimal transport that requires taking the logarithm of the result of heat diffusion. Mattos Da Silva’s framework provided more reliable computations by doing diffusion directly in the logarithmic domain. This enabled a more stable way to, for example, find a geometric notion of average among distributions on surface meshes like a model of a koala.

Even though their framework focuses on general, nonlinear problems, it can also be used to solve linear PDE. For instance, the method solves the Fokker-Planck equation, where heat diffuses in a linear way, but there are additional terms that drift in the same direction heat is spreading. In a straightforward application, the approach modeled how swirls would evolve over the surface of a triangulated sphere. The result resembles purple-and-brown latte art.

The researchers note that this project is a starting point for tackling the nonlinearity in other PDEs that appear in graphics and geometry processing head-on. For example, they focused on static surfaces but would like to apply their work to moving ones, too. Moreover, their framework solves problems involving a single parabolic PDE, but the team would also like to tackle problems involving coupled parabolic PDE. These types of problems arise in biology and chemistry, where the equation describing the evolution of each agent in a mixture, for example, is linked to the others’ equations.

Mattos Da Silva and Solomon wrote the paper with Oded Stein, assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. Their work was supported, in part, by an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Fellowship funded by Google, a MathWorks Fellowship, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center, Adobe Systems, and Google Research.

How do you measure the value of an economic policy? Of an aid organization’s programming? For Saeed Miganeh, who completed an MITx MicroMasters in Data, Economics, and Development Policy and is now enrolled in MIT’s master’s program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), these are key questions he is determined to answer.

“Enrolling at MIT fed my interest in investigating the political economy questions surrounding the development of African countries,” he says. “It boils down to promoting pro-poor, evidence-based policymaking in the developing world.”

Miganeh earned a bachelor of business administration from the University of Hargeisa and completed coursework in Open University Malaysia’s master of business administration program. Before enrolling at MIT full time, he spent 14 years as an accountant with the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. His work with the IOM fed his curiosity about intent and impact, particularly how political agendas can affect policy adoption, how safeguarding human rights strengthens peace and prevents conflict, how climate change adaptation policies affect the poor, and how promoting intra-African trade spurs economic growth in the continent.

“My journey to DEDP began when I earned a certificate in Monitoring and Evaluation offered by the International Training Center of the International Labour Organization,” he recalls. “Our course coach recommended taking MITx courses, which led me to the MicroMasters program.”

Saeed grew up and completed his early education in the self-declared Republic of Somaliland during the reconstruction period after a decade-long civil war with Somalia. He was inspired by his country’s development of a functioning democracy and economy after conflict. Miganeh’s work is all the more impressive for someone who has lived almost exclusively there — with the exception of four years as a child spent in Ethiopia due to the civil war in Somalia — and whose studies have taken place entirely in the republic.

“Africa is the new battleground for fighting global poverty in the 21st century,” he says.

Practices and progress toward measurable improvement

Before pursuing graduate study at MIT, Miganeh worked in youth development programs with the Somaliland National Youth Organization. “I was the coordinator for one of their youth networks that worked on health,” he says. “After completing my undergraduate study, I assumed the position of finance officer for the organization.”

Later during his tenure with IOM, Miganeh learned that, while the organization has a central evaluation function that evaluates projects and programs, Somaliland’s governmental institutions lacked the capacity to effectively evaluate public policies and programs effectively. His work with the IOM helped him discover the practice areas where he might benefit from partnering with others possessing expertise he’d need to make a difference. “During my work with IOM, I was involved in development projects’ administrative and accounting functions,” he remembers. “I was interested in knowing how projects were impacting beneficiaries’ lives.

Miganeh wants to dig deeper into understanding and answering developing African countries’ political economy questions, noting that “development projects can consume lots of resources from design through implementation.” Ensuring these programs’ effectiveness is crucial to maximizing their impact and societal benefit. “Every country needs to have the necessary human capital to undertake evidence-based policy design to avoid wasting resources,” he says.

He returned to Somaliland to complete a capstone project that will allow him to put his newly acquired skills and knowledge to work. The project is an important part of his master’s program. “I’m [working] with the Somaliland Ministry of Education & Science, assisting in institutionalizing evidence-based policymaking in the education sector,”  he says.

A unique vision to drive effective change

Miganeh is already planning to use the skills he’s acquiring at MIT to facilitate change at home. “I must discover and produce policy insights using my research and, with the guidance of the top academics and professionals at MIT and other institutions, translate them into effective policies that can make a demonstrable impact,” he says.

Miganeh reports that MITx’s MicroMasters and DEDP master’s programs help students develop the unique blend of skills — including the ability to leverage data-driven insights to design, implement, and evaluate public policies that improve societal outcomes — that can help them become effective agents of social change.

“My early enthusiasm for mathematics in high school and my later work in development organizations gave me the right combination to excel in the rigorous developmental economics coursework at MIT,” he says. “Once I’ve completed the program, I will establish a consultancy to advise government agencies, nonprofits, and the private sector’s corporate social responsibility departments on designing, implementing, and evaluating policies and programs.”

Miganeh lauded the faculty and students he encountered while continuing his studies. “I have developed professionally and personally,” he reports. He saved his highest praise for the Institute, however.

“Pursuing this master’s degree at MIT, where modern economics education has been reinvented and is home to faculty including Nobel laureates and other distinguished professors and scholars, was an enriching lifetime experience, personally and professionally,” he says. 

“Looking back on discussions of how to tackle the world’s development challenges is a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life.”

This summer, 350 participants came to MIT to dive into a question that is, so far, outpacing answers: How can education still create opportunities for all when digital literacy is no longer enough — a world in which students now need to have AI fluency?

The AI + Education Summit was hosted by the MIT RAISE Initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, the Mayor’s Office of the City of Boston, the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and more. Highlights included an onsite “Hack the Climate” hackathon, where teams of beginner and experienced MIT App Inventor users had a single day to develop an app for fighting climate change.

In opening remarks, RAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal emphasized what new goals for AI fluency look like. “Education is not just about learning facts,” Klopfer said. “Education is a whole developmental process. And we need to think about how we support teachers in being more effective. Teachers must be part of the AI conversation.” Abelson highlighted the empowerment aspect of computational action, namely its immediate impact, that “what’s different than in the decades of people teaching about computers [is] what kids can do right now.” And Breazeal, director of the RAISE Initiative, touched upon AI-supported learning, including the imperative to use technology like classroom robot companions as something supplementary to what students and teachers can do together, not as a replacement for one another. Or as Breazeal underlined in her talk: “We really want people to understand, in an appropriate way, how AI works and how to design it responsibly. We want to make sure that people have an informed voice of how AI should be integrated into society. And we want to empower all kinds of people around the world to be able to use AI, harness AI, to solve the important problems of their communities.”

The summit featured the invited winners of the Global AI Hackathon. Prizes were awarded for apps in two tracks: climate and sustainability, and health and wellness. Winning projects addressed issues like sign-language-to-audio translation, moving object detection for the vision impaired, empathy practice using interactions with AI characters, and personal health checks using tongue images. Attendees also participated in hands-on demos for MIT App Inventor, a “playground” for the Personal Robots Group’s social robots, and an educator professional development session on responsible AI.

By convening people of so many ages, professional backgrounds, and geographies, organizers were able to foreground a unique mix of ideas for participants to take back home. Conference papers included real-world case studies of implementing AI in school settings, such as extracurricular clubs, considerations for student data security, and large-scale experiments in the United Arab Emirates and India. And plenary speakers tackled funding AI in education, state government’s role in supporting its adoption, and — in the summit’s keynote speech by Microsoft’s principal director of AI and machine learning engineering Francesca Lazzeri — the opportunities and challenges of the use of generative AI in education. Lazzeri discussed the development of tool kits that enact safeguards around principles like fairness, security, and transparency. “I truly believe that learning generative AI is not just about computer science students,” Lazzeri said. “It’s about all of us.”

Trailblazing AI education from MIT

Critical to early AI education has been the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a longtime collaborator that helped MIT deploy computational action and project-based learning years before AI was even a widespread pedagogical challenge. A summit panel discussed the history of its CoolThink project, which brought such learning to grades 4-6 in 32 Hong Kong schools in an initial pilot and then met the ambitious goal of bringing it to over 200 Hong Kong schools. On the panel, CoolThink director Daniel Lai said that the trust, MIT, Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong did not want to add a burden to teachers and students of another curriculum outside of school. Instead, they wanted “to mainstream it into our educational system so that every child would have equal opportunity to access these skills and knowledge.”

MIT worked as a collaborator from CoolThink’s start in 2016. Professor and App Inventor founder Hal Abelson helped Lai get the project off the ground. Several summit attendees and former MIT research staff members were leaders in the project development. Educational technologist Josh Sheldon directed the MIT team’s work on the CoolThink curriculum and teacher professional development. Karen Lang, then App Inventor’s education and business development manager, was the main curriculum developer for the initial phase of CoolThink, writing the lessons and accompanying tutorials and worksheets for the three levels in the curriculum, with editing assistance from the Hong Kong education team. And Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led the development of the project’s research design and theoretical grounding. Among other key tasks, they ran the initial teacher training for the first two cohorts of Hong Kong teachers, consisting of sessions totaling 40 hours with about 40 teachers each.

The ethical demands of today’s AI “funhouse mirror”

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, delivered the closing keynote. He described the current state of AI as a “funhouse mirror” that “distorts the world around us” and framed it as yet another technology that has presented humans with ethical demands to find its positive, empowering uses that complement our intelligence but also to mitigate its risks. 

“One of the areas I’m most excited about personally,” Huttenlocher said, “is people learning from AI,” with AI discovering solutions that people had not yet come upon on their own. As so much of the summit demonstrated, AI and education is something that must happen in collaboration. “[AI] is not human intellect. This is not human judgment. This is something different.”

For the past decade, disordered rock salt has been studied as a potential breakthrough cathode material for use in lithium-ion batteries and a key to creating low-cost, high-energy storage for everything from cell phones to electric vehicles to renewable energy storage.

A new MIT study is making sure the material fulfills that promise.

Led by Ju Li, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, a team of researchers describe a new class of partially disordered rock salt cathode, integrated with polyanions — dubbed disordered rock salt-polyanionic spinel, or DRXPS — that delivers high energy density at high voltages with significantly improved cycling stability.

“There is typically a trade-off in cathode materials between energy density and cycling stability … and with this work we aim to push the envelope by designing new cathode chemistries,” says Yimeng Huang, a postdoc in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and first author of a paper describing the work published today in Nature Energy. “(This) material family has high energy density and good cycling stability because it integrates two major types of cathode materials, rock salt and polyanionic olivine, so it has the benefits of both.”

Importantly, Li adds, the new material family is primarily composed of manganese, an earth-abundant element that is significantly less expensive than elements like nickel and cobalt, which are typically used in cathodes today.

“Manganese is at least five times less expensive than nickel, and about 30 times less expensive than cobalt,” Li says. “Manganese is also the one of the keys to achieving higher energy densities, so having that material be much more earth-abundant is a tremendous advantage.”

A possible path to renewable energy infrastructure

That advantage will be particularly critical, Li and his co-authors wrote, as the world looks to build the renewable energy infrastructure needed for a low- or no-carbon future.

Batteries are a particularly important part of that picture, not only for their potential to decarbonize transportation with electric cars, buses, and trucks, but also because they will be essential to addressing the intermittency issues of wind and solar power by storing excess energy, then feeding it back into the grid at night or on calm days, when renewable generation drops.

Given the high cost and relative rarity of materials like cobalt and nickel, they wrote, efforts to rapidly scale up electric storage capacity would likely lead to extreme cost spikes and potentially significant materials shortages.

“If we want to have true electrification of energy generation, transportation, and more, we need earth-abundant batteries to store intermittent photovoltaic and wind power,” Li says. “I think this is one of the steps toward that dream.”

That sentiment was shared by Gerbrand Ceder, the Samsung Distinguished Chair in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Research and a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Lithium-ion batteries are a critical part of the clean energy transition,” Ceder says. “Their continued growth and price decrease depends on the development of inexpensive, high-performance cathode materials made from earth-abundant materials, as presented in this work.”

Overcoming obstacles in existing materials

The new study addresses one of the major challenges facing disordered rock salt cathodes — oxygen mobility.

While the materials have long been recognized for offering very high capacity — as much as 350 milliampere-hour per gram — as compared to traditional cathode materials, which typically have capacities of between 190 and 200 milliampere-hour per gram, it is not very stable.

The high capacity is contributed partially by oxygen redox, which is activated when the cathode is charged to high voltages. But when that happens, oxygen becomes mobile, leading to reactions with the electrolyte and degradation of the material, eventually leaving it effectively useless after prolonged cycling.

To overcome those challenges, Huang added another element — phosphorus — that essentially acts like a glue, holding the oxygen in place to mitigate degradation.

“The main innovation here, and the theory behind the design, is that Yimeng added just the right amount of phosphorus, formed so-called polyanions with its neighboring oxygen atoms, into a cation-deficient rock salt structure that can pin them down,” Li explains. “That allows us to basically stop the percolating oxygen transport due to strong covalent bonding between phosphorus and oxygen … meaning we can both utilize the oxygen-contributed capacity, but also have good stability as well.”

That ability to charge batteries to higher voltages, Li says, is crucial because it allows for simpler systems to manage the energy they store.

“You can say the quality of the energy is higher,” he says. “The higher the voltage per cell, then the less you need to connect them in series in the battery pack, and the simpler the battery management system.”

Pointing the way to future studies

While the cathode material described in the study could have a transformative impact on lithium-ion battery technology, there are still several avenues for study going forward.

Among the areas for future study, Huang says, are efforts to explore new ways to fabricate the material, particularly for morphology and scalability considerations.

“Right now, we are using high-energy ball milling for mechanochemical synthesis, and … the resulting morphology is non-uniform and has small average particle size (about 150 nanometers). This method is also not quite scalable,” he says. “We are trying to achieve a more uniform morphology with larger particle sizes using some alternate synthesis methods, which would allow us to increase the volumetric energy density of the material and may allow us to explore some coating methods … which could further improve the battery performance. The future methods, of course, should be industrially scalable.”

In addition, he says, the disordered rock salt material by itself is not a particularly good conductor, so significant amounts of carbon — as much as 20 weight percent of the cathode paste — were added to boost its conductivity. If the team can reduce the carbon content in the electrode without sacrificing performance, there will be higher active material content in a battery, leading to an increased practical energy density.

“In this paper, we just used Super P, a typical conductive carbon consisting of nanospheres, but they’re not very efficient,” Huang says. “We are now exploring using carbon nanotubes, which could reduce the carbon content to just 1 or 2 weight percent, which could allow us to dramatically increase the amount of the active cathode material.”

Aside from decreasing carbon content, making thick electrodes, he adds, is yet another way to increase the practical energy density of the battery. This is another area of research that the team is working on.

“This is only the beginning of DRXPS research, since we only explored a few chemistries within its vast compositional space,” he continues. “We can play around with different ratios of lithium, manganese, phosphorus, and oxygen, and with various combinations of other polyanion-forming elements such as boron, silicon, and sulfur.”

With optimized compositions, more scalable synthesis methods, better morphology that allows for uniform coatings, lower carbon content, and thicker electrodes, he says, the DRXPS cathode family is very promising in applications of electric vehicles and grid storage, and possibly even in consumer electronics, where the volumetric energy density is very important.

This work was supported with funding from the Honda Research Institute USA Inc. and the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and used resources of the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. The work was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano’s facilities. 

Amulya Aluru ’23, MEng ’24, will head to the University of California at Berkeley for a PhD in molecular and cell biology PhD this fall. Aluru knows her undergraduate 6-7 major and MEng program, where she worked on a computational project in a biology lab, have prepared her for the next step of her academic journey.

“I’m a lot more comfortable with the unknown in terms of research — and also life,” she says. “While I’ve enjoyed what I’ve done so far, I think it’s equally valuable to try and explore new topics. I feel like there’s still a lot more for me to learn in biology.”

Unlike many of her peers, however, Aluru won’t reach the San Francisco Bay Area by car, plane, or train. She will arrive by bike — a journey she began in Washington just a few days after receiving her master’s degree.

Showing that science is accessible

Spokes is an MIT-based nonprofit that each year sends students on a transcontinental bike ride. Aluru worked for months with seven fellow MIT students on logistics and planning. Since setting out, the team has bonded over their love of memes and cycling-themed nicknames: Hank “Handlebar Hank” Stennes, Clelia “Climbing Cleo” Lacarriere, Varsha “Vroom Vroom Varsha” Sandadi, Rebecca “Railtrail Rebecca” Lizarde, JD “JDerailleur Hanger” Hagood, Sophia “Speedy Sophia” Wang, Amulya “Aero Amulya” Aluru, and Jessica “Joyride Jess” Xu. The support minivan, carrying food, luggage, and occasionally injured or sick cyclists, even earned its own nickname: “Chrissy”, short for Chrysler Pacifica.

“I really wanted to do something to challenge myself, but not in a strictly academic sense,” Aluru says of her decision to join the team and bike more than 3,000 miles this summer.

The Spokes team is not biking across the country solely to accomplish such a feat. Throughout their journey, they’ll be offering a variety of science demonstrations, including making concrete with Rice Krispies, demonstrating the physics of sound, using 3D printers, and, in Aluru’s case, extracting DNA from strawberries.   

“We’re going to be in a lot of really different learning environments,” she says. “I hope to demonstrate that science can be accessible, even if you don’t have a lab at your disposal.”

These demonstrations have been held in venues such as a D.C. jail, a space camp, and libraries and youth centers across the country; their learning festivals were even featured on a local news channel in Kentucky.

Some derailments

The team was beset with challenges from the first day they started their journey. Aluru’s first day on the road involved driving to every bike shop and REI store in the D.C. metro area to purchase bike computers for navigation because the ones the team had already purchased would only display maps of Europe.

Four days in and four Chrysler Pacificas later — the first was unsafe due to bald tires, the second made a weird sound as they pulled out of the rental lot, and the third’s gas pedal stopped working over 50 miles away from the nearest rental agency — the team was back together again in Waynesboro, Virginia, for the first time since they’d set out.

Since then, they’ve had run-ins with local fauna — including mean dogs and a meaner turtle — attempted to repair a tubeless bike that was not, in fact, tubeless, and slept in Chrissy the minivan after their tents got soaked and blew away.

Although it hasn’t all been smooth riding, the team has made time for fun. They’ve perfected the art of eating a Clif bar while on two wheels, played around on monkey bars in Colorado, met up with Stanford Spokes, enjoyed pounds of ice cream, and downed gallons of lattes.

The team prioritized routes on bike trails, rather than highways, as much as possible. Their teaching activities are scheduled between visits to National Parks like Tahoe, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, and touring and hiking places like Breaks Interstate Park, Mammoth Cave, and the Collegiate Peaks.

Aluru says she’s excited to see parts of the country she’s never visited before, and experience the terrain under her own power — except for breaks when it’s her turn to drive Chrissy.

Rolling with the ups and downs

Aluru was only a few weeks into her first Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project in the late professor Angelika Amon’s lab when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, quickly transforming her wet lab project into a computational one. David Waterman, her postdoc mentor in the Amon Lab, was trained as a biologist, not a computational scientist. Luckily, Aluru had just taken two computer science classes.

“I was able to have a big hand in formulating my project and bouncing ideas off of him,” she recalls. “That helped me think about scientific questions, which I was able to apply when I came back to campus and started doing wet lab research again.”

When Aluru returned to campus, she began work in the Page Lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She continued working there for the rest of her time at MIT, first as an undergraduate student and then as an MEng student.

The Page Lab’s work primarily concerns sex differences and how those differences play out in genetics, development, and disease — and the Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, which oversees the MEng program, allows students to pursue computational projects across disciplines, no matter the department.

For her MEng work, Aluru looked at sex differences in human height, a continuation of a paper that the Page Lab published in 2019. Height is an easily observable human trait and, from previous research, is known to be sex-biased across at least five species. Genes that have sex-biased expression patterns, or expression patterns that are higher or lower in males compared to females, may play a role in establishing or maintaining these sex differences. Through statistical genetics, Aluru replicated the findings of the earlier paper and expanded them using newly published datasets.

“Amulya has had an amazing journey in our department,” says David Page, professor of biology and core member of the Whitehead Institute. “There is simply no stopping her insatiable curiosity and zest for life.”

Working with the lab as a graduate student came with more day-to-day responsibility and independence than when she was an undergrad.

“It was a shift I quite appreciated,” Aluru says. “At times it was challenging, but I think it was a good challenge: learning how to structure my research on my own, while still getting a lot of support from lab members and my PI [principal investigator].”

Gearing up for the future

Since departing MIT, Aluru and the rest of the Spokes team have spent their nights camping, sleeping in churches, and staying with hosts. They enjoyed the longest day of the year in a surprisingly “Brooklyn chic” house, spent a lazy afternoon on a river, and pinky-promised to be in each other’s weddings. The team has also been hosted by, met up with, and run into MIT alums as they’ve crossed the country.

As Aluru looks to the future, she admits she’s not exactly sure what she’ll study — but when she reaches the West Coast, she knows she’s not leaving what she’s built through MIT far behind.

“There’s going to be a small MIT community even there — a lot of my friends are in San Francisco, and a few people I know are also going to be at Berkeley,” she says. “I have formed a community at MIT that I know will support me in all my future endeavors.”

Pursuing an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program project (or two or three) is a quintessential part of the academic experience at MIT. The program, known as UROP, allows students to be “shoulder to shoulder” with faculty, graduate students, and affiliated researchers in MIT’s labs.

Given the plethora of research options and disciplines — everything from getting a crash course in advancing quantum computing to developing neuroprosthetics — it’s no surprise that over 90 percent of undergraduates end up doing a UROP by the time they graduate.

The half-century-old program continues to evolve, adapting to student interest. Consider the experience of rising senior Alexander Edwards, a nuclear and mechanical engineering student and cadet in the Army ROTC program. The Alabama native leveraged his military training thanks to a new fellowship with the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), an endeavor in which MIT, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and industry partners work together to develop technologies that advance the protection, survivability, and mission capabilities of the U.S. Armed Forces. That fellowship is thanks to a gift of alumnus and ROTC graduate Aneal Krishnan ’02, who commissioned as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. Here, Edwards and Krishnan describe the unique UROP experience and offer advice for future students.

Q: What was special about having a UROP focused on the challenges that a soldier in the field might face, such as the decades-long challenges of managing excess weight while also having proper ballistic protection?

Edwards: Having a UROP specifically designed for MIT ROTC cadets has allowed me to grow my technical skills while also helping contribute to national defense. The ISN works on an array of different interesting research projects related to defense technologies in any and every STEM discipline.

Team members collaborate on basic research to create new materials, devices, processes, and systems, and on applied research to transition promising results toward practical products useful to the war fighter. U.S. Army members at the ISN also give guidance on soldier protection and survivability needs and evaluate the relevance of research proposed to address these needs.

These collaborations help identify dual-use applications for ISN-derived technologies for firefighters, police officers, other first responders, and the civilian community at large.

Krishnan: The ISN was founded at MIT in 2002, and since its founding, the ISN’s research has been the genesis of over 140 patents, more than 50 startups, and dozens of major transitions of fieldable products. Through the MIT ROTC/ISN fellowship, the ISN benefits from the work of exceptional science and engineering students from MIT, who will also be future military leaders and can bring a real-world perspective to their work. The ROTC cadets benefit by pursuing research as part of their degree in areas in which they are passionate, and that will benefit them in their endeavors after graduation. An overarching success of this fellowship is that there is now a connection between ROTC and MIT’s DoD labs that did not exist in my time as an undergraduate. As a tangible success in this regard, in March 2024, Lt. General Maria Barrett, the commanding general of U.S. Army Cyber Command, conducted a visit at MIT coordinated by both ROTC and the ISN, further elevating the profile of the Institute amongst the DoD top brass.

Q: What was your specific project? 

Edwards: My project for the past year has been related to calculating the losses on a radio-photovoltaic thermo-nuclide generator (RTG), also known as a nuclear battery.

My classmate, fellow Army ROTC cadet and fellowship recipient rising junior William Cruz, worked with nanocomputing and piezoelectric fibers to create heartbeat-sensing clothing. He and I can attest that both projects have been incredibly fulfilling, both personally and professionally.

Alongside the UROPs, Mr. Krishnan took us on a day trip in January to Washington D.C., where we were treated to a host of amazing networking opportunities at an array of organizations that seek to transition innovation out of the lab and into the front lines such as Silicon Valley Defense Group, JP Morgan, Peraton, and from In-Q-Tel, the global, not-for-profit strategic investor for the U.S. national security community and America's allies, hosted by fellow MIT alumnus David LoBosco ’02.

Q: What lessons or takeaways did you gain from this experience? What advice might you share with other students?

Edwards: My main takeaways from all these meetings were, first, the importance of proper communication between the private sector and the government, something that has been lacking of late, and secondly, how I may be able to apply my technical background to consulting, investment, or many other fields.

Overall, I would recommend this program to future MIT ROTC cadets, and both Cadet Cruz and I are exceedingly grateful to Mr. Krishnan and the ISN for the opportunity.

Krishnan: Cadets Edwards and Cruz will now be able to share their experiences with the next class of prospective cadet researchers, thereby increasing the fellowship’s reach and impact. Future initiatives are to expand the fellowship to MIT’s Air Force and Navy ROTC programs, schedule more visits of senior military leaders to both ROTC and ISN, and connect fellowship recipients with ISN startups for career opportunities. And for my part, I’m incredibly fortunate to have met such outstanding Americans as cadets Edwards and Cruz. I’m excited to see where life takes them and hope to be a mentor along the way.

Duane Boning ’84, SM ’86, PhD ’91 has been named the next MIT vice provost for international activities (VPIA), effective Sept. 1. Boning, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, succeeds Japan Steel Industry Professor Richard Lester, who has served as VPIA since 2015.

The VPIA provides intellectual leadership, guidance, and oversight of MIT’s international policies and engagements. In this role, Boning will conduct strategic reviews of the portfolio of international activities, advise the administration on global strategic priorities, and work with academic unit leaders and researchers to develop major new global programs and projects. Boning will also help coordinate faculty and administrative reviews of certain international projects to identify and manage U.S. national security, human rights, and economic and other risks.

“Duane has an exceptional record of accomplishment and will provide the forward-looking and collaborative leadership needed to guide the Institute’s international engagements and policies,” says Provost Cynthia Barnhart. “I am thrilled to welcome him to the role.”

Boning’s ties to MIT are long and lasting, first receiving his SB, SM and PhD degrees in EECS at the Institute, in 1984, 1986 and 1991, respectively. His tenure includes several campus leadership positions, including as associate department head of EECS from 2004 to 2011, and associate chair of the faculty from 2019 to 2021. He is the associate director for computation and CAD for the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, where he leads the MTL Statistical Metrology Group.

In 2016, Boning became the engineering faculty co-director of the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program. With LGO Sloan faculty co-director Retsef Levi, Boning led the formation of MIT’s Machine Intelligence for Manufacturing & Operations (MIMO), which extends LGO activities in machine intelligence through additional industrial research projects, seminars, and workshops.

His experiences as a researcher and an educator have helped him appreciate the benefits of MIT’s international collaboration efforts, Boning says. “Taking on the VPIA role is about me wanting to continue and amplify that appreciation into the future, where I think it’s going to become even more important for MIT to remain and be engaged in the world.”

Among his previous leadership roles in international collaborations, Boning served as faculty director of the MIT/Masdar Institute Cooperative Program from 2011 to 2018, and director/faculty lead of the MIT Skoltech Initiative from 2011 to 2013.

Boning says the office of the VPIA can act as a driver and initiator of international engagement, but he looks forward to being a “a facilitator or convener, a coalescing point to find out where there are international opportunities and to bring people to them.”

“Finding ways to support higher MIT institutional priorities through international activities will be important,” he adds, citing as an example of these priorities the Climate Project at MIT launched by President Sally Kornbluth in 2023. “We will be puzzling out how our international components can best contribute to that and other initiatives.”

Lester will step into the role of interim vice president of climate (VPC), reporting to Kornbluth, while the search for a permanent VPC continues. Lester expects to complete his interim role and return to his MIT research activities at the end of the calendar year.

Formative experiences

Boning’s participation in the Cambridge-MIT Institute was one of his first experiences in international research and education. “It was eye-opening, seeing, ‘oh, you mean they don’t have weekly problem sets here?’” he jokes. “It showed me very different approaches to education that can also work, and how I might try some of those ideas in my own context.”

He looks back on the Cambridge experience and later work in manufacturing research with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology “with fondness in my heart,” he says. “It enabled me to see how international activities can benefit my own research and the research of my colleagues around me.”

His leadership in larger programs such as LGO and the MIT/Masdar program taught him the importance of creating and recruiting for MIT’s international collaborations, “by finding appropriate ways to connect with the passions of MIT faculty,” Boning says.

Boning says he will also draw on his experiences in departmental and faculty-level governance to guide him in his new role. “I recognize how broad MIT is and how widespread the different practices and cultures are in different schools and departments and programs across MIT,” he explains. “It’s given me a broader appreciation of faculty, staff, administration — everybody across all corners of the Institute and how they contribute to MIT’s mission.”

Future goals

Barnhart praised Lester, the outgoing VPIA, saying that “Richard’s body of work as vice provost for international activities is impressive and impactful. He has applied his commendable leadership skills, sharp intellect, and broad vision to transforming the ways MIT engages and collaborates with partners across the globe.”

She noted that Lester had expanded the reach of MIT’s research and education missions through numerous international collaborations, especially in Africa and Asia. As convenor and co-chair of the MIT China Strategy Group, Lester led the preparation and implementation of an influential November 2022 report on how MIT should approach its interactions and collaborations with China.

Boning cites the China report as an excellent example of how the VPIA can identify best practices and address head-on the values and complexities of international collaboration. “We have to live up to the reputation of the mission of MIT in intellectual development and freedom, while also recognizing that there are risks that need to be managed and choices that need to be made,” he says.

Boning’s field of expertise — semiconductor and photonics manufacturing and design — has become a topic of intense interest and attention in innovation and economic circles, and he intends to stay engaged fully in research as a result. As VPIA, he may have to step back from some of his teaching, however, “and that is the piece I will miss the most. I will miss any semester when I am not in the classroom with students,” he says.

“But I’m curious about what the future is going to bring — boundless new opportunities, new technologies, AI — and how MIT can best facilitate the wise application of these for the world’s problems,” Boning adds. “I’m looking forward to lots of conversations with faculty colleagues and the whole community around what MIT can be doing, what we should be doing, and how we can best do it to support MIT’s mission through international activities.”

Before completing her undergraduate studies, Sophie Hartley, a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, had an epiphany that was years in the making.

“The classes I took in my last undergraduate semester changed my career goals, but it started with my grandfather,” she says when asked about what led her to science writing. She’d been studying comparative human development at the University of Chicago, which Hartley describes as “a combination of psychology and anthropology,” when she took courses in environmental writing and digital science communications.

“What if my life could be about learning more of life’s intricacies?” she thought.

Hartley’s grandfather introduced her to photography when she was younger, which helped her develop an appreciation for the natural world. Each summer, they would explore tide pools, overgrown forests, and his sprawling backyard. He gave her a camera and encouraged her to take pictures of anything interesting.

“Photography was a door into science journalism,” she notes. “It lets you capture the raw beauty of a moment and return to it later.”

Lasting impact through storytelling

Hartley spent time in Wisconsin and Vermont while growing up. That’s when she noticed a divide between rural communities and urban spaces. She wants to tell stories about communities that are less likely to be covered, and “connect them to people in cities who might not otherwise understand what’s happening and why.”

People have important roles to play in arresting climate change impacts, improving land management practices and policies, and taking better care of our natural resources, according to Hartley. Challenges related to conservation, land management, and farming affect us all, which is why she believes effective science writing is so important.

“We’re way more connected than we believe or understand,” Hartley says. “Climate change is creating problems throughout the entire agricultural supply chain.”

For her news writing course, Hartley wrote a story about how flooding in Vermont led to hay shortages, which impacted comestibles as diverse as goat cheese and beef. “When the hay can’t dry, it’s ruined,” she says. “That means cows and goats aren’t eating, which means they can’t produce our beef, milk, and cheese.”

Ultimately, Hartley believes her work can build compassion for others while also educating people about how everything we do affects nature and one another.

“The connective tissues between humans persist,” she said. “People who live in cities aren’t exempt from rural concerns.”

Creating connections with science writing

During her year-long study in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, Hartley is also busy producing reporting for major news outlets.

Earlier this year, Hartley authored a piece for Ars Technica that explored ongoing efforts to develop technology aimed at preventing car collisions with kangaroos. As Hartley reported, given the unique and unpredictable behavior of kangaroos, vehicle animal detection systems have proven ineffective. That’s forced Australian communities to develop alternative solutions, such as virtual fencing, to keep kangaroos away from the roads.

In June, Hartley co-produced a story for GBH News with Hannah Richter, a fellow student in the science writing program. They reported on how and why officials at a new Peabody power plant are backtracking on an earlier pledge to run the facility on clean fuels.

The story was a collaboration between GBH News and the investigative journalism class in the science writing program. Hartley recalls a wonderful experience working with Richter. “We were able to lean on each other’s strengths and learn from each other,” she says. “The piece took a long time to report and write, and it was helpful to have a friend and colleague to continuously motivate me when we would pick it back up after a while.”

Co-reporting can also help evenly divide what can sometimes become a massive workload, particularly with deeply, well-researched pieces like the Peabody story. “When there is so much research to do, it’s helpful to have another person to divvy up the work,” she continued. “It felt like everything was stronger and better, from the writing to the fact-checking, because we had two eyes on it during the reporting process.”

Hartley’s favorite piece in 2024 focused on beech leaf disease, a deadly pathogen devastating North American forests. Her story, which was later published in The Boston Globe Magazine, followed a team of four researchers racing to discover how the disease works. Beech leaf disease kills swiftly and en masse, leaving space for invasive species to thrive on forest floors. Her interest in land management and natural resources shines through in much of her work.

Local news organizations are an endangered species as newsrooms across America shed staff and increasingly rely on aggregated news accounts from larger organizations. What can be lost, however, are opportunities to tell small-scale stories with potentially large-scale impacts. “Small and rural accountability stories are being told less and less,” Hartley notes. “I think it’s important that communities are aware of what is happening around them, especially if it impacts them.”

For many decades, nuclear fusion power has been viewed as the ultimate energy source. A fusion power plant could generate carbon-free energy at a scale needed to address climate change. And it could be fueled by deuterium recovered from an essentially endless source — seawater.

Decades of work and billions of dollars in research funding have yielded many advances, but challenges remain. To Ju Li, the TEPCO Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, there are still two big challenges. The first is to build a fusion power plant that generates more energy than is put into it; in other words, it produces a net output of power. Researchers worldwide are making progress toward meeting that goal.

The second challenge that Li cites sounds straightforward: “How do we get the heat out?” But understanding the problem and finding a solution are both far from obvious.

Research in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) includes development and testing of advanced materials that may help address those challenges, as well as many other challenges of the energy transition. MITEI has multiple corporate members that have been supporting MIT’s efforts to advance technologies required to harness fusion energy.

The problem: An abundance of helium, a destructive force

Key to a fusion reactor is a superheated plasma — an ionized gas — that’s reacting inside a vacuum vessel. As light atoms in the plasma combine to form heavier ones, they release fast neutrons with high kinetic energy that shoot through the surrounding vacuum vessel into a coolant. During this process, those fast neutrons gradually lose their energy by causing radiation damage and generating heat. The heat that’s transferred to the coolant is eventually used to raise steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

The problem is finding a material for the vacuum vessel that remains strong enough to keep the reacting plasma and the coolant apart, while allowing the fast neutrons to pass through to the coolant. If one considers only the damage due to neutrons knocking atoms out of position in the metal structure, the vacuum vessel should last a full decade. However, depending on what materials are used in the fabrication of the vacuum vessel, some projections indicate that the vacuum vessel will last only six to 12 months. Why is that? Today’s nuclear fission reactors also generate neutrons, and those reactors last far longer than a year.

The difference is that fusion neutrons possess much higher kinetic energy than fission neutrons do, and as they penetrate the vacuum vessel walls, some of them interact with the nuclei of atoms in the structural material, giving off particles that rapidly turn into helium atoms. The result is hundreds of times more helium atoms than are present in a fission reactor. Those helium atoms look for somewhere to land — a place with low “embedding energy,” a measure that indicates how much energy it takes for a helium atom to be absorbed. As Li explains, “The helium atoms like to go to places with low helium embedding energy.” And in the metals used in fusion vacuum vessels, there are places with relatively low helium embedding energy — namely, naturally occurring openings called grain boundaries.

Metals are made up of individual grains inside which atoms are lined up in an orderly fashion. Where the grains come together there are gaps where the atoms don’t line up as well. That open space has relatively low helium embedding energy, so the helium atoms congregate there. Worse still, helium atoms have a repellent interaction with other atoms, so the helium atoms basically push open the grain boundary. Over time, the opening grows into a continuous crack, and the vacuum vessel breaks.

That congregation of helium atoms explains why the structure fails much sooner than expected based just on the number of helium atoms that are present. Li offers an analogy to illustrate. “Babylon is a city of a million people. But the claim is that 100 bad persons can destroy the whole city — if all those bad persons work at the city hall.” The solution? Give those bad persons other, more attractive places to go, ideally in their own villages.

To Li, the problem and possible solution are the same in a fusion reactor. If many helium atoms go to the grain boundary at once, they can destroy the metal wall. The solution? Add a small amount of a material that has a helium embedding energy even lower than that of the grain boundary. And over the past two years, Li and his team have demonstrated — both theoretically and experimentally — that their diversionary tactic works. By adding nanoscale particles of a carefully selected second material to the metal wall, they’ve found they can keep the helium atoms that form from congregating in the structurally vulnerable grain boundaries in the metal.

Looking for helium-absorbing compounds

To test their idea, So Yeon Kim ScD ’23 of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Haowei Xu PhD ’23 of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering acquired a sample composed of two materials, or “phases,” one with a lower helium embedding energy than the other. They and their collaborators then implanted helium ions into the sample at a temperature similar to that in a fusion reactor and watched as bubbles of helium formed. Transmission electron microscope images confirmed that the helium bubbles occurred predominantly in the phase with the lower helium embedding energy. As Li notes, “All the damage is in that phase — evidence that it protected the phase with the higher embedding energy.”

Having confirmed their approach, the researchers were ready to search for helium-absorbing compounds that would work well with iron, which is often the principal metal in vacuum vessel walls. “But calculating helium embedding energy for all sorts of different materials would be computationally demanding and expensive,” says Kim. “We wanted to find a metric that is easy to compute and a reliable indicator of helium embedding energy.”

They found such a metric: the “atomic-scale free volume,” which is basically the maximum size of the internal vacant space available for helium atoms to potentially settle. “This is just the radius of the largest sphere that can fit into a given crystal structure,” explains Kim. “It is a simple calculation.” Examination of a series of possible helium-absorbing ceramic materials confirmed that atomic free volume correlates well with helium embedding energy. Moreover, many of the ceramics they investigated have higher free volume, thus lower embedding energy, than the grain boundaries do.

However, in order to identify options for the nuclear fusion application, the screening needed to include some other factors. For example, in addition to the atomic free volume, a good second phase must be mechanically robust (able to sustain a load); it must not get very radioactive with neutron exposure; and it must be compatible — but not too cozy — with the surrounding metal, so it disperses well but does not dissolve into the metal. “We want to disperse the ceramic phase uniformly in the bulk metal to ensure that all grain boundary regions are close to the dispersed ceramic phase so it can provide protection to those regions,” says Li. “The two phases need to coexist, so the ceramic won’t either clump together or totally dissolve in the iron.”

Using their analytical tools, Kim and Xu examined about 50,000 compounds and identified 750 potential candidates. Of those, a good option for inclusion in a vacuum vessel wall made mainly of iron was iron silicate.

Experimental testing

The researchers were ready to examine samples in the lab. To make the composite material for proof-of-concept demonstrations, Kim and collaborators dispersed nanoscale particles of iron silicate into iron and implanted helium into that composite material. She took X-ray diffraction (XRD) images before and after implanting the helium and also computed the XRD patterns. The ratio between the implanted helium and the dispersed iron silicate was carefully controlled to allow a direct comparison between the experimental and computed XRD patterns. The measured XRD intensity changed with the helium implantation exactly as the calculations had predicted. “That agreement confirms that atomic helium is being stored within the bulk lattice of the iron silicate,” says Kim.

To follow up, Kim directly counted the number of helium bubbles in the composite. In iron samples without the iron silicate added, grain boundaries were flanked by many helium bubbles. In contrast, in the iron samples with the iron silicate ceramic phase added, helium bubbles were spread throughout the material, with many fewer occurring along the grain boundaries. Thus, the iron silicate had provided sites with low helium-embedding energy that lured the helium atoms away from the grain boundaries, protecting those vulnerable openings and preventing cracks from opening up and causing the vacuum vessel to fail catastrophically.

The researchers conclude that adding just 1 percent (by volume) of iron silicate to the iron walls of the vacuum vessel will cut the number of helium bubbles in half and also reduce their diameter by 20 percent — “and having a lot of small bubbles is OK if they’re not in the grain boundaries,” explains Li.

Next steps

Thus far, Li and his team have gone from computational studies of the problem and a possible solution to experimental demonstrations that confirm their approach. And they’re well on their way to commercial fabrication of components. “We’ve made powders that are compatible with existing commercial 3D printers and are preloaded with helium-absorbing ceramics,” says Li. The helium-absorbing nanoparticles are well dispersed and should provide sufficient helium uptake to protect the vulnerable grain boundaries in the structural metals of the vessel walls. While Li confirms that there’s more scientific and engineering work to be done, he, along with Alexander O'Brien PhD ’23 of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Kang Pyo So, a former postdoc in the same department, have already developed a startup company that’s ready to 3D print structural materials that can meet all the challenges faced by the vacuum vessel inside a fusion reactor.

This research was supported by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative. Additional support was provided by a Kwajeong Scholarship; the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Idaho National Laboratory; U.S. DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Creative Materials Discovery Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea.

The following announcement was released jointly by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the National Strategic Research Institute.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI) at the University of Nebraska (NU), a university-affiliated research center designated by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), have established a joint student research program.

The goal is to bring together the scientific expertise, cutting-edge capabilities, and student capacity of NU and MIT for critical issues within global health and agricultural security, aiming to foster solutions to detect and neutralize emerging biological threats.

"We are excited to combine forces with NSRI to develop critical biotechnologies that will enhance national security," says Catherine Cabrera, who leads Lincoln Laboratory's Biological and Chemical Technologies Group. "This partnership underscores our shared commitment to safeguarding America through scientific leadership."

"In an era of rapidly evolving dangers, we must stay ahead of the curve through continuous innovation," says David Roberts, the NSRI research director for special programs. "This partnership harnesses a unique combination of strengths from two leading academic institutions and two research institutes to create new paradigms in biological defense."

With funding from a DoD agency, the collaborators conducted a pilot of the program embedded within the MIT Engineering Systems Design and Development II course. The students’ challenge was to develop methods to rapidly screen for novel biosynthetic capabilities. Currently, such methods are limited by the lack of standardized, high-throughput devices that can support the culture of traditionally “uncultivable” microorganisms, which severely limits the cell diversity that could be probed for bioprospecting or biomanufacturing applications.

Led by Todd Thorsen, a technical staff member in the Biological and Chemical Technologies Group at Lincoln Laboratory, MIT students created the project, "Bioprospecting Experimentation Apparatus with Variable Environmental Regulation," which focused on developing simple high-throughput tools with integrated environmental control systems to expand the environmental testing envelope.

"This program, which emphasizes both engineering design and prototyping, challenges students to take what they learned in the classroom in their past undergraduate and graduate studies, and apply it to a real-world problem," Thorsen says. "For many students, the hands-on nature of this course is an exciting opportunity to test their abilities to prioritize what is important in developing products that are both functional and easy to use. What I found most impressive was the students’ ability to apply their collective knowledge to the design and prototyping of the biomedical devices, emphasizing their diverse backgrounds in areas like fluid mechanicals, controls, and solid mechanics."

In total, 12 mechanical engineering students contributed to the program, producing and validating a gas gradient manifold prototype and a droplet-dispensing manifold that has the potential to generate arbitrary pH gradients in industry-standard 96-well plates used for biomedical research. These devices will greatly simplify and accelerate the microculture of complex mixtures of organisms, like bacteria populations, where the growth conditions are unknown, allowing the end user to use the manifolds to dial in the optimal environmental parameters without the need for expensive, bulky hardware like the anaerobic chambers typically used for microbiology research.

"This class was my first experience with microfluidics and biotech, and thanks to our sponsors, I gained the confidence to pursue a career path in biotech," says Rachael Rosco, an MIT mechanical engineering graduate student. "The project itself was meaningful, and I know that our work will hopefully one day make an impact. Who knows, maybe one day it will lead to cultivating extremophile bacteria on a foreign planet!"

The collaboration will continue to seek DoD research funding to create workforce development opportunities for top scientific talent and introduce students to long-standing DoD challenges. Projects will take place nationwide at several NSRI, NU, Lincoln Laboratory, and MIT facilities.

Christine Ortiz, the Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, has been named the next director of the MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP).

"Christine is a force of nature," says Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences and director of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), which houses TPP. "Her years of service to the Institute, her support of grad students in particular, her research focus on innovation and the social good, and her network of connections across academia, industry, and government all make her the right leader for the program. At a time when technology has become such a critical part in informing evidence-based policy, I am confident that Christine will take TPP to the next level."

Ortiz is a professor, engineer, scientist, entrepreneur, former dean, corporate board director, and foundation trustee. She is an internationally recognized researcher in biotechnology and biomaterials, advanced and additive manufacturing, and sustainable and socially-directed materials design. She has over 30 years of experience in science, engineering, research and development, and technology innovation. She has published more than 210 publications and supervised the research projects of more than 300 students, postdocs, and researchers from 60 different majors and disciplines. She has received more than 30 national and international honors, including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.

Ortiz served as dean for graduate education for MIT between 2010 and 2016, supporting all MIT graduate programs and more than 8,000 graduate students, where she led new initiatives in global education, educational technologies, and mentorship. She founded the nonprofit higher education and research institution Station 1 Laboratory Inc. (Station1), which is focused on socially-directed science and technology education, research, and innovation and maintains national and global reach.

Through her work at MIT and Station1, Ortiz has led the development of programs involving collaborations with more than 100 technology-focused startup companies and social enterprises. She serves on the board of directors of two public companies, Mueller Water Products (a water infrastructure and technology company) and Enovis (a medical technology company); is a member of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Apprenticeship Council and the MIT Museum Advisory Board; and is a trustee of the Essex County Community Foundation in Massachusetts.

"I am deeply honored to take on the role of director of the TPP program, and inspired by its focus and impressive legacy of contributions related to the integration of responsible technological innovation, policy, community, and societal impact," says Ortiz. "I look forward to supporting and advancing the TPP mission and collaborating with the incredible TPP students, faculty, alumni, and partners involved in this important and transformative work."

Ortiz succeeds IDSS and earth, atmospheric, and planetary science Professor Noelle Selin, who was TPP director from 2018 to 2023. IDSS Senior Research Engineer Frank Field served as interim director this past year.

In late 2023, the first drug with potential to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease was approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration. Alzheimer's is one of many debilitating neurological disorders that together affect one-eighth of the world's population, and while the new drug is a step in the right direction, there is still a long journey ahead to fully understanding it, and other such diseases.

"Reconstructing the intricacies of how the human brain functions on a cellular level is one of the biggest challenges in neuroscience," says Lars Gjesteby, a technical staff member and algorithm developer from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Human Health and Performance Systems Group. "High-resolution, networked brain atlases can help improve our understanding of disorders by pinpointing differences between healthy and diseased brains. However, progress has been hindered by insufficient tools to visualize and process very large brain imaging datasets."

A networked brain atlas is in essence a detailed map of the brain that can help link structural information with neural function. To build such atlases, brain imaging data need to be processed and annotated. For example, each axon, or thin fiber connecting neurons, needs to be traced, measured, and labeled with information. Current methods of processing brain imaging data, such as desktop-based software or manual-oriented tools, are not yet designed to handle human brain-scale datasets. As such, researchers often spend a lot of time slogging through an ocean of raw data.

Gjesteby is leading a project to build the Neuron Tracing and Active Learning Environment (NeuroTrALE), a software pipeline that brings machine learning, supercomputing, as well as ease of use and access to this brain mapping challenge. NeuroTrALE automates much of the data processing and displays the output in an interactive interface that allows researchers to edit and manipulate the data to mark, filter, and search for specific patterns.

Untangling a ball of yarn

One of NeuroTrALE's defining features is the machine-learning technique it employs, called active learning. NeuroTrALE's algorithms are trained to automatically label incoming data based on existing brain imaging data, but unfamiliar data can present potential for errors. Active learning allows users to manually correct errors, teaching the algorithm to improve the next time it encounters similar data. This mix of automation and manual labeling ensures accurate data processing with a much smaller burden on the user.

"Imagine taking an X-ray of a ball of yarn. You'd see all these crisscrossed, overlapping lines," says Michael Snyder, from the laboratory's Homeland Decision Support Systems Group. "When two lines cross, does it mean one of the pieces of yarn is making a 90-degree bend, or is one going straight up and the other is going straight over? With NeuroTrALE's active learning, users can trace these strands of yarn one or two times and train the algorithm to follow them correctly moving forward. Without NeuroTrALE, the user would have to trace the ball of yarn, or in this case the axons of the human brain, every single time." Snyder is a software developer on the NeuroTrALE team along with staff member David Chavez.

Because NeuroTrALE takes the bulk of the labeling burden off of the user, it allows researchers to process more data more quickly. Further, the axon tracing algorithms harness parallel computing to distribute computations across multiple GPUs at once, leading to even faster, scalable processing. Using NeuroTrALE, the team demonstrated a 90 percent decrease in computing time needed to process 32 gigabytes of data over conventional AI methods.

The team also showed that a substantial increase in the volume of data does not translate to an equivalent increase in processing time. For example, in a recent study they demonstrated that a 10,000 percent increase in dataset size resulted in only a 9 percent and a 22 percent increase in total data processing time, using two different types of central processing units.

"With the estimated 86 billion neurons making 100 trillion connections in the human brain, manually labeling all the axons in a single brain would take lifetimes," adds Benjamin Roop, one of the project's algorithm developers. "This tool has the potential to automate the creation of connectomes for not just one individual, but many. That opens the door for studying brain disease at the population level."

The open-source road to discovery

The NeuroTrALE project was formed as an internally funded collaboration between Lincoln Laboratory and Professor Kwanghun Chung's laboratory on MIT campus. The Lincoln Lab team needed to build a way for the Chung Lab researchers to analyze and extract useful information from their large amount of brain imaging data flowing into the MIT SuperCloud — a supercomputer run by Lincoln Laboratory to support MIT research. Lincoln Lab's expertise in high-performance computing, image processing, and artificial intelligence made it exceptionally suited to tackling this challenge.

In 2020, the team uploaded NeuroTrALE to the SuperCloud and by 2022 the Chung Lab was producing results. In one study, published in Science, they used NeuroTrALE to quantify prefrontal cortex cell density in relation to Alzheimer's disease, where brains affected with the disease had a lower cell density in certain regions than those without. The same team also located where in the brain harmful neurofibers tend to get tangled in Alzheimer's-affected brain tissue.

Work on NeuroTrALE has continued with Lincoln Laboratory funding and funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build up NeuroTrALE's capabilities. Currently, its user interface tools are being integrated with Google's Neuroglancer program — an open-source, web-based viewer application for neuroscience data. NeuroTrALE adds the ability for users to visualize and edit their annotated data dynamically, and for multiple users to work with the same data at the same time. Users can also create and edit a number of shapes such as polygons, points, and lines to facilitate annotation tasks, as well as customize color display for each annotation to distinguish neurons in dense regions.

"NeuroTrALE provides a platform-agnostic, end-to-end solution that can be easily and rapidly deployed on standalone, virtual, cloud, and high performance computing environments via containers." says Adam Michaleas, a high performance computing engineer from the laboratory's Artificial Intelligence Technology Group. "Furthermore, it significantly improves the end user experience by providing capabilities for real-time collaboration within the neuroscience community via data visualization and simultaneous content review."

To align with NIH's mission of sharing research products, the team's goal is to make NeuroTrALE a fully open-source tool for anyone to use. And this type of tool, says Gjesteby, is what's needed to reach the end goal of mapping the entirety of the human brain for research, and eventually drug development. "It's a grassroots effort by the community where data and algorithms are meant to be shared and accessed by all."

The codebases for the axon tracing, data management, and interactive user interface of NeuroTrALE are publicly available via open-source licenses. Please contact Lars Gjesteby for more information on using NeuroTrALE. 

Ask a large language model (LLM) like GPT-4 to smell a rain-soaked campsite, and it’ll politely decline. Ask the same system to describe that scent to you, and it’ll wax poetic about “an air thick with anticipation" and “a scent that is both fresh and earthy," despite having neither prior experience with rain nor a nose to help it make such observations. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the LLM is simply mimicking the text present in its vast training data, rather than working with any real understanding of rain or smell.

But does the lack of eyes mean that language models can’t ever “understand" that a lion is “larger" than a house cat? Philosophers and scientists alike have long considered the ability to assign meaning to language a hallmark of human intelligence — and pondered what essential ingredients enable us to do so.

Peering into this enigma, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have uncovered intriguing results suggesting that language models may develop their own understanding of reality as a way to improve their generative abilities. The team first developed a set of small Karel puzzles, which consisted of coming up with instructions to control a robot in a simulated environment. They then trained an LLM on the solutions, but without demonstrating how the solutions actually worked. Finally, using a machine learning technique called “probing,” they looked inside the model’s “thought process” as it generates new solutions. 

After training on over 1 million random puzzles, they found that the model spontaneously developed its own conception of the underlying simulation, despite never being exposed to this reality during training. Such findings call into question our intuitions about what types of information are necessary for learning linguistic meaning — and whether LLMs may someday understand language at a deeper level than they do today.

“At the start of these experiments, the language model generated random instructions that didn’t work. By the time we completed training, our language model generated correct instructions at a rate of 92.4 percent,” says MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL affiliate Charles Jin, who is the lead author of a new paper on the work. “This was a very exciting moment for us because we thought that if your language model could complete a task with that level of accuracy, we might expect it to understand the meanings within the language as well. This gave us a starting point to explore whether LLMs do in fact understand text, and now we see that they’re capable of much more than just blindly stitching words together.”

Inside the mind of an LLM

The probe helped Jin witness this progress firsthand. Its role was to interpret what the LLM thought the instructions meant, unveiling that the LLM developed its own internal simulation of how the robot moves in response to each instruction. As the model’s ability to solve puzzles improved, these conceptions also became more accurate, indicating that the LLM was starting to understand the instructions. Before long, the model was consistently putting the pieces together correctly to form working instructions.

Jin notes that the LLM’s understanding of language develops in phases, much like how a child learns speech in multiple steps. Starting off, it’s like a baby babbling: repetitive and mostly unintelligible. Then, the language model acquires syntax, or the rules of the language. This enables it to generate instructions that might look like genuine solutions, but they still don’t work.

The LLM’s instructions gradually improve, though. Once the model acquires meaning, it starts to churn out instructions that correctly implement the requested specifications, like a child forming coherent sentences.

Separating the method from the model: A “Bizarro World”

The probe was only intended to “go inside the brain of an LLM” as Jin characterizes it, but there was a remote possibility that it also did some of the thinking for the model. The researchers wanted to ensure that their model understood the instructions independently of the probe, instead of the probe inferring the robot’s movements from the LLM’s grasp of syntax.

“Imagine you have a pile of data that encodes the LM’s thought process,” suggests Jin. “The probe is like a forensics analyst: You hand this pile of data to the analyst and say, ‘Here’s how the robot moves, now try and find the robot’s movements in the pile of data.’ The analyst later tells you that they know what’s going on with the robot in the pile of data. But what if the pile of data actually just encodes the raw instructions, and the analyst has figured out some clever way to extract the instructions and follow them accordingly? Then the language model hasn't really learned what the instructions mean at all.”

To disentangle their roles, the researchers flipped the meanings of the instructions for a new probe. In this “Bizarro World,” as Jin calls it, directions like “up” now meant “down” within the instructions moving the robot across its grid. 

“If the probe is translating instructions to robot positions, it should be able to translate the instructions according to the bizarro meanings equally well,” says Jin. “But if the probe is actually finding encodings of the original robot movements in the language model’s thought process, then it should struggle to extract the bizarro robot movements from the original thought process.”

As it turned out, the new probe experienced translation errors, unable to interpret a language model that had different meanings of the instructions. This meant the original semantics were embedded within the language model, indicating that the LLM understood what instructions were needed independently of the original probing classifier.

“This research directly targets a central question in modern artificial intelligence: are the surprising capabilities of large language models due simply to statistical correlations at scale, or do large language models develop a meaningful understanding of the reality that they are asked to work with? This research indicates that the LLM develops an internal model of the simulated reality, even though it was never trained to develop this model,” says Martin Rinard, an MIT professor in EECS, CSAIL member, and senior author on the paper.

This experiment further supported the team’s analysis that language models can develop a deeper understanding of language. Still, Jin acknowledges a few limitations to their paper: They used a very simple programming language and a relatively small model to glean their insights. In an upcoming work, they’ll look to use a more general setting. While Jin’s latest research doesn’t outline how to make the language model learn meaning faster, he believes future work can build on these insights to improve how language models are trained.

“An intriguing open question is whether the LLM is actually using its internal model of reality to reason about that reality as it solves the robot navigation problem,” says Rinard. “While our results are consistent with the LLM using the model in this way, our experiments are not designed to answer this next question.”

“There is a lot of debate these days about whether LLMs are actually ‘understanding’ language or rather if their success can be attributed to what is essentially tricks and heuristics that come from slurping up large volumes of text,” says Ellie Pavlick, assistant professor of computer science and linguistics at Brown University, who was not involved in the paper. “These questions lie at the heart of how we build AI and what we expect to be inherent possibilities or limitations of our technology. This is a nice paper that looks at this question in a controlled way — the authors exploit the fact that computer code, like natural language, has both syntax and semantics, but unlike natural language, the semantics can be directly observed and manipulated for experimental purposes. The experimental design is elegant, and their findings are optimistic, suggesting that maybe LLMs can learn something deeper about what language ‘means.’”

Jin and Rinard’s paper was supported, in part, by grants from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

In June 2023, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities could no longer use race as a factor in their admission decisions, many higher education institutions across the United States faced the same challenge: how to maintain diversity in their student bodies. So Noelle Wakefield, director of MIT’s Summer Research Program (MSRP) and assistant dean for diversity initiatives in MIT’s Office of Graduate Education (OGE), started planning.

On July 31, a little more than a year after the decision was released, the OGE hosted the inaugural Inclusive Pathways to the PhD Summit, which brought representatives from nearly 20 minority-serving institutions (MSIs), including several historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet with MIT administrators, faculty, and doctoral students. The admission question — how to continue attracting a diverse cohort of graduate students with the new legal restrictions? — was only the first of many that framed a broader and more complex picture.

“What are fresh ways for us to find talent in places that aren’t typically represented at MIT?” Wakefield asks. “How can we form partnerships with institutions that aren’t already part of our ecosystem? What is the formula for partnerships where both institutions benefit and feel good about the work that is happening?”

These aren’t new outreach questions for MIT, Wakefield says, but the changing admissions landscape sparked a need for the Institute to “be more thoughtful.”

And a need to clear up misperceptions, adds Denzil Streete, senior associate dean and director of the OGE. “MIT faculty may have outdated perspectives about HBCUs and MSIs,” he says. “And our visitors may be relying on historical knowledge of MIT that is largely negative” when it comes to attracting graduate applications from smaller, lesser-known colleges and universities. The summit was designed to be a first step in demystifying these assumptions and in establishing “a common platform and a shared understanding for moving forward,” Streete says.

For decades, the OGE has focused its HBCU and MSI outreach efforts on student recruitment, but the summit signals a broadening of that approach to include faculty and staff mentors — the people Wakefield describes as “levers for decision-making” among prospective graduate students. Streete says, “if we at MIT say we attract the best and brightest in the world and we don’t include these institutions, then our supposition comes into question.”

The summit agenda included information sessions about navigating the MIT graduate admission process and finding research opportunities for undergraduates, as well as conversations with current MIT doctoral students who’d graduated from the MSIs represented at the summit. There was a campus tour, a poster session by students in the MIT Summer Research Program, and a panel discussion on forming reciprocal relationships with HBCUs and MSIs, featuring visitors from Spelman College, Prairie View A & M University, and the University of Puerto Rico, among others.

That discussion resonated with visitor Gwendolyn Scott-Jones, dean of the Wesley College of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Delaware State University. “It felt like an authentic discussion about the disparities and lack of equal resources that HBCUs historically contend with compared to predominantly white institutions,” she observes. “HBCUs have been known to do more with less and have produced very talented professionals, and I believe MIT is trying to provide HBCUs with access and opportunity.”

One of the summit’s goals was to begin ensuring that this access and opportunity would be “bidirectional” — going both ways between an institution like MIT and an HCBU like Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where Christina Chisholm, one of the panelists, did her undergraduate work. Collaborations “aren’t spaces in which you’re just throwing money at something to fix it, or to bridge a gap,” says Chisholm, a biophysicist who’s now director of the McNair Scholars Program and Thrive Student Support Services at Rutgers University.

Instead, she advised, focus on cooperation, coordination, and positive mentorship. Tiffany Oliver, a biology professor at Spelman, recalled a potential student-research project she was exploring with a partner at a larger institution who would host her students in his lab. “His attitude was, ‘We have the money so we’re going to tell you what you need to do.’” she recalls. “That’s a reflection of how you’re going to treat my students, and I would rather send my students to some other place if the people show that they care. I want my students to leave school still loving science, not tarnished by science.”

Another piece of advice came from Kareem McLemore, assistant vice president of strategic enrollment management at Delaware State. “When you’re partnering with us, the first thing we’re going to ask is, ‘Are you doing this to check a box?’” he says. “If it’s a checkbox, we don’t want it. We want to know what the objectives are, the key goals, the KPIs [key performance indicators]. You may have the money, but think about the resources we have as HBCUs that can help you raise your brand. We have to ride the wave together.”

The summit served as a starting point: a way to build trust among institutions with different histories and resources, and to stimulate ideas for future partnerships, whether that means a joint research project, a shared curriculum, or a faculty exchange.

“We all understand that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not distributed in the same manner,” says Bryan Thomas Jr., assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a co-organizer of the event. Broadening MIT’s networks through the Inclusive Pathways Summit means “expanding our ecosystem of opportunity, collaboration, and adding new ways of solving problems,” he says. “And that ultimately benefits all of us.”

Early-stage trials in Alzheimer’s disease patients and studies in mouse models of the disease have suggested positive impacts on pathology and symptoms from exposure to light and sound presented at the “gamma” band frequency of 40 hertz (Hz). A new study zeroes in on how 40Hz sensory stimulation helps to sustain an essential process in which the signal-sending branches of neurons, called axons, are wrapped in a fatty insulation called myelin. Often called the brain’s “white matter,” myelin protects axons and insures better electrical signal transmission in brain circuits.

“Previous publications from our lab have mainly focused on neuronal protection,” says Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and senior author of the new open-access study in Nature Communications. Tsai also leads MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative. “But this study shows that it’s not just the gray matter, but also the white matter that’s protected by this method.”

This year Cognito Therapeutics, the spinoff company that licensed MIT’s sensory stimulation technology, published phase II human trial results in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease indicating that 40Hz light and sound stimulation significantly slowed the loss of myelin in volunteers with Alzheimer’s. Also this year, Tsai’s lab published a study showing that gamma sensory stimulation helped mice withstand neurological effects of chemotherapy medicines, including by preserving myelin. In the new study, members of Tsai’s lab led by former postdoc Daniela Rodrigues Amorim used a common mouse model of myelin loss — a diet with the chemical cuprizone — to explore how sensory stimulation preserves myelination.

Amorim and Tsai’s team found that 40Hz light and sound not only preserved myelination in the brains of cuprizone-exposed mice, it also appeared to protect oligodendrocytes (the cells that myelinate neural axons), sustain the electrical performance of neurons, and preserve a key marker of axon structural integrity. When the team looked into the molecular underpinnings of these benefits, they found clear signs of specific mechanisms including preservation of neural circuit connections called synapses; a reduction in a cause of oligodendrocyte death called “ferroptosis;” reduced inflammation; and an increase in the ability of microglia brain cells to clean up myelin damage so that new myelin could be restored.

“Gamma stimulation promotes a healthy environment,” says Amorim, who is now a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Galway in Ireland. “There are several ways we are seeing different effects.”

The findings suggest that gamma sensory stimulation may help not only Alzheimer’s disease patients but also people battling other diseases involving myelin loss, such as multiple sclerosis, the authors wrote in the study.

Maintaining myelin

To conduct the study, Tsai and Amorim’s team fed some male mice a diet with cuprizone and gave other male mice a normal diet for six weeks. Halfway into that period, when cuprizone is known to begin causing its most acute effects on myelination, they exposed some mice from each group to gamma sensory stimulation for the remaining three weeks. In this way they had four groups: completely unaffected mice, mice that received no cuprizone but did get gamma stimulation, mice that received cuprizone and constant (but not 40Hz) light and sound as a control, and mice that received cuprizone and also gamma stimulation.

After the six weeks elapsed, the scientists measured signs of myelination throughout the brains of the mice in each group. Mice that weren’t fed cuprizone maintained healthy levels, as expected. Mice that were fed cuprizone and didn’t receive 40Hz gamma sensory stimulation showed drastic levels of myelin loss. Cuprizone-fed mice that received 40Hz stimulation retained significantly more myelin, rivaling the health of mice never fed cuprizone by some, but not all, measures.

The researchers also looked at numbers of oligodendrocytes to see if they survived better with sensory stimulation. Several measures revealed that in mice fed cuprizone, oligodendrocytes in the corpus callosum region of the brain (a key point for the transit of neural signals because it connects the brain’s hemispheres) were markedly reduced. But in mice fed cuprizone and also treated with gamma stimulation, the number of cells were much closer to healthy levels.

Electrophysiological tests among neural axons in the corpus callosum showed that gamma sensory stimulation was associated with improved electrical performance in cuprizone-fed mice who received gamma stimulation compared to cuprizone-fed mice left untreated by 40Hz stimulation. And when researchers looked in the anterior cingulate cortex region of the brain, they saw that MAP2, a protein that signals the structural integrity of axons, was much better preserved in mice that received cuprizone and gamma stimulation compared to cuprizone-fed mice who did not.

A key goal of the study was to identify possible ways in which 40Hz sensory stimulation may protect myelin.

To find out, the researchers conducted a sweeping assessment of protein expression in each mouse group and identified which proteins were differentially expressed based on cuprizone diet and exposure to gamma frequency stimulation. The analysis revealed distinct sets of effects between the cuprizone mice exposed to control stimulation and cuprizone-plus-gamma mice.

A highlight of one set of effects was the increase in MAP2 in gamma-treated cuprizone-fed mice. A highlight of another set was that cuprizone mice who received control stimulation showed a substantial deficit in expression of proteins associated with synapses. The gamma-treated cuprizone-fed mice did not show any significant loss, mirroring results in a 2019 Alzheimer’s 40Hz study that showed synaptic preservation. This result is important, the researchers wrote, because neural circuit activity, which depends on maintaining synapses, is associated with preserving myelin. They confirmed the protein expression results by looking directly at brain tissues.

Another set of protein expression results hinted at another important mechanism: ferroptosis. This phenomenon, in which errant metabolism of iron leads to a lethal buildup of reactive oxygen species in cells, is a known problem for oligodendrocytes in the cuprizone mouse model. Among the signs was an increase in cuprizone-fed, control stimulation mice in expression of the protein HMGB1, which is a marker of ferroptosis-associated damage that triggers an inflammatory response. Gamma stimulation, however, reduced levels of HMGB1.

Looking more deeply at the cellular and molecular response to cuprizone demyelination and the effects of gamma stimulation, the team assessed gene expression using single-cell RNA sequencing technology. They found that astrocytes and microglia became very inflammatory in cuprizone-control mice but gamma stimulation calmed that response. Fewer cells became inflammatory and direct observations of tissue showed that microglia became more proficient at clearing away myelin debris, a key step in effecting repairs.

The team also learned more about how oligodendrocytes in cuprizone-fed mice exposed to 40Hz sensory stimulation managed to survive better. Expression of protective proteins such as HSP70 increased and as did expression of GPX4, a master regulator of processes that constrain ferroptosis.

In addition to Amorim and Tsai, the paper’s other authors are Lorenzo Bozzelli, TaeHyun Kim, Liwang Liu, Oliver Gibson, Cheng-Yi Yang, Mitch Murdock, Fabiola Galiana-Meléndez, Brooke Schatz, Alexis Davison, Md Rezaul Islam, Dong Shin Park, Ravikiran M. Raju, Fatema Abdurrob, Alissa J. Nelson, Jian Min Ren, Vicky Yang and Matthew P. Stokes.

Fundacion Bancaria la Caixa, The JPB Foundation, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Carol and Gene Ludwig Family Foundation, Lester A. Gimpelson, Eduardo Eurnekian, The Dolby Family, Kathy and Miguel Octavio, the Marc Haas Foundation, Ben Lenail and Laurie Yoler, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding for the study.

Eleven faculty in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning have been recognized with promotions for their significant contributions to the school, effective July 1. Five faculty promotions are in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; four are in the Department of Architecture; and two are in the program in Media Arts and Sciences.

“Whether architects, urbanists, historians, artists, economists, or aero-astro engineers, they represent our school at its best, in its breadth of inquiry and in its persistence to improve, by design, the relationship between human beings and their environment,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “Collectively, they add considerable strength to our faculty.”

Department of Architecture

Azra Akšamija has been promoted to full professor. An artist and architectural historian, she is the director of the Art, Culture, and Technology program. She also directs the Future Heritage Lab. Akšamija is the author of two books, and her artistic work has been exhibited at leading international venues, including the Generali Foundation and Secession in Vienna; Biennials in Venice, Liverpool, Valencia, and Manila; Manifesta 7; museums of contemporary art in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana; Sculpture Center and Queens Museum of Art in New York; the Royal Academy of Arts London; and Design Festivals in Milan, Istanbul, Eindhoven, and Amman.

Brandon Clifford has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Clifford is the director and co-founder of Matter Design, which leverages ancient construction techniques to shape transformative architectural visions. Known for animating megalithic sculptures, he pioneers “projective archaeology,” merging historical events with imaginary futures. Clifford’s speculative works redefine architectural practice, paving the way for new constructive opportunities.

Timothy Hyde has been promoted to full professor. Hyde is an historian of architecture whose research has expanded the understanding of the ways in which entanglements of architecture and law have shaped buildings and cities from the 18th century to the present. In numerous articles, and in books such as “Constitutional Modernism and Ugliness and Judgment,” he has explored buildings — and more recently building sites — in the Americas and in Europe to reveal the participation of architectural discourse in the legal formulation of social techniques of the modern city.  

Lawrence “Larry” Sass has been promoted to full professor. Sass is a designer and researcher in the Department of Architecture at MIT. He is a pioneer within the field of design and digital fabrication for low-cost housing. He discovered a low-cost method of single-family home construction using computation and digital fabrication. The impact of his research has been knowledge construction related to the idea that digital fabrication can automate construction. His methods reduce the number of steps in the production of a home. He was the first to publish the idea of digitally fabricated wooden housing in 2006 and exhibited his idea at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008.

Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP)

devin michelle bunten has been promoted to associate professor. Bunten is a teacher, writer, and urban economic theorist. Her research uses economic theory and empirical tools to study a range of urban topics, including gentrification and neighborhood change, restrictive zoning, and the white supremacy at the root of American housing.

Catherine D’Ignazio has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer, and “hacker momma” who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy, and civic engagement. She is the director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work toward gender and racial justice, particularly as they relate to space and place.

Jeffrey Levine has been promoted to associate professor of the practice. Involved in land-use planning on the local and regional level for 25 years, Levine is interested in how to apply best practices in theory and research in local and municipal settings. His research interests are in the areas where public finance, private equity, and land-use planning intersect, as well as how transportation, housing, and sustainability interact in small- to mid-sized cities and regions.

Elisabeth Reynolds has been promoted to professor of the practice. Reynolds’s research is focused on systems of innovation, manufacturing and industrial competitiveness, and regional economic development. Her recent academic and applied work has focused on growing innovative companies to scale, digital technology adoption, and inclusive growth.

Andres Sevtsuk has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Sevtsuk is the head of the City Design and Development Group in DUSP and director of the City Form Lab. His research focuses on public qualities of cities, and on making urban environments more walkable, sustainable, and equitable, bridging the fields of urban design, spatial analytics, and mobility research. He is the author of the Urban Network Analysis framework and software tools, used by researchers and practitioners around the world to model pedestrian activity in cities and to study coordinated land use and transportation development in ways that reduce transportation carbon emissions.

Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Kent Larson has been promoted to professor of the practice. Larson is an architect, director of City Science at the MIT Media Lab, and co-director of the Norman Foster Institute on Sustainable Cities based in Madrid. His research is focused on urban and architectural design, urban modeling and simulation, transformable micro-housing, living laboratories, ultralight autonomous mobility, and algorithmic dynamic zoning.

Danielle Wood has been promoted to associate professor. Wood is the founding director of the Space Enabled Research group, which seeks to advance justice in Earth’s complex systems using designs enabled by space. Prior to serving on the faculty at MIT, Wood held positions at NASA Headquarters, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Aerospace Corp., Johns Hopkins University, and the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, a noted scholar of American literature, passed away on July 25. She was 87.

Wolff joined the humanities faculty at MIT in 1980 and was named the Class of 1922 Professor of Humanities in 1985. She taught in the Literature Section, and later moved to the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. Her expertise was in the exploration of 19th and 20th century female American writers. She retired from MIT in 2003.

Wolff was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, on Aug. 20, 1934. She was a graduate of Radcliffe College, attended Harvard Medical School, and in 1965 received her PhD in English at Harvard University. Before her arrival at MIT, she was a tenured professor of English and American literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Wolff wrote two major literary biographies. “A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton” was published in 1977. That was followed by the 1986 biography “Emily Dickinson.” Wolff worked for several years to unearth new and original primary sources before even starting the process of writing a first draft. She sought to analyze her subject’s literary oeuvre with a complete understanding of the authors’ historical and personal contexts. She also edited numerous books that brought long-overdue attention to American women writers.

Several years before her retirement, Wolff began composing a third literary biography on writer Willa Cather. Wolff continued work after her retirement but found herself unable to bring it to fruition and eventually put it aside.

“A devoted teacher and an inspired scholar, Cynthia Griffin Wolff cemented her literary legacy worldwide with her highly influential biographies of Edith Wharton and Emily Dickinson,” says Kenneth Manning, the Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric (programs in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Science, Technology, and Society) at MIT who worked with Wolff during her tenure. “I was anticipating the same creative force in her biographical research on Willa Cather.”

Following her retirement, Wolff spent much of her time in South Dennis, Massachusetts, in an early 19th century Cape Colonial she restored. She later moved into the Orchard Cove senior community in Canton, Massachusetts.

Wolff is survived by her sons Patrick and Tobias; Patrick’s wife, Diana; and two grandchildren, Samuel and Athena. 

Quantum materials — those with electronic properties that are governed by the principles of quantum mechanics, such as correlation and entanglement — can exhibit exotic behaviors under certain conditions, such as the ability to transmit electricity without resistance, known as superconductivity. However, in order to get the best performance out of these materials, they need to be properly tuned, in the same way that race cars require tuning as well. A team led by Mingda Li, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), has demonstrated a new, ultra-precise way to tweak the characteristics of quantum materials, using a particular class of these materials, Weyl semimetals, as an example.

The new technique is not limited to Weyl semimetals. “We can use this method for any inorganic bulk material, and for thin films as well,” maintains NSE postdoc Manasi Mandal, one of two lead authors of an open-access paper — published recently in Applied Physics Reviews — that reported on the group’s findings.

The experiment described in the paper focused on a specific type of Weyl semimetal, a tantalum phosphide (TaP) crystal. Materials can be classified by their electrical properties: metals conduct electricity readily, whereas insulators impede the free flow of electrons. A semimetal lies somewhere in between. It can conduct electricity, but only in a narrow frequency band or channel. Weyl semimetals are part of a wider category of so-called topological materials that have certain distinctive features. For instance, they possess curious electronic structures — kinks or “singularities” called Weyl nodes, which are swirling patterns around a single point (configured in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction) that resemble hair whorls or, more generally, vortices. The presence of Weyl nodes confers unusual, as well as useful, electrical properties. And a key advantage of topological materials is that their sought-after qualities can be preserved, or “topologically protected,” even when the material is disturbed.

“That’s a nice feature to have,” explains Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the other lead author of the paper. “When you try to fabricate this kind of material, you don’t have to be exact. You can tolerate some imperfections, some level of uncertainty, and the material will still behave as expected.”

Like water in a dam

The “tuning” that needs to happen relates primarily to the Fermi level, which is the highest energy level occupied by electrons in a given physical system or material. Mandal and Chotrattanapituk suggest the following analogy: Consider a dam that can be filled with varying levels of water. One can raise that level by adding water or lower it by removing water. In the same way, one can adjust the Fermi level of a given material simply by adding or subtracting electrons.

To fine-tune the Fermi level of the Weyl semimetal, Li’s team did something similar, but instead of adding actual electrons, they added negative hydrogen ions (each consisting of a proton and two electrons) to the sample. The process of introducing a foreign particle, or defect, into the TaP crystal — in this case by substituting a hydrogen ion for a tantalum atom — is called doping. And when optimal doping is achieved, the Fermi level will coincide with the energy level of the Weyl nodes. That’s when the material’s desired quantum properties will be most fully realized.

For Weyl semimetals, the Fermi level is especially sensitive to doping. Unless that level is set close to the Weyl nodes, the material’s properties can diverge significantly from the ideal. The reason for this extreme sensitivity owes to the peculiar geometry of the Weyl node. If one were to think of the Fermi level as the water level in a reservoir, the reservoir in a Weyl semimetal is not shaped like a cylinder; it’s shaped like an hourglass, and the Weyl node is located at the narrowest point, or neck, of that hourglass. Adding too much or too little water would miss the neck entirely, just as adding too many or too few electrons to the semimetal would miss the node altogether.

Fire up the hydrogen

To reach the necessary precision, the researchers utilized MIT’s two-stage “Tandem” ion accelerator — located at the Center for Science and Technology with Accelerators and Radiation (CSTAR) — and buffeted the TaP sample with high-energy ions coming out of the powerful (1.7 million volt) accelerator beam. Hydrogen ions were chosen for this purpose because they are the smallest negative ions available and thus alter the material less than a much larger dopant would. “The use of advanced accelerator techniques allows for greater precision than was ever before possible, setting the Fermi level to milli-electron volt [thousandths of an electron volt] accuracy,” says Kevin Woller, the principal research scientist who leads the CSTAR lab. “Additionally, high-energy beams allow for the doping of bulk crystals beyond the limitations of thin films only a few tens of nanometers thick.”

The procedure, in other words, involves bombarding the sample with hydrogen ions until a sufficient number of electrons are taken in to make the Fermi level just right. The question is: how long do you run the accelerator, and how do you know when enough is enough? The point being that you want to tune the material until the Fermi level is neither too low nor too high.

“The longer you run the machine, the higher the Fermi level gets,” Chotrattanapituk says. “The difficulty is that we cannot measure the Fermi level while the sample is in the accelerator chamber.” The normal way to handle that would be to irradiate the sample for a certain amount of time, take it out, measure it, and then put it back in if the Fermi level is not high enough. “That can be practically impossible,” Mandal adds.

To streamline the protocol, the team has devised a theoretical model that first predicts how many electrons are needed to increase the Fermi level to the preferred level and translates that to the number of negative hydrogen ions that must be added to the sample. The model can then tell them how long the sample ought to be kept in the accelerator chamber.

The good news, Chotrattanapituk says, is that their simple model agrees within a factor of 2 with trusted conventional models that are much more computationally intensive and may require access to a supercomputer. The group’s main contributions are two-fold, he notes: offering a new, accelerator-based technique for precision doping and providing a theoretical model that can guide the experiment, telling researchers how much hydrogen should be added to the sample depending on the energy of the ion beam, the exposure time, and the size and thickness of the sample.

Fine things to come with fine-tuning

This could pave the way to a major practical advance, Mandal notes, because their approach can potentially bring the Fermi level of a sample to the requisite value in a matter of minutes — a task that, by conventional methods, has sometimes taken weeks without ever reaching the required degree of milli-eV precision.

Li believes that an accurate and convenient method for fine-tuning the Fermi level could have broad applicability. “When it comes to quantum materials, the Fermi level is practically everything,” he says. “Many of the effects and behaviors that we seek only manifest themselves when the Fermi level is at the right location.” With a well-adjusted Fermi level, for example, one could raise the critical temperature at which materials become superconducting. Thermoelectric materials, which convert temperature differences into an electrical voltage, similarly become more efficient when the Fermi level is set just right. Precision tuning might also play a helpful role in quantum computing.

Thomas Zac Ward, a senior scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, offered a bullish assessment: “This work provides a new route for the experimental exploration of the critical, yet still poorly understand, behaviors of emerging materials. The ability to precisely control the Fermi level of a topological material is an important milestone that can help bring new quantum information and microelectronics device architectures to fruition.”

MIT D-Lab students and instructors are improving the efficacy and economics of a brooder technology for newborn chicks that utilizes a practical, local resource: beeswax.

Developed through participatory design with agricultural partners in Cameroon, their Off-Grid Brooder is a solution aimed at improving the profitability of the African nation’s small- and medium-scale poultry farms. Since it is common for smallholders in places with poor electricity supply to tend open fires overnight to keep chicks warm, the invention might also let farmers catch up on their sleep.

“The target is eight hours. If farmers can sustain the warmth for eight hours, then they get to sleep,” says D-Lab instructor and former student Ahmad (Zak) Zakka SM ’23, who traveled to Cameroon in May to work on implementing brooder improvements tested at the D-Lab, along with D-Lab students, collaborators from African Solar Generation (ASG), and the African Diaspora Council of Switzerland – Branch Cameroon (CDAS–BC).

Poultry farming is heavily concentrated in lower- and middle-income countries, where it is an important component of rural economies and provides an inexpensive source of protein for residents. Raising chickens is fraught with economic risk, however, largely because it is hard for small-scale farmers to keep newborn chicks warm enough to survive (33 to 35 degrees Celsius, or 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on age). After the cost of feed, firewood used to heat the chick space is the biggest input for rural poultry farmers.

According to D-Lab researchers, an average smallholder in Cameroon using traditional brooding methods spends $17 per month on firewood, achieves a 10 percent profit margin, and experiences chick mortality that can be as high as a total loss due to overheating or insufficient heat. The Off-Grid Brooder is designed to replace open fires with inexpensive, renewable, and locally available beeswax — a phase-change material used to make thermal batteries.

ASG initially developed a brooder technology, the SolarBox, that used photovoltaic panels and electric batteries to power incandescent bulbs. While this provided effective heating, it was prohibitively expensive and difficult to maintain. In 2020, students from the D-Lab Energy class took on the challenge of reducing the cost and complexity of the SolarBox heating system to make it more accessible to small farmers in Cameroon. Through participatory design — a collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders in early stages of the design process — the team discovered a unique solution. Beeswax stored in a used glass container (such as a mayonnaise jar) is melted using a double boiler over a fire and then installed inside insulated brooder boxes alongside the chicks. As the beeswax cools and solidifies, it releases heat for several hours, keeping the brooder within the temperature range that chicks need to grow and develop. Farmers can then recharge the cooled wax batteries and repeat the process again and again. 

“The big challenge was how to get heat,” says D-Lab Research Scientist Daniel Sweeney, who, with Zakka, co-teaches two D-Lab classes, 2.651/EC.711 (Introduction to Energy in Global Development), and 2.652/EC.712 (Applications of Energy in Global Development). “Decoupling the heat supplied by biomass (wood) from the heat the chicks need at night in the brooder, that’s the core of the innovation here.”

D-Lab instructors, researchers, and students have tested and tuned the system with partners in Cameroon. A research box constructed during a D-Lab trip to Cameroon in January 2023 worked well, but was “very expensive to build,” Zakka says. “The research box was a proof of concept in the field. The next step was to figure out how to make it affordable,” he continues.

A new brooder box, made entirely of locally sourced recycled materials at 5 percent of the cost of the research prototype, was developed during D-Lab’s January 2024 trip to Cameroon. Designed and produced in collaboration with CDAS-BC, the new brooder is much more affordable, but its functionality still needs fine-tuning. From late-May through mid-June, the D-Lab team, led by Zakka, worked with Cameroonian collaborators to improve the system again. This time, they assessed the efficacy of using straw, a readily available and low-cost material, arranged in panels to insulate the brooder box.

The MIT team was hosted by CDAS-BC, including its president and founder Carole Erlemann Mengue and secretary and treasurer Kathrin Witschi, who operate an organic poultry farm in Afambassi, Cameroon. “The students will experiment with the box and try to improve the insulation of the box without neglecting that the chicks will need ventilation,” they say.

In addition, the CDAS-BC partners say that they hoped to explore increasing the number of chicks that the box can keep warm. “If the system could heat 500 to 1,000 chicks at a time,” they note, “it would help farmers save firewood, to sleep through the night, and to minimize the risk of fire in the building and the risk of stepping on chicks while replacing firewood.” 

Earlier this spring, Erlemann Mengue and Witschi tested the low-cost Off-Grid Brooder Box, which can hold 30 to 40 chicks in its current design.

“They were very interested in partnering with us to evaluate the technology. They are running the tests and doing a lot of technical measurement to track the temperature inside the brooder over time,” says Sweeney, adding that the CDAS-BC partners are amassing datasets that they send to the MIT D-Lab team. 

Sweeney and Zakka, along with PhD candidate Aly Kombargi, who worked on the research box in Cameroon last year, hope to not only improve the functionality of the Off-Grid Poultry Brooder but also broaden its use beyond Cameroon.

“The goal of our trip was to have a working prototype, and the goal since then has been to scale this up,” Kombargi says. “It’s absolutely scalable.”

Concurring that “the technology should work across developing countries in small-scale poultry sectors,” Zakka says this spring’s D-Lab trip included workshops for area poultry farmers to teach them about benefits of the Off-Grid Brooder and how to make their own. 

“I’m excited to see if we can get people excited about pushing this as a business … to see if they would build and sell it to other people in the community,” Zakka says.

Adds Sweeney, “This isn’t rocket science. If we have some guidance and some open-source information we could share, I’m pretty sure (farmers) could put them together on their own.”

Already, he says, partners identified through MIT’s networks in Zambia and Uganda are building their own brooders based on the D-Lab design.

MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), which supports research, innovation, and cross-disciplinary collaborations involving water and food systems, awarded the Off-Grid Brooder project a $25,000 research and development grant in 2022. The program is “pleased that the project’s approach was grounded in engagement with MIT students and community collaborators,” says Executive Director Renee J. Robins ’83. “The participatory design process helped produce innovative prototypes that are already making positive impacts for smallholder poultry farmers.”

That process and the very real impact on communities in Cameroon is what draws students to the project and keeps them committed.

Sweeney says a recent D-Lab design review for the chick brooder highlighted that the project continued to attract the attention and curiosity of students who participated in earlier stages and still want to be involved.

“There’s something about this project. There’s this whole tribe of students that are still active on the broader project,” he says. “There’s something about it.”

Alex K. Shalek, the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES) and Department of Chemistry, has been named the new director of IMES, effective Aug. 1.

“Professor Shalek’s substantial contributions to the scientific community as a researcher and educator have been exemplary. His extensive network across MIT, Harvard, and Mass General Brigham will be a tremendous asset as director of IMES,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of the School of Engineering, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “He will undoubtedly be an excellent leader, bringing his innovative approach and collaborative spirit to this new role.”

Shalek is a core member of IMES, a professor of chemistry, and holds several leadership positions, including director of the Health Innovation Hub. He is also an extramural member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; a member of the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard; an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; an assistant in immunology at Mass General Brigham; and an instructor in health sciences and technology at Harvard Medical School.

The Shalek Lab’s research seeks to uncover how communities of cells work together within human tissues to support health, and how they become dysregulated in disease. By developing and applying innovative experimental and computational technologies, they are shedding light on a wide range of human health conditions.

Shalek and his team use a cross-disciplinary approach that combines genomics, chemical biology, and nanotechnology to develop platforms to profile and control cells and their interactions. Collaborating with researchers across the globe, they apply these tools to study human diseases in great detail. Their goal is to connect what occurs at a cellular level with what medical professionals observe in patients, paving the way for more precise ways to prevent and treat diseases. 

Over the course of his career, Shalek’s groundbreaking research has earned him widespread recognition and numerous awards and honors. These include an NIH New Innovator Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Searle Scholar Award, a Pew-Stewart Scholar Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, and an Avant-Garde (DP1 Pioneer) Award. Shalek has also been celebrated for his dedication as a faculty member, educator, and mentor. He was awarded the 2019-20 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award at MIT and the 2020 HMS Young Mentor Award.

Shalek received his bachelor’s degree in chemical physics from Columbia University and his master’s and PhD in chemical physics from Harvard University. Prior to joining MIT’s faculty in 2014, he was a postdoc at the Broad Institute.

Shalek succeeds Elazer Edelman, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science, who has led IMES since April 2018.

“I am grateful to Professor Edelman for his incredible leadership and service to IMES over the past six years,” says Chandrakasan. “His contributions to IMES have been invaluable, and we are thankful for his dedication and vision during his tenure as director.”

Pick-and-place machines are a type of automated equipment used to place objects into structured, organized locations. These machines are used for a variety of applications — from electronics assembly to packaging, bin picking, and even inspection — but many current pick-and-place solutions are limited. Current solutions lack “precise generalization,” or the ability to solve many tasks without compromising on accuracy.

“In industry, you often see that [manufacturers] end up with very tailored solutions to the particular problem that they have, so a lot of engineering and not so much flexibility in terms of the solution,” Maria Bauza Villalonga PhD ’22, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind where she works on robotics and robotic manipulation. “SimPLE solves this problem and provides a solution to pick-and-place that is flexible and still provides the needed precision.”

A new paper by MechE researchers published in the journal Science Robotics explores pick-and-place solutions with more precision. In precise pick-and-place, also known as kitting, the robot transforms an unstructured arrangement of objects into an organized arrangement. The approach, dubbed SimPLE (Simulation to Pick Localize and placE), learns to pick, regrasp and place objects using the object’s computer-aided design (CAD) model, and all without any prior experience or encounters with the specific objects.

“The promise of SimPLE is that we can solve many different tasks with the same hardware and software using simulation to learn models that adapt to each specific task,” says Alberto Rodriguez, an MIT visiting scientist who is a former member of the MechE faculty and now associate director of manipulation research for Boston Dynamics. SimPLE was developed by members of the Manipulation and Mechanisms Lab at MIT (MCube) under Rodriguez’ direction. 

“In this work we show that it is possible to achieve the levels of positional accuracy that are required for many industrial pick and place tasks without any other specialization,” Rodriguez says.

Using a dual-arm robot equipped with visuotactile sensing, the SimPLE solution employs three main components: task-aware grasping, perception by sight and touch (visuotactile perception), and regrasp planning. Real observations are matched against a set of simulated observations through supervised learning so that a distribution of likely object poses can be estimated, and placement accomplished.

In experiments, SimPLE successfully demonstrated the ability to pick-and-place diverse objects spanning a wide range of shapes, achieving successful placements over 90 percent of the time for 6 objects, and over 80 percent of the time for 11 objects.

“There’s an intuitive understanding in the robotics community that vision and touch are both useful, but [until now] there haven’t been many systematic demonstrations of how it can be useful for complex robotics tasks,” says mechanical engineering doctoral student Antonia Delores Bronars SM ’22. Bronars, who is now working with Pulkit Agrawal, assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), is continuing her PhD work investigating the incorporation of tactile capabilities into robotic systems.

“Most work on grasping ignores the downstream tasks,” says Matt Mason, chief scientist at Berkshire Grey and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the work. “This paper goes beyond the desire to mimic humans, and shows from a strictly functional viewpoint the utility of combining tactile sensing, vision, with two hands.”

Ken Goldberg, the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, who was also not involved in the study, says the robot manipulation methodology described in the paper offers a valuable alternative to the trend toward AI and machine learning methods.

“The authors combine well-founded geometric algorithms that can reliably achieve high-precision for a specific set of object shapes and demonstrate that this combination can significantly improve performance over AI methods,” says Goldberg, who is also co-founder and chief scientist for Ambi Robotics and Jacobi Robotics. “This can be immediately useful in industry and is an excellent example of what I call 'good old fashioned engineering' (GOFE).”

Bauza and Bronars say this work was informed by several generations of collaboration.

“In order to really demonstrate how vision and touch can be useful together, it’s necessary to build a full robotic system, which is something that’s very difficult to do as one person over a short horizon of time,” says Bronars. “Collaboration, with each other and with Nikhil [Chavan-Dafle PhD ‘20] and Yifan [Hou PhD ’21 CMU], and across many generations and labs really allowed us to build an end-to-end system.”

Being able to say, “I fly helicopters” — specifically the Seahawk series that boast a maximum cruise elevation of 10,000 feet and 210 miles per hour — must be a great conversation starter. So must saying that you are helping to train a future generation of naval cadets at MIT, Harvard and Tufts universities, and other local schools.

U.S. Navy Commander Jennifer A. Huck, executive officer (XO) for the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) consortium, can do both. Called the Old Ironsides Battalion, the unit comprises around 80 midshipmen across six universities and is housed on the MIT campus.

After 20 years of active duty, Huck has now returned home, in a sense. She herself was commissioned through the NROTC program at Boston University, where she earned a BS in biomedical engineering in 2003. Here, Huck explains her role and how the Naval ROTC program prepares students to commission as officers in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps upon graduation.

Q: Tell us a bit about your own military and academic career. Why did you decide to pursue that path? What has surprised you along the way? And of course, what is it like to fly helicopters?

A: I have always been a person who seeks a sense of purpose, and I enjoy being part of a team. I also grew up being very involved in athletics and wanted to keep physical fitness as a big part of my life. After learning about various educational opportunities the Navy offers, I instantly gravitated towards the idea of joining because I felt that the job checked the blocks for so many things that are important to me. I joined Navy ROTC at Boston University in 1999 and I have had nothing but amazing experiences since then.

As a midshipman, I explored career paths in medicine and nuclear power. My summer training experience in 2002 onboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman sealed the deal for me wanting to be a naval aviator. The freedom of flight was exhilarating and the responsibility, leadership, and skill required of the pilots fueled my drive for purpose and mission accomplishment — not to mention the views from above were quite nice!

So after graduating from BU, I completed naval flight training and earned my pilot wings in August 2005. I subsequently spent over 10 years flying missions operating in the Middle East, Horn of Africa, and Western Pacific. Flying multi-million dollar combat helicopters is thrilling and fulfilling as it requires precise control, coordination, and focus to agilely maneuver amidst immersive aircraft vibrations, loud rotor-blade noise, and anything else that may be in the area (weather, threats, terrain, etc).

Throughout my career, I’ve had many exciting assignments, including flying those H-60 combat helicopters, working operations at the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, developing requirements for next-generation technologies at the Pentagon, and instructing students in flight school and in ROTC.

It has, however, been the people, and not necessarily the jobs, that have kept me in the Navy for 21 years. There is no other organization where you will find the same camaraderie as military service.

Q: MIT has a long history of national service and takes great pride in its ROTC students — especially given the dual rigor of the curriculum and the military training. Can you explain what an XO does day to day and how you support students?

A: The NROTC executive officer plays a vital role in the leadership and administration of the program. As second-in-command, I assist the NROTC commander, Captain Jack Houdeshell, in managing the unit’s operations. I directly supervise the unit staff and midshipmen and provide guidance, mentorship, and support to ensure everyone fulfills their roles and responsibilities effectively.

Since our unit’s mission is to train midshipmen, I also oversee the development and execution of our training curriculum, which includes naval science classes, physical training, laboratory sessions, drill instruction, and other professional development activities. This oversight ensures that midshipmen are prepared to commission as officers in the United States Navy and Marine Corps upon graduation.

MIT graduates are top performers in the fleet, and the rigorous four-year program they complete here prepares them to be ready to respond to future technical and leadership challenges.

Q: As part of your service, you’ve traveled around the world, living and working in a half-dozen countries. How would you characterize the culture at MIT? What’s been special about your time on campus?

A: Like I previously mentioned, one of the most exciting parts about my job is the dynamic environment I operate in. Part of the dynamics involves traveling around the world and experiencing different cultures and conditions. My experience at MIT, in many ways, parallels certain cultural experiences from around the world.

First, MIT has a diverse student body with students representing numerous ethnic backgrounds, countries, and experiences. MIT students are very talented, hard-working, and focused on achieving their goals; they want to make the world a better place. MIT encourages freedom of thought and unique problem-solving, similar to what is required of our military and global leaders.

What I find most special about MIT is the people. Similar to the Navy, MIT creates a global network of friendships and lifelong connections. I consider the MIT community to be my “MIT family.”

When MIT senior Rudiba Laiba saw that stores in the Netherlands eschewed plastic bags to save the planet, her first thought was, “that doesn’t happen in Bangladesh.”

Laiba is one of eight MIT students who traveled to the Netherlands in June as part of an MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI)-sponsored trip to experience first-hand the country’s approach to the energy transition. The Netherlands aims to be carbon neutral by 2050, making it one of the top 10 countries leading the charge on climate change, according to U.S. News and World Report.

MITEI sponsored the week-long trip to allow undergraduate and graduate students to collaboratively explore clean energy efforts with researchers, corporate leaders, and nongovernmental organizations. The students heard about projects ranging from creating hydrogen pipelines in the North Sea to climate-proofing a fuel-guzzling, asphalt-dense neighborhood.

Felipe Abreu from Kissimmee, Florida, a rising second-year student studying materials science and engineering, is working this summer on ways to melt and reuse metal scraps discarded in manufacturing processes. “When MITEI put out this notice about visiting the Netherlands, I wanted to see if there were more advanced approaches to renewable energy that I’d never been exposed to,” Abreu says.

Laiba notes that her native Bangladesh has not yet achieved the Netherlands’ nearly universal buy-in to tackling climate change, even though this South Asian country, like the Netherlands, is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels due to topography and high population density.

Laiba, who spent part of her childhood in New York City and lived in Bangladesh from ages 8 to 18, calls Bangladesh “on the front lines of climate change.

“Even if I didn’t want to care about climate change, I had to, because I would see the effects of it,” she says.

Key players

The MIT students conducted hands-on exercises on how to switch from traditional energy sources to zero-carbon technologies. “We talked a lot about infrastructure, particularly how to repurpose natural gas infrastructure for hydrogen,” says Antje Danielson, director of education at MITEI, who led the trip with Em Schule, MITEI research and programming assistant. “The students were challenged to grapple with real-world decision-making.”

The northern section of the Netherlands is known as the “hydrogen valley” of Europe. At the University of Groningen and Hanze University School of Applied Sciences, also in Groningen, the students heard about how the region profiles itself as a world capital for the energy transition through its push toward a hydrogen-based economy and its state-of-the-art global climate models.

Erick Liang, a rising junior from Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood pursuing a dual major in nuclear science and engineering and physics, was intrigued by a massive wind farm in the port city of Eemshaven, one of the group’s first stops in the north of the country. “It was impressive as an engineering challenge, because they must have figured out ways to cheaply and effectively manufacture all these wind turbines,” he says.

They visited German energy company RWE, which is generating 15 percent of Eemshaven’s electricity from biomass, replacing coal.

Laiba, who is majoring in molecular biology and electrical engineering and computer science with a minor in business management, was intrigued by a presentation on biofuels. “It piqued my interest to see if they would use biomass on a large scale” because of the challenges and unpredictability associated with it as a fuel source.

In Paddepoel, the students toured the first of several neighborhoods that once lacked greenery and used fossil fuel-based heating systems and now aim to generate more energy than they consume.

“The students got to see what the size of the district heating pipes would be, and how they go through people’s gardens into the houses. We talked about the physical impact on the neighborhood of installing these pipes, as well as the potential social and political implications connected to a really difficult transition like this,” Danielson says.

Going green

Green hydrogen promises to be a key player in the energy transition, and Netherlands officials say they have committed to the new infrastructure and business models needed to move ahead with hydrogen as a fuel source.

The students explored how green hydrogen differs from fossil fuel-generated hydrogen. They saw how Dutch companies grappled with siting hydrogen production facilities and handling hydrogen as a gas, which, unlike natural gas, does not yet have a detectable artificial odor. 

The students heard from energy network operator Gasunie about the science and engineering behind repurposing existing natural gas pipelines for a hydrogen network in the North Sea, and were challenged to solve the puzzle of combining hydrogen production with offshore wind energy. 

In the port of Rotterdam, they saw how the startup Battolyser Systems — which is working with Delft University of Technology on an electrolysis device that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen and doubles as a battery — is transitioning from lab bench to market.

Laiba was impressed by how much capital was going into high-risk ventures and startups, “not only because they’re trying to make something revolutionary, but also because society needs to accept and use” their products.

Abreu says that at Battolyser Systems, “I saw people my age on the forefront of green hydrogen, trying to make a difference.”

The students visited the Global Center on Adaptation’s carbon-neutral floating offices and learned how this international organization supports climate adaptation actions around the world and the practice of mitigation.

Also in Rotterdam, international marine contractor Van Oord took students to view a ship that installs wind turbines and explained how their new technology reduces the sound shockwave impact of the installations on marine life.

At the Port of Rotterdam, the students heard about the challenges faced by Europe’s largest port in terms of global shipping and choosing the fuels of the future. The speaker tasked the MIT students with coming up with a plan to transition the privately owned, owner-inhabited barges that ply the region’s inland waterways to a zero-carbon system.

“The Port Authority uses this exercise to illustrate the enormous complexity faced by companies in the energy transition,” Danielson says. “The fact that our students performed really well on the spot shows that we are doing something right at MIT.”

Defining a path forward

Liang, Abreu, and Laiba were struck by how the Netherlands has come together as a country over climate change. “In the U.S., a lot of people disagree with the concept of climate change as a whole,” Liang says. “But in the Netherlands, everyone is on the same page that this is an issue that we should be working toward. They’re capable of seeing a path forward and trying to take action whenever possible.”

Liang, a member of the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team, is doing undergraduate research sponsored by MITEI this summer, working to accelerate fusion manufacturing and development at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He’s improving 3D printing processes to manufacture components that can accommodate the high temperatures and small space within a tokamak reactor, which uses magnetic fields to confine plasma and produce controlled thermonuclear fusion.

“I personally would like to try finding a new solution” to achieving carbon neutrality, he says. That solution, to Liang, is fusion energy, with some entities hoping to demonstrate net energy gain through fusion in the next five years.

Laiba is a researcher with the MIT Office of Sustainability, looking at ways to quantify and reduce the level of MIT’s Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. Scope 3 emissions are tied to the purchase of goods that use fossil fuels in their manufacture. She says, ​“Whatever I decide to do in the future will involve making a more sustainable future. And to me, renewable energy is the driving force behind that.”

In the Netherlands, she says, “what we learned through the entire trip was that renewable energy powers the country to a large amount. Things I could see tangibly was Starbucks having paper cups even for our iced drinks, which I think would flop very hard in the U.S. I don't think society’s ready for that yet.”

Abreu says, “In America, sustainability has always been in the back seat while other things take the forefront. So going to a country where everybody you talk to has a stake (in sustainability) and actually cares, and they’re all pushing together for this common goal, it was inspiring. It gave me hope.”

Dimitris Bertsimas PhD ’88 has been appointed vice provost for open learning at MIT, effective Sept. 1. In this role, Bertsimas, who is the Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at MIT, will work with partners across the Institute to transform teaching and learning on and off MIT’s campus.

Provost Cynthia Barnhart announced Bertsimas’s appointment in an email to the MIT community today.

“As the vice provost for open learning, Dimitris will work with faculty and staff across MIT to shape Open Learning’s next chapter,” Barnhart wrote. “Dimitris will be a member of my leadership team as well as Academic Council, and he will work closely with the school and college deans, faculty, and staff to advance research into the science of learning with the goal of innovating, studying, and scaling up digital technologies on campus and for the benefit of the world.”

She added, “I am thrilled that Dimitris has agreed to serve the Institute in this capacity.”

Bertsimas comes to MIT Open Learning from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is associate dean for the master of business analytics program and a professor of operations research. Bertsimas has been a faculty member at the Institute since 1988, after completing his PhD in operations research and applied mathematics from MIT. He works in the areas of optimization and machine learning and their applications, including in health care and medicine. Bertsimas developed and launched the MBA program at MIT and has served as its inaugural faculty director since 2013. The program has been rated No. 1 in analytics in the world every year since its inception. Passionate about teaching, research, and entrepreneurship, Bertsimas is no stranger to MIT Open Learning. He developed 15.071 (The Analytics Edge), available on MITx, which has attracted hundreds of thousands of learners since its launch in 2013.

In his new role, Bertsimas will oversee MIT Open Learning’s product offerings — including OpenCourseWare, MITx courses, MicroMasters programs, xPRO courses, MIT Horizon, Jameel World Education Lab, MIT pK-12, and others — as well as Open Learning’s infrastructure, finances, and operations.

“I am excited about the opportunity to lead Open Learning and to advance its mission,” says Bertsimas. “I have particular interest in introducing students of all ages, from all backgrounds — science, engineering, management, architecture/planning, law, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts — to the art of the feasible in AI and its potential to revolutionize fields.”

Bertsimas is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a recipient of various research and teaching awards, including the John von Neumann Theory Prize from INFORMS. He views MIT Open Learning as central to the Institute’s mission.

“OpenCourseWare is arguably the most significant accomplishment of MIT in the arena of open learning,” says Bertsimas, who has co-authored seven graduate-level books and co-founded 10 analytics companies. “MIT led the way in educating millions of people around the world by having access to MIT classes. I aspire for Open Learning to equal and possibly surpass the impact of OpenCourseWare in the new era of AI.”

Bertsimas succeeds Eric Grimson PhD ’80, who served as interim vice president for open learning for the past two years. Grimson, the Bernard M. Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering and professor of computer science and engineering, will continue to serve the Institute as chancellor for academic advancement.

Grimson’s connection to Open Learning dates back to 2012 when he co-taught two of the earliest courses available on MITx, which remain among the world’s most popular online courses: 6.00.1x (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python) and 6.00.2x (Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science).

In July 2022, Grimson was named interim vice president for open learning. During his time at the helm of MIT Open Learning, Grimson expanded outreach to the Institute’s school councils and college, providing comprehensive information on opportunities for faculty members to use Open Learning resources. He advanced research into artificial intelligence’s impact on education, including experiments in creating AI-based tutors for introductory online courses. Grimson oversaw the expansion of MITx Online, a platform that serves as an alternative to edX for delivery of MITx’s digital courses, as well as the development of a soon-to-be-launched portal that will unify access to all MIT online educational content for learners worldwide.

“When former MIT President Rafael Reif launched Open Learning, his stated goals were to educate millions of learners around the world, to change how we teach on campus, and to learn about learning and use that knowledge to guide our innovations in teaching,” Grimson says. “I share that vision, and I have been delighted to be part of Open Learning as it strives to revolutionize teaching and learning, both on campus and off. Seeing the incredible impact that MIT has globally in providing easy access to high-quality educational experiences is one of the great pleasures from being part of MIT.”

Bertsimas’s appointment follows an internal search launched in January. The search advisory group was chaired by Duane Boning, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. As part of its work, the advisory group sought input from current and former leaders of Open Learning, members of the Open Learning faculty advisory committees, MIT deans, Open Learning staff, and leaders of online learning initiatives at other universities.

“With his exceptional background and deep commitment to MIT, Dimitris is a leader who will get big things done on behalf of Open Learning and all of MIT, in this moment of time when learning technologies are fast evolving and provide enormous opportunities for educational impact," Boning says.

Hamsa Balakrishnan, the William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) at MIT, has been appointed associate dean of the MIT School of Engineering effective Aug. 1.

As associate dean, Balakrishnan will focus on efforts to attract, retain, and support top talent across all academic levels in the School of Engineering. She will help lead and shape various faculty-focused programs and will help manage many of the school’s student-facing programs and initiatives. Balakrishnan will also support both faculty and students across the school with regards to fellowships, awards, and honors. Additionally, she will support and contribute to a number of key groups within the school.

“Professor Balakrishnan’s passion and dedication have already made a lasting impact on the School of Engineering. Through leadership roles in AeroAstro and beyond, she has demonstrated a commitment to supporting and uplifting our students, faculty, and staff. I am delighted to welcome her to the School of Engineering faculty leadership team,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of the School of Engineering, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

As principal investigator of the Dynamics, Infrastructure Networks, and Mobility (DINaMo) group, Balakrishnan and her team research the modeling, analysis, control, and optimization of modern infrastructure systems. They have collaborated with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, and major airports to address challenges such as advanced air mobility, air traffic congestion, and airport operations.

Balakrishnan served as associate department head in AeroAstro from 2018 to 2021. In that role, she was responsible for the undergraduate and graduate education programs in the department. During her tenure as associate department head, she restructured graduate student recruiting through the use of multi-year fellowships, coordinated the mid-semester shift to remote instruction in March 2020, and introduced a first-of-its-kind provisional funding program for PhD students who wished to change research groups.

Balakrishnan also served as director of Transportation@MIT in 2018-19. During this time, she managed the interdepartmental graduate programs in transportation that span the schools of Engineering and Architecture and Planning, focusing on improving faculty engagement and student recruiting to the program.

In addition to her roles at MIT, Balakrishnan co-founded Lumo, which uses data and analytics to predict flight delays. She currently serves as the company’s chief scientist.

Over the course of her career, Balakrishnan has received numerous honors and accolades for both her research contributions and her dedication as an educator. In addition to being named an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), she has been honored with an NSF CAREER Award, the inaugural CNA Award for Operational Analysis, AIAA’s Lawrence Sperry Award, and the American Automatic Control Council’s Donald P. Eckman Award. She has also been recognized for her mentorship and support of students with a Committed to Caring Award, the MIT AIAA Undergraduate Teaching Award, and the MIT AIAA Undergraduate Advising Award.

Balakrishnan received her bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras, and her master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. Before joining MIT, she served as a principal development engineer at the University Affiliated Research Center at the University of California Santa Cruz and NASA Ames Research Center's Terminal Air Traffic Management Concepts Branch.

Balakrishnan succeeds Elsa Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who has served as associate dean of engineering since Sept. 1, 2023 and was recently named an MIT Climate Project mission director. Olivetti will continue in her role as associate dean until the end of August.

“I’m grateful to Professor Olivetti for her tremendous dedication to the School of Engineering. Her contributions to the school’s leadership team were substantial. I’m thrilled that the MIT Climate Project will benefit from her passion and expertise,” adds Chandrakasan. 

The MIT School of Science is launching a center to advance knowledge and computational capabilities in the field of sustainability science, and support decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society to achieve sustainable development goals. Aligned with the Climate Project at MIT, researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy will develop and apply expertise from across the Institute to improve understanding of sustainability challenges, and thereby provide actionable knowledge and insight to inform strategies for improving human well-being for current and future generations.

Noelle Selin, professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, will serve as the center’s inaugural faculty director. C. Adam Schlosser and Sergey Paltsev, senior research scientists at MIT, will serve as deputy directors, with Anne Slinn as executive director.

Incorporating and succeeding both the Center for Global Change Science and Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change while adding new capabilities, the center aims to produce leading-edge research to help guide societal transitions toward a more sustainable future. Drawing on the long history of MIT’s efforts to address global change and its integrated environmental and human dimensions, the center is well-positioned to lead burgeoning global efforts to advance the field of sustainability science, which seeks to understand nature-society systems in their full complexity. This understanding is designed to be relevant and actionable for decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society in their efforts to develop viable pathways to improve quality of life for multiple stakeholders.

“As critical challenges such as climate, health, energy, and food security increasingly affect people’s lives around the world, decision-makers need a better understanding of the earth in its full complexity — and that includes people, technologies, and institutions as well as environmental processes,” says Selin. “Better knowledge of these systems and how they interact can lead to more effective strategies that avoid unintended consequences and ensure an improved quality of life for all.”    

Advancing knowledge, computational capability, and decision support

To produce more precise and comprehensive knowledge of sustainability challenges and guide decision-makers to formulate more effective strategies, the center has set the following goals:

• Advance fundamental understanding of the complex interconnected physical and socio-economic systems that affect human well-being. As new policies and technologies are developed amid climate and other global changes, they interact with environmental processes and institutions in ways that can alter the earth’s critical life-support systems. Fundamental mechanisms that determine many of these systems’ behaviors, including those related to interacting climate, water, food, and socio-economic systems, remain largely unknown and poorly quantified. Better understanding can help society mitigate the risks of abrupt changes and “tipping points” in these systems.
• Develop, establish and disseminate new computational tools toward better understanding earth systems, including both environmental and human dimensions. The center’s work will integrate modeling and data analysis across disciplines in an era of increasing volumes of observational data. MIT multi-system models and data products will provide robust information to inform decision-making and shape the next generation of sustainability science and strategy.
• Produce actionable science that supports equity and justice within and across generations. The center’s research will be designed to inform action associated with measurable outcomes aligned with supporting human well-being across generations. This requires engaging a broad range of stakeholders, including not only nations and companies, but also nongovernmental organizations and communities that take action to promote sustainable development — with special attention to those who have historically borne the brunt of environmental injustice.

“The center’s work will advance fundamental understanding in sustainability science, leverage leading-edge computing and data, and promote engagement and impact,” says Selin. “Our researchers will help lead scientists and strategists across the globe who share MIT’s commitment to mobilizing knowledge to inform action toward a more sustainable world.”

Building a better world at MIT

Building on existing MIT capabilities in sustainability science and strategy, the center aims to: 

• focus research, education, and outreach under a theme that reflects a comprehensive state of the field and international research directions, fostering a dynamic community of students, researchers, and faculty;
• raise the visibility of sustainability science at MIT, emphasizing links between science and action, in the context of existing Institute goals and other efforts on climate and sustainability, and in a way that reflects the vital contributions of a range of natural and social science disciplines to understanding human-environment systems; and
• re-emphasize MIT’s long-standing expertise in integrated systems modeling while leveraging the Institute’s concurrent leading-edge strengths in data and computing, establishing leadership that harnesses recent innovations, including those in machine learning and artificial intelligence, toward addressing the science challenges of global change and sustainability.

“The Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy will provide the necessary synergy for our MIT researchers to develop, deploy, and scale up serious solutions to climate change and other critical sustainability challenges,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics and dean of the MIT School of Science. “With Professor Selin at its helm, the center will also ensure that these solutions are created in concert with the people who are directly affected now and in the future.”

The center builds on more than three decades of achievements by the Center for Global Change Science and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, both of which were directed or co-directed by professor of atmospheric science Ronald Prinn.

Seen from a distance, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Building (Building 54) — designed by renowned architect and MIT alumnus I.M. Pei ’40 — is one of the most iconic buildings on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, skyline. Home to the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), the 21-story concrete structure soars over campus, topped with its distinctive spherical radar dome. Close up, however, it was a different story.

A sunless, two-story, open-air plaza beneath the tower previously served as a nondescript gateway to the department’s offices, labs, and classrooms above. “It was cold and windy — probably the windiest place on campus,” EAPS department head Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told a packed auditorium inside the building in March. “You would pass through the elevators and disappear into the corridors, never to be seen again until the end of the day.”

Van der Hilst was speaking at a dedication event to celebrate the opening of the renovated and expanded space, 60 years after the Green Building’s original dedication in 1964. In a dramatic transformation, the perpetually-shaded expanse beneath the tower has been filled with an airy, glassed-in structure that is as inviting as the previous space was forbidding.

Designed to meet LEED-platinum certification, the newly-constructed Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) seems to float next to the Brutalist tower, its glass façade both opening up the interior and reflecting the sunlight and green space outside. The 300-seat auditorium within the original tower has been similarly transformed, bringing light and space to the newly dubbed Dixie Lee Bryant (1891) Lecture Hall, named after the first person to earn a geology degree at MIT.

Catalyzing collaboration

The project is about more than updating an overlooked space. “The building we’re here to celebrate today does something else,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said at the dedication.

“In its lightness, in its transparency, it calls attention not to itself, but to the people gathered inside it. In its warmth, its openness, it makes room for culture and community. And it welcomes in those who don’t yet belong … as we take on the immense challenges of climate together,” she continued, referencing the recent launch of The Climate Project at MIT — a whole-of-MIT initiative to innovate bold solutions to climate change. In MIT’s famously decentralized structure, the Moghadam Building provides a new physical hub for students, scientists, and engineers interested in climate and the environment to congregate and share ideas.

From the start, fostering this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration was part of Van der Hilst’s vision. In addition to serving as the flagship location for EAPS, Building 54 has long been the administrative home of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering — a graduate program in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. With the addition of Building 55, EAPS has now been joined by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) — a campus-wide program fostering education, outreach, and innovation in earth system science, urban infrastructure, and sustainability — and will welcome closer collaboration with Terrascope — a first-year learning community which invites its students to take on real-world environmental challenges.

A shared vision comes to life

The building project dovetailed with the long-overdue refurbishment of the Green Building. After a multi-year fundraising campaign where Van der Hilst spearheaded the department’s efforts, the project received a major boost from lead donors Tina and Hamid Moghadam ’77, SM ’78, allowing the department to break ground in November 2021.

In Moghadam, chair and CEO of Prologis, which owns 1.2 billion square feet of warehouses and other logistics infrastructure worldwide, EAPS found a fellow champion for climate and environmental innovation. By putting solar panels on the roofs of Prologis buildings, the company is now the second largest on-site producer of solar energy in the United States. “I don’t think there needs to be a trade-off between good sound economics and return on investment and solving climate change problems,” Moghadam said at the dedication. “The solutions that really work are the ones that actually make sense in a market economy.”

Architectural firm AW-ARCH designed the Moghadam Building with a light touch, emphasizing spaciousness in contrast to the heavy concrete buildings that surround it. “The kind of delicacy and fragility of the thing is in some ways a depiction of what happens here,” said architect and co-founding partner Alex Anmahian at the dedication reception, giving a nod to the study of the delicate balance of the earth system itself. The sense is further illustrated by the responsiveness of the façade to the surrounding environment, which, depending on the time of day and quality of light, makes the glass alternately reflective and transparent.

Inside, the 11,900-square foot pavilion is highly flexible and serves as a showcase for the science that happens in the labs and offices above. Central to the space is a 16-foot by 9-foot video wall featuring vivid footage of field work, lab research, data visualizations, and natural phenomena — visible even to passers-by outside. The video wall is counterposed to an unpretentious set of stair-step bleachers leading to the second floor that could play host to anything from a scientific lecture to a community pizza-and-movie night.

Van der Hilst has referred to his vision for the atrium as a “campus living room,” and the furniture throughout is intentionally chosen to allow for impromptu rearrangements, providing a valuable public space on campus for students to work and socialize.

The second level is similarly adaptable, featuring three classrooms with state-of-the-art teaching technologies that can be transformed from a single large space for a hackathon to intimate rooms for discussion.

“The space is really meant for a yet unforeseen experience,” Anmahian says. “The reason it is so open is to allow for any possibility.”

The inviting, dynamic design of the pavilion has also become an instant point of pride for the building’s inhabitants. At the dedication, School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala quipped that anyone walking into the space “gains two inches in height.”

Van der Hilst quoted a colleague with a similar observation: “Now, when I come into this space, I feel respected by it.”

The perfect complement

Another significant feature of the project is the List Visual Arts Center Percent-for-Art Program installation by conceptual artist Julian Charrière, entitled “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More.”

Consisting of three interrelated works, the commission includes: “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” three glacial erratic boulders which sit atop their own core samples in the surrounding green space; “We Are All Astronauts,” a trio of glass pillars containing vintage globes with distinctions between nations, land, and sea removed; and “Pure Waste,” a synthetic diamond embedded in the foundation, created from carbon captured from the air and the breath of researchers who work in the building.

Known for themes that explore the transformation of the natural world over time and humanity’s complex relationship with our environment, Charrière was a perfect fit to complement the new Building 55 — offering a thought-provoking perspective on our current environmental challenges while underscoring the value of the research that happens within its walls.

Dean Agustín Rayo and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently welcomed nine new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research.

Sonya Atalay joins the Anthropology Section as a professor. She is a public anthropologist and archaeologist who studies Indigenous science protocols, practices, and research methods carried out with and for Indigenous communities. Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, a newly established National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center. She has expertise in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and served two terms on the National NAGPRA Review Committee, first appointed by the Bush administration and then for a second term by the Obama administration. Atalay has produced a series of research-based comics in partnership with Native nations about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under NAGPRA law. Atalay earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

Anna Huang SM ’08 joins the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Music and Theater Arts as assistant professor. She will help develop graduate programming focused on music technology. Previously, she spent eight years with Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music-making. She is the creator of Music Transformer and Coconet (which powered the Bach Google Doodle). She was a judge and organizer for the AI Song Contest. Anna holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, a BM in music composition, a BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an MS from the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Elena Kempf joins the History Section as an assistant professor. She is an historian of modern Europe with special interests in international law and modern Germany in its global context. Her current book project is a legal, political, and cultural history of weapons prohibitions in modern international law from the 1860s to the present. Before joining MIT, Kempf was a postdoc at the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at UC Berkeley and a lecturer at the Department of History at Stanford University. Elena earned her PhD in history from UC Berkeley.

Matthias Michel joins the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy as an assistant professor. Matthias completed his PhD in philosophy in 2019 at Sorbonne Université. Before coming to MIT, he was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. His research is at the intersection between philosophy and cognitive science, and focuses on philosophical issues related to the scientific study of consciousness. His current work addresses questions such as how to distinguish entities with minds from those without, which animals are sentient, and which mental functions can be performed unconsciously.

Jacob Moscona PhD ’21 is a new assistant professor in the Department of Economics. His research explores broad questions in economic development, with a focus on the role of innovation, the environment, and political economy. One stream of his research investigates the forces that drive the rate and direction of technological progress, as well as how new technologies shape global productivity differences and adaptation to major threats like climate change. Another stream of his research studies the political economy of economic development, with a focus on how variation in social organization and institutions affects patterns of conflict and cooperation. Prior to joining MIT, he was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. He received his BA from Harvard in 2016 and PhD from MIT in 2021. Outside of MIT, Jacob enjoys playing and performing music.

Sendhil Mullainathan joins the departments of EECS and Economics as the Peter de Florez Professor. His research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and medicine. Previously, Mullainathan spent five years at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2004, and then the University of Chicago in 2018. He received his BA in computer science, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard.

Elise Newman PhD ’21 is a new assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Her forthcoming monograph, “When arguments merge,” studies the ingredients that languages use to construct verb phrases, and examines how those ingredients interact with other linguistic processes such as question formation. By studying these interactions, she forms a hypothesis about how different languages’ verb phrases can be distinct from each other, and what they must have in common, providing insight into this aspect of the human language faculty. In addition to the structural properties of language, Newman also has expertise in semantics (the study of meaning) and first language acquisition. She returns to MIT after a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, after completing her PhD in linguistics at MIT in 2021.

Oliver Rollins joins the Program in Science, Technology, and Society as an assistant professor. He is a qualitative sociologist who explores the sociological dimensions of neuroscientific knowledge and technologies. His work primarily illustrates the way race, racialized discourses, and systemic practices of social difference impact and are shaped by the development and use of neuroscience. His book, “Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of The Violent Brain” (Stanford University Press, 2021), traces the evolution of neuroimaging research on antisocial behavior, stressing the limits of this controversial brain model when dealing with aspects of social inequality. Rollins’s second book project will grapple with the legacies of scientific racism in and through the mind and brain sciences, elucidating how the haunting presence of race endures through modern neuroscientific theories, data, and technologies. Rollins recently received an NSF CAREER Award to investigate the intersections between social justice and science. Through this project, he aims to examine the sociopolitical vulnerabilities, policy possibilities, and anti-racist promises for contemporary (neuro)science. Rollins received his PhD in sociology from the University of California at San Francisco. Before joining MIT, he held faculty positions at the University of Washington and the University of Louisville and was a postdoc in the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Race, Science, and Society.

Ishani Saraf joins the Program in Science, Technology, and Society as an assistant professor. She is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her research studies the transformation and trade of discarded machines in translocal spaces in India and the Indian Ocean, where she focuses on questions of postcolonial capitalism, urban belonging, material practices, situated bodies of knowledge, and environmental governance. She received her PhD from the University of California at Davis, and prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoc and lecturer at the University of Virginia.

Each year, new MIT graduate students are tasked with the momentous decision of choosing a research group that will serve as their home for the next several years. Among many questions they face: join an established research effort, or work with a new faculty member in a growing group?

Professors Cynthia Breazeal, leading a group of over 30 students, and Ming Guo, with a lab of fewer than 10, demonstrate that excellent mentorship can thrive in a research group of any size.

Cynthia Breazeal: Flexible leadership

Cynthia Breazeal is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab. She is also the MIT dean for digital learning, leading MIT Open Learning’s business and research and engagement units. Breazeal is a pioneer of social robotics and human-robot interaction, and her research group investigates social robots applied to education, pediatrics, health and wellness, and aging.

Breazeal’s focus on taking multidisciplinary approaches to her research has resulted in an inclusive and supportive lab environment. Moreover, she does not shy away from taking students with unconventional backgrounds.

One nominator joined Breazeal's lab as a design researcher without a computer science background. However, Breazeal recognized the value of their work within the context of her lab’s research directions. “I was a bit of an oddball in the group”, the nominator modestly recounts, “but had joined to help make the work in the group more human-centered.”

Throughout the student's academic journey, Breazeal offered unwavering support, whether by connecting them with experts to solve specific problems or guiding them through the academic job search process.

Over the Covid-19 pandemic, Breazeal prioritized gathering student feedback through a survey about how she could best support her research group. In response to this input, Breazeal established the Senior Research Team (SRT) within her group.

The SRT includes PhD holders such as postdocs and research scientists who provide personalized mentorship to one or two graduate students per semester. The SRT members serve as dedicated advocates and points of contact, with weekly check-ins to address questions within the lab. Additionally, SRT members meet by themselves weekly to discuss student concerns and bring up urgent issues with Breazeal directly. Lastly, students can sign up for meetings with Breazeal and participate in paper review sessions with her and co-authors.

In the nominator’s opinion, this new system was implemented because Breazeal cares about her students and her lab culture. With over 30 members in her group, Breazeal cannot provide hands-on support for everyone daily, but she still deeply cares about each person's experience in the lab. The nominator shared that Breazeal “understands as she progresses in her career, she needs to make sure that she is changing and creating new systems for her research group to continue to operate smoothly.”

Ming Guo: Emphasizing learning over achievement

Ming Guo is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Guo’s group works at the interface of mechanics, physics, and cell biology, seeking to understand how physical properties and biological function affect each other in cellular systems.

A key aspect of Guo’s mentorship style is his ability to foster an environment where students feel comfortable expressing their difficulties. He actively shows empathy for his students’ lives outside of the lab, often reaching out to provide support during challenging times. When one nominator found themselves faced with significant personal difficulties, Guo made a point to check in regularly, ensuring the student had a support network of friends and labmates.

Guo champions his students both academically and personally. For instance, when a collaborating lab placed unrealistic expectations on a student’s experimental output, Guo openly praised the student’s efforts and achievements in a joint meeting, alleviating pressure and highlighting the student’s hard work.

In addition, Guo encourages vulnerable conversations about issues affecting students, such as political developments and racial inequities. During the graduate student unionization process, he fostered open discussion, showing genuine interest in understanding the challenges faced by graduate students and using these insights to better support them.

In Guo’s research group, learning and development are prioritized over achievements and goals. When students encounter challenges in their research, Guo helps them maintain perspective by validating their struggles and recognizing the skills they acquire through difficult experiments. By celebrating their progress and emphasizing the importance of the learning process, he ensures that students understand the value of their experiences beyond outcomes. This approach not only boosts their confidence, but also fosters a deeper appreciation for the scientific process and their own development as researchers.

Guo says that he feels most energized and happy when he talks to students. He looks forward to the new ideas that they present. One nominator commented on how much Guo enjoys giving feedback at group meetings: “Sometimes he isn’t convinced in the beginning, but he has cultivated our lab atmosphere to be conducive to extended discussion.”

The nominator continues, “When things do work and become really interesting, he is extremely excited with us and pushes us to share our own ideas with the wider research community.” 

MIT physicists and colleagues report new insights into exotic particles key to a form of magnetism that has attracted growing interest because it originates from ultrathin materials only a few atomic layers thick. The work, which could impact future electronics and more, also establishes a new way to study these particles through a powerful instrument at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Among their discoveries, the team has identified the microscopic origin of these particles, known as excitons. They showed how they can be controlled by chemically “tuning” the material, which is primarily composed of nickel. Further, they found that the excitons propagate throughout the bulk material instead of being bound to the nickel atoms.

Finally, they proved that the mechanism behind these discoveries is ubiquitous to similar nickel-based materials, opening the door for identifying — and controlling — new materials with special electronic and magnetic properties.

The open-access results are reported in the July 12 issue of Physical Review X.

“We’ve essentially developed a new research direction into the study of these magnetic two-dimensional materials that very much relies on an advanced spectroscopic method, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS), which is available at Brookhaven National Lab,” says Riccardo Comin, MIT’s Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics and leader of the work. Comin is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory and the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Comin’s colleagues on the work include Connor A. Occhialini, an MIT graduate student in physics, and Yi Tseng, a recent MIT postdoc now at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY). The two are co-first authors of the Physical Review X paper.

Additional authors are Hebatalla Elnaggar of the Sorbonne; Qian Song, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics; Mark Blei and Seth Ariel Tongay of Arizona State University; Frank M. F. de Groot of Utrecht University; and Valentina Bisogni and Jonathan Pelliciari of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Ultrathin layers

The magnetic materials at the heart of the current work are known as nickel dihalides. They are composed of layers of nickel atoms sandwiched between layers of halogen atoms (halogens are one family of elements), which can be isolated to atomically thin layers. In this case, the physicists studied the electronic properties of three different materials composed of nickel and the halogens chlorine, bromine, or iodine. Despite their deceptively simple structure, these materials host a rich variety of magnetic phenomena.

The team was interested in how these materials’ magnetic properties respond when exposed to light. They were specifically interested in particular particles — the excitons — and how they are related to the underlying magnetism. How exactly do they form? Can they be controlled?

Enter excitons

A solid material is composed of different types of elementary particles, such as protons and electrons. Also ubiquitous in such materials are “quasiparticles” that the public is less familiar with. These include excitons, which are composed of an electron and a “hole,” or the space left behind when light is shone on a material and energy from a photon causes an electron to jump out of its usual position.

Through the mysteries of quantum mechanics, however, the electron and hole are still connected and can “communicate” with each other through electrostatic interactions. This interaction leads to a new composite particle formed by the electron and the hole — an exciton.

Excitons, unlike electrons, have no charge but possess spin. The spin can be thought of as an elementary magnet, in which the electrons are like little needles orienting in a certain way. In a common refrigerator magnet, the spins all point in the same direction. Generally speaking, the spins can organize in other patterns leading to different kinds of magnets. The unique magnetism associated with the nickel dihalides is one of these less-conventional forms, making it appealing for fundamental and applied research.

The MIT team explored how excitons form in the nickel dihalides. More specifically, they identified the exact energies, or wavelengths, of light necessary for creating them in the three materials they studied.

“We were able to measure and identify the energy necessary to form the excitons in three different nickel halides by chemically ‘tuning,’ or changing, the halide atom from chlorine to bromine to iodine,” says Occhialini. “This is one essential step towards understanding how photons — light — could one day be used to interact with or monitor the magnetic state of these materials.” Ultimate applications include quantum computing and novel sensors.

The work could also help predict new materials involving excitons that might have other interesting properties. Further, while the studied excitons originate on the nickel atoms, the team found that they do not remain localized to these atomic sites. Instead, “we showed that they can effectively hop between sites throughout the crystal,” Occhialini says. “This observation of hopping is the first for these types of excitons, and provides a window into understanding their interplay with the material’s magnetic properties.”

A special instrument

Key to this work — in particular for observing the exciton hopping — is resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS), an experimental technique that co-authors Pelliciari and Bisogni helped pioneer. Only a few facilities in the world have advanced high energy resolution RIXS instruments. One is at Brookhaven. Pelliciari and Bisogni are part of the team running the RIXS facility at Brookhaven. Occhialini will be joining the team there as a postdoc after receiving his MIT PhD.

RIXS, with its specific sensitivity to the excitons from the nickel atoms, allowed the team to “set the basis for a general framework for nickel dihalide systems,” says Pelliciari. “it allowed us to directly measure the propagation of excitons.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Science and Brookhaven National Laboratory through the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA), a DoE Quantum Information Science Research Center.