In a 2014 essay on mentorship in The Chronicle of Higher Education, American scholar Leonard Cassuto wrote: “In Greek myth, Mentor was a wise man who earned the trust of Odysseus, who selected him to educate his son, Telemachus. The word has a legacy: ‘Mentor’ is a title that should be earned.” 

Earlier this year, it was announced that two MIT affiliates — Kimberly “Kim” Benard, associate dean and director of distinguished fellowships and academic excellence at the MIT Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD), and Leigh Estabrooks, longtime invention education officer with the Lemelson-MIT Program — had been honored by the Joe Biden administration with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). The award, administered by the National Science Foundation on behalf of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, celebrates those who’ve made “significant contributions to mentoring and thereby support the future productivity” of the nation’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce.

While this award marks Benard’s and Estabrooks’ decades of service and leadership at the Institute, it also spotlights the ways MIT staff and other community members provide essential mentorship.

“Too often, notions of good mentorship focus on faculty advisors and overlook the vital work done by others,” notes Anjali Tripathi ’09, one of Benard’s nominators. To her, the PAESMEM awards recognize the dedicated effort behind cultivating effective mentoring relationships across higher education, which can inspire other unsung heroes as they show up for their mentees.

Kim Benard: Growing a garden

When Tripathi, now a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, established a mentoring program while earning her advanced degrees at Harvard University, she took inspiration from a transformative mentoring experience from her senior year at MIT: working on graduate fellowship applications with Benard. Throughout the process, Benard’s power to motivate, listen, and give to her students left a mark on Tripathi, who later wrote, “I have had many ‘mentors’ in the form of advisers, but in my life only two mentors, as Cassuto would have it. Kim is one of them.”

In Benard’s 18 years at MIT, she has personally mentored over 2,000 students from all backgrounds as they tackle the question of what comes next after MIT and explore post-graduate opportunities such as the Rhodes, Marshall, and Fulbright scholarships. To help students through the competitive application process, Benard established MIT’s Distinguished Fellowships program, which sits within CAPD.  

“Someone once said to me that mentoring is like growing a garden. You plant a seed and hope that it grows and bears fruit,” Benard notes. “Some produce fruit quickly, and others take a long time to finally see the result. Being nominated by a former student for this award, and seeing so many others celebrate it, means that I have hopefully allowed these students to bear fruit.”

As Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, sees it, “Kim is remarkable in so many ways.” Alongside one-on-one consultations and mock interviews, Benard gets to know dozens of applicants individually, then synthesizes their information into recommendation letters each summer. “She works extremely hard, accomplishing with her small team a job done by much larger teams at our competitor institutions.”

While her work has left a remarkable impact on students exploring fellowships, much of that garden-tending happens in the tasks described above — the quiet consistency that doesn’t regularly make the news. Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing and co-chair of the Distinguished Fellowships Committee, describes Benard as “one of the hidden heroes who sustain MIT.” He adds: “Every university needs someone like Kim. We’re very lucky to have the original.”

Benard sees this recognition as an opportunity to illuminate the tangible ways MIT community members can — and do — make an impact on the next generation. “Mentoring and advising is valuable work, but often unseen,” she explains. “This recognition demonstrates the effort MIT mentors and advisors put into budding scientists and demonstrates that these are important and vital tasks for the success of research.”

She designs her work around two main tenets of good mentoring: adaptive practices and deep, or active, listening. As Benard has noticed in her countless sessions, each person’s unique needs require a different kind of guided self-reflection. Throughout the process, she employs active listening. It’s not always an easy conversation, so a caring approach is essential.

“She has guided 20 years’ worth of students through an intense process of self-examination and reflection with her extraordinarily successful combination of tough, often existential questioning and unconditionally caring moral support every step of the way,” Will Broadhead, associate professor of history and MacVicar Faculty Fellow, says. “Her students love her, and it’s easy to see why!”

In fact, the cohort of Benard’s advisees — both fellowship winners and non-winners — who proudly call themselves “Kim’s kids” can speak to all the large and small ways that mentorship plays out. Years after they graduate, “Kim’s kids” are still in touch with her, and many volunteer their time to help current fellowship applicants. Keen to emulate Bernard’s mentorship and pay it forward, alumni such as Tripathi become a part of the MIT community “of people eager to help, support, and lift each other up.”

After all, Tripathi observes, “Kim is the human heart of MIT.”

Leigh Estabrooks: Inspiring mentees to pay it forward

As the Invention Education Officer for the Lemelson-MIT (LMIT) program for 18 years until her retirement from MIT last December, Leigh Estabrooks played a pivotal role in mentoring thousands of students and educators through LMIT’s High School InvenTeam grant initiative and other programs.

Stephanie Couch, LMIT’s executive director, notes, “Leigh created a network of exceptional educators devoted to helping students discover their full potential. Her research led to the development of new curriculum and program offerings for all ages and grade levels, fueling the growth of invention education across the U.S. We are so grateful for her time with the Lemelson-MIT program.”

“Receiving this award has been a humbling and emotional experience,” Estabrooks shares. “I never set out to be an honored mentor; I simply set out to help others build confidence in and understanding of what it means to invent technological solutions to improve the world. I will be forever grateful for the sustained mentoring opportunities with K-14 students and teachers while at LMIT.”

Michael Cima, MIT faculty director for LMIT, underscores the depth of Estabrooks’ impact: “Leigh is a tireless champion of the value of invention education. Her efforts have helped untold numbers of students and teachers over the years. We still cross paths with students from decades ago who tell us about the difference Dr. Estabrooks made in their lives.”

Estabrooks emphasizes that mentoring is a long-term commitment rather than a one-time event. For students, it can begin in middle or high school and continue into college and professional careers. For teachers, mentoring starts even before they apply for grants and remains integral throughout their careers and educational advancements. “[Mentoring] doesn’t take place within one school year; it is informal with no end date,” Estabrooks says. “The ongoing act of mentoring forges strong bonds and builds relationships that endure for decades.”

“Leigh has been able to alter the trajectory of students’ lives through invention education,” Cima adds. “Many students who had never even considered college, let alone engineering or science as a career path, ended up attending college — some even at MIT.”

Believing that every student and teacher deserves a caring mentor, Estabrooks encourages others to take on mentorship roles, noting how vital mentors were in shaping her own personal and professional journey. “Students and teachers may not directly ask, ‘Will you be my mentor?’ However, you can become a mentor simply by being available,” She says.

One former student shared that Estabrooks naturally assumed a mentor role during their time working together. As a 10th grader, this student wouldn’t have thought to ask, yet Estabrooks became a mentor and has remained one for over half of the student’s life.

One of the most remarkable aspects of mentorship, according to Estabrooks, is its ripple effect. Many of Estabrooks’ mentees have gone on to become mentors themselves, fostering a culture of support and guidance that spans generations. As one mentee put it, “One hallmark of a great mentor is their ability to inspire their mentees to pay it forward, increasing their impact exponentially.” Katelyn Sweeney ’18, for example, whom Estabrooks has mentored since Sweeney was in 10th grade, now mentors middle and high school inventors and roboticists and serves as an educational counselor [CK] for MIT.

Doug Scott, an LMIT Invention Education Fellow who nominated Estabrooks for the PAESMEM award, affirms her influence: “Leigh is the genuine article and a mentor in every sense of the word. She has developed inventors both young and old through her knowledge and kindness. Over the years, I have seen her help every person she has encountered.”

Instilling the importance of mentorship in her mentees, Estabrooks encourages them to reflect on how guidance has helped them navigate key decision points in their schooling and careers. She hopes they will extend this generosity of spirit to others who may not initially see themselves in STEM or know how to pursue college and career opportunities.

Today, Estabrooks continues to collaborate with LMIT. “Mentoring, to me, includes the gift of time to listen, provide opportunities, make connections, and offer gentle guidance — all while genuinely caring about mentees,” she says.

The legacies of both Estabrooks and Benard will continue to shape future generations of scientists, engineers, inventors, educators, and more, ensuring that the cycle of mentorship remains unbroken.

On board Intuitive Machines’ Athena spacecraft, which made a moon landing on March 6, were cutting-edge MIT payloads: a depth-mapping camera and a mini-rover called “AstroAnt.” Also on that craft were the words and voices of people from around the world speaking in dozens of languages. These were etched on a 2-inch silicon wafer computationally designed by Professor Craig Carter of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering and mounted on the mission’s Lunar Outpost MAPP Rover.

Dubbed the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space (HUMANS), the project is a collaboration of art and science, bringing together experts from across MIT — with technical expertise from the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; nano-etching and testing from MIT.nano; audio processing from the MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future and the Music and Theater Arts Section; and lunar mission support from the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative.

While a 6-inch HUMANS wafer flew on the Axiom-2 mission to the International Space Station in 2023, the 2-inch wafer was a part of the IM-2 mission to the lunar south polar region, linked to the MIT Media Lab’s To the Moon to Stay program, which reimagines humankind’s return to the moon. IM-2 ended prematurely after the Athena spacecraft tipped onto its side shortly after landing in March, but the HUMANS wafer fulfilled its mission by successfully reaching the lunar surface.

“If you ask a person on the street: ‘What does MIT do?’ Well, that person might say they’re a bunch of STEM nerds who make devices and create apps. But that’s not the entire MIT. It’s more multifaceted than that,” Carter says. “This project embodies that. It says, ‘We’re not just one-trick ponies.’”

A message etched in silicon

The HUMANS project, initially conceived of by MIT students, was inspired by the Golden Record, a pair of gold-plated phonograph records launched in 1977 aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, with human voices, music, and images. Designed to explore the outer solar system, the Voyagers have since traveled into interstellar space, beyond the sun’s heliosphere. But while the earlier project was intended to introduce humanity to an extraterrestrial audience, the HUMANS message is directed at fellow human beings — reminding us that space belongs to all.

Maya Nasr PhD ’23, now a researcher at Harvard University, has led the project since 2020, when she was a graduate student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She co-founded it with Lihui Zhang SM ’21, from the MIT Technology and Policy Program. The team invited people to share what space means to them, in writing or audio, to create a “symbol of unity that promotes global representation in space.”

When Nasr and Zhang sought an expert to translate their vision into a physical artifact, they turned to Carter, who had previously created the designs and algorithms for many art projects and, most recently, for One.MIT, a series of mosaics composed of the names of MIT faculty, students, and staff. Carter quickly agreed.

“I love figuring out how to turn equations into code, into artifacts,” Carter says. “Whether they’re art or not is a difficult question. They’re definitely artful. They’re definitely artisanal.”

Carter played a pivotal role in the computational design and fabrication of the silicon wafer now on the surface of the moon. He first translated the submitted phrases, in 64 languages, into numerical representations that could be turned into fonts. He also reverse-engineered a typesetting language to “kern” the text — adjusting the spacing between letters for visual clarity.

“Kerning is important for the aesthetics of written text. You’d want a Y to be not-too-close to a neighboring T, but farther from a W,” Carter said. “All of the phrases were sequences of words like D-O-G, and it’s not as simple as, put a D, put an O, put a G. It’s put a D, figure out where the O should be, put the O, figure out where the G should be, put the G.”

After refining the text placement, Carter designed an algorithm that geometrically transformed both the text and the audio messages’ digital waveforms — graphical representations of sound — into spirals on the wafer. The design pays homage to the Voyagers’ Golden Records, which featured spiral grooves, much like a vinyl record.

In the center of the disc is an image of a globe, or map projection — Carter found publicly available geospatial coordinates and mapped them into the design.

“I took those coordinates and then created something like an image from the coordinates. It had to be geometry, not pixels,” he says.

Once the spirals and globe imagery were in place, Carter handed the data for the design to MIT.nano, which has specialized instruments for high-precision etching and fabrication.

Human voices, lunar surface

“I hope people on Earth feel a deep sense of connection and belonging — that their voices, stories, and dreams are now part of this new chapter in lunar exploration,” Nasr says. “When we look at the moon, we can feel an even deeper connection, knowing that our words — in all their diversity — are now part of its surface, carrying the spirit of humanity forward.”

For Carter, the project conveys the human capacity for wonder and a shared sense of what’s possible. “In many cases, looking outward forces you to look inward at the same time to put the wonder in some kind of personal context,” Carter says. “So if this project somehow conveys that we are all wondering about this marvelous universe together in all of our languages, I would consider that a victory.”

The project’s link to the Golden Record — an artifact launched nearly 50 years ago and now traveling beyond the solar system — strikes another chord with Carter.

“It’s unimaginably far away, and so the notion that we can connect to something in time and space, to something that’s out there, I think it is just a wonderful connection.” 

In 1949, the U.S. Air Force called upon MIT with an urgent need. Soviet aircraft carrying atomic bombs were capable of reaching the U.S. homeland, and the nation was defenseless. A dedicated center — MIT Lincoln Laboratory — was established. The brightest minds from MIT came together in service to the nation, making scientific and engineering leaps to prototype the first real-time air defense system. The commercial sector and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) then produced and deployed the system, called SAGE, continent-wide.

The SAGE story still describes MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s approach to national security innovation today. The laboratory works with DoD agencies to identify challenging national security gaps, determines if technology can contribute to a solution, and then executes an R&D program to advance critical technologies. The principal products of these programs are advanced technology prototypes, which are often rapidly fabricated and demonstrated through test and evaluation.

Throughout this process, the laboratory closely coordinates with the DoD and other federal agency sponsors, and then transfers the technology in many forms to industry for manufacturing at scale to meet national needs. For nearly 75 years, these technologies have saved lives, responded to emergencies, fueled the nation’s economy, and impacted the daily life of Americans and our allies. 

"Lincoln Laboratory accelerates the pace of national security technology development, in partnership with the government, private industry, and the broader national security ecosystem," says Melissa Choi, director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory. "We integrate high-performance teams with advanced facilities and the best technology available to bring novel prototypes to life, providing lasting benefits to the United States."

The Air Force and MIT recently renewed their contract for the continued operation of Lincoln Laboratory. The contract was awarded by the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center Strategic Services Division on Hanscom Air Force Base for a term of five years, with an option for an additional five years. Since Lincoln Laboratory’s founding, MIT has operated the laboratory in the national interest for no fee and strictly on a cost-reimbursement basis. The contract award is indicative of the DoD’s continuing recognition of the long-term value of, and necessity for, cutting-edge R&D in service of national security.

Critical contributions to national security

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is the DoD’s largest federally funded research and development center R&D laboratory. Sponsored by the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, it contributes to a broad range of national security missions and domains.

Among the most critical domains are air and missile defense. Laboratory researchers pioneer advanced radar systems and algorithms crucial for detecting, tracking, and targeting ballistic missiles and aircraft, and serve as scientific advisors to the Reagan Test Site. They also conduct comprehensive studies on missile defense needs, such as the recent National Defense Authorization Act–directed study on the defense of Guam, and provide actionable insights to Congress.  

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is also at the forefront of space systems and technologies, enabling the military to monitor space activities and communicate at very high bandwidths. Laboratory engineers developed the innovatively curved detector within the Space Surveillance Telescope that allows the U.S. Space Force to track tiny space objects. It also operates the world's highest-resolution long-range radar for imaging satellites. Recently, the laboratory worked closely with NASA to demonstrate laser communications systems in space, setting a record for the fastest satellite downlink and farthest lasercom link ever achieved. These breakthroughs are heralding a new era in satellite communications for defense and civil missions.

Perhaps most importantly, MIT Lincoln Laboratory is asked to rapidly prototype solutions to urgent and emerging threats. These solutions are both transferred to industry for production and fielded directly to war-fighters, saving lives. To combat improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, the laboratory quickly and iteratively developed several novel systems to detect and defeat explosive devices and insurgent networks. When insurgents were attacking forward-operating bases at night, the laboratory developed an advanced infrared camera system to prevent the attacks. Like other multi-use technologies developed at the laboratory, that system led to a successful commercial startup, which was recently acquired by Anduril.

Responding to domestic crises is also a key part of the laboratory’s mission. After the attacks of 9/11/2001, the laboratory quickly integrated a system to defend the airspace around critical locations in the capital region. More recently, the laboratory’s application of AI to video forensics and physical screening has resulted in commercialized systems deployed in airports and mass transit settings. Over the last decade, the laboratory has adapted its technology for many other homeland security needs, including responses to natural disasters. As one example, researchers repurposed a world-class lidar system first used by the military for terrain mapping to quickly quantify damage after hurricanes.

For all of these efforts, the laboratory exercises responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds, identifying multiple uses for the technologies it develops and introducing disruptive approaches to reduce costs for the government. Sometimes, the system architecture or design results in cost savings, as is the case with the U.S. Air Force's SensorSat; the laboratory’s unique sensor design enabled a satellite 10 times smaller and cheaper than those typically used for space surveillance. Another approach is by creating novel systems from low-cost components. For instance, laboratory researchers discovered a way to make phased-array radars using cell phone electronics instead of traditional expensive components, greatly reducing the cost of deploying the radars for weather and aircraft surveillance.

The laboratory also pursues emerging technology to bring about transformative solutions. In the 1960s, such vision brought semiconductor lasers into the world, and in the 1990s shrunk transistors more than industry imagined possible. Today, laboratory staff are pursuing other new realms: making imagers reconfigurable at the pixel level, designing quantum sensors to transform navigation technology, and developing superconducting electronics to improve computing efficiency.

A long, beneficial relationship between MIT and the DoD

"Lincoln Laboratory has created a deep understanding and knowledge base in core national security missions and associated technologies. We look forward to continuing to work closely with government sponsors, industry, and academia through our trusted, collaborative relationships to address current and future national security challenges and ensure technological superiority," says Scott Anderson, assistant director for operations at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

"MIT has always been proud to support the nation through its operation of Lincoln Laboratory. The long-standing relationship between MIT and the Department of Defense through this storied laboratory has been a difference-maker for the safety, economy, and industrial power of the United States, and we look forward to seeing the innovations ahead of us," notes Ian Waitz, MIT vice president for research.

Under the terms of the renewed contract, MIT will ensure that Lincoln Laboratory remains ready to meet R&D challenges that are critical to national security.

As we mature from childhood, our vocabulary — as well as the ways we use it — grows, and our experiences become richer, allowing us to think, reason, and interact with others with specificity and intention. Accordingly, our word choices evolve to align with our personal values, ethics, cultural norms, and views. Over time, most of us develop an internal “guide” that enables us to learn context behind conversation; it also frequently directs us away from sharing information and sentiments that are, or could be, harmful or inappropriate. As it turns out, large language models (LLMs) — which are trained on extensive, public datasets and therefore often have biases and toxic language baked in — can gain a similar capacity to moderate their own language.

A new method from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and IBM Research, called self-disciplined autoregressive sampling (SASA), allows LLMs to detoxify their own outputs, without sacrificing fluency. 

Unlike other detoxifying methods, this decoding algorithm learns a boundary between toxic/nontoxic subspaces within the LLM’s own internal representation, without altering the parameters of the model, the need for retraining, or an external reward model. Then, during inference, the algorithm assesses the toxicity value of the partially generated phrase: tokens (words) already generated and accepted, along with each potential new token that could reasonably be chosen for proximity to the classifier boundary. Next, it selects a word option that places the phrase in the nontoxic space, ultimately offering a fast and efficient way to generate less-toxic language.

“We wanted to find out a way with any existing language model [that], during the generation process, the decoding can be subject to some human values; the example here we are taking is toxicity,” says the study’s lead author Ching-Yun “Irene” Ko PhD ’24, a former graduate intern with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and a current research scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.

Ko’s co-authors include Luca Daniel, professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and Ko’s graduate advisor; and several members of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and/or IBM Research — Pin-Yu Chen, Payel Das, Youssef Mroueh, Soham Dan, Georgios Kollias, Subhajit Chaudhury, and Tejaswini Pedapati. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.

Finding the “guardrails”

The training resources behind LLMs almost always include content collected from public spaces like the internet and other readily available datasets. As such, curse words and bullying/unpalatable language is a component, although some of it is in the context of literary works. It then follows that LLMs can innately produce — or be tricked into generating — dangerous and/or biased content, which often contains disagreeable words or hateful language, even from innocuous prompts. Further, it’s been found that they can learn and amplify language that’s not preferred or even detrimental for many applications and downstream tasks — leading to the need for mitigation or correction strategies.

There are many ways to achieve robust language generation that’s fair and value-aligned. Some methods use LLM retraining with a sanitized dataset, which is costly, takes time, and may alter the LLM’s performance; others employ decoding external reward models, like sampling or beam search, which take longer to run and require more memory. In the case of SASA, Ko, Daniel, and the IBM Research team developed a method that leverages the autoregressive nature of LLMs, and using a decoding-based strategy during the LLM’s inference, gradually steers the generation — one token at a time — away from unsavory or undesired outputs and toward better language.

The research group achieved this by building a linear classifier that operates on the learned subspace from the LLM’s embedding. When LLMs are trained, words with similar meanings are placed closely together in vector space and further away from dissimilar words; the researchers hypothesized that an LLM’s embedding would therefore also capture contextual information, which could be used for detoxification. The researchers used datasets that contained sets of a prompt (first half of a sentence or thought), a response (the completion of that sentence), and human-attributed annotation, like toxic or nontoxic, preferred or not preferred, with continuous labels from 0-1, denoting increasing toxicity. A Bayes-optimal classifier was then applied to learn and figuratively draw a line between the binary subspaces within the sentence embeddings, represented by positive values (nontoxic space) and negative numbers (toxic space). 

The SASA system then works by re-weighting the sampling probabilities of newest potential token based on the value of it and the generated phrase’s distance to the classifier, with the goal of remaining close to the original sampling distribution.

To illustrate, if a user is generating a potential token #12 in a sentence, the LLM will look over its full vocabulary for a reasonable word, based on the 11 words that came before it, and using top-k, top-p, it will filter and produce roughly 10 tokens to select from. SASA then evaluates each of those tokens in the partially completed sentence for its proximity to the classifier (i.e., the value of tokens 1-11, plus each potential token 12). Tokens that produce sentences in the positive space are encouraged, while those in the negative space are penalized. Additionally, the further away from the classifier, the stronger the impact.

“The goal is to change the autoregressive sampling process by re-weighting the probability of good tokens. If the next token is likely to be toxic given the context, then we are going to reduce the sampling probability for those prone to be toxic tokens,” says Ko. The researchers chose to do it this way “because the things we say, whether it’s benign or not, is subject to the context.”

Tamping down toxicity for value matching

The researchers evaluated their method against several baseline interventions with three LLMs of increasing size; all were transformers and autoregressive-based: GPT2-Large, Llama2-7b, and Llama 3.1-8b-Instruct, with 762 million, 7 billion, and 8 billion parameters respectively. For each prompt, the LLM was tasked with completing the sentence/phrase 25 times, and PerspectiveAPI scored them from 0 to 1, with anything over 0.5 being toxic. The team looked at two metrics: the average maximum toxicity score over the 25 generations for all the prompts, and the toxic rate, which was the probability of producing at least one toxic phrase over 25 generations. Reduced fluency (and therefore increased perplexity) were also analyzed. SASA was tested to complete RealToxicityPrompts (RPT), BOLD, and AttaQ datasets, which contained naturally occurring, English sentence prompts.

The researchers ramped up the complexity of their trials for detoxification by SASA, beginning with nontoxic prompts from the RPT dataset, looking for harmful sentence completions. Then, they escalated it to more challenging prompts from RPT that were more likely to produce concerning results, and as well applied SASA to the instruction-tuned model to assess if their technique could further reduce unwanted ouputs. They also used the BOLD and AttaQ benchmarks to examine the general applicability of SASA in detoxification. With the BOLD dataset, the researchers further looked for gender bias in language generations and tried to achieve a balanced toxic rate between the genders. Lastly, the team looked at runtime, memory usage, and how SASA could be combined with word filtering to achieve healthy and/or helpful language generation.

“If we think about how human beings think and react in the world, we do see bad things, so it’s not about allowing the language model to see only the good things. It’s about understanding the full spectrum — both good and bad,” says Ko, “and choosing to uphold our values when we speak and act.”

Overall, SASA achieved significant toxic language generation reductions, performing on par with RAD, a state-of-the-art external reward model technique. However, it was universally observed that stronger detoxification accompanied a decrease in fluency. Before intervention, the LLMs produced more toxic responses for female labeled prompts than male; however, SASA was able to also significantly cut down harmful responses, making them more equalized. Similarly, word filtering on top of SASA did markedly lower toxicity levels, but it also hindered the ability of the LLM to respond coherently.

A great aspect of this work is that it’s a well-defined, constrained optimization problem, says Ko, meaning that balance between open language generation that sounds natural and the need to reduce unwanted language can be achieved and tuned.

Further, Ko says, SASA could work well for multiple attributes in the future: “For human beings, we have multiple human values. We don’t want to say toxic things, but we also want to be truthful, helpful, and loyal … If you were to fine-tune a model for all of these values, it would require more computational resources and, of course, additional training.” On account of the lightweight manner of SASA, it could easily be applied in these circumstances: “If you want to work with multiple values, it’s simply checking the generation’s position in multiple subspaces. It only adds marginal overhead in terms of the compute and parameters,” says Ko, leading to more positive, fair, and principle-aligned language.

This work was supported, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the National Science Foundation.

MIT Professors Andrew Vanderburg and Ariel White have been honored as Committed to Caring for their attentiveness to student needs and for creating a welcoming and inclusive culture. For MIT graduate students, the Committed to Caring program recognizes those who go above and beyond.

Professor Vanderburg “is incredibly generous with his time, resources, and passion for mentoring the next generation of astronomers,” praised one of his students. 

“Professor Ariel White has made my experience at MIT immeasurably better and I hope that one day I will be in a position to pay her kindness forward,” another student credited.

Andrew Vanderburg: Investing in student growth and development

Vanderburg is the Bruno B. Rossi Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics and is affiliated with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His research focuses on studying exoplanets. Vanderburg is interested in developing cutting-edge techniques and methods to discover new planets outside of our solar system, and studying these planets to learn their detailed properties.

Ever respectful of students’ boundaries between their research and personal life, Vanderburg leads by example in striking a healthy balance. A nominator commented that he has recently been working on his wildlife photography skills, and has even shared some of his photos at the group’s meetings.

Balancing personal and work life is something that almost everyone Vanderburg knows struggles with, from undergraduate students to faculty. “I encourage my group members to spend free time doing things they enjoy outside of work,” Vanderburg says, “and I try to model that balanced behavior myself.”

Vanderburg also understands and accepts that sometimes personal lives can completely overwhelm everything else and affect work and studies. He offers, “when times like these inevitably happen, I just have to acknowledge that life is unpredictable, family comes first, and that the astronomy can wait.”

In addition, Vanderburg organizes group outings, such as hiking, apple picking, and Red Sox games, and occasionally hosts group gatherings at his home. An advisee noted that “these efforts make our group feel incredibly welcoming, and fosters friendship between all our team members.”

Vanderburg has provided individualized guidance and support to over a dozen students in his first two years as faculty at MIT. His students credit him with “meeting them where they are,” and say that he candidly addresses themes like imposter syndrome and student feelings of belonging in astronomy. Vanderburg is always ready to offer his fresh perspective and unwavering support to his students.

“I try to treat everyone in my group with kindness and support,” Vanderburg says, allowing his students to trust that he has their best interest at heart. Students feel this way as well; another nominator exclaimed that Vanderburg “genuinely and truly is one of the kindest humans I know.” 

Vanderburg went above and beyond in offering his students support and insisting that his advisees will accomplish their goals. One nominator said, “his support meant the world to me at a time where I doubted my own abilities and potential.”

The Committed to Caring honor recognizes Vanderburg’s seemingly endless capacity to share his knowledge, support his students through difficult times, and invest in his mentees’ personal growth and development.

Ariel White: Student well-being and advocacy

White is an associate professor of political science who studies voting and voting rights, race, the criminal legal system, and bureaucratic behavior. Her research uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people's everyday interactions with government. Her recent work investigates how potential voters react to experiences with punitive government policies, such as incarceration and immigration enforcement, and how people can make their way back into political life after these experiences.

She cares deeply about student well-being and departmental culture. One of her nominators shared a personal story describing that they were frequently belittled and insulted early in their graduate school journey. They had battled with whether this hurtful treatment was part of a typical grad school journey. The experience was negatively impacting their academic performance and feeling of belonging in the department. 

When she learned of it, White immediately expressed concern and reinforced that the student deserved an environment that was conducive to learning and well-being, and then quickly took steps to talk to the peer to ensure their interactions improved. 

“She wants me to feel valued, and is dedicated to both my growth as a scholar and my well-being as a person,” the nominator expressed. “This has been especially valuable as I found the adjustment to the department difficult and isolating.”

Another student commended, “I am constantly in awe of the time and effort that Ariel puts into leading by example, actively fostering an inclusive learning environment, and ensuring students feel heard and empowered.”

White is a radiant example of a professor who can have an outstanding publishing record while still treating graduate students with kindness and respect. She shows compassion and support to students, even those she does not advise. In the words of one nominator, “Ariel is the most caring person in this department.”

White has consistently expressed her desire to support her students and advocate for them. “I think one of the hardest transitions to make is the one from being a consumer of research to a producer of it.” Students work on the rather daunting prospect of developing an idea on their own for a solo project, and it can be hard to know where to start or how to keep going.

To address this, White says that she talks with advisees about what she’s seen work for her and for other students. She also encourages them to talk with their peers for advice and try out different ways of structuring their time or plan out goals.

“I try to help by explicitly highlighting these challenges and validating them: These are difficult things for nearly everyone who goes through the PhD program,” White adds.

One student reflected, “Ariel is the type of advisor that everyone should aspire to be, and that anyone would be lucky to have.” 

The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) has announced the establishment of the Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub, an ambitious effort designed to drive cutting-edge innovation in children’s health care. Launched in collaboration with the Charles H. Hood Foundation, the hub will focus on addressing unmet needs in pediatric medicine by developing technologies and treatments tailored specifically for children.

Leveraging the Institute’s strengths in the life sciences, the hub will provide seed funding and strategic support for bold, high-impact research projects with the potential to transform health care for children. It will also act as a springboard for emerging scientific leaders, empowering them to help shape the future of pediatric health.

“The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub represents an extraordinary opportunity to create meaningful and lasting change in the lives of children,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, and head of MIT HEALS. “By collaborating with the Charles H. Hood Foundation, we’re harnessing MIT’s interdisciplinary strengths to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in pediatric health care.”

Addressing critical gaps in pediatric health care

Despite making up a significant portion of the global population, children have been largely underserved when it comes to medical innovation, leaving immense gaps in care. Pediatric conditions that shape a lifetime of health and well-being often lack dedicated solutions — forcing reliance on repurposed adult treatments or no solution at all. From 2008 to 2018, only 10 percent of U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals were designated for individuals under the age of 18.

There is a massive opportunity to prioritize innovation for people during their formative years and drive breakthroughs that not only improve individual lives but also elevate health outcomes for generations to come. The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub seeks to lead this transformation by creating a dedicated community for advancing technologies and research.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with MIT to launch the hub, a bold initiative that will drive groundbreaking science and technology for children. MIT’s unparalleled expertise in engineering and life sciences, combined with our deep commitment to pediatric innovation, creates a powerful force for change,” says Hood Foundation President Neil Smiley, on behalf of the foundation’s board of trustees. “We look forward to this catalytic gift igniting transformative programs that will shape the future of children’s health and well-being for generations to come.”

The Hood Foundation, based in Massachusetts, has committed $15 million over five years to support the creation and development of the hub, reinforcing its long-standing dedication to advancing groundbreaking pediatric research. Since its establishment in 1942, the Charles H. Hood Foundation has sought to fill gaps in the pediatric health care system by awarding research grants and supporting the development of pediatric related tools and treatments.

In addition to its established grant programs, over the course of the past decade the Hood Foundation has served as a pioneer in supporting young companies trying to bring pediatric innovations to the patients who need them, by way of program-related investments made via its venture arm, CH Innovations LLC.

“The Hood Foundation’s longstanding dedication to improving child health has led to the formation of an extensive and robust network of researchers, clinician-scientists, entrepreneurs, and other leaders in science and business who stand well-positioned to engage with and contribute to the hub’s efforts,” adds Smiley.

A central role in the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative

The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub, which will be administered in the MIT School of Engineering, will serve as a cornerstone of MIT HEALS, an Institute-wide initiative to address society’s most urgent health challenges. The hub’s cross-disciplinary approach underscores MIT’s commitment to inspiring, accelerating, and delivering solutions at scale to some of society’s most urgent and intractable health challenges.

Elazer R. Edelman will serve as faculty lead, with Joseph J. Frassica as the executive director of the hub. Edelman is the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and director of MIT’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research. He also serves as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s cardiac intensive care unit in Boston. Frassica serves as professor of the practice in IMES at MIT. He is also a member of the teaching and research staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital (pediatric critical care) and serves as pediatric editor for the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine.

“As scientists, engineers, and clinicians, we are obliged to ensure that what we learn and what we invent is available to all. Ironically, those most in need of innovation are least able to access and benefit from it — children especially. The support of the Hood Foundation and collaboration with our MIT and extended community can help address this gap and fill this vital void,” says Edelman.

"The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub will serve as a catalyst, mentor, and advocate for pediatric innovation, harnessing MIT’s world-class expertise and Hood’s extensive network of pediatric innovators to tackle the most pressing challenges in pediatric care. Thanks to the generous support of the Hood Foundation, we plan to build the infrastructure and programs needed to transform groundbreaking ideas into real-world solutions that improve the lives of children and the providers who care for them," Frassica adds.

Driving research, advocacy, and education

Beyond supporting research, the hub seeks to bolster the broader pediatric research community through outreach, education, and advocacy. By working closely with key collaborators and leveraging relationships with other stakeholders such as hospitals, industry, patient advocates, and funders, the hub will identify, develop, and advance efforts to find economically viable pathways to bring treatments to young patients. 

The hub will also create the infrastructure to seamlessly share deep organizational understanding of the regulatory processes governing innovation for children with researchers and innovators in the hub community.

“No cash prizes. But our friends in Kiev are calling in, and they’ll probably say thanks,”​ was the the tagline that drew students and tech professionals to join MIT-Ukraine’s first-ever hackathon this past January.

The hackathon was co-sponsored by MIT-Ukraine and Mission Innovation X and was shaped by the efforts of MIT alumni from across the world. It was led by Hosea Siu ’14, SM ’15, PhD ’18, a seasoned hackathon organizer and AI researcher, in collaboration with Phil Tinn MCP ’16, a research engineer now based at SINTEF [Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research] in Norway. The program was designed to prioritize tangible impact: 

“In a typical hackathon, you might get a weekend of sleepless nights and some flashy but mostly useless prototypes. Here, we stretched it out over four weeks, and we’re expecting real, meaningful outcomes,”​ says Siu, the hackathon director.

One week of training, three weeks of project development

In the first week, participants attended lectures with leading experts on key challenges Ukraine currently faces, from a talk on mine contamination with Andrew Heafitz PhD ’05 to a briefing on disinformation with Nina Lutz SM ’21. Then, participants formed teams to develop projects addressing these challenges, with mentorship from top MIT specialists including Phil Tinn (AI & defense), Svetlana Boriskina (energy resilience), and Gene Keselman (defense innovation and dual-use technology).

“I really liked the solid structure they gave us — walking us through exactly what’s happening in Ukraine, and potential solutions,”​ says Timur Gray, a first-year in engineering at Olin College.

The five final projects spanned demining, drone technology, AI and disinformation, education for Ukraine, and energy resilience. 

Supporting demining efforts

With current levels of technology, it is estimated that it will take 757 years to fully de-mine Ukraine. Students Timur Gray and Misha Donchenko, who is a sophomore mathematics major at MIT, came together to research the latest developments in demining technology and strategize how students could most effectively support innovations.

The team has made connections with the Ukrainian Association of Humanitarian Demining and the HALO Trust to explore opportunities for MIT students to directly support demining efforts in Ukraine. They also explored project ideas to work on tools for civilians to report on mine locations, and the team created a demo web page рішучість757, which includes an interactive database mapping mine locations.

“Being able to apply my skills to something that has a real-world impact — that’s been the best part of this hackathon,” says Donchenko.

Innovating drone production

Drone technology has been one of Ukraine’s most critical advantages on the battlefield — but government bureaucracy threatens to slow innovation, according to Oleh Deineka, who made this challenge the focus of his hackathon project. 

Joining remotely from Ukraine, where he studies post-war recovery at the Kyiv School of Economics, Deineka brought invaluable firsthand insight from living and working on the ground, enriching the experience for all participants. Prior to the hackathon, he had already begun developing UxS.AGENCY, a secure digital platform to connect drone developers with independent funders, with the aim of ensuring that the speed of innovations in drone technology is not curbed. 

He notes that Ukrainian arms manufacturers have the capacity to produce three times more weapons and military equipment than the Ukrainian government can afford to purchase. Promoting private sector development of drone production could help solve this. The platform Deineka is working on also aims to reduce the risk of corruption, allowing developers to work directly with funders, bypassing any bureaucratic interference.

Deineka is also working with MIT’s Keselman, who gave a talk during the hackathon on dual-use technology — the idea that military innovations should also have civilian applications. Deineka emphasized that developing such dual-use technology in Ukraine could help not only to win the war, but also to create sustainable civilian applications, ensuring that Ukraine’s 10,000 trained drone operators have jobs after it ends. He pointed to future applications such as drone-based urban infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, and even personal security — like a small drone following a child with asthma, allowing parents to monitor their well-being in real time​.

“This hackathon has connected me with MIT’s top minds in innovation and security. Being invited to collaborate with Gene Keselman and others has been an incredible opportunity," says Deineka.

Disinformation dynamics on Wikipedia

Wikipedia has long been a battleground for Russian disinformation, from the profiling of artists like Kazimir Malevich to the framing of historical events. The hackathon’s disinformation team worked together on a machine learning-based tool to detect biased edits. 

They found that Wikipedia’s moderation system is susceptible to reinforcing systemic bias, particularly when it comes to history. Their project laid the groundwork for a potential student-led initiative to track disinformation, propose corrections, and develop tools to improve fact-checking on Wikipedia.

Education for Ukraine’s future

Russia’s war against Ukraine is having a detrimental impact on education, with constant air raid sirens disrupting classes, and over 2,000 Ukrainian schools damaged or destroyed. The STEM education team focused on what they could do to support Ukrainian students. They developed a plan for adapting MIT’s Beaver Works Summer Institute in STEM for students still living in Ukraine, or potentially for Ukrainians currently displaced to neighboring countries. 

“I didn’t realize how many schools had been destroyed and how deeply that could impact kids’ futures. You hear about the war, but the hackathon made it real in a way I hadn’t thought about before,” says Catherine Tang, a senior in electrical engineering and computer science.

Vlad Duda, founder of Nomad AI, also contributed to the education track of the hackathon with a focus on language accessibility and learning support. One of the prototypes he presented, MOVA, is a Chrome extension that uses AI to translate online resources into Ukrainian — an especially valuable tool for high school students in Ukraine, who often lack the English proficiency needed to engage with complex academic content. Duda also developed OpenBookLM, an AI-powered tool that helps students turn notes into audio and personalized study guides, similar in concept to Google’s NotebookLM but designed to be open-source and adaptable to different languages and educational contexts.

Energy resilience 

The energy resilience team worked on exploring cheaper, more reliable heating and cooling technologies so Ukrainian homes can be less dependent on traditional energy grids that are susceptible to Russian attacks.

The team tested polymer filaments that generate heat when stretched and cool when released, which could potentially offer low-cost, durable home heating solutions in Ukraine. Their work focused on finding the most effective braid structure to enhance durability and efficiency.

From hackathon to reality

Unlike most hackathons, where projects end when the event does, MIT-Ukraine’s goal is to ensure these ideas don’t stop here. All the projects developed during the hackathon will be considered as potential avenues for MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and MISTI Ukraine summer internship programs. Last year, 15 students worked on UROP and MISTI projects for Ukraine, contributing in areas such as STEM education and reconstruction in Ukraine. With the many ideas generated during the hackathon, MIT-Ukraine is committed to expanding opportunities for student-led projects and collaborations in the coming year.

"The MIT-Ukraine program is about learning by doing, and making an impact beyond MIT’s campus. This hackathon proved that students, researchers, and professionals can work together to develop solutions that matter — and Ukraine’s urgent challenges demand nothing less," says Elizabeth Wood, Ford International Professor of History at MIT and the faculty director of the MIT-Ukraine Program at the Center for International Studies. 

As the world moves to reduce carbon emissions, solar and wind power will play an increasing role on electricity grids. But those renewable sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy. So to ensure a reliable power grid — one that can deliver electricity 24/7 — it’s crucial to have a means of storing electricity when supplies are abundant and delivering it later, when they’re not. And sometimes large amounts of electricity will need to be stored not just for hours, but for days, or even longer.

Some methods of achieving “long-duration energy storage” are promising. For example, with pumped hydro energy storage, water is pumped from a lake to another, higher lake when there’s extra electricity and released back down through power-generating turbines when more electricity is needed. But that approach is limited by geography, and most potential sites in the United States have already been used. Lithium-ion batteries could provide grid-scale storage, but only for about four hours. Longer than that and battery systems get prohibitively expensive.

A team of researchers from MIT and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has been investigating a less-familiar option based on an unlikely-sounding concept: liquid air, or air that is drawn in from the surroundings, cleaned and dried, and then cooled to the point that it liquefies. 

“Liquid air energy storage” (LAES) systems have been built, so the technology is technically feasible. Moreover, LAES systems are totally clean and can be sited nearly anywhere, storing vast amounts of electricity for days or longer and delivering it when it’s needed. But there haven’t been conclusive studies of its economic viability. Would the income over time warrant the initial investment and ongoing costs? With funding from the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center, the researchers developed a model that takes detailed information on LAES systems and calculates when and where those systems would be economically viable, assuming future scenarios in line with selected decarbonization targets as well as other conditions that may prevail on future energy grids.

They found that under some of the scenarios they modeled, LAES could be economically viable in certain locations. Sensitivity analyses showed that policies providing a subsidy on capital expenses could make LAES systems economically viable in many locations. Further calculations showed that the cost of storing a given amount of electricity with LAES would be lower than with more familiar systems such as pumped hydro and lithium-ion batteries. They conclude that LAES holds promise as a means of providing critically needed long-duration storage when future power grids are decarbonized and dominated by intermittent renewable sources of electricity.

The researchers — Shaylin A. Cetegen, a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE); Professor Emeritus Truls Gundersen of the NTNU Department of Energy and Process Engineering; and MIT Professor Emeritus Paul I. Barton of ChemE — describe their model and their findings in a new paper published in the journal Energy.

The LAES technology and its benefits

LAES systems consists of three steps: charging, storing, and discharging. When supply on the grid exceeds demand and prices are low, the LAES system is charged. Air is then drawn in and liquefied. A large amount of electricity is consumed to cool and liquefy the air in the LAES process. The liquid air is then sent to highly insulated storage tanks, where it’s held at a very low temperature and atmospheric pressure. When the power grid needs added electricity to meet demand, the liquid air is first pumped to a higher pressure and then heated, and it turns back into a gas. This high-pressure, high-temperature, vapor-phase air expands in a turbine that generates electricity to be sent back to the grid.

According to Cetegen, a primary advantage of LAES is that it’s clean. “There are no contaminants involved,” she says. “It takes in and releases only ambient air and electricity, so it’s as clean as the electricity that’s used to run it.” In addition, a LAES system can be built largely from commercially available components and does not rely on expensive or rare materials. And the system can be sited almost anywhere, including near other industrial processes that produce waste heat or cold that can be used by the LAES system to increase its energy efficiency.

Economic viability

In considering the potential role of LAES on future power grids, the first question is: Will LAES systems be attractive to investors? Answering that question requires calculating the technology’s net present value (NPV), which represents the sum of all discounted cash flows — including revenues, capital expenditures, operating costs, and other financial factors — over the project's lifetime. (The study assumed a cash flow discount rate of 7 percent.)

To calculate the NPV, the researchers needed to determine how LAES systems will perform in future energy markets. In those markets, various sources of electricity are brought online to meet the current demand, typically following a process called “economic dispatch:” The lowest-cost source that’s available is always deployed next. Determining the NPV of liquid air storage therefore requires predicting how that technology will fare in future markets competing with other sources of electricity when demand exceeds supply — and also accounting for prices when supply exceeds demand, so excess electricity is available to recharge the LAES systems.

For their study, the MIT and NTNU researchers designed a model that starts with a description of an LAES system, including details such as the sizes of the units where the air is liquefied and the power is recovered, and also capital expenses based on estimates reported in the literature. The model then draws on state-of-the-art pricing data that’s released every year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and is widely used by energy modelers worldwide. The NREL dataset forecasts prices, construction and retirement of specific types of electricity generation and storage facilities, and more, assuming eight decarbonization scenarios for 18 regions of the United States out to 2050.

The new model then tracks buying and selling in energy markets for every hour of every day in a year, repeating the same schedule for five-year intervals. Based on the NREL dataset and details of the LAES system — plus constraints such as the system’s physical storage capacity and how often it can switch between charging and discharging — the model calculates how much money LAES operators would make selling power to the grid when it’s needed and how much they would spend buying electricity when it’s available to recharge their LAES system. In line with the NREL dataset, the model generates results for 18 U.S. regions and eight decarbonization scenarios, including 100 percent decarbonization by 2035 and 95 percent decarbonization by 2050, and other assumptions about future energy grids, including high-demand growth plus high and low costs for renewable energy and for natural gas.

Cetegen describes some of their results: “Assuming a 100-megawatt (MW) system — a standard sort of size — we saw economic viability pop up under the decarbonization scenario calling for 100 percent decarbonization by 2035.” So, positive NPVs (indicating economic viability) occurred only under the most aggressive — therefore the least realistic — scenario, and they occurred in only a few southern states, including Texas and Florida, likely because of how those energy markets are structured and operate.

The researchers also tested the sensitivity of NPVs to different storage capacities, that is, how long the system could continuously deliver power to the grid. They calculated the NPVs of a 100 MW system that could provide electricity supply for one day, one week, and one month. “That analysis showed that under aggressive decarbonization, weekly storage is more economically viable than monthly storage, because [in the latter case] we’re paying for more storage capacity than we need,” explains Cetegen.

Improving the NPV of the LAES system

The researchers next analyzed two possible ways to improve the NPV of liquid air storage: by increasing the system’s energy efficiency and by providing financial incentives. Their analyses showed that increasing the energy efficiency, even up to the theoretical limit of the process, would not change the economic viability of LAES under the most realistic decarbonization scenarios. On the other hand, a major improvement resulted when they assumed policies providing subsidies on capital expenditures on new installations. Indeed, assuming subsidies of between 40 percent and 60 percent made the NPVs for a 100 MW system become positive under all the realistic scenarios.

Thus, their analysis showed that financial incentives could be far more effective than technical improvements in making LAES economically viable. While engineers may find that outcome disappointing, Cetegen notes that from a broader perspective, it’s good news. “You could spend your whole life trying to optimize the efficiency of this process, and it wouldn’t translate to securing the investment needed to scale the technology,” she says. “Policies can take a long time to implement as well. But theoretically you could do it overnight. So if storage is needed [on a future decarbonized grid], then this is one way to encourage adoption of LAES right away.”

Cost comparison with other energy storage technologies

Calculating the economic viability of a storage technology is highly dependent on the assumptions used. As a result, a different measure — the “levelized cost of storage” (LCOS) — is typically used to compare the costs of different storage technologies. In simple terms, the LCOS is the cost of storing each unit of energy over the lifetime of a project, not accounting for any income that results.

On that measure, the LAES technology excels. The researchers’ model yielded an LCOS for liquid air storage of about $60 per megawatt-hour, regardless of the decarbonization scenario. That LCOS is about a third that of lithium-ion battery storage and half that of pumped hydro. Cetegen cites another interesting finding: the LCOS of their assumed LAES system varied depending on where it’s being used. The standard practice of reporting a single LCOS for a given energy storage technology may not provide the full picture.

Cetegen has adapted the model and is now calculating the NPV and LCOS for energy storage using lithium-ion batteries. But she’s already encouraged by the LCOS of liquid air storage. “While LAES systems may not be economically viable from an investment perspective today, that doesn’t mean they won’t be implemented in the future,” she concludes. “With limited options for grid-scale storage expansion and the growing need for storage technologies to ensure energy security, if we can't find economically viable alternatives, we’ll likely have to turn to least-cost solutions to meet storage needs. This is why the story of liquid air storage is far from over. We believe our findings justify the continued exploration of LAES as a key energy storage solution for the future.”

For the past decade, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has been instrumental in promoting student engagement across the Institute to help solve the world’s most pressing water and food system challenges. As part of J-WAFS’ central mission of securing the world’s water and food supply, J-WAFS aims to cultivate the next generation of leaders in the water and food sectors by encouraging MIT student involvement through a variety of programs and mechanisms that provide research funding, mentorship, and other types of support.

J-WAFS offers a range of opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students to engage in the advancement of water and food systems research. These include graduate student fellowships, travel grants for participation in conferences, funding for research projects in India, video competitions highlighting students’ water and food research, and support for student-led organizations and initiatives focused on critical areas in water and food.

As J-WAFS enters its second decade, it continues to expose students across the Institute to experiential hands-on water and food research, career and other networking opportunities, and a platform to develop their innovative and collaborative solutions.

Graduate student fellowships

In 2017, J-WAFS inaugurated two graduate student fellowships: the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions and the J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship Program. The Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions is a doctoral fellowship for students pursuing research related to water for human need at MIT. The fellowship is made possible by Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. Each year, up to two outstanding students are selected to receive fellowship support for one academic semester. Through it, J-WAFS seeks to support distinguished MIT students who are pursuing solutions to the pressing global water supply challenges of our time. The J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions is funded by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program, which offers companies the opportunity to collaborate with MIT on water and food research. A portion of each research affiliate’s fees supports this fellowship.

Aditya Avinash Ghodgaonkar, a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), reflects on how receiving a J-WAFS graduate student fellowship positively impacted his research on the design of low-cost emitters for affordable, resilient drip irrigation for farmers: “My J-WAFS fellowship gave me the flexibility and financial support needed to explore new directions in the area of clog-resistant drip irrigation that had a higher risk element that might not have been feasible to manage on an industrially sponsored project,” Ghodgaonkar explains. Emitters, which control the volume and flow rate of water used during irrigation, often clog due to small particles like sand. Ghodgaonkar worked with Professor Amos Winter, and with farmers in resource-constrained communities in countries like Jordan and Morocco, to develop an emitter that is mechanically more resistant to clogging. Ghodgaonkar reports that their energy-efficient, compact, clog-resistant drip emitters are being commercialized by Toro and may be available for retail in the next few years. The opportunities and funding support Ghodgaonkar has received from J-WAFS contributed greatly to his entrepreneurial success and the advancement of the water and agricultural sectors.

Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang, a PhD student advised by Professor Robert Langer and Principal Research Scientist Ana Jaklenec of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was a 2022 J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellow. With the fellowship, Zhang was able to focus on her innovative research on a novel micronutrient delivery platform that fortifies food with essential vitamins and nutrients. “We intake micronutrients from basically all the healthy food that we eat; however, around the world there are about 2 billion people currently suffering from micronutrient deficiency because they do not have access to very healthy, very fresh food,” Zhang says. Her research involves the development of biodegradable polymers that can deliver these micronutrients in harsh environments in underserved regions of the world. “Vitamin A is not very stable, for example; we have vitamin A in different vegetables but when we cook them, the vitamin can easily degrade,” Zhang explains. However, when vitamin A is encapsulated in the microparticle platform, simulation of boiling and of the stomach environment shows that vitamin A was stabilized. “The meaningful factors behind this experiment are real,” says Zhang. The J-WAFS Fellowship helped position Zhang to win the 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition for this work.

J-WAFS grant for water and food projects in India

J-WAFS India Grants are intended to further the work being pursued by MIT individuals as a part of their research, innovation, entrepreneurship, coursework, or related activities. Faculty, research staff, and undergraduate and graduate students are eligible to apply. The program aims to support projects that will benefit low-income communities in India, and facilitates travel and other expenses related to directly engaging with those communities.

Gokul Sampath, a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Jonathan Bessette, a PhD student in MechE, initially met through J-WAFS-sponsored conference travel, and discovered their mutual interest in the problem of arsenic in water in India. Together, they developed a cross-disciplinary proposal that received a J-WAFS India Grant. Their project is studying how women in rural India make decisions about where they fetch water for their families, and how these decisions impact exposure to groundwater contaminants like naturally-occurring arsenic. Specifically, they are developing low-cost remote sensors to better understand water-fetching practices. The grant is enabling Sampath and Bessette to equip Indian households with sensor-enabled water collection devices (“smart buckets”) that will provide them data about fetching practices in arsenic-affected villages. By demonstrating the efficacy of a sensor-based approach, the team hopes to address a major data gap in international development. “It is due to programs like the Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab that I was able to obtain the support for interdisciplinary work on connecting water security, public health, and regional planning in India,” says Sampath.

J-WAFS travel grants for water conferences

In addition to funding graduate student research, J-WAFS also provides grants for graduate students to attend water conferences worldwide. Typically, students will only receive travel funding to attend conferences where they are presenting their research. However, the J-WAFS travel grants support learning, networking, and career exploration opportunities for exceptional MIT graduate students who are interested in a career in the water sector, whether in academia, nonprofits, government, or industry.

Catherine Lu ’23, MNG ’24 was awarded a 2023 Travel Grant to attend the UNC Water and Health Conference in North Carolina. The conference serves as a curated space for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to convene and assess data, scrutinize scientific findings, and enhance new and existing strategies for expanding access to and provision of services for water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Lu, who studied civil and environmental engineering, worked with Professor Dara Entekhabi on modeling and predicting droughts in Africa using satellite Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) data. As she evaluated her research trajectory and career options in the water sector, Lu found the conference to be informative and enlightening. “I was able to expand my knowledge on all the sectors and issues that are related to water and the implications they have on my research topic.” Furthermore, she notes: “I was really impressed by the diverse range of people that were able to attend the conference. The global perspective offered at the conference provided a valuable context for understanding the challenges and successes of different regions around the world — from WASH education in schools in Zimbabwe and India to rural water access disparities in the United States … Being able to engage with such passionate and dedicated people has motivated me to continue progress in this sector.” Following graduation, Lu secured a position as a water resources engineer at CDM Smith, an engineering and construction firm.

Daniela Morales, a master’s student in city planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, was a 2024 J-WAFS Travel Grant recipient who attended World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden. The annual global conference is organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute and convenes leading experts, decision-makers, and professionals in the water sector to actively engage in discussions and developments addressing critical water-related challenges. Morales’ research interests involve drinking water quality and access in rural and peri-urban areas affected by climate change impacts, the effects of municipal water shutoffs on marginalized communities, and the relationship between regional water management and public health outcomes. When reflecting on her experience at the conference, Morales writes: “Being part of this event has given me so much motivation to continue my professional and academic journey in water management as it relates to public health and city planning … There was so much energy that was collectively generated in the conference, and so many new ideas that I was able to process around my own career interests and my role as a future planner in water management, that the last day of the conference felt less like an ending and more of the beginning of a new chapter. I am excited to take all the information I learned to work towards my own research, and continue to build relationships with all the new contacts I made.” Morales also notes that without the support of the J-WAFS grant, “I would not have had the opportunity to make it to Stockholm and participate in such a unique week of water wisdom.”

Seed grants and Solutions grants

J-WAFS offers seed grants for early-stage research and Solutions Grants for later-stage research that is ready to move from the lab to the commercial world. Proposals for both types of grants must be submitted and led by an MIT principal investigator, but graduate students, and sometimes undergraduates, are often supported by these grants.

Arjav Shah, a PhD-MBA student in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management, is currently pursuing the commercialization of a water treatment technology that was first supported through a 2019 J-WAFS seed grant and then a 2022 J-WAFS Solutions Grant with Professor Patrick Doyle. The technology uses hydrogels to remove a broad range of micropollutants from water. The Solutions funding enables entrepreneurial students and postdocs to lay the groundwork to commercialize a technology by assessing use scenarios and exploring business needs with actual potential customers. “With J-WAFS’ support, we were not only able to scale up the technology, but also gain a deeper understanding of market needs and develop a strong business case,” says Shah. Shah and the Solutions team have discovered that the hydrogels could be used in several real-world contexts, ranging from large-scale industrial use to small-scale, portable, off-grid applications. “We are incredibly grateful to J-WAFS for their support, particularly in fostering industry connections and facilitating introductions to investors, potential customers, and experts,” Shah adds.

Shah was also a 2023 J-WAFS Travel Grant awardee who attended Stockholm World Water Week that year. He says, “J-WAFS has played a pivotal role in both my academic journey at MIT and my entrepreneurial pursuits. J-WAFS support has helped me grow both as a scientist and an aspiring entrepreneur. The exposure and opportunities provided have allowed me to develop critical skills such as customer discovery, financial modeling, business development, fundraising, and storytelling — all essential for translating technology into real-world impact. These experiences provided invaluable insights into what it takes to bring a technology from the lab to market.”

Shah is currently leading efforts to spin out a company to commercialize the hydrogel research. Since receiving J-WAFS support, the team has made major strides toward launching a startup company, including winning the Pillar VC Moonshot Prize, Cleantech Open National Grand Prize, MassCEC Catalyst Award, and participation in the NSF I-Corps National Program.

J-WAFS student video competitions

J-WAFS has hosted two video competitions: MIT Research for a Water Secure Future and MIT Research for a Food Secure Future, in honor of World Water Day and Word Food Day, respectively. In these competitions, students are tasked with creating original videos showcasing their innovative water and food research conducted at MIT. The opportunity is open to MIT students, postdocs, and recent alumni.

Following a review by a distinguished panel of judges, Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22 won first place in the 2022 J-WAFS World Food Day Student Video Competition for his video focused on eliminating pesticide pollution and waste. Jayaprakash delved into the science behind AgZen-Cloak, a new generation of agricultural sprays that prevents pesticides from bouncing off of plants and seeping into the ground, thus causing harmful runoff. The J-WAFS competition provided Jayaprakash with a platform to highlight the universal, low-cost, and environmentally sustainable benefits of AgZen-Cloak. Jayaprakash worked on similar technology as a funded student on a J-WAFS Solutions grant with Professor Kripa Varanasi. The Solutions grant, in fact, helped Jayaprakash and Varanasi to launch AgZen, a company that deploys AgZen-Cloak and other products and technologies to control the interactions of droplets and sprays with crop surfaces. AgZen is currently helping farmers sustainably tend to their agricultural plots while also protecting the environment.  

In 2021, Hilary Johnson SM ’18, PhD ’22, won first place in the J-WAFS World Water Day video competition. Her video highlighted her work on a novel pump that uses adaptive hydraulics for improved pump efficiency. The pump was part of a sponsored research project with Xylem Inc., a J-WAFS Research Affiliate company, and Professor Alex Slocum of MechE. At the time, Johnson was a PhD student in Slocum’s lab. She was instrumental in the development of the pump by engineering the volute to expand and contract to meet changing system flow rates. Johnson went on to later become a 2021-22 J-WAFS Fellow, and is now a full-time mechanical engineer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

J-WAFS-supported student clubs

J-WAFS-supported student clubs provide members of the MIT student community the opportunity for networking and professional advancement through events focused on water and food systems topics.

J-WAFS is a sponsor of the MIT Water Club, a student-led group that supports and promotes the engagement of the MIT community in water-sector-related activism, dissemination of information, and research innovation. The club allows students to spearhead the organization of conferences, lectures, outreach events, research showcases, and entrepreneurship competitions including the former MIT Water Innovation Prize and MIT Water Summit. J-WAFS not only sponsors the MIT Water Club financially, but offers mentorship and guidance to the leadership team.

The MIT Food and Agriculture Club is also supported by J-WAFS. The club’s mission is to promote the engagement of the MIT community in food and agriculture-related topics. In doing so, the students lead initiatives to share the innovative technology and business solutions researchers are developing in food and agriculture systems. J-WAFS assists in the connection of passionate MIT students with those who are actively working in the food and agriculture industry beyond the Institute. From 2015 to 2022, J-WAFS also helped the club co-produce the Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize — a student business plan competition for food and agricultural startups.

From 2023 onward, the MIT Water Club and the MIT Food and Ag Club have been joining forces to organize a combined prize competition: The MIT Water, Food and Agriculture (WFA) Innovation Prize. The WFA Innovation Prize is a business plan competition for student-led startups focused on any region or market. The teams present business plans involving a technology, product, service, or process that is aimed at solving a problem related to water, food, or agriculture. The competition encourages all approaches to innovation, from engineering and product design to policy and data analytics. The goal of the competition is to help emerging entrepreneurs translate research and ideas into businesses, access mentors and resources, and build networks in the water, food, and agriculture industries. J-WAFS offers financial and in-kind support, working with student leaders to plan, organize, and implement the stages of the competition through to the final pitch event. This year, J-WAFS is continuing to support the WFA team, which is led by Ali Decker, an MBA student at MIT Sloan, and Sam Jakshtis, a master’s student in MIT’s science in real estate development program. The final pitch event will take place on April 30 in the MIT Media Lab.

“I’ve had the opportunity to work with Renee Robins, executive director of J-WAFS, on MIT’s Water, Food and Agriculture Innovation Prize for the past two years, and it has been both immensely valuable and a delight to have her support,” says Decker. “Renee has helped us in all areas of prize planning: brainstorming new ideas, thinking through startup finalist selection, connecting to potential sponsors and partners, and more. Above all, she supports us with passion and joy; each time we meet, I look forward to our discussion,” Decker adds.

J-WAFS events

Throughout the year, J-WAFS aims to offer events that will engage any in the MIT student community who are working in water or food systems. For example, on April 19, 2023, J-WAFS teamed up with the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) to co-host an MIT student poster session for Earth Month. The theme of the poster session was “MIT research for a changing planet,” and it featured work from 11 MIT students with projects in water, food, energy, and the environment. The students, who represented a range of MIT departments, labs, and centers, were on hand to discuss their projects and engage with those attending the event. Attendees could vote for their favorite poster after being asked to consider which poster most clearly communicated the research problem and the potential solution. At the end of the night, votes were tallied and the winner of the “People’s Choice Award” for best poster was Elaine Liu ’24, an undergraduate in mathematics at the time of the event. Liu’s poster featured her work on managing failure cascades in systems with wind power.

J-WAFS also hosts less-structured student networking events. For instance, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2024, J-WAFS hosted an ice cream social for student networking. The informal event was an opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students from across the Institute to meet and mingle with like-minded peers working in, or interested in, water and food systems. Students were able to explain their current and future research, interests, and projects and ask questions while exchanging ideas, engaging with one another, and potentially forming collaborations, or at the very least sharing insights.

Looking ahead to 10 more years of student impact

Over the past decade, J-WAFS has demonstrated a strong commitment to empowering students in the water and food sectors, fostering an environment where they can confidently drive meaningful change and innovation. PhD student Jonathan Bessette sums up the J-WAFS community as a “one-of-a-kind community that enables essential research in water and food that otherwise would not be pursued. It’s this type of research that is not often the focus of major funding, yet has such a strong impact in sustainable development.”

J-WAFS aims to provide students with the support and tools they need to conduct authentic and meaningful water and food-related research that will benefit communities around the world. This support, coupled with an MIT education, enables students to become leaders in sustainable water and food systems. As the second decade of J-WAFS programming begins, the J-WAFS team remains committed to fostering student collaboration across the Institute, driving innovative solutions to revitalize the world’s water and food systems while empowering the next generation of pioneers in these critical fields. 

The MIT Press announced today the inception of its new Faculty and Alumni Book Awards program, along with the inaugural winners. The new awards are made possible by an anonymous donor and are intended to honor the enduring importance of books and their authors within the MIT community.

“We are deeply grateful to have the opportunity to publish so many distinguished MIT faculty and alumni voices — books that enrich our collective understanding and inspire new perspectives,” says Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press. “In establishing the MIT Press Faculty and Alumni Book Awards program, we aim to acknowledge these scholars and the incredible contributions they make towards the progress of knowledge within the MIT community and beyond.”

Awards in the two author categories (faculty and alumni) will be selected each year from a shortlist of nominated MIT Press titles published in the three preceding years. The winning books, selected by a dedicated committee, will be those that most successfully provide a clear cultural, professional, and publishing contribution to the academic community or reading public; advance scholarship in their disciplines, pioneer a new field of inquiry, or effectively engage the public; and represent the prestige and quality for which the MIT Press is widely recognized.

The winner of the 2025 MIT Press Faculty Book Award is “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines” (2023), by David Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow; David Mindell, professor of aerospace engineering and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing; and Elisabeth Reynolds, professor of the practice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. In an era of rapid technological advancement and shifting labor markets, “The Work of the Future” stands as an essential, insightful, and profoundly timely contribution to one of the most pressing issues of our time.

The other finalist titles in this category were: 

• “Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action,” by Catherine D’Ignazio;
• “Data Is Everybody's Business: The Fundamentals of Data Monetization,” by Barbara Wixom, Cynthia Beath, and Leslie Owens; and
• “The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis,” by Zachary Lamb and Lawrence Vale.

The winner of the 2025 MIT Press Alumni Book Award is “The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World” (2023), by Michael D. Smith PhD ’99, who earned his MIT doctorate in management science and is now the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. “The Abundant University” is a wake-up call for elite institutions and a visionary roadmap for the future of higher education.

The other finalist titles in this category were: 

• “Melancholy Wedgwood,” by Iris Moon PhD ’13;
• “Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us,” by Gary Marcus PhD ’93; and
• “Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science,” by Frank Keil ’73

MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart will present the awards at a campus celebration on April 17.

Established in 1962, the MIT Press’ mission is to lead by pushing the boundaries of scholarly publishing in active partnership with the MIT community and aligned with MIT’s mission to advance knowledge in science, technology, the arts, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.

MIT graduate students Sreekar Mantena and Arjun Ramani, and recent MIT alumni Rupert Li ’24 and Jupneet Singh ’23, have been named 2025 P.D. Soros Fellows. In addition, Soros Fellow Andre Ye will begin a PhD in computer science at MIT this fall.

Each year, the P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans awards 30 outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants $90,000 in graduate school financial support over a two-year period. The merit-based program selects fellows based on their achievements, potential to make meaningful contributions to their fields and communities, and dedication to the ideals of the United States represented in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. This year’s fellows were selected from a competitive pool of more than 2,600 applicants nationwide.

Rupert Li ’24

The son of Chinese immigrants, Rupert Li was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from MIT in 2024 with a double major in mathematics and computer science, economics, and data science, and earned an MEng in the latter subject.

Li was named a Marshall Scholar in 2023 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the Part III mathematics program at Cambridge University. His P.D. Soros Fellowship will support his pursuit of a PhD in mathematics at Stanford University.

Li’s first experience with mathematics research was as a high school student participant in the MIT PRIMES-USA program. He continued research in mathematics as an undergraduate at MIT, where he worked with professors Henry Cohn, Nike Sun, and Elchanan Mossel in the Department of Mathematics. Li also spent two summers at the Duluth REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program with Professor Joe Gallian.

Li’s research in probability, discrete geometry, and combinatorics culminated in him receiving the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, an honorable mention for the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student, the Marshall Scholarship, and the Hertz Fellowship.

Beyond research, Li finds fulfillment in opportunities to give back to the math community that has supported him throughout his mathematical journey. This year marks the second time he has served as a graduate student mentor for the PRIMES-USA program, which sparked his mathematical career, and his first year as an advisor for the Duluth REU program.

Sreekar Mantena

Sreekar Mantena graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College with a degree in statistics and molecular biology. He is currently an MD student in biomedical informatics in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), where he works under Professor Soumya Raychaudhuri of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is also pursuing a PhD in bioinformatics and integrative genomics at Harvard Medical School. In the future, Mantena hopes to blend compassion with computation as a physician-scientist who harnesses the power of machine learning and statistics to advance equitable health care delivery.

The son of Indian-American immigrants, Mantena was raised in North Carolina, where he grew up as fond of cheese grits as of his mother’s chana masala. Every summer of his childhood, he lived with his grandparents in Southern India, who instilled in him the importance of investing in one’s community and a love of learning.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Mantena was inspired by the potential of statistics and data science to address gaps in health-care delivery. He founded the Global Alliance for Medical Innovation, a nonprofit organization that has partnered with physicians in six countries to develop data-driven medical technologies for underserved communities, including devices to detect corneal disease.

Mantena also pursued research in Professor Pardis Sabeti’s lab at the Broad Institute, where he built new algorithms to design diagnostic assays that improve the detection of infectious pathogens in resource-limited settings. He has co-authored over 20 scientific publications, and his lead-author work has been published in many journals, including Nature Biotechnology, The Lancet Digital Health, and the Journal of Pediatrics.

Arjun Ramani

Arjun Ramani, from West Lafayette, Indiana, is the son of immigrants from Tamil Nadu, India. He is currently pursuing a PhD in economics at MIT, where he studies technological change and innovation. He hopes his research can inform policies and business practices that generate broadly shared economic growth.

Ramani’s dual interests in technology and the world led him to Stanford University, where he studied economics as an undergraduate and pursued a master’s in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence. As data editor of the university’s newspaper, he started the Stanford Open Data Project to improve campus data transparency. During college, Ramani also spent time at the White House working on economic policy, in Ghana helping startups scale, and at Citadel in financial markets — all of which cultivated a broad interest in the economic world.

After graduating from Stanford, Ramani became The Economist’s global business and economics correspondent. He first covered technology and finance and later shifted to covering artificial intelligence after the technology took the world by storm in 2022.

In 2023, Ramani moved to India to cover the Indian economy in the lead-up to its election. There, he gained a much deeper appreciation for the social and institutional barriers that slowed technology adoption and catch-up growth. Ramani wrote or co-wrote six cover stories, was shortlisted for U.K. financial journalist of the year in 2024 for his AI and economics reporting, and co-authored a six-part special report on India’s economy.

Jupneet Singh ’23

Jupneet Singh, the daughter of Indian immigrants, is a Sikh-American who grew up deeply connected to her Punjabi and Sikh heritage in Somis, California. The Soros Fellowship will support her MD studies at Harvard Medical School’s HST program under the U.S. Air Force Health Professions Scholarship Program.

Singh plans to complete her medical residency as an active-duty U.S. Air Force captain, and after serving as a surgeon in the USAF she hopes to enter the United States Public Health Commissioned Corps. While Singh is the first in her family to serve in the U.S. armed services, she is proud to be carrying on a long Sikh military legacy.

Singh graduated from MIT in 2023 with a degree in chemistry and a concentration in history and won a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue two degrees at the University of Oxford: a master’s in public policy and a master’s in translational health sciences. At MIT, she served as the commander (highest-ranked cadet) of the Air Force ROTC Detachment and is now commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant. She is the first woman Air Force ROTC Rhodes Scholar.

Singh has worked in de-addiction centers in Punjab, India. She also worked at the Ventura County Family Justice Center and Ventura County Medical Center Trauma Center, and published a first-author paper in The American Surgeon. She founded Pathways to Promise, a program to support the health of children affected by domestic violence. She has conducted research on fatty liver disease under Professor Alex Shalek at MIT and on maternal health inequalities at the National Perinatal Epidemiological Unit at Oxford.

To Vanessa Chan PhD ’00, effective engineers don’t just solve technical problems. To make an impact with a new product or technology, they need to bring it to market, deploy it, and make it mainstream. Yet this is precisely what they aren’t trained to do.

In fact, 97 percent of patents fail to make it over the “commercialization wall.”

“Only 3 percent of patents succeed, and one of the biggest challenges is we are not training our PhDs, our undergrads, our faculty, to commercialize technologies,” said Chan, vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. She delivered the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE)’s spring 2025 Wulff Lecture at MIT on March 10. “Instead, we’re focused on the really hard technical issues that we have to overcome, versus everything that needs to be addressed for something to make it to market.”

Chan spoke from deep experience, having led McKinsey & Co.’s innovation practice, helping Fortune 100 companies commercialize technologies. She also invented the tangle-free headphones Loopit at re.design, the firm she founded, and served as the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)’s chief commercialization officer and director of the Office of Technology Transitions during the Biden administration.

From invention to impact

A DMSE alumna, Chan addressed a near-capacity crowd about the importance of materials innovation. She highlighted how new materials — or existing materials used in new ways — could solve key challenges, from energy sustainability to health care delivery. For example, carbon fiber composites have replaced aluminum in the airline industry, leading to reduced fuel consumption, lower emissions, and enhanced safety. Modern lithium-ion and solid-state batteries use optimized electrode materials for higher efficiency and faster charging. And biodegradable polymer stents, which dissolve over time, have replaced traditional metallic stents that remain in arteries and can cause complications.

The Wulff Lecture is a twice-yearly talk aimed at educating students, especially first-years, about materials science and engineering and its impact on society.

Inventing a groundbreaking technology is just the beginning, Chan said. She gave the example of Thomas Edison, often thought of as the father of the electric light bulb. But Edison didn’t invent the carbonized filament — that was Joseph Swan.

“Thomas Edison was the father of the deployed light bulb,” Chan said. “He took Swan’s patents and figured out, how do we actually pull a vacuum on this? How do we manufacture this at scale?”

For an invention to make an impact, it needs to successfully traverse the commercialization journey from research to development, demonstration, and deployment in the market. “An invention without deployment is a tragedy, because you’ve invented something where you may have a lot of paper publications, but it is not making a difference at all in the real world.”

Materials commercialization is difficult, Chan explained, because new materials are at the very beginning of a value chain — the full range of activities in producing a product or service. To make it to market, the materials invention must be adopted by others along the chain, and in some cases, companies must navigate how each part of the chain gets paid. A new material for hip replacements, for example, designed to reduce the risk of infection and rehospitalization, might be a materials breakthrough, but getting it to market is complicated by the way insurance works.

“They will not pay more to avoid hospitalization,” Chan said. “If your material is more expensive than what is currently being used today, the providers will not reimburse for that.”

Beyond technology

But engineers can increase their odds in commercialization if they know the right language. “Adoption readiness levels” (ARLs), developed in Chan’s Office of Technology Transitions, help assess the nontechnical risks technologies face on their journey to commercialization. These risks cover value proposition — whether a technology can perform at a price customers will pay — market acceptance, and other potential barriers, such as infrastructure and regulations.

In 2022, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act allocated $370 billion toward clean energy deployment — 10 times the Department of Energy’s annual budget — to advance clean energy technologies such as carbon management, clean hydrogen, and geothermal heating and cooling. But Chan emphasized that the real prize was unlocking an estimated $23 trillion from private-sector investors.

“Those are the ones who are going to bring the technologies to market. So, how do we do that? How do we convince them to actually commercialize these technologies which aren’t quite there?” Chan asked.

Chan’s team spearheaded “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff,” a roadmap to bridge the gap between innovation and commercial adoption, helping identify scaling requirements, key players, and the acceptable risk levels for early adoption.

She shared an example from the DoE initiative, which received $8 billion from Congress to create a market for clean hydrogen technologies. She tied the money to specific pathways, explaining, “the private sector will start listening because they want the money.”

Her team also gathered data on where the industry was headed, identifying sectors that would likely adopt hydrogen, the infrastructure needed to support it, and what policies or funding could accelerate commercialization.

“There’s also community perception, because when we talk to people about hydrogen, what's the first thing people think about? The Hindenburg,” Chan said, referencing the 1937 dirigible explosion. “So these are the kinds of things that we had to grapple with if we’re actually going to create a hydrogen economy.”

“What do you love?”

Chan concluded her talk by offering students professional advice. She encouraged them to do what they love. On a slide, she shared a Venn diagram of her passions for technology, business, and making things — she recently started a pottery studio called Rebel Potters — illustrating the motivations behind her career journey.

“So I need you to ask yourself, What is your Venn diagram? What is it that you love?” Chan asked. “And you may say, ‘I don’t know. I’m 18 right now, and I just need to figure out what classes I want to take.’ Well, guess what? Get outside your comfort zone. Go do something new. Go try new things.”

Attendee Delia Harms, a DMSE junior, found the exercise particularly useful. “I think I’m definitely lacking a little bit of direction in where I want to go after undergrad and what I want my career path to look like,” Harms said. “So I’ll definitely try that exercise later — thinking about what my circles are, and how they come together.”

Jeannie She, a junior majoring in artificial intelligence and bioengineering, found inspiration in Chan’s public sector experience.

“I have always seen government as bureaucracy, red tape, slow — but I’m also really interested in policy and policy change,” She said. “So learning from her and the things that she’s accomplished during her time as an appointee has been really inspiring, and makes me see that there are careers in policy where things can actually get done.”

Enabling and sustaining a clean energy transition depends not only on groundbreaking technology to redefine the world’s energy systems, but also on that innovation happening at scale. As a part of an ongoing speaker series, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) hosted Emily Knight, the president and CEO of The Engine, a nonprofit incubator and accelerator dedicated to nurturing technology solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. She explained how her organization is bridging the gap between research breakthroughs and scalable commercial impact.

“Our mission from the very beginning was to support and accelerate what we call ‘tough tech’ companies — [companies] who had this vision to solve some of the world’s biggest problems,” Knight said.

The Engine, a spinout of MIT, coined the term “tough tech” to represent not only the durability of the technology, but also the complexity and scale of the problems it will solve. “We are an incubator and accelerator focused on building a platform and creating what I believe is an open community for people who want to build tough tech, who want to fund tough tech, who want to work in a tough tech company, and ultimately be a part of this community,” said Knight.

According to Knight, The Engine creates “an innovation orchard” where early-stage research teams have access to the infrastructure and resources needed to take their ideas from lab to market while maximizing impact. “We use this pathway — from idea to investment, then investment to impact — in a lot of the work that we do,” explained Knight.

She said that tough tech exists at the intersection of several risk factors: technology, market and customer, regulatory, and scaling. Knight highlighted MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) — one of many MIT spinouts within The Engine’s ecosystem that focus on energy — as an example of how The Engine encourages teams to work through these risks.

In the early days, the CFS team was told to assume their novel fusion technology would work. “If you’re only ever worried that your technology won’t work, you won’t pick your head up and have the right people on your team who are building the public affairs relationships so that, when you need it, you can get your first fusion reactor sited and done,” explained Knight. “You don’t know where to go for the next round of funding, and you don’t know who in government is going to be your advocates when you need them to be.”

“I think [CFS’s] eighth employee was a public affairs person,” Knight said. With the significant regulatory, scaling, and customer risks associated with fusion energy, building their team wisely was essential. Bringing on a public affairs person helped CFS build awareness and excitement around fusion energy in the local community and build the community programs necessary for grant funding.

The Engine’s growing ecosystem of entrepreneurs, researchers, institutions, and government agencies is a key component of the support offered to early-stage researchers. The ecosystem creates a space for sharing knowledge and resources, which Knight believes is critical for navigating the unique challenges associated with Tough Tech.

This support can be especially important for new entrepreneurs: “This leader that is going from PhD student to CEO — that is a really, really big journey that happens the minute you get funding,” said Knight. “Knowing that you’re in a community of people who are on that same journey is really important.”

The Engine also extends this support to the broader community through educational programs that walk participants through the process of translating their research from lab to market. Knight highlighted two climate and energy startups that joined The Engine through one such program geared toward graduate students and postdocs: Lithios, which is producing sustainable, low-cost lithium, and Lydian, which is developing sustainable aviation fuels.

The Engine also offers access to capital from investors with an intimate understanding of tough tech ventures. She said that government agency partners can offer additional support through public funding opportunities and highlighted that grants from the U.S. Department of Energy were key in the early funding of another MIT spinout within their ecosystem, Sublime Systems.

In response to the current political shift away from climate investments, as well as uncertainty surrounding government funding, Knight believes that the connections within their ecosystem are more important than ever as startups explore alternative funding. “We’re out there thinking about funding mechanisms that could be more reliable. That’s our role as an incubator.”

Being able to convene the right people to address a problem is something that Knight attributes to her education at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “My ethos across all of this is about service,” stated Knight. “We’re constantly evolving our resources and how we help our teams based on the gaps they’re facing.”

MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition is an MIT Energy Initiative speaker series highlighting energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. The next seminar in this series will be April 30 with Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Visit MITEI’s Events page for more information on this and additional events.

Watching and listening to a pianist’s performance is an immersive and enjoyable experience. The pianist and the instrument, with a blend of skill, training, and presence, create a series of memorable moments for themselves and the audience. But is there a way to improve the performance and our understanding of how the performer and their instrument work together to create this magic, while also minimizing performance-related injuries?

Mi-Eun Kim, director of keyboard studies in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Section, and Praneeth Namburi PhD ’16, a research scientist in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, are investigating how the body works when pianists play. Their joint project, The Biomechanics of Assimilating a New Piano Skill, aims to develop mechanistic insights that could transform how we understand and teach piano technique, reduce performance-related injuries, and bridge the gap between artistic expression and biomechanical efficiency. 

Their project is among those recently selected for a SHASS+ Connectivity Fund grant through the MIT Human Insight Collaborative.

“The project emerged from a convergence of interests and personal experiences,” Namburi says. “Mi-Eun witnessed widespread injuries among fellow pianists and saw how these injuries could derail careers.”

Kim is a renowned pianist who has performed on stages throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. She earned the Liszt-Garrison Competition’s Liszt Award and the Corpus Christi solo prize, among other honors. She teaches piano and chamber music through MIT Music’s Emerson/Harris Program and chamber music through MIT’s Chamber Music Society. She earned advanced degrees from the University of Michigan and holds a bachelor of arts degree in history from Columbia University.

Namburi’s work focuses on the biomechanics of efficient, expressive, and coordinated movement. He draws inspiration from artists and athletes in specialized movement disciplines, such as dancing and fencing, to investigate skilled movement. He earned a PhD in experimental neuroscience from MIT and a bachelor of engineering degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. 

Pursuing the project

Kim and Namburi arrived at their project by taking different roads into the arts. While Kim was completing her studies at the University of Michigan, Namburi was taking dance lessons as a hobby in Boston. He learned that both expressive and sustainable movements might share a common denominator. “A key insight was that elastic tissues play a crucial role in coordinated, expressive, and sustainable movements in dance — a principle that could extend beyond dancing,” he notes.

“We recognized that studying elastic tissues could shed light on reducing injury risk, as well as understanding musical expression and embodiment in the context of piano playing,” Kim says.

Kim and Namburi began collaborating on what would become their project in October 2023, though the groundwork was in place months before. “A visiting student working with me on a research project studying pianists in the MIT.nano Immersion Lab reached out to Mi-Eun in summer 2023,” Namburi recalls. A shared Instagram video showing their setup with motion capture sensors and a pianist playing Chopin on a digital keyboard sparked Kim’s interest. The Immersion Lab is an open-access, shared facility for MIT and beyond dedicated to visualizing, understanding, and interacting with large, multidimensional data.

“I couldn't make sense of all the sensors, but immediately noticed they were using a digital keyboard,” she says.

Kim wanted to elevate these studies’ quality by pairing the musicians with the proper equipment and instrument. While the digital pianos they’d previously used are portable and provide musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) data, they don’t offer the same experience as a real piano. “Pianists dream of playing on an ideal instrument — a 9-foot concert grand with perfectly regulated 24-inch keys that responds to every musical intention without resistance,” Kim says.

The researchers brought both Steinway Spirio D|r and Yamaha DCFX grand pianos to the Immersion Lab and observed that the instruments player piano technology could both capture pianists’ hammer strike velocities and reproduce them to play back the performance. Monitoring Kim’s performance on the concert grand piano, for example, both noted marked differences in her playing style.

“Despite all the sensors, lighting, and observers, playing felt so natural that I forgot I was in a lab,” she says. “I could focus purely on the music, without worrying about adapting to a smaller keyboard or digital sound.”

This setup allowed them to observe pianists’ natural movements, which was exactly what Kim wanted to study.

During Independent Activities Period 2025, Kim and Namburi hosted a new course, Biomechanics of Piano Playing, in the Immersion Lab. Students and faculty from MIT, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and the University of Hartford took part. Participants learned how to use motion capture, accelerometers, and ultrasound imaging to visualize signals from the body during piano playing.

Observations and outcomes

If the efficiency and perceived fluency of an expert pianist’s movements comes from harnessing the body’s inherent elastic mechanisms, Kim and Namburi believe, it’s possible to redesign how piano playing is taught. Each wants to reduce occurrences of playing-related injuries and improve how musicians learn their craft.

“I want us to bridge the gap between artistic expression and biomechanical efficiency,” Namburi says.

Through their exploratory sessions at the Immersion Lab, Kim and Namburi found common ground, gathering information about their observations of and experiences in piano and dance through sensor technology, including ultrasound.

Beyond these, Kim saw potential for transforming piano pedagogy. “Traditional teaching relies heavily on subjective descriptions and metaphors passed down through generations,” she says. “While valuable, these approaches could be enhanced with objective, scientific understanding of the physical mechanisms behind skilled piano performance — evidence-driven piano pedagogy, if you will.”

MIT Health Student Health Plan Research and Resolution Specialist Juanita Battle passed away on Jan. 14. She was 70.

Battle was best known throughout the MIT community as one of the friendly faces and voices that students encountered whenever they had a question about their health insurance. For more than 17 years, Juanita was there to help students navigate the complexities of the U.S. health-care system.

“Juanita really cared about the students,” remembers Affiliate Health Plan Representative Lawanda Santiago. Whenever Battle was on a call with a student, you knew that call could take 20 minutes. “She would always go above and beyond.”

Sheila Sanchez, lead student health plan research and resolution specialist, agrees. “There was nothing she wouldn’t do to make sure that the student had a good experience when it came to some insurance question. She made sure that the student was always heard, always happy.”

“At the end of any conversation, she knew the student’s name, where they were from, what their mother’s name was, and even their favorite color,” says Sanchez.

“Juanita was the outward face of the MIT Student Health Insurance Plan,” adds David Tytell, MIT Health’s director of marketing and communications. “Whenever there was a call for volunteers to help promote student insurance, like Campus Preview Weekend, Juanita was always the first to raise her hand.” Her detailed, clear explanations of difficult insurance concepts were featured in multiple MIT Health videos.

“She also had a ‘crush’ on Tim the Beaver,” says Tytell. “She would instantly become a kid again whenever Tim entered the room, and she never missed an opportunity to take a selfie with him.”

Battle’s friends also recall her passion for dining out. “Juanita loved food! When we would go out to eat, Juanita would have the menu memorized before we even got there,” says Sanchez. "She had already done her research, read Yelp reviews, looked at pictures, figured out her top three favorite things, and even had recommendations for everybody else!”

“She especially loved tiramisu,” says Santiago.

Battle’s laugh was infectious. She was known for always looking at the bright side of things and had the uncanny ability to make a joke out of just about anything. Halloween was her favorite holiday, and she would always dress up and pose for pictures. “One of my last encounters with Juanita was last Halloween,” says Tytell. “I came back from a meeting to find a trick-or-treat bag filled with candy and a note from Juanita on my desk.”

“She didn’t let anything affect her attitude,” says Sanchez. “Everything about her was just happy.”

The MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering Breakerspace transformed into an art gallery on March 10, with six easels arranged in an arc to showcase arresting images — black-and-white scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of crumpled biological structures alongside the brilliant hues of digital optical microscopy.

The images were the winning entries from the inaugural Breakerspace Microscope Image Contest, which opened in fall 2024. The contest invited all MIT undergraduates to train on the Breakerspace’s microscopic instruments, explore material samples, and capture images that were artistic, instructive, or technically challenging.

“The goal of the contest is to inspire curiosity and creativity, encouraging students to explore the imaging tools in the Breakerspace,” says Professor Jeffrey Grossman of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “We want students to see the beauty and complexity of materials at the microscopic level, to think critically about the images they capture, and to communicate what they mean to others.”

Grossman was a driving force behind the Breakerspace, a laboratory and lounge designed to encourage MIT undergraduates to explore the world of materials.

The contest drew about 50 entries across four categories:

• Most Instructive, for images illustrating key concepts with documentation
• Most Challenging, requiring significant sample preparation
• Best Optical Microscope Image of a sample, rendered in color
• Best Electron Microscope Image, magnified hundreds or even thousands of times

Winners in the four categories received $500, and two runners-up received $100.

“By making this a competition with prizes, we hope to motivate more students to explore microscopy and develop a stronger connection to the materials science community at MIT,” Grossman says.

A window onto research

Amelia How, a DMSE sophomore and winner of the Most Instructive category, used an SEM to show how hydrogen atoms seep into titanium — a phenomenon called hydrogen embrittlement, which can weaken metals and lead to material failure in applications such as aerospace, energy, or construction. The image stemmed from How’s research in Associate Professor Cem Tasan’s research lab, through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). She trained on the SEM for the contest after seeing an email announcement.

“It helped me realize how to explain what I was actually doing,” How says, “because the work that I’m doing is something that’s going into a paper, but most people won’t end up reading that.”

Mishael Quraishi, a DMSE senior and winner of Best SEM Image, captured the flower Alstroemeria and its pollen-bearing structure, the anther. She entered the contest mainly to explore microscopy — but sharing that experience was just as rewarding.

“I really love how electron images look,” Quraishi says. “But as I was taking the images, I was also able to show people what pollen looked like at a really small scale — it’s kind of unrecognizable. That was the most fun part: sharing the image and then telling people about the technique.”

Quraishi, president of the Society of Undergraduate Materials Scientists, also organized the event, part of Materials Week, a student-run initiative that highlights the department’s people, research, and impact.

Persistence in practice

The winner of the Most Challenging category, DMSE sophomore Nelushi Vithanachchi gained not just microscopy experience, but also perseverance. The category called for significant effort put into the sample preparation — and Vithanachchi spent hours troubleshooting.

Her sample — a carving of MIT’s Great Dome in silicon carbide — was made using a focused ion beam, a tool that sculpts materials by bombarding them with ions, or charged atoms. The process requires precision, as even minor shifts can ruin a sample.

In her first attempt, while milling the dome’s façade, the sample shifted and broke. A second try with a different design also failed. She credits her UROP advisor, Aaditya Bhat from Associate Professor James LeBeau’s research group, for pushing her to keep going.

“It was four in the morning, and after failing for the third time, I said, ‘I’m not doing this,’” Vithanachchi recalls. “Then Aaditya said, ‘No, we’ve got to finish what we started.’” After a fourth attempt, using the lessons learned from the previous failures, they were finally able to create a structure that resembled the MIT dome.

Anna Beck, a DMSE sophomore and runner-up for Best Electron Microscope Image, had a much different experience. “It was very relaxed for me. I just sat down and took images,” she says. Her entry was an SEM image of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) fibers from an event wrist band. HDPE is a durable material used in packaging, plumbing, and consumer goods.

Through the process, Beck gained insight into composition and microscopy techniques — and she’s excited to apply what she’s learned in the next competition in fall 2025. “In hindsight, I look at mine now and I wish I turned the brightness up a little more.”

Although 35 percent of the entries came from DMSE students, a majority — 65 percent — came from other majors, or first-year students.

With the first contest showcasing both creativity and technical skill, organizers hope even more students will take on the challenge, bringing fresh perspectives and discoveries to the microscopic world. The contest will run again in fall 2025.

“The inaugural contest brought in an incredible range of submissions. It was exciting to see students engage with microscopy in new ways and share their discoveries,” Grossman says. “The Breakerspace was designed for all undergraduates, regardless of major or experience level — whether they’re conducting research, exploring new materials, or simply curious about what something is made of. We’re excited to expand participation and encourage even more entries in the next competition.”

The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) has awarded MIT Lincoln Laboratory a 2025 FLC Excellence in Technology Transfer Award. The award recognizes the laboratory's exceptional efforts in commercializing microwave sounders hosted on small satellites called CubeSats. The laboratory first developed the technology for NASA, demonstrating that such satellites could work in tandem to collect hurricane data more frequently than previously possible and significantly improve hurricane forecasts. The technology is now licensed to the company Tomorrow.io, which will launch a large constellation of the sounder-equipped satellites to enhance hurricane prediction and expand global weather coverage. 

"This FLC award recognizes a technology with significant impact, one that could enhance hourly weather forecasting for aviation, logistics, agriculture, and emergency management, and highlights the laboratory's important role in bringing federally funded innovation to the commercial sector," says Asha Rajagopal, Lincoln Laboratory's chief technology transfer officer.

A nationwide network of more than 300 government laboratories, agencies, and research centers, the FLC helps facilitate the transfer of technologies out of federal labs and into the marketplace to benefit the U.S. economy, society, and national security.

Lincoln Laboratory originally proposed and demonstrated the technology for NASA's TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats) mission. For TROPICS, the laboratory put its microwave sounders on low-cost, commercially available CubeSats for the first time.

Of all the technology used for sensing hurricanes, microwave sounders provide the greatest improvement to forecasting models. From space, these instruments detect a range of microwave frequencies that penetrate clouds, allowing them to measure 3D temperature, humidity, and precipitation in a storm. State-of-the-art instruments are typically large (the size of a washing machine) and hosted aboard $2 billion polar-orbiting satellites, which collectively may revisit a storm every six hours. If sounders could be miniaturized, laboratory researchers imagined, then they could be put on small satellites and launched in large numbers, working together to revisit storms more often.

The TROPICS sounder is the size of a coffee cup. The laboratory team worked for several years to develop and demonstrate the technology that resulted in a miniaturized instrument, while maintaining performance on par with traditional sounders for the frequencies that provide the most useful tropical cyclone observations. By 2023, NASA launched a constellation of four TROPICS satellites, which have since collected rapidly refreshed data of many tropical storms.

Now, Tomorrow.io plans to increase that constellation to a global network of 18 satellites. The resulting high-rate observations — under an hour — are expected to improve weather forecasts, hurricane tracking, and early-warning systems.

"This partnership with Tomorrow.io expands the impact of the TROPICS mission. Tomorrow.io’s increased constellation size, software pipeline, and resilient business model enable it to support a number of commercial and government organizations. This transfer to industry has resulted in a self-sustaining national capability, one that is expected to help the economy and the government for years to come," says Tom Roy, who managed the transfer of the technology to Tomorrow.io.

The technology transfer spanned 18 months. Under a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), the laboratory team adapted the TROPICS payload to an updated satellite design and delivered to Tomorrow.io the first three units, two of which were launched in September 2024. The team also provided in-depth training to Tomorrow.io and seven industry partners who will build, test, launch, and operate the future full commercial constellation. The remaining satellites are expected to launch before the end of this year.

"With these microwave sounders, we can set a new standard in atmospheric data collection and prediction. This technology allows us to capture atmospheric data with exceptional accuracy, especially over oceans and remote areas where traditional observations are scarce," said Rei Goffer, co-founder of Tomorrow.io, in a press release announcing the September launches.

Tomorrow.io will use the sounder data as input into their weather forecasts, data products, and decision support tools available to their customers, who range from major airlines to governments. Tomorrow.io's nonprofit partner, TomorrowNow, also plans to use the data as input to its climate model for improving food security in Africa.

This technology is especially relevant as hurricanes and severe weather events continue to cause significant destruction. In 2024, the United States experienced a near-record 27 disaster events that each exceeded $1 billion in damage, resulting in a total cost of approximately $182.7 billion, and that caused the deaths of at least 568 people. Globally, these storm systems cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage each year.

“It has been great to see the Lincoln Laboratory, Tomorrow.io, and industry partner teams work together so effectively to rapidly incorporate the TROPICS technology and bring the new Tomorrow.io microwave sounder constellation online,” says Bill Blackwell, principal investigator of the NASA TROPICS mission and the CRADA with Tomorrow.io. “I expect that the improved revisit rate provided by the Tomorrow.io constellation will drive further improvements in hurricane forecasting performance over and above what has already been demonstrated by TROPICS.”

The team behind the transfer includes Tom Roy, Bill Blackwell, Steven Gillmer, Rebecca Keenan, Nick Zorn, and Mike DiLiberto of Lincoln Laboratory and Kai Lemay, Scott Williams, Emma Watson, and Jan Wicha of Tomorrow.io. Lincoln Laboratory will be honored among other winners of 2025 FLC Awards at the FLC National Meeting to be held virtually on May 13.

LEGOs are no stranger to many members of the MIT community. Faculty, staff, and students, alike, have developed a love of building and mechanics while playing with the familiar plastic bricks. In just a few hours, a heap of bricks can become a house, a ship, an airplane, or a cat. The simplicity lends itself to creativity and ingenuity, and it has inspired many MIT faculty members to bring LEGOs into the classroom, including class 2.S00 (Introduction to Manufacturing), where students use LEGO bricks to learn about manufacturing processes and systems.

It was perhaps no surprise, then, that the lecture hall in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing was packed with students, faculty, staff, and guests to hear Carsten Rasmussen, chief operating officer of the LEGO Group, speak as part of the Manufacturing@MIT Distinguished Speaker Series on March 20.

In his engaging and inspiring talk, Rasmussen asked one of the most important questions in manufacturing: How do you balance innovation with sustainability while keeping a complex global supply chain running smoothly? He emphasized that success in modern manufacturing isn’t just about cutting costs — it’s about creating value across the entire network, and integrating every aspect of the business.

Successful manufacturing is all about balance

The way the toy industry views success is evolving, Rasmussen said. In the past, focusing on “cost, quality, safety, delivery, and service” may have been enough, but today’s landscape is far more demanding. “Now, it’s about availability, customers’ happiness, and innovation,” he said.

Rasmussen, who has been with the LEGO Group since 2001, started as a buyer before moving to various leadership roles within the organization. Today, he oversees the LEGO Group’s operations strategy, including manufacturing and supply chain planning, quality, engineering, and sales and operations planning.

“The way we can inspire the builders of tomorrow is basically, whatever we develop, we are able to produce, and we are able to sell,” he said.

The LEGO Group’s operations are intricate. Focusing on areas such as capacity and infrastructure, network utilization, analysis and design, and sustainability, keeps the company true to its mission, “to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.” Within the organization, departments operate with a focus on how their decisions will impact the rest of the company. To do this, they need to communicate effectively.

Intuition and experience play a big role in effective decision-making

In a time where data analytics is a huge part of decision-making in manufacturing and supply-chain management, Rasmussen highlighted the importance of blending data with intuition and experience.

“Many of the decisions you have to make are very, very complex,” he explained. “A lot of the data you’re going to provide me is based on history. And what happened in history is not what you’re facing right now. So, you need to really be able to take great data and blend that with your intuition and your experience to make a decision.”

This shift reflects a broader trend in industries where leaders are beginning to see the benefits of looking beyond purely data-driven decision-making. With global supply chains disrupted by unforeseen events like the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s growing acknowledgement that historical data may not be the most effective way to predict the future. Rasmussen said that the audience should practice blending their own intuition and experience with data by asking themselves: “Does it make sense? Does it feel right?”

Prioritizing sustainability 

Rasmussen also highlighted the LEGO Group’s ambitious sustainability goals, signaling that innovation cannot come at the expense of environmental responsibility. “There is no excuse for us to not leave a better planet for the next generation, for the next hundred years,” he said.

With an ambition to make its products from more renewable or recycled materials by 2032 and eliminate single-use packaging, the company aims to lead a shift in trends in manufacturing toward being more environmentally friendly, including an effort to turn waste into bricks.

Innovation doesn’t exist in a vacuum

Throughout his talk, Rasmussen underscored the importance of innovation. The only way to stay on top is to be constantly thinking of new ideas, he said.

“Are you daring to put new products into the market?” he asked, adding that it’s not enough to come up with a novel product or approach. How its implementation will work within the system is essential, too. “Our challenge that you need to help me with,” he said to the audience, “is how can we bring in innovation, because we can’t stand still either. We also need to be fit for the future … that is actually one of our bigger challenges.”

He reminded the audience that innovation is not a linear path. It involves risk, some failure, and continuous evolution. “Resilience is absolutely key,” he said.

Q&A

After his presentation, Rasmussen sat down with Professor John Hart for a brief Q&A, followed by audience questions. Among the questions that Hart asked Rasmussen was how he would respond to a designer who presented a model of MIT-themed LEGO set, assuring Rasmussen it would break sales records. “Oh, I’ve heard that so many times,” Rasmussen laughed.

Hart asked what it would take to turn an idea into reality. “How long does it take from bricks to having it on my doorstep?” he asked.

“Typically, a new product takes between 12 to 18 months from idea to when we put it out on the market,” said Rasmussen, explaining that the process requires a good deal of integration and that there is a lot of planning to make sure that new ideas can be implemented across the organization.

Then the microphone was opened up to the crowd. The first audience questions came from Emerson Linville-Engler, the youngest audience member at just 5 years old, who wanted to know what the most difficult LEGO set to make was (the Technic round connector pieces), as well as Rasmussen’s favorite LEGO set (complex builds, like buildings or Technic models).

Other questions showcased how much LEGO inspired the audience. One member asked Rasmussen if it ever got old being told that he worked for a company that inspires the inner child? “No. It motivates me every single day when you meet them,” he said.

Through the Q&A, the audience was also able to ask more about the manufacturing process from ideas to execution, as well as whether Rasmussen was threatened by imitators (he welcomes healthy competition, but not direct copycats), and whether the LEGO Group plans on bringing back some old favorites (they are discussing whether to bring back old sets, but there are no set plans to do so at this time).

For the aspiring manufacturing leaders and innovators in the room, the lesson of Rasmussen’s talk was clear: Success isn’t just about making the right decision, it’s about understanding the entire system, having the courage to innovate, and being resilient enough to navigate unexpected challenges.

The event was hosted by the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group as part of the Manufacturing@MIT Distinguished Speaker Series. Past speakers include the TSMC founder Morris Chang, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. 

MIT Solve has launched its 2025 Global Challenges, calling on innovators worldwide to submit transformative, tech-driven solutions to some of the planet's most pressing and persistent problems. With over $1 million in funding available, selected innovators have a unique opportunity to scale their solutions and gain an influential network.

"In an era where technology is transforming our world at breakneck speed, we're seeing a profound shift in how innovators approach global problems," says Hala Hanna, executive director of MIT Solve. "The unprecedented convergence of technological capabilities and social consciousness sets our current moment apart. Our Solver teams aren't just creating solutions — they're rewriting the rules of what's possible in social innovation. With their solutions now reaching over 280 million lives worldwide, they're demonstrating that human-centered technology can scale impact in ways we never imagined possible."

Thirty winning solutions will be announced at Solve Challenge Finals during Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Selected innovators join the 2025 Solver Class, gaining access to a comprehensive nine-month support program that includes connections to MIT's innovation ecosystem, specialized mentorship, extensive pro-bono resources, and substantial funding from Solve's growing community of supporters.

2025 funding opportunities for selected Solvers exceed $1 million and include:

• Health Innovation Award (supported by Johnson & Johnson Foundation): All Solver teams selected for Solve's Global Health Challenge will receive an additional prize from Global Health Anchor Supporter, Johnson & Johnson Foundation
• The Seeding the Future Food Systems Prize (supported by the Seeding The Future Foundation)
• The GM Prize (supported by General Motors)
• The AI for Humanity Prize (supported by The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation)
• The Crescent Enterprises "AI for Social Innovation" Prize (supported by Crescent Enterprises)
• The Citizens Workforce Innovation Prize (supported by Citizens)
• The E Ink Innovation Prize (supported by E Ink)
• Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Ocean Innovation Prize (supported by Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation)
• Schmidt Marine Wavemaker’s Prize (supported by Schmidt Marine Technology Partners)

Since 2015, supporters of MIT Solve have catalyzed more than 800 partnerships and deployed more than $70 million, touching the lives of 280 million people worldwide.

For over a decade, through a collaboration managed by MIT.nano, MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec), one of the largest universities in Latin America, have worked together to develop innovative academic and research initiatives with a particular focus in nanoscience and nanotechnology and, more recently, an emphasis on design and smart manufacturing. Now, the collaboration has also expanded to include undergraduate education. Seven Tec undergrads are developing methods to manufacture low-cost, desktop fiber-extrusion devices, or FrEDs, alongside peers at MIT in an “in-the-lab” teaching and learning factory, the FrED Factory.

“The FrED Factory serves as a factory-like education platform for manufacturing scale-up, enabling students and researchers to engage firsthand in the transition from prototype development to small-scale production,” says Brian Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE).

Through on-campus learning, participants observe, analyze, and actively contribute to this process, gaining critical insights into the complexities of scaling manufacturing operations. The product of the FrED Factory are FrED kits — tabletop manufacturing kits that themselves produce fiber and that are used to teach smart manufacturing principles. “We’re thrilled to have students from Monterrey Tec here at MIT, bringing new ideas and perspectives, and helping to develop these new ways to teach manufacturing at both MIT and Tec,” says Anthony.

The FrED factory was originally built by a group of MIT graduate students in 2022 as their thesis project in the Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design program. They adapted and scaled the original design of the device, built by Anthony’s student David Kim, into something that could be manufactured into multiple units at a substantially lower cost. The resulting computer-aided design files were shared with Tec de Monterrey for use by faculty and students. Since launching the FrED curriculum at Tec in 2022, MIT has co-hosted two courses led by Tec faculty: “Mechatronics Design: (Re) Design of FrED,” and “Automation of Manufacturing Systems: FrED Factory Challenge.”

New this academic year, undergraduate Tec students are participating in FrED Factory research immersions. The students engage in collaborative FrED projects at MIT and then return to Tec to implement their knowledge — particularly to help replicate and implement what they have learned, with the launch of a new FrED Factory at Tec de Monterrey this spring. The end goal is to fully integrate this project into Tec’s mechatronics engineering curriculum, in which students learn about automation and robotics firsthand through the devices.

Russel Bradley, a PhD student in MechE supervised by Anthony, is the project lead of FrED Factory and has been working closely with the undergraduate Tec students.

“The process of designing and manufacturing FrEDs is an educational experience in itself,” says Bradley. “Unlike a real factory, which likely wouldn’t welcome students to experiment with the machines, the FrED factory provides an environment where you can fail and learn.”

The Tec undergrads are divided into groups working on specific projects, including Development of an Education 4.0 Framework for FrED, Immersive Technology (AR) for Manufacturing Operations, Gamifying Advanced Manufacturing Education in FrED Factory, and Immersive Cognitive Factory Twins.

Sergio Siller Lobo is a Tec student who is working on the development of the education framework for FrED. He and other students are revising the code to make the interface more student-friendly and best enable the students to learn while working with the devices. They are focused particularly on helping students to engage with the topics of control systems, computer vision, and internet of things (IoT) in both a digital course that they are developing, and in directly working with the devices. The digital course can be presented by an instructor or done autonomously by students.

“Students can be learning the theory with the digital courses, as well as having access to hands-on, practical experience with the device,” says Siller Lobo. “You can have the best of both ways of learning, both the practical and the theoretical.”

Arik Gómez Horita, an undergrad from Tec who has also been working on the education framework, says that the technology that currently exists in terms of how to teach students about control systems, computer vision, and IoT is often very limited in either its capability or quantity.

“A key aspect of the value of the FrEDs is that we are integrating all these concepts and a module for education into a single device,” says Gómez Horita. “Bringing FrED into a classroom is a game-changer. Our main goal is trying to put FrED into the hands of the teacher, to use it for all its teaching capabilities.”

Once the students return to Tec de Monterrey with the educational modules they’ve developed, there will be workshops with the FrEDs and opportunities for Tec students to use their own creativity and iterate on the devices.

“The FrED is really a lab in a box, and one of the best things that FrEDs do is create data,” says Siller Lobo. “Finding new ways to get data from FrED gives it more value.”

Tec students Ángel Alarcón and André Mendoza are preparing to have MIT students test the FrED factory, running a simulation with the two main roles of engineer and operator. The operator role assembles the FrEDs within the workstations that simulate a factory. The engineer role analyzes the data created on the factory side by the operator and tries to find ways to improve production.

“This is a very immersive way to teach manufacturing systems,” says Alarcón. “Many students studying manufacturing, undergraduate and even graduate, finish their education never having even gone to an actual factory. The FrED Factory gives students the valuable opportunity to get to know what a factory is like and experience an industry environment without having to go off campus.”

The data gained from the workstations — including cycle time and defects in an operation — will be used to teach different topics about manufacturing. Ultimately, the FrED factory at Tec will be used to compare the benefits and drawbacks of automation versus manual labor.

Bradley says that the Tec students bring a strong mechatronics background that adds a lot of important insights to the project, and beyond the lab, it’s also a valuable multicultural exchange.

“It’s not just about what the students are learning from us,” says Bradley, “but it’s really a collaborative process in which we’re all complementing each other.”

Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.

“What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of a level playing field,” said Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow, during a conference-opening keynote panel.

The theme of the two-day conference, which is organized each year by MIT students, was “Breakthrough to deployment: Driving climate innovation to market.” Speakers largely expressed optimism about advancements in green technology, balanced by occasional notes of alarm about a rapidly changing regulatory and political environment.

Deese defined what he called “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the current energy landscape. The good: Clean energy investment in the United States hit an all-time high of $272 billion in 2024. The bad: Announcements of future investments have tailed off. And the ugly: Macro conditions are making it more difficult for utilities and private enterprise to build out the clean energy infrastructure needed to meet growing energy demands.

“We need to build massive amounts of energy capacity in the United States,” Deese said. “And the three things that are the most allergic to building are high uncertainty, high interest rates, and high tariff rates. So that’s kind of ugly. But the question … is how, and in what ways, that underlying commercial momentum can drive through this period of uncertainty.”

A shifting clean energy landscape

During a panel on artificial intelligence and growth in electricity demand, speakers said that the technology may serve as a catalyst for green energy breakthroughs, in addition to putting strain on existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to building digital infrastructure responsibly, and part of that means catalyzing the development of clean energy infrastructure that is not only meeting the AI need, but also benefiting the grid as a whole,” said Lucia Tian, head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google.

Across the two days, speakers emphasized that the cost-per-unit and scalability of clean energy technologies will ultimately determine their fate. But they also acknowledged the impact of public policy, as well as the need for government investment to tackle large-scale issues like grid modernization.

Vanessa Chan, a former U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) official and current vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, warned of the “knock-on” effects of the move to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs, for example. “In reality, what you’re doing is undercutting every single academic institution that does research across the nation,” she said.

During a panel titled “No clean energy transition without transmission,” Maria Robinson, former director of the DoE’s Grid Deployment Office, said that ratepayers alone will likely not be able to fund the grid upgrades needed to meet growing power demand. “The amount of investment we’re going to need over the next couple of years is going to be significant,” she said. “That’s where the federal government is going to have to play a role.”

David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy venture builder at MIT, noted that extreme weather events have changed the climate change conversation in recent years. “There was a narrative 10 years ago that said … if we start talking about resilience and adaptation to climate change, we’re kind of throwing in the towel or giving up,” he said. “I’ve noticed a very big shift in the investor narrative, the startup narrative, and more generally, the public consciousness. There’s a realization that the effects of climate change are already upon us.”

“Everything on the table”

The conference featured panels and keynote addresses on a range of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy, and nuclear fusion, as well as a session on carbon capture.

Alex Creely, a chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explained that fusion (the combining of small atoms into larger atoms, which is the same process that fuels stars) is safer and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion facilities, he said, can be powered down instantaneously, and companies like his are developing new, less-expensive magnet technology to contain the extreme heat produced by fusion reactors.

By the early 2030s, Creely said, his company hopes to be operating 400-megawatt power plants that use only 50 kilograms of fuel per year. “If you can get fusion working, it turns energy into a manufacturing product, not a natural resource,” he said.

Quinn Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface facilities at geothermal energy supplier Fervo Energy, said his company is making the geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation, and economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the largest cost in producing geothermal power. Fervo has “completely flipped the cost structure” with advances in drilling, Woodard said, and now the company is focused on bringing down its power plant costs.

“We have to continuously be focused on cost, and achieving that is paramount for the success of the geothermal industry,” he said.

One common theme across the conference: a number of approaches are making rapid advancements, but experts aren’t sure when — or, in some cases, if — each specific technology will reach a tipping point where it is capable of transforming energy markets.

“I don’t want to get caught in a place where we often descend in this climate solution situation, where it’s either-or,” said Peter Ellis, global director of nature climate solutions at The Nature Conservancy. “We’re talking about the greatest challenge civilization has ever faced. We need everything on the table.”

The road ahead

Several speakers stressed the need for academia, industry, and government to collaborate in pursuit of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of sustainability for Microsoft, compared the challenge to the Apollo spaceflight program, and she said that academic institutions need to focus more on how to scale and spur investments in green energy.

“The challenge is that academic institutions are not currently set up to be able to learn the how, in driving both bottom-up and top-down shifts over time,” Luers said. “If the world is going to succeed in our road to net zero, the mindset of academia needs to shift. And fortunately, it’s starting to.”

During a panel called “From lab to grid: Scaling first-of-a-kind energy technologies,” Hannan Happi, CEO of renewable energy company Exowatt, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all the same,” he said. “The only thing [customers] care about with regards to electrons is that they are available when they need them, and that they’re very cheap.”

Melissa Zhang, principal at Azimuth Capital Management, noted that energy infrastructure development cycles typically take at least five to 10 years — longer than a U.S. political cycle. However, she warned that green energy technologies are unlikely to receive significant support at the federal level in the near future. “If you’re in something that’s a little too dependent on subsidies … there is reason to be concerned over this administration,” she said.

World Energy CEO Gene Gebolys, the moderator of the lab-to-grid panel, listed off a number of companies founded at MIT. “They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They all went from somebody’s idea, to a lab, to proof-of-concept, to scale. It’s not like any of this stuff ever ends. It’s an ongoing process.”

The MIT School of Science welcomes Jess Speedie, one of eight recipients of the 2025 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. The announcement was made March 27 by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, named after the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star, was established in 2017 to provide postdocs with the opportunity to conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy.

Speedie, who expects to complete her PhD in astronomy at the University of Victoria, Canada, this summer, will be hosted by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). She will be mentored by Kerr-McGee Career Development Professor Richard Teague as she uses a combination of observational data and simulations to study the birth of planets and the processes of planetary formation.

“The planetary environment is where all the good stuff collects … it has the greatest potential for the most interesting things in the universe to happen, such as the origin of life,” she says. “Planets, for me, are where the stories happen.”

Speedie’s work has focused on understanding “cosmic nurseries” and the detection and characterization of the youngest planets in the galaxy. A lot of this work has made use of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), located in northern Chile. Made up of a collection of 66 parabolic dishes, ALMA studies the universe with radio wavelengths, and Speedie has developed a novel approach to find signals in the data of gravitational instability in protoplanetary disks, a method of planetary formation.

“One of the big, big questions right now in the community focused on planet formation is, where are the planets? It is that simple. We think they’re developing in these disks, but we’ve detected so few of them,” she says.

While working as a fellow, Speedie is aiming to develop an algorithm that carefully aligns and stacks a decade of ALMA observational data to correct for a blurring effect that happens when combining images captured at different times. Doing so should produce the sharpest, most sensitive images of early planetary systems to date.

She is also interested in studying infant planets, especially ones that may be forming in disks around protoplanets, rather than stars. Modeling how these ingredient materials in orbit behave could give astronomers a way to measure the mass of young planets.

“What’s exciting is the potential for discovery. I have this sense that the universe as a whole is infinitely more creative than human minds — the kinds of things that happen out there, you can’t make that up. It’s better than science fiction,” she says.

The other 51 Pegasi b Fellows and their host institutions this year are Nick Choksi (Caltech), Yan Liang (Yale University), Sagnick Mukherjee (Arizona State University), Matthew Nixon (Arizona State University), Julia Santos (Harvard University), Nour Skaf (University of Hawaii), and Jerry Xuan (University of California at Los Angeles).

The fellowship provides up to $450,000 of support over three years for independent research, a generous salary and discretionary fund, mentorship at host institutions, an annual summit to develop professional networks and foster collaboration, and an option to apply for another grant to support a future position in the United States.

When major disasters hit and structures collapse, people can become trapped under rubble. Extricating victims from these hazardous environments can be dangerous and physically exhausting. To help rescue teams navigate these structures, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Notre Dame, developed the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit (SPROUT). SPROUT is a vine robot — a soft robot that can grow and maneuver around obstacles and through small spaces. First responders can deploy SPROUT under collapsed structures to explore, map, and find optimum ingress routes through debris. 

"The urban search-and-rescue environment can be brutal and unforgiving, where even the most hardened technology struggles to operate. The fundamental way a vine robot works mitigates a lot of the challenges that other platforms face," says Chad Council, a member of the SPROUT team, which is led by Nathaniel Hanson. The program is conducted out of the laboratory's Human Resilience Technology Group. 

First responders regularly integrate technology, such as cameras and sensors, into their workflows to understand complex operating environments. However, many of these technologies have limitations. For example, cameras specially built for search-and-rescue operations can only probe on a straight path inside of a collapsed structure. If a team wants to search further into a pile, they need to cut an access hole to get to the next area of the space. Robots are good for exploring on top of rubble piles, but are ill-suited for searching in tight, unstable structures and costly to repair if damaged. The challenge that SPROUT addresses is how to get under collapsed structures using a low-cost, easy-to-operate robot that can carry cameras and sensors and traverse winding paths. 

SPROUT is composed of an inflatable tube made of airtight fabric that unfurls from a fixed base. The tube inflates with air, and a motor controls its deployment. As the tube extends into rubble, it can flex around corners and squeeze through narrow passages. A camera and other sensors mounted to the tip of the tube image and map the environment the robot is navigating. An operator steers SPROUT with joysticks, watching a screen that displays the robot's camera feed. Currently, SPROUT can deploy up to 10 feet, and the team is working on expanding it to 25 feet.

When building SPROUT, the team overcame a number of challenges related to the robot's flexibility. Because the robot is made of a deformable material that bends at many points, determining and controlling the robot's shape as it unfurls through the environment is difficult — think of trying to control an expanding wiggly sprinkler toy. Pinpointing how to apply air pressure within the robot so that steering is as simple as pointing the joystick forward to make the robot move forward was essential for system adoption by emergency responders. In addition, the team had to design the tube to minimize friction while the robot grows and engineer the controls for steering.

While a teleoperated system is a good starting point for assessing the hazards of void spaces, the team is also finding new ways to apply robot technologies to the domain, such as using data captured by the robot to build maps of the subsurface voids. "Collapse events are rare but devastating events. In robotics, we would typically want ground truth measurements to validate our approaches, but those simply don't exist for collapsed structures," Hanson says. To solve this problem, Hanson and his team made a simulator that allows them to create realistic depictions of collapsed structures and develop algorithms that map void spaces.

SPROUT was developed in collaboration with Margaret Coad, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an MIT graduate. When looking for collaborators, Hanson — a graduate of Notre Dame — was already aware of Coad's work on vine robots for industrial inspection. Coad's expertise, together with the laboratory's experience in engineering, strong partnership with urban search-and-rescue teams, and ability to develop fundamental technologies and prepare them for  transition to industry, "made this a really natural pairing to join forces and work on research for a traditionally underserved community," Hanson says. "As one of the primary inventors of vine robots, Professor Coad brings invaluable expertise on the fabrication and modeling of these robots."

Lincoln Laboratory tested SPROUT with first responders at the  Massachusetts Task Force 1  training site in Beverly, Massachusetts. The tests allowed the researchers to improve the durability and portability of the robot and learn how to grow and steer the robot more efficiently. The team is planning a larger field study this spring.

"Urban search-and-rescue teams and first responders serve critical roles in their communities but typically have little-to-no research and development budgets," Hanson says. "This program has enabled us to push the technology readiness level of vine robots to a point where responders can engage with a hands-on demonstration of the system."

Sensing in constrained spaces is not a problem unique to disaster response communities, Hanson adds. The team envisions the technology being used in the maintenance of military systems or critical infrastructure with difficult-to-access locations.

The initial program focused on mapping void spaces, but future work aims to localize hazards and assess the viability and safety of operations through rubble. "The mechanical performance of the robots has an immediate effect, but the real goal is to rethink the way sensors are used to enhance situational awareness for rescue teams," says Hanson. "Ultimately, we want SPROUT to provide a complete operating picture to teams before anyone enters a rubble pile." 

C. Cem Tasan has been appointed director of MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), effective March 15. The POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), Tasan succeeds Lionel “Kim” Kimerling, who has held the post of interim director since Carl Thompson stepped down in August 2023.

“MRL is a strategic asset for MIT, and Cem has a clear vision to build upon the lab’s engagement with materials researchers across the breadth of the Institute as well as with external collaborators and sponsors,” wrote Vice President for Research Ian Waitz, in a letter announcing the appointment.

The MRL is a leading interdisciplinary center dedicated to materials science and engineering. As a hub for innovation, the MRL unites researchers across disciplines, fosters industry and government partnerships, and drives advancements that shape the future of technology. Through groundbreaking research, the MRL supports MIT’s mission to advance science and technology for the benefit of society, enabling discoveries that have a lasting impact across industries and everyday life.

“MRL has a position at the core of materials research activities across departments at MIT,” Tasan says. “It can only grow from where it is, right in the heart of the Institute’s innovative hub.”

As director, Tasan will lead MRL’s research mission, with a view to strengthening internal collaboration and building upon the interdisciplinary laboratory’s long history of industry engagement. He will also take on responsibility for the management of Building 13, the Vannevar Bush Building, which houses key research facilities and labs.

“MRL is in very good hands with Cem Tasan’s leadership,” says Kimerling, the outgoing interim director. “His vision for a united MIT materials community whose success is stimulated by the convergence of basic science and engineering solutions provides the nutrition for MIT’s creative relevance to society. His collegial nature, motivating energy, and patient approach will make it happen.”

Tasan is a metallurgist with expertise in the fracture in metals and the design of damage-resistant alloys. Among other advances, his lab has demonstrated a multiscale means of designing high-strength/high-ductility titanium alloys; and explained the stress intensification mechanism by which human hair damages hard steel razors, pointing the way to stronger and longer-lasting blades.

“We need better materials that operate in more and more extreme conditions, for almost all of our critical industries and applications,” says Tasan. “Materials research in MRL identifies interdisciplinary pathways to address this important challenge.” 

He studied in Turkey and the Netherlands, earning his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology before spending several years leading a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials in Germany. He joined the MIT faculty in 2016 and earned tenure in 2022.

“Cem has led one of the major collaborative research teams at MRL, and he expects to continue developing a strong community among the MIT materials research faculty,” wrote Waitz in his letter on March 14.

The MRL was established in 2017 through the merger of the MIT Materials Processing Center (MPC) and the Center for Materials Science and Engineering. This unification aimed to strengthen MIT’s leadership in materials research by fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and advancing breakthroughs in areas such as energy conversion, quantum materials, and materials sustainability.

From 2008 to 2017, Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, served as director of the MPC. During his tenure, he played a crucial role in expanding materials research and building partnerships with industry, government agencies, and academic institutions. With the formation of the MRL in 2017, Thompson was appointed its inaugural director, guiding the new laboratory to prominence as a hub for cutting-edge materials science. He stepped down from this role in August 2023.

At that time, Kimerling stepped in to serve as interim director of MRL. He brought special knowledge of the lab’s history, having served as director of the MPC from 1993 to 2008, transforming it into a key industry-academic interface. Under his leadership, the MPC became a crucial gateway for industry partners to collaborate with MIT faculty across materials-related disciplines, bridging fundamental research with industrial applications. His vision helped drive technological innovation and economic development by aligning academic expertise with industry needs. As interim director of MRL these past 18 months, Kimerling has ensured continuity in leadership.

“I’m delighted that Cem will be the next MRL director,” says Thompson. “He’s a great fit. He has been affiliated with MPC, and then MRL, since the beginning of his faculty career at MIT. He’s also played a key role in leading a renaissance in physical metallurgy at MIT and has many close ties to industry.”

Frederick “Fred” Davis Greene II, professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Chemistry who was accomplished in the field of physical organic chemistry and free radicals, passed away peacefully after a brief illness, surrounded by his family, on Saturday, March 22. He had been a member of the MIT community for over 70 years.

“Greene’s dedication to teaching, mentorship, and the field of physical organic chemistry is notable,” said Professor Troy Van Voorhis, head of the Department of Chemistry, upon learning of Greene’s passing. “He was also a constant source of joy to those who interacted with him, and his commitment to students and education was legendary. He will be sorely missed.”

Greene, a native of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, was born on July 7, 1927 to parents Phillips Foster Greene and Ruth Altman Greene. He spent his early years in China, where his father was a medical missionary with Yale-In-China. Greene and his family moved to the Philippines just ahead of the Japanese invasion prior to World War Il, and then back to the French Concession of Shanghai, and to the United States in 1940. He joined the U.S. Navy in December 1944, and afterwards earned his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1949 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1952. Following a year at the University of California at Los Angeles as a research associate, he was appointed a professor of chemistry at MIT by then-Department Head Arthur C. Cope in 1953. Greene retired in 1995.

Greene’s research focused on peroxide decompositions and free radical chemistry, and he reported the remarkable bimolecular reaction between certain diacyl peroxides and electron-rich olefins and aromatics. He was also interested in small-ring heterocycles, e.g., the three-membered ring 2,3-diaziridinones. His research also covered strained olefins, the Greene-Viavattene diene, and 9, 9', 10, 10'-tetradehydrodianthracene.

Greene was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College for his research in free radicals. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organic Chemistry of the American Chemical Society from 1962 to 1988. He was awarded a special fellowship form the National Science Foundation and spent a year at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, and was a member of the Chemical Society of London.

Greene and Professor James Moore of the University of Philadelphia worked closely with Greene’s wife, Theodora “Theo” W. Greene, in the conversion of her PhD thesis, which was overseen by Professor Elias J. Corey of Harvard University, into her book “Greene’s Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis.” The book became an indispensable reference for any practicing synthetic organic or medicinal chemist and is now in its fifth edition. Theo, who predeceased Fred in July 2005, was a tremendous partner to Greene, both personally and professionally. A careful researcher in her own right, she served as associate editor of the Journal of Organic Chemistry for many years.

Fred Greene was recently featured in a series of videos featuring Professor Emeritus Dietmar Seyferth (who passed away in 2020) that was spearheaded by Professor Rick Danheiser. The videos cover a range of topics, including Seyferth and Greene’s memories during the 1950s to mid-1970s of their fellow faculty members, how they came to be hired, the construction of various lab spaces, developments in teaching and research, the evolution of the department’s graduate program, and much more. 

Danheiser notes that it was a privilege to share responsibility for the undergraduate class 5.43 (Advanced Organic Chemistry) with Greene. “Fred Greene was a fantastic teacher and inspired several generations of MIT undergraduate and graduate students with his superb lectures,” Danheiser recalls. The course they shared was Danheiser’s first teaching assignment at MIT, and he states that Greene’s “counsel and mentoring was invaluable to me.”

The Department of Chemistry recognized Greene’s contributions to its academic program by naming the annual student teaching award the “Frederick D. Greene Teaching Award.” This award recognizes outstanding contributions in teaching in chemistry by undergraduates. Since 1993 the award has been given to 46 students.

Dabney White Dixon PhD ’76 was one of many students with whom Greene formed a lifelong friendship and mentorship. Dixon shares, “Fred Greene was an outstanding scientist — intelligent, ethical, and compassionate in every aspect of his life. He possessed an exceptional breadth of knowledge in organic chemistry, particularly in mechanistic organic chemistry, as evidenced by his long tenure as editor of the Journal of Organic Chemistry (1962 to 1988). Weekly, large numbers of manuscripts flowed through his office. He had an acute sense of fairness in evaluating submissions and was helpful to those submitting manuscripts. His ability to navigate conflicting scientific viewpoints was especially evident during the heated debates over non-classical carbonium ions in the 1970s.

“Perhaps Fred’s greatest contribution to science was his mentorship. At a time when women were rare in chemistry PhD programs, Fred’s mentorship was particularly meaningful. I was the first woman in my scientific genealogical lineage to study chemistry, and his guidance gave me the confidence to overcome challenges. He and Theo provided a supportive and joyful environment, helping me forge a career in academia where I have since mentored 13 PhD students — an even mix of men and women — a testament to the social progress in science that Fred helped foster.

“Fred’s meticulous attention to detail was legendary. He insisted that every new molecule be fully characterized spectroscopically before he would examine the data. Through this, his students learned the importance of thoroughness, accuracy, and organization. He was also an exceptional judge of character, entrusting students with as much responsibility as they could handle. His honesty was unwavering — he openly acknowledged mistakes, setting a powerful example for his students.

“Shortly before the pandemic, I had the privilege of meeting Fred with two of his scientific ‘granddaughters’ — Elizabeth Draganova, then a postdoc at Tufts (now an assistant professor at Emory), and Cyrianne Keutcha, then a graduate student at Harvard (now a postdoc at Yale). As we discussed our work, it was striking how much science had evolved — from IR and NMR of small-ring heterocycles to surface plasmon resonance and cryo-electron microscopy of large biochemical systems. Yet, Fred’s intellectual curiosity remained as sharp as ever. His commitment to excellence, attention to detail, and passion for uncovering chemical mechanisms lived on in his scientific descendants.

“He leaves a scientific legacy of chemists who internalized his lessons on integrity, kindness, and rigorous analysis, carrying them forward to their own students and research. His impact on the field of chemistry — and on the lives of those fortunate enough to have known him — will endure.”

Carl Renner PhD ’74 felt fortunate and privileged to be a doctoral student in the Greene group from 1969 to 1973, and also his teaching assistant for his 5.43 course. Renner recalls, “He possessed a curious mind of remarkable clarity and discipline. He prepared his lectures meticulously and loved his students. He was extremely generous with his time and knowledge. I never heard him complain or say anything unkind. Everyone he encountered came away better for it.”

Gary Breton PhD ’91 credits the development of his interest in physical organic chemistry to his time spent in Greene’s class. Breton says, “During my time in the graduate chemistry program at MIT (1987-91) I had the privilege of learning from some of the world’s greatest minds in chemistry, including Dr. Fred Greene. At that time, all incoming graduate students in organic chemistry were assigned in small groups to a seminar-type course that met each week to work on the elucidation of reaction mechanisms, and I was assigned to Dr. Greene’s class. It was here that not only did Dr. Greene afford me a confidence in how to approach reaction mechanisms, but he also ignited my fascination with physical organic chemistry. I was only too happy to join his research group, and begin a love/hate relationship with reactive nitrogen-containing heterocycles that continues to this day in my own research lab as a chemistry professor. 

“Anyone that knew Dr. Greene quickly recognized that he was highly intelligent and exceptionally knowledgeable about all things organic, but under his mentorship I also saw his creativity and cleverness. Beyond that, and even more importantly, I witnessed his kindness and generosity, and his subtle sense of humor. Dr. Greene’s enduring legacy is the large number of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs whose lives he touched over his many years. He will be greatly missed.”

John Dolhun PhD ’73 recalls Greene’s love for learning, and that he “was one of the kindest persons that I have known.” Dolhun shares, “I met Fred Greene when I was a graduate student. His organic chemistry course was one of the most popular, and he was a top choice for many students’ thesis committees. When I returned to MIT in 2008 and reconnected with him, he was still endlessly curious — always learning, asking questions. A few years ago, he visited me and we had lunch. Back at the chemistry building, I reached for the elevator button and he said, ‘I always walk up the five flights of stairs.’ So, I walked up with him. Fred knew how to keep both mind and body in shape. He was truly a beacon of light in the department.”

Liz McGrath, retired chemistry staff member, warmly recalls the regular coffees and conversations she shared with Fred over two decades at the Institute. She shares, “Fred, who was already emeritus by the time of my arrival, imparted to me a deep interest in the history of MIT Chemistry’s events and colorful faculty. He had a phenomenal memory, which made his telling of the history so rich in its content. He was a true gentleman and sweet and kind to boot. ... I will remember him with much fondness.”

Greene is survived by his children, Alan, Carol, Elizabeth, and Phillips; nine grandchildren; and six great grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on April 5 at 11 a.m. at the First Congregational Church in Winchester, Massachusetts.

Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Fluid Interfaces research group within the MIT Media Lab, has been awarded the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. She will accept the award at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan this April.

The Lifetime Research Award is given to individuals whose research in human-computer interaction (HCI) is considered both fundamental and influential to the field. Recipients are selected based on their cumulative contributions, influence on the work of others, new research developments, and being an active participant in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) community.

Her nomination recognizes her advocacy to place human agency at the center of HCI and artificial intelligence research. Rather than AI replacing human capabilities, Maes has advocated for ways in which human capabilities can be supported or enhanced by the integration of AI.

Pioneering the concept of software agents in the 1990s, Maes’ work has always been situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence and has helped lay the foundations for today’s online experience. Her article “Social information filtering: algorithms for automating 'word of mouth'” from CHI 95, co-authored with graduate student Upendra Shardanand, is the second-most-cited paper from ACM SIGCHI.  

Beyond her contributions in desktop-based interaction, she has an extensive body of work in the area of  novel wearable devices that enhance the human experience, for example by supporting memory, learning, decision-making, or health. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Maes has explored accessible and ethical designs while stressing the need for a human-centered approach.

“As a senior faculty member, Pattie is an integral member of the Media Lab, MIT, and larger HCI communities,” says Media Lab Director Dava Newman. “Her contributions to several different fields, alongside her unwavering commitment to enhancing the human experience in her work, is exemplary of not only the Media Lab’s interdisciplinary spirit, but also our core mission: to create transformative technologies and systems that enable people to reimagine and redesign their lives. We all celebrate this well-deserved recognition for Pattie!”

Maes is the second MIT professor to receive this honor, joining her Media Lab colleague Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Tangible Media research group.

“I am honored to be recognized by the ACM community, especially given that it can be difficult sometimes for researchers doing highly interdisciplinary research to be appreciated, even though some of the most impactful innovations often emerge from that style of research,” Maes comments.

On March 25, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT launched the global Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) with Community Jameel at an event in São Paulo, Brazil. 

ADEPT is a network of universities, governments, and other members united by a shared vision: To empower the next generation of policymakers, decision-makers, and researchers with the tools to innovate, test, and scale the most effective social policies and programs. These programs have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.

Too often, policy decisions in governments and other organizations are driven by ideology or guesswork. This can result in ineffective and inefficient policies and programs that don’t always serve their intended populations. ADEPT will bring a scientific perspective to policymaking, focusing on topics like statistical analysis, data science, and rigorous impact evaluation. 

Together with J-PAL, members will create innovative pathways for learners that include virtual and in-person courses, develop new academic programs on policy evaluation and data analysis, and cultivate a network of evidence-informed policy professionals to drive change globally. 

At the launch event at Insper, a Brazilian higher education institution, MIT economists Esther Duflo, co-founder of J-PAL, and Sara Fisher Ellison, faculty director of ADEPT, spoke about the importance of building a community aligned in support of evidence-informed policymaking. 

“Our aim is to create a vision-driven network of institutions around the world able to equip far more people in far more places with the skills and ambition for evidence-informed policymaking,” said Duflo. “We are excited to welcome Insper to the movement and create new opportunities for learners in Brazil.”

Members of the alliance will also have access to the MITx MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), which offers online courses taught by MIT Department of Economics faculty through MIT’s Office of Open Learning. The program offers graduate-level courses that combine the tools of economics and policy design with a strong foundation in economic and mathematical principles.

Early members of the alliance include Insper, a leading research and training institution in Brazil; the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics of Abidjan in collaboration with the Cote d’Ivorian government; the Paris School of Economics; and Princeton University. 

“This unprecedented initiative in Latin America reinforces Insper’s commitment to academic excellence and the internationalization of teaching, providing Brazilian students with access to a globally renowned program,” says Cristine Pinto, Insper’s director of research. “Promoting large-scale impact through research and data analysis is a core objective of Insper, and shared by J-PAL and the expansion of ADEPT.”

Learners who obtain the DEDP MicroMasters credential through ADEPT can accelerate their pursuit of a master’s degree by applying to participating universities, including Insper and MIT, opening doors for learners who may not otherwise have access to leading economics programs.

By empowering learners with the tools and ambition to create meaningful change, ADEPT seeks to accelerate data-driven decision-making at every step of the policymaking process. Ultimately, the hope is that ADEPT’s impact will be felt not only by alliance members and their individual learners, but by millions of people reached by better policies and programs worldwide.

As a college student in Serbia with a passion for math and physics, Ana Trišović found herself drawn to computer science and its practical, problem-solving approaches. It was then that she discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, and decided to study a course on Data Analytics with Python in 2012 — something her school didn’t offer.

That experience was transformative, says Trišović, who is now a research scientist at the FutureTech lab within MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“That course changed my life,” she says. “Throughout my career, I have considered myself a Python coder, and MIT OpenCourseWare made it possible. I was in my hometown on another continent, learning from MIT world-class resources. When I reflect on my path, it’s incredible.”

Over time, Trišović's path led her to explore a range of OpenCourseWare resources. She recalls that, as a non-native English speaker, some of the materials were challenging. But thanks to the variety of courses and learning opportunities available on OpenCourseWare, she was always able to find ones that suited her. She encourages anyone facing that same challenge to be persistent.

“If the first course doesn’t work for you, try another,” she says. “Being persistent and investing in yourself is the best thing a young person can do.”

In her home country of Serbia, Trišović earned undergraduate degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering before going on to Cambridge University and CERN, where she contributed to work on the Large Hadron Collider and completed her PhD in computer science in 2018. She has also done research at the University of Chicago and Harvard University.

“I like that computer science allows me to make an impact in a range of fields, but physics remains close to my heart, and I’m constantly inspired by it,” she says.

MIT FutureTech, an interdisciplinary research group, draws on computer science, economics, and management to identify computing trends that create risk and opportunities for sustainable economic growth. There, Trišović studies the democratization of AI, including the implications of open-source AI and how that will impact science. Her work at MIT is a chance to build on research she has been pursuing since she was in graduate school.

“My work focuses on computational social science. For many years, I’ve been looking at what's known as 'the science of science' — investigating issues like research reproducibility," Trišović explains. “Now, as AI becomes increasingly prevalent and introduces new challenges, I’m interested in examining a range of topics — from AI democratization to its effects on the scientific method and the broader landscape of science.”

Trišović is grateful that, way back in 2012, she made the decision to try something new and learn with an OpenCourseWare course.

“I instantly fell in love with Python the moment I took that course. I have such a soft spot for OpenCourseWare — it shaped my career,” she says. “Every day at MIT is inspiring. I work with people who are excited to talk about AI and other fascinating topics.”

You’re an aerospace engineer on a tight timeline to develop a component for a rocket engine. No sweat, you think — you know the concepts by heart, and the model looks appropriate in CAD. But you inspect the 3D-printed part that you’ve outsourced for manufacturing, and something is wrong. The impeller blade angle is off, and the diameter is larger than the design intent. The vendor won’t get back to you. Suddenly you’re over budget. Something is leaking. Running the pump test rig, you’re not sure where that vibration is coming from.

Successfully navigating nightmares like this can make or break an engineer, but real-time problem-solving during assembly is something few undergraduates experience as part of their curriculum. Enter class 16.811 (Advanced Manufacturing for Aerospace Engineers), a new communication-intensive laboratory course that allows juniors and seniors to drive a full engineering cycle, gaining experience that mirrors the challenges they’ll face as practicing engineers.

In just 13 weeks, students design, build, and test a laboratory-scale electric turbopump, the type of pump used in liquid rocket propulsion systems to deliver fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber under high pressure. Teams of two or three students work through the entire production process while balancing budgets, documenting, and testing.

The course was developed and taught by Zachary Cordero, Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor, and Zoltán Spakovszky, the T. Wilson Professor in Aeronautics, along with a team of teaching assistants (TAs), technical instructors, and communication experts. It ran for the first time last fall, open to students who had completed Unified Engineering, the foundational Course 16 curriculum covering the four disciplines at the core of aerospace engineering. It generated so much interest upon its announcement that spots were allocated via lottery.

“Sometimes it’s assumed that students will get hands-on experience through their extracurriculars, but they may not. Students in this class gain that experience through exposure to cutting-edge design and manufacturing tools, like metal 3D printing,” says Cordero. “They don’t just learn how to solve a problem set — they learn how to be an engineer.”

Training for a rapidly evolving field

The course was born out of feedback from participants at an annual workshop that Cordero organizes each summer addressing materials challenges in reusable rocket engines. Attendees representing industry, government, and academic sectors consistently emphasized the need for the next generation of engineers to be familiar with advanced engineering concepts, in addition to having strong fundamentals. Experience with new computational design tools and processes like additive manufacturing is becoming essential for success in the aerospace industry. “Our mission is to train, inspire, and motivate the next generation of aerospace engineers. We have to listen to what our industry partners want from engineers and adapt our curriculum to meet those needs,” says Cordero.

Spakovszky, Cordero, and the team built the course over two years of Independent Activities Period workshops, developing independent modules that teach concepts for constructing the turbopump. The first set of labs focuses on the impellers — the rotating bladed-disk component that draws fluid into the pump to pressurize it. The second lab breaks down the rotor system that supports the pump impeller, and the third covers integration of the rotor assembly into the casing and final testing.

Throughout the course, students receive instruction in technical communication and training on the full array of machine shop tools available in the Arthur and Linda Gelb Laboratory. Beyond learning the concepts and tools, the majority of the design and implementation is up to the students.

“They are pushed to learn how to learn on their own,” says Spakovszky. “The key differentiator here is that there is no solution. In other classes, you have a problem, and the instructor has the solution. This is open ended, and every team has a different design.” Project management is left up to each team, with instructors and TAs serving as resources, rather than leads. Each team works with vendors to help bring their designs to life. The students conducted their machinery analysis using the Agile Engineering Design System (AEDS) and Advanced Rotating Machine Dynamics (ARMD) software tools from Concepts NREC. Impellers were printed at the MIT SHED (Safety Health Environmental Discovery lab), with support from Tolga Durak, managing director of environment, health and safety, and by industry collaborators at Desktop Metal.

“A lot of the design questions we were working with don’t have firm answers,” says junior Danishell Destefano. “I learned a lot about how to read technical literature and compare design trade-offs to make my own decisions.”

On the floor

“Making things is really hard,” says Spakovszky. “In addition to manufacturing parts and components, the assembly of rotating machinery requires careful tolerancing of the part dimensions and precision manufacturing of the interfaces to meet design specification.”

At the core of the curriculum is the manufacturing process itself, with its myriad components posing a unique challenge for students who may not have experienced the kind of rapid design cycle that is becoming more and more common in the field. The course uses concurrent engineering as a methodology to emphasize the close connections between fundamental concepts, functional requirements, design, materials, and manufacturing.

Student teams document their lab results in written reports and give regular progress presentations. Lecturer Jessie Stickgold-Sarah instructed the class on professional communication. At the end of the semester, students walk away with the ability to not only create new things, but communicate about their creations.

“I really enjoyed working with this group of students,” says Stickgold-Sarah. “The main paper and presentations required students to express the reasoning using the design-build-test sequence, and to explain and justify their choices based on their technical understanding of core topics. They were incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and the papers and presentations they produced exceeded my expectations.”

The course culminates in a final presentation, where teams showcase their findings and get feedback from their MIT instructors and industry representatives — potential future colleagues and employers.

Whether or not students go directly into a career in rocket or jet propulsion, the breadth of skills they learn in class has applications across disciplines. “The biggest skill I’ve gained is time and project management. To build a pump in a semester is a pretty tough timeline challenge, and learning how to manage my time and work with a team has been a great soft skill to learn,” says Destafano.

The course drives home the reality that the manufacturing process can be just as important as the product. “I hope through this, they gain confidence to explore the unknown and deal with uncertainty in engineering systems,” says Cordero. “In the real world, things are leaking. Things aren’t as you initially anticipated or behaving as you thought they would behave. And the students had to react and respond. That's real life. It's kind of intuitive, kind of common sense, sure — but you can hone that skill, and develop confidence in that skill.”

Metamaterials are artificially-structured materials with extraordinary properties not easily found in nature. With engineered three-dimensional (3D) geometries at the micro- and nanoscale, these architected materials achieve unique mechanical and physical properties with capabilities beyond those of conventional materials — and have emerged over the past decade as a promising way to engineering challenges where all other existing materials have lacked success.

Architected materials exhibit unique mechanical and functional properties, but their full potential remains untapped due to challenges in design, fabrication, and characterization. Improvements and scalability in this space could help transform a range of industries, from biomedical implants, sports equipment, automotive and aerospace, and energy and electronics.

“Advances in scalable fabrication, high-throughput testing, and AI-driven design optimization could revolutionize the mechanics and materials science disciplines, enabling smarter, more adaptive materials that redefine engineering and everyday technologies,” says Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

In a Perspective published this month in the journal Nature Materials, Portela and James Surjadi, a postdoc in mechanical engineering, discuss key hurdles, opportunities, and future applications in the field of mechanical metamaterials. The paper is titled “Enabling three-dimensional architected materials across length scales and timescales.”

“The future of the field requires innovation in fabricating these materials across length scales, from nano to macro, and progress in understanding them at a variety of time scales, from slow deformation to dynamic impact,” says Portela, adding that it also demands interdisciplinary collaboration.

A Perspective is a peer-reviewed content type that the journal uses to invite reflection or discussion on matters that may be speculative, controversial, or highly technical, and where the subject matter may not meet the criteria for a Review.

“We felt like our field, following substantial progress over the last decade, is still facing two bottlenecks: issues scaling up, and no knowledge or understanding of properties under dynamic conditions,” says Portela, discussing the decision to write the piece.

Portela and Surjadi’s paper summarizes state-of-the-art approaches and highlights existing knowledge gaps in material design, fabrication, and characterization. It also proposes a roadmap to accelerate the discovery of architected materials with programmable properties via the synergistic combination of high-throughput experimentation and computational efforts, toward leveraging emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for their design and optimization.

“High-throughput miniaturized experiments, non-contact characterization, and benchtop extreme-condition methods will generate rich datasets for the implementation of data-driven models, accelerating the optimization and discovery of metamaterials with unique properties,” says Surjadi.

The Portela Lab’s motto is “architected mechanics and materials across scales.” The Perspective aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and real-world applications of next-generation architected materials, and it presents a vision the lab has been working toward for the past four years.

Six current MIT affiliates and 27 additional MIT alumni have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 

The 2024 class of AAAS Fellows includes 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators, spanning all 24 of AAAS disciplinary sections, who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, life member of the MIT Corporation, was named a AAAS Fellow “for outstanding leadership in biotechnology, in particular mRNA therapeutics, and for advocacy for recognition of the contributions of immigrants to economic and scientific progress.” Afeyan is the founder and CEO of the venture creation company Flagship Pioneering, which has built over 100 science-based companies to transform human health and sustainability. He is also the chairman and cofounder of Moderna, which was awarded a 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the development of its Covid-19 vaccine. Afeyan earned his PhD in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987 and was a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management for 16 years, starting in 2000. Among other activities at the Institute, he serves on the advisory board of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and delivered MIT’s 2024 Commencement address.

Cynthia Breazeal SM ’93, ScD ’00 is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group in the MIT Media Lab. At MIT Open Learning, she is the MIT dean for digital learning, and in this role, she leverages her experience in emerging digital technologies and business, research, and strategic initiatives to lead Open Learning’s business and research and engagement units. She is also the director of the MIT-wide Initiative on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (raise.mit.edu). She co-founded the consumer social robotics company, Jibo, Inc., where she served as chief scientist and chief experience officer. She is recognized for distinguished contributions in the field of artificial intelligence education, particularly around the use of social robots, and learning at scale.

Alan Edelman PhD ’89 is an applied mathematics professor for the Department of Mathematics and leads the Applied Computing Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the MIT Julia Lab. He is recognized as a 2024 AAAS fellow for distinguished contributions and outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, random matrix theory, computational science, and in particular for the development of the Julia programming language. Edelman has been elected a fellow of five different societies — AMS, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and AAAS.

Robert B. Millard '73, life member and chairman emeritus of the MIT Corporation, was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for outstanding contributions to the scientific community and U.S. higher education "through exemplary leadership service to such storied institutions as AAAS and MIT." Millard joined the MIT Corporation as a term member in 2003 and was elected a life member in 2013. He served on the Executive Committee for 10 years and on the Investment Company Management Board for seven years, including serving as its chair for the last four years. He served as a member of the Visiting Committees for Physics, Architecture, and Chemistry. In addition, Millard has served as a member of the Linguistics and Philosophy Visiting Committee, the Corporation Development Committee, and the Advisory Council for the Council for the Arts. In 2011, Millard received the Bronze Beaver Award, the MIT Alumni Association’s highest honor for distinguished service.

Jagadeesh S. Moodera is a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics. His research interests include experimental condensed matter physics: spin polarized tunneling and nano spintronics; exchange coupled ferromagnet/superconductor interface, triplet pairing, nonreciprocal current transport and memory toward superconducting spintronics for quantum technology; and topological insulators/superconductors, including Majorana bound state studies in metallic systems. His research in the area of spin polarized tunneling led to a breakthrough in observing tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) at room temperature in magnetic tunnel junctions. This resulted in a huge surge in this area of research, currently one of the most active areas. TMR effect is used in all ultra-high-density magnetic data storage, as well as for the development of nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM) that is currently being advanced further in various electronic devices, including for neuromorphic computing architecture. For his leadership in spintronics, the discovery of TMR, the development of MRAM, and for mentoring the next generation of scientists, Moodera was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow. For his TMR discovery he was awarded the Oliver Buckley Prize (2009) by the American Physical Society (APS), named an American National Science Foundation Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow (2008-10), won IBM and TDK Research Awards (1995-98), and became a Fellow of APS (2000).

Noelle Eckley Selin, the director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, uses atmospheric chemistry modeling to inform decision-making strategies on air pollution, climate change, and toxic substances, including mercury and persistent organic pollutants. She has also published articles and book chapters on the interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations, in particular focusing on global efforts to regulate hazardous chemicals and persistent organic pollutants. She is named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for world-recognized leadership in modeling the impacts of air pollution on human health, in assessing the costs and benefits of related policies, and in integrating technology dynamics into sustainability science.

Additional MIT alumni honored as 2024 AAAS Fellows include: Danah Boyd SM ’02 (Media Arts and Sciences); Michael S. Branicky ScD ’95 (EECS); Jane P. Chang SM ’95, PhD ’98 (Chemical Engineering); Yong Chen SM '99 (Mathematics); Roger Nelson Clark PhD '80 (EAPS); Mark Stephen Daskin ’74, PhD ’78 (Civil and Environmental Engineering); Marla L. Dowell PhD ’94 (Physics); Raissa M. D’Souza PhD ’99 (Physics); Cynthia Joan Ebinger SM '86, PhD '88 (EAPS/WHOI); Thomas Henry Epps III ’98, SM ’99 (Chemical Engineering); Daniel Goldman ’94 (Physics); Kenneth Keiler PhD ’96 (Biology); Karen Jean Meech PhD '87 (EAPS); Christopher B. Murray PhD ’95 (Chemistry); Jason Nieh '89 (EECS); William Nordhaus PhD ’67 (Economics); Milica Radisic PhD '04 (Chemical Engineering); James G. Rheinwald PhD ’76 (Biology); Adina L. Roskies PhD ’04 (Philosophy); Linda Rothschild (Preiss) PhD '70 (Mathematics); Soni Lacefield Shimoda PhD '03 (Biology); Dawn Y. Sumner PhD ’95 (EAPS); Tina L. Tootle PhD ’04 (Biology); Karen Viskupic PhD '03 (EAPS); Brant M. Weinstein PhD ’92 (Biology); Chee Wei Wong SM ’01, ScD ’03 (Mechanical Engineering; and Fei Xu PhD ’95 (Brain and Cognitive Sciences). 

Earle Leonard Lomon PhD ’54, MIT professor emeritus of physics, died on March 7 in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 94.  

A longtime member of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Lomon was interested primarily in the forces between protons and neutrons at low energies, where the effects of quarks and gluons are hidden by their confinement.

His research focused on the interactions of hadrons — protons, neutrons, mesons, and nuclei — before it was understood that they were composed of quarks and gluons. 

“Earle developed an R-matrix formulation of scattering theory that allowed him to separate known effects at long distance from then-unknown forces at short distances,” says longtime colleague Robert Jaffe, the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics.

“When QCD [quantum chromodynamics] emerged as the correct field theory of hadrons, Earle moved quickly to incorporate the effects of quarks and gluons at short distance and high energies,” says Jaffe. “Earle’s work can be interpreted as a precursor to modern chiral effective field theory, where the pertinent degrees of freedom at low energy, which are hadrons, are matched smoothly onto the quark and gluon degrees of freedom that dominate at higher energy.”

“He was a truly cosmopolitan scientist, given his open mind and deep kindness,” says Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus of physics.

Early years

Born Nov. 15, 1930, in Montreal, Quebec, Earle was the only son of Harry Lomon and Etta Rappaport. At Montreal High School, he met his future wife, Ruth Jones. Their shared love for classical music drew them both to the school's Classical Music Club, where Lomon served as president and Ruth was an accomplished musician.

While studying at McGill University, he was a research physicist for the Canada Defense Research Board from 1950 to 1951. After graduating in 1951, he married Jones, and they moved to Cambridge, where he pursued his doctorate at MIT in theoretical physics, mentored by Professor Hermann Feshbach.

Lomon spent 1954 to 1955 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen. “With the presence of Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Willem V.R. Malkus, there were many physicists from Europe and elsewhere, including MIT’s Dave Frisch, making the Institute for Physics an exciting place to be,” recalled Lomon.

In 1956-57, he was a research associate at the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He received his PhD from MIT in 1954, and did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Denmark, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Cornell. He was an associate professor at McGill from 1957 until 1960, when he joined the MIT faculty.

In 1965, Lomon was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was a visiting scientist at CERN. In 1968, he joined the newly formed MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He became a full professor in 1970 and retired in 1999.

Los Alamos and math theory

From 1968 to 2015, Lomon was an affiliate researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During this time, he collaborated with Fred Begay, a Navajo nuclear physicist and medicine man. New Mexico became the Lomon family’s second home, and Lomon enjoyed the area hiking trails and climbing Baldy Mountain.   

Lomon also developed educational materials for mathematical theory. He developed textbooks, educational tools, research, and a creative problem-solving curriculum for the Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools. His children recall when Earle would review the educational tools with them at the dinner table. From 2001 to 2013, he was program director for mathematical theory for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Theoretical Physics research hub.

Lomon was an American Physical Society Fellow and a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists.

Husband of the late Ruth Lomon, he is survived by his daughters Glynis Lomon and Deirdre Lomon; his son, Dylan Lomon; grandchildren Devin Lomon, Alexia Layne-Lomon, and Benjamin Garner; and six great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial service at a later date; instead of flowers, please consider donating to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation. 

Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.

“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.” 

Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.

The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.

“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”

Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.

MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.

The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.

“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS. 

“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”

The SeaPerch underwater robot is a popular educational tool for students in grades 5 to 12.  Building and piloting SeaPerch, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), involves a variety of hand fabrication processes, electronics techniques, and STEM concepts. Through the SeaPerch program, educators and students explore structures, electronics, and underwater dynamics.  

“SeaPerch has had a tremendous impact on the fields of ocean science and engineering,” says Andrew Bennett ’85, PhD ’97, MIT SeaGrant education administrator and senior lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE).

The original SeaPerch project was launched by MIT Sea Grant in 2003. In the decades that followed, it quickly spread across the country and overseas, creating a vibrant community of builders. Now under the leadership of RoboNation, SeaPerch continues to thrive with competitions around the world. These competitions introduce challenging real-world problems to foster creative solutions. Some recent topics have included deep sea mining and collecting data on hydrothermal vents.

SeaPerch II, which has been in development at MIT Sea Grant since 2021, builds on the original program by adding robotics and elements of marine and climate science. It remains a “do-it-yourself” maker project with objectives that are achievable by middle and high school students. Bennett says he hopes SeaPerch II will enable an even greater impact by providing an approachable path to learning more about sensors, robotics, climate science, and more.

“What I think is most valuable about it is that it uses hardware store components that need to be cut, waterproofed, connected, soldered, or somehow processed before becoming part of the robot or controller,” says Diane Brancazio ME ’90, K-12 maker team leader for the MIT Edgerton Center, who co-leads the MIT SeaPerch initiative with Bennett. “[It’s] kind of like making a cake from scratch, instead of from a mix — you see what goes into the final product and how it all comes together.”

SeaPerch II is a family of modules that allow students and educators to create educational adventures tailored to their particular wants or requirements. Offerings include a pressure and temperature sensing module that can be used on its own; an autonomy module that the students can use to construct a closed-loop automatic depth control system for their SeaPerch; and a lesson module for soft robotic “fingers” that can be configured into grippers, distance sensors, and bump sensors.

The basic SeaPerch is a PVC pipe structure with three motors and a tether to a switch box. Through the building process, students learn about buoyancy, structural design, hand fabrication, and electric circuits. SeaPerch II leverages technologies that are more advanced, less expensive, and more accessible than they were when SeaPerch was first conceived. Bennett says SeaPerch II is meant to extend the original SeaPerch program without invalidating any of the existing system.

Teagan Sullivan, a third-year student in mechanical engineering, first became involved with the project in January 2023 through an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project with MIT Sea Grant. Initially, she continued development of the soft robotics portion of the project, before switching to a more general focus where she worked on frame design for SeaPerch II, making sure components could fit and that stability could be maintained. Later she helped run outreach programs, taking feedback from the students she worked with to help modify designs and make them “more robust and kid-friendly.”

“I have been able to see the impact of SeaPerch II on a small scale by working directly with students,” Sullivan says. “I have seen how it encourages creativity, and how it has taught kids that collaboration is the best road to success. SeaPerch II teaches the basics of electronics, coding, and manufacturing, but its best strength is the ability to challenge the way people think and encourage critical thinking.”

The team’s vision is to create opportunities for young people to engage in authentic science investigations and engineering challenges, developing a passion for engineering, science, and the aquatic environment. MIT Sea Grant is continuing to develop new SeaPerch II modules, including incorporating land-water communication, salinity and dissolved oxygen sensors, and fluorometers.

Sullivan says she hopes the program will reach more students and inspire them to take an interest in engineering while teaching the skills they need to be the next generation of problem-solvers. Brancazio says she hopes this project inspires and prepares young people to work on climate change issues.

“Robots are supposed to help people do things they couldn’t otherwise do,” Brancazio says. “SeaPerch is a robot with a mission.”

Nuclear physicist and MIT Professor Emeritus Lee Grodzins died on March 6 at his home in the Maplewood Senior Living Community at Weston, Massachusetts. He was 98.   

Grodzins was a pioneer in nuclear physics research. He was perhaps best known for the highly influential experiment determining the helicity of the neutrino, which led to a key understanding of what's known as the weak interaction. He was also the founder of Niton Corp. and the nonprofit Cornerstones of Science, and was a co-founder of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

He retired in 1999 after serving as an MIT physics faculty member for 40 years. As a member of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), he initiated the relativistic heavy-ion physics program. He published over 170 scientific papers and held 64 U.S. patents.

“Lee was a very good experimental physicist, especially with his hands making gadgets,” says Heavy Ion Group and Francis L. Friedman Professor Emeritus Wit Busza PhD ’64. “His enthusiasm for physics spilled into his enthusiasm for how physics was taught in our department.”

Industrious son of immigrants

Grodzins was born July 10, 1926, in Lowell, Massachusetts, the middle child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants David and Taube Grodzins. He grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire. His two sisters were Ethel Grodzins Romm, journalist, author, and businesswoman who later ran his company, Niton Corp.; and Anne Lipow, who became a librarian and library science expert.

His father, who ran a gas station and a used-tire business, died when Lee was 15. To help support his family, Lee sold newspapers, a business he grew into the second-largest newspaper distributor in Manchester.

At 17, Grodzins attended the University of New Hampshire, graduating in less than three years with a degree in mechanical engineering.  However, he decided to be a physicist after disagreeing with a textbook that used the word “never.”

“I was pretty good in math and was undecided about my future,” Grodzins said in a 1958 New York Daily News article. “It wasn’t until my senior year that I unexpectedly realized I wanted to be a physicist. I was reading a physics text one day when suddenly this sentence hit me: ‘We will never be able to see the atom.’ I said to myself that that was as stupid a statement as I’d ever read. What did he mean ‘never!’ I got so annoyed that I started devouring other writers to see what they had to say and all at once I found myself in the midst of modern physics.”

He wrote his senior thesis on “Atomic Theory.”

After graduating in 1946, he approached potential employers by saying, “I have a degree in mechanical engineering, but I don’t want to be one. I’d like to be a physicist, and I’ll take anything in that line at whatever you will pay me.”

He accepted an offer from General Electric’s Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he worked in fundamental nuclear research building cosmic ray detectors, while also pursuing his master’s degree at Union College. “I had a ball,” he recalled. “I stayed in the lab 12 hours a day. They had to kick me out at night.”

Brookhaven

After earning his PhD from Purdue University in 1954, he spent a year as a lecturer there, before becoming a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) with Maurice Goldhaber’s nuclear physics group, probing the properties of the nuclei of atoms.

In 1957, he, with Goldhaber and Andy Sunyar, used a simple table-top experiment to measure the helicity of the neutrino. Helicity characterizes the alignment of a particle’s intrinsic spin vector with that particle’s direction of motion. 

The research provided new support for the idea that the principle of conservation of parity — which had been accepted for 30 years as a basic law of nature before being disproven the year before, leading to the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics — was not as inviolable as the scientists thought it was, and did not apply to the behavior of some subatomic particles.

The experiment took about 10 days to complete, followed by a month of checks and rechecks. They submitted a letter on “Helicity of Neutrinos” to Physical Review on Dec. 11, 1957, and a week later, Goldhaber told a Stanford University audience that the neutrino is left-handed, meaning that the weak interaction was probably one force. This work proved crucial to our understanding of the weak interaction, the force that governs nuclear beta decay.

“It was a real upheaval in our understanding of physics,” says Grodzins’ longtime colleague Stephen Steadman. The breakthrough was commemorated in 2008, with a conference at BNL on “Neutrino Helicity at 50.” 

Steadman also recalls Grodzins’ story about one night at Brookhaven, where he was working on an experiment that involved a radioactive source inside a chamber. Lee noticed that a vacuum pump wasn’t working, so he tinkered with it a while before heading home. Later that night, he gets a call from the lab. “They said, ‘Don't go anywhere!’” recalls Steadman. It turns out the radiation source in the lab had exploded, and the pump filled the lab with radiation. “They were actually able to trace his radioactive footprints from the lab to his home,” says Steadman. “He kind of shrugged it off.”

The MIT years       

Grodzins joined the faculty of MIT in 1959, where he taught physics for four decades. He inherited Robley Evans’ Radiation Laboratory, which used radioactive sources to study properties of nuclei, and led the Relativistic Heavy Ion Group, which was affiliated with the LNS.

In 1972, he launched a program at BNL using the then-new Tandem Van de Graaff accelerator to study interactions of heavy ions with nuclei. “As the BNL tandem was getting commissioned, we started a program, together with Doug Cline at the University of Rochester, tandem to investigate Coulomb-nuclear interference,” says Steadman, a senior research scientist at LNS. “The experimental results were decisive but somewhat controversial at the time. We clearly detected the interference effect.” The experimental work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Grodzins’ team looked for super-heavy elements using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Super-Hilac, investigated heavy-ion fission and other heavy-ion reactions, and explored heavy-ion transfer reactions. The latter research showed with precise detail the underlying statistical behavior of the transfer of nucleons between the heavy-ion projectile and target, using a theoretical statistical model of Surprisal Analysis developed by Rafi Levine and his graduate student. Recalls Steadman, “these results were both outstanding in their precision and initially controversial in interpretation.”

In 1985, he carried out the first computer axial tomographic experiment using synchrotron radiation, and in 1987, his group was involved in the first run of Experiment 802, a collaborative experiment with about 50 scientists from around the world that studied relativistic heavy ion collisions at Brookhaven. The MIT responsibility was to build the drift chambers and design the bending magnet for the experiment.

“He made significant contributions to the initial design and construction phases, where his broad expertise and knowledge of small area companies with unique capabilities was invaluable,” says George Stephans, physics senior lecturer and senior research scientist at MIT.

Professor emeritus of physics Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62 recalls working on a Mossbauer experiment to establish if photons changed frequency as they traveled through bright regions. “It was an idea held by some to explain the ‘apparent’ red shift with distance in our universe,” says Weiss. “We became great friends in the process, and of course, amateur cosmologists.”

“Lee was great for developing good ideas,” Steadman says. “He would get started on one idea, but then get distracted with another great idea. So, it was essential that the team would carry these experiments to their conclusion: they would get the papers published.”

MIT mentor

Before retiring in 1999, Lee supervised 21 doctoral dissertations and was an early proponent of women graduate students in physics. He also oversaw the undergraduate thesis of Sidney Altman, who decades later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For many years, he helped teach the Junior Lab required of all undergraduate physics majors. He got his favorite student evaluation, however, for a different course, billed as offering a “superficial overview” of nuclear physics. The comment read: “This physics course was not superficial enough for me.”

“He really liked to work with students,” says Steadman. “They could always go into his office anytime. He was a very supportive mentor.”

“He was a wonderful mentor, avuncular and supportive of all of us,” agrees Karl van Bibber ’72, PhD ’76, now at the University of California at Berkeley. He recalls handing his first paper to Grodzins for comments. “I was sitting at my desk expecting a pat on the head. Quite to the contrary, he scowled, threw the manuscript on my desk and scolded, ‘Don't even pick up a pencil again until you've read a Hemingway novel!’ … The next version of the paper had an average sentence length of about six words; we submitted it, and it was immediately accepted by Physical Review Letters.”

Van Bibber has since taught the “Grodzins Method” in his graduate seminars on professional orientation for scientists and engineers, including passing around a few anthologies of Hemingway short stories. “I gave a copy of one of the dog-eared anthologies to Lee at his 90th birthday lecture, which elicited tears of laughter.”

Early in George Stephans’ MIT career as a research scientist, he worked with Grodzins’ newly formed Relativistic Heavy Ion Group. “Despite his wide range of interests, he paid close attention to what was going on and was always very supportive of us, especially the students. He was a very encouraging and helpful mentor to me, as well as being always pleasant and engaging to work with. He actively pushed to get me promoted to principal research scientist relatively early, in recognition of my contributions.”

“He always seemed to know a lot about everything, but never acted condescending,” says Stephans. “He seemed happiest when he was deeply engaged digging into the nitty-gritty details of whatever unique and unusual work one of these companies was doing for us.”

Al Lazzarini ’74, PhD ’78 recalls Grodzins’ investigations using proton-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) as a sensitive tool to measure trace elemental amounts. “Lee was a superb physicist,” says Lazzarini. “He gave an enthralling seminar on an investigation he had carried out on a lock of Napoleon’s hair, looking for evidence of arsenic poisoning.”

Robert Ledoux ’78, PhD ’81, a former professor of physics at MIT who is now program director of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency with the Department of Energy, worked with Grodzins as both a student and colleague. “He was a ‘nuclear physicist’s physicist’ — a superb experimentalist who truly loved building and performing experiments in many areas of nuclear physics. His passion for discovery was matched only by his generosity in sharing knowledge.”

The research funding crisis starting in 1969 led Grodzins to become concerned that his graduate students would not find careers in the field. He helped form the Economic Concerns Committee of the American Physical Society, for which he produced a major report on the “Manpower Crisis in Physics” (1971), and presented his results before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and at the Karlsruhe National Lab in Germany.   

Grodzins played a significant role in bringing the first Chinese graduate students to MIT in the 1970s and 1980s.

One of the students he welcomed was Huan Huang PhD ’90. “I am forever grateful to him for changing my trajectory,” says Huang, now at the University of California at Los Angeles. “His unwavering support and ‘go do it’ attitude inspired us to explore physics at the beginning of a new research field of high energy heavy ion collisions in the 1980s. I have been trying to be a ‘nice professor’ like Lee all my academic career.”

Even after he left MIT, Grodzins remained available for his former students. “Many tell me how much my lifestyle has influenced them, which is gratifying,” Huang says. “They’ve been a central part of my life. My biography would be grossly incomplete without them.”

Niton Corp. and post-MIT work

Grodzins liked what he called “tabletop experiments,” like the one used in his 1957 neutrino experiment, which involved a few people building a device that could fit on a tabletop. “He didn’t enjoy working in large collaborations, which nuclear physics embraced.” says Steadman. “I think that’s why he ultimately left MIT.”

In the 1980s, he launched what amounted to a new career in detection technology. In 1987, after developing a scanning proton-induced X-ray microspectrometer for use measuring elemental concentrations in air, he founded the Niton Corp., which developed, manufactured, and marketed test kits and instruments to measure radon gas in buildings, lead-based paint detection, and other nondestructive testing applications. (“Niton” is an obsolete term for radon.)

“At the time, there was a big scare about radon in New England, and he thought he could develop a radon detector that was inexpensive and easy to use,” says Steadman. “His radon detector became a big business.”

He later developed devices to detect explosives, drugs, and other contraband in luggage and cargo containers. Handheld devices used X-ray fluorescence to determine the composition of metal alloys and to detect other materials. The handheld XL Spectrum Analyzer could detect buried and surface lead on painted surfaces, to protect children living in older homes. Three Niton X-ray fluorescence analyzers earned R&D 100 awards.

“Lee was very technically gifted,” says Steadman.

In 1999, Grodzins retired from MIT and devoted his energies to industry, including directing the R&D group at Niton.

His sister Ethel Grodzins Romm was the president and CEO of Niton, followed by his son Hal. Many of Niton’s employees were MIT graduates. In 2005, he and his family sold Niton to Thermo Fisher Scientific, where Lee remained as a principal scientist until 2010.

In the 1990s, he was vice president of American Science and Engineering, and between the ages of 70 and 90, he was awarded three patents a year. 

“Curiosity and creativity don’t stop after a certain age,” Grodzins said to UNH Today. “You decide you know certain things, and you don’t want to change that thinking. But thinking outside the box really means thinking outside your box.”

“I miss his enthusiasm,” says Steadman. “I saw him about a couple of years ago and he was still on the move, always ready to launch a new effort, and he was always trying to pull you into those efforts.”

A better world

In the 1950s, Grodzins and other Brookhaven scientists joined the American delegation at the Second United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva.

Early on, he joined several Manhattan Project alums at MIT in their concern about the consequences of nuclear bombs. In Vietnam-era 1969, Grodzins co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems. He served as its chair in 1970 and 1972. He also chaired committees for the American Physical Society and the National Research Council.

As vice president for advanced products at American Science and Engineering, which made homeland security equipment, he became a consultant on airport security, especially following the 9/11 attacks. As an expert witness, he testified at the celebrated trial to determine whether Pan Am was negligent for the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and he took part in a weapons inspection trip on the Black Sea. He also was frequently called as an expert witness on patent cases.

In 1999, Grodzins founded the nonprofit Cornerstones in Science, a public library initiative to improve public engagement with science. Based originally at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, Cornerstones now partners with libraries in Maine, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California. Among their initiatives was one that has helped supply telescopes to libraries and astronomy clubs around the country.

“He had a strong sense of wanting to do good for mankind,” says Steadman.

Awards

Grodzins authored more than 170 technical papers and holds more than 60 U.S. patents. His numerous accolades included being named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1964 and 1971, and a senior von Humboldt fellow in 1980. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received an honorary doctor of science degree from Purdue University in 1998.

In 2021, the Denver X-Ray Conference gave Grodzins the Birks Award in X-Florescence Spectrometry, for having introduced “a handheld XRF unit which expanded analysis to in-field applications such as environmental studies, archeological exploration, mining, and more.”

Personal life

One evening in 1955, shortly after starting his work at Brookhaven, Grodzins decided to take a walk and explore the BNL campus. He found just one building that had lights on and was open, so he went in. Inside, a group was rehearsing a play. He was immediately smitten with one of the actors, Lulu Anderson, a young biologist. “I joined the acting company, and a year-and-a-half later, Lulu and I were married,” Grodzins had recalled. They were happily married for 62 years, until Lulu’s death in 2019.

They raised two sons, Dean, now of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hal Grodzins, who lives in Maitland, Florida. Lee and Lulu owned a succession of beloved huskies, most of them named after physicists.

After living in Arlington, Massachusetts, the Grodzins family moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1972 and bought a second home a few years later in Brunswick, Maine. Starting around 1990, Lee and Lulu spent every weekend, year-round, in Brunswick. In both places, they were avid supporters of their local libraries, museums, theaters, symphonies, botanical gardens, public radio, and TV stations.

Grodzins took his family along to conferences, fellowships, and other invitations. They all lived in Denmark for two sabbaticals, in 1964-65 and 1971-72, while Lee worked at the Neils Bohr Institute. They also traveled together to China for a month in 1975, and for two months in 1980. As part of the latter trip, they were among the first American visitors to Tibet since the 1940s. Lee and Lulu also traveled the world, from Antarctica to the Galapagos Islands to Greece.

His homes had basement workshops well-stocked with tools. His sons enjoyed a playroom he built for them in their Arlington home. He also once constructed his own high-fidelity record player, patched his old Volvo with fiberglass, changed his own oil, and put on the winter tires and chains himself. He was an early adopter of the home computer.

“His work in science and technology was part of a general love of gadgets and of fixing and making things,” his son, Dean, wrote in a Facebook post.

Lee is survived by Dean, his wife, Nora Nykiel Grodzins, and their daughter, Lily; and by Hal and his wife Cathy Salmons. 

A remembrance and celebration for Lee Grodzins is planned for this summer. Donations in his name may be made to Cornerstones of Science.

As director of the MIT BioMicro Center (BMC), Stuart Levine ’97 wholeheartedly embraces the variety of challenges he tackles each day. One of over 50 core facilities providing shared resources across the Institute, the BMC supplies integrated high-throughput genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis, bioinformatics support, and data management to researchers across MIT. The BioMicro Center is part of the Integrated Genomics and Bioinformatics core facility at the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Biotechnology Center.

“Every day is a different day,” Levine says, “there are always new problems, new challenges, and the technology is continuing to move at an incredible pace.” After more than 15 years in the role, Levine is grateful that the breadth of his work allows him to seek solutions for so many scientific problems.

By combining bioinformatics expertise with biotech relationships and a focus on maximizing the impact of the center’s work, Levine brings the broad range of skills required to match the diversity of questions asked by investigators in MIT’s Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, as well as researchers across MIT’s campus.

Expansive expertise

Biology first appealed to Levine as an MIT undergraduate taking class 7.012 (Introduction to Biology), thanks to the charisma of instructors Professor Eric Lander and Amgen Professor Emerita Nancy Hopkins. After earning his PhD in biochemistry from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, Levine returned to MIT for postdoctoral work with Professor Richard Young, core member at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

In the Young Lab, Levine found his calling as an informaticist and ultimately decided to stay at MIT. Here, his work has a wide-ranging impact: the BMC serves over 100 labs annually, from the the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Chemical Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; and, of course, Biology.

“It’s a fun way to think about science,” Levine says, noting that he applies his knowledge and streamlines workflows across these many disciplines by “truly and deeply understanding the instrumentation complexities.”

This depth of understanding and experience allows Levine to lead what longtime colleague Professor Laurie Boyer describes as “a state-of-the-art core that has served so many faculty and provides key training opportunities for all.” He and his team work with cutting-edge, finely tuned scientific instruments that generate vast amounts of bioinformatics data, then use powerful computational tools to store, organize, and visualize the data collected, contributing to research on topics ranging from host-parasite interactions to proposed tools for NASA’s planetary protection policy.

Staying ahead of the curve

With a scientist directing the core, the BMC aims to enable researchers to “take the best advantage of systems biology methods,” says Levine. These methods use advanced research technologies to do things like prepare large sets of DNA and RNA for sequencing, read DNA and RNA sequences from single cells, and localize gene expression to specific tissues.

Levine presents a lightweight, clear rectangle about the width of a cell phone and the length of a VHS cassette.

“This is a flow cell that can do 20 human genomes to clinical significance in two days — 8 billion reads,” he says. “There are newer instruments with several times that capacity available as well.”

The vast majority of research labs do not need that kind of power, but the Institute, and its researchers as a whole, certainly do. Levine emphasizes that “the ROI [return on investment] for supporting shared resources is extremely high because whatever support we receive impacts not just one lab, but all of the labs we support. Keeping MIT’s shared resources at the bleeding edge of science is critical to our ability to make a difference in the world.”

To stay at the edge of research technology, Levine maintains company relationships, while his scientific understanding allows him to educate researchers on what is possible in the space of modern systems biology. Altogether, these attributes enable Levine to help his researcher clients “push the limits of what is achievable.”

The man behind the machines

Each core facility operates like a small business, offering specialized services to a diverse client base across academic and industry research, according to Amy Keating, Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology and head of the Department of Biology. She explains that “the PhD-level education and scientific and technological expertise of MIT’s core directors are critical to the success of life science research at MIT and beyond.” 

While Levine clearly has the education and expertise, the success of the BMC “business” is also in part due to his tenacity and focus on results for the core’s users.

He was recognized by the Institute with the MIT Infinite Mile Award in 2015 and the MIT Excellence Award in 2017, for which one nominator wrote, “What makes Stuart’s leadership of the BMC truly invaluable to the MIT community is his unwavering dedication to producing high-quality data and his steadfast persistence in tackling any type of troubleshooting needed for a project. These attributes, fostered by Stuart, permeate the entire culture of the BMC.”      

“He puts researchers and their research first, whether providing education, technical services, general tech support, or networking to collaborators outside of MIT,” says Noelani Kamelamela, lab manager of the BMC. “It’s all in service to users and their projects.”

Tucked into the far back corner of the BMC lab space, Levine’s office is a fitting symbol of his humility. While his guidance and knowledge sit at the center of what elevates the BMC beyond technical support, he himself sits away from the spotlight, resolutely supporting others to advance science.

“Stuart has always been the person, often behind the scenes, that pushes great science, ideas, and people forward,” Boyer says. “His knowledge and advice have truly allowed us to be at the leading edge in our work.”

Wildfires set acres ablaze. Earthquakes decimate towns into rubble. People go missing in mountains and bodies of water. Coronavirus cases surge globally.

When disaster strikes, timely, cohesive emergency response is crucial to saving lives, reducing property and resource loss, and protecting the environment. Large-scale incidents can call into action thousands of first responders from multiple jurisdictions and agencies, national and international. To effectively manage response, relief, and recovery efforts, they must work together to collect, process, and distribute accurate information from disparate systems. This lack of interoperability can hinder coordination and ultimately result in significant failures in disaster response.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory developed the Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS) to enable first responders across different jurisdictions, agencies, and countries to effectively coordinate during emergencies of any scale. Originally intended to help U.S. firefighters respond to wildfires, NICS has since evolved from an R&D prototype into an open-source operational platform adopted by emergency-response agencies worldwide, not only for natural disaster response but also search-and-rescue operations, health crises management, public event security, and aviation safety. The global community of users cultivated by NICS, and spinouts inspired by NICS, have maximized its impact.

At the core of the web-based NICS software tool is an incident map overlaying aggregated data from various external and internal sources such as first responders on the ground, airborne imaging sensors, weather and traffic reports, census data, and satellite-based maps; virtually any data source can be added. Emergency personnel upload the content directly on a computer or mobile app and communicate in real time through voice and chat functions. Role-based collaboration rooms are available for user-defined subsets of first responders to focus on a particular activity — such as air drop support, search and rescue, and wildlife rescue — while maintaining access to the comprehensive operational picture.

With its open-standards architecture, NICS interoperates with organizations' existing systems and allows internal data to be shared externally for enhanced visibility and awareness among users as a disaster unfolds. The modular design of NICS facilitates system customization for diverse user needs and changing mission requirements. The system archives all aspects of a created incident and can generate reports for post-incident analysis to inform future response planning. 

Partnering with first responders

As a federally funded research and development (R&D) center, Lincoln Laboratory has a long history of conducting R&D of architectures for information sharing, situational awareness, and decision-making in support of the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal entities. Recognizing that aspects of these architectures are relevant to disaster response, Lincoln Laboratory's Technology Office initiated in 2007 a study focused on wildfire response in California. A laboratory-led research team partnered with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), which annually responds to thousands of wildfires in collaboration with police, medical, and other services.

"CAL FIRE provided firsthand insight into what information is critical during emergency response and how may be best to view and share this information," says NICS co-developer Gregory Hogan, now associate leader of the laboratory's Advanced Sensors and Techniques Group.

With this insight, the laboratory developed and demonstrated a prototype of NICS. Noting the utility of such a system, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) began funding the R&D of NICS in 2010. Over the next several years, the laboratory team refined NICS, soliciting input from an organically formed users' group comprising more than 450 organizations across fire, law, medical, emergency services and management, border patrol, industry, utilities, nongovernmental organizations, and tribal partners. Thousands of training exercises and real emergencies employed NICS to coordinate diverse emergency-response activities spanning disaster management, law enforcement, and special security.

In 2014, CAL FIRE — which had been using NICS to respond to wildfires, mudslides and floods — officially adopted NICS statewide. That same year, the Emergency Management Directorate of Victoria, Australia's largest state, implemented NICS (as the Victorian Information Network for Emergencies, or VINE) after a worldwide search for a system to manage large-scale crises like bush fires.

In 2015, NICS was transferred to the California Office of Emergency Services. The California Governor's Office of Emergency Services deployed NICS as the Situation Awareness and Collaboration Tool (SCOUT) for emergency responders and law enforcement officials statewide in 2016.

Creating an open-source community

NICS also spawned an initial spinout company formed by personnel from CAL FIRE, the Worldwide Incident Command Services (WICS), which received a license for the system's software code in early 2015. WICS is a California-incorporated nonprofit public benefit corporation and the official DHS S&T Technology Transition Partner created to transition the NICS R&D project to a robust operational platform, which was named Raven. Later that year, DHS S&T made NICS available worldwide at no cost to first responder and emergency management agencies through an open-source release of the software code base on Github.

Sponsorship of NICS by DHS S&T is ongoing, with contributions over the years from the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Research and Development Center and the NATO Science for Peace and Security (SPS) Program. In 2015, the USCG funded the development of the cross-platform mobile app Portable Handset Integrated NICS (PHINICS), which enables first responders to access NICS with or without cellular coverage.

In 2016, Lincoln Laboratory and DHS S&T launched a four-year partnership with the NATO SPS Program to extend NICS to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Croatia, North Macedonia, and Montenegro for enhanced emergency collaboration among and within these Western Balkan nations. Under this Advanced Regional Civil Emergency Coordination Pilot, NICS was demonstrated in dozens of field exercises and applied to real-life incidents, including wildfires in BiH and a 6.2-magnitude earthquake in Croatia. In 2019, North Macedonia adopted NICS as its official crisis management system. And, when Covid-19 struck, NICS entered a new application space: public health. In North Macedonia, emergency institutions used NICS to not only coordinate emergency response, but also inform residents about infection cases and health resource locations. The laboratory team worked with North Macedonia's Crisis Management Center to enable national public access to NICS. 

Increasing global impact

NICS' reach continues to grow. In 2021, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Aeronautics Division and the U.S. Department of Transportation Volpe National Transportation Systems Center collaborated with Lincoln Laboratory using the baseline NICS system to field a new web-based tool: the Commonwealth aiRspace and Information Sharing Platform (CRISP). Integrating sensor feeds, airspace information, and resource data, CRISP enables a robust counter–small uncrewed aircraft systems mission for the safety and security of aviation and aviation-related activities throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

"The NICS project has demonstrated the power of collaborative development, in which each partner lends their expertise, resulting in a meaningful contribution to the global disaster response community," says Stephanie Foster, who was the lead developer and program manager of NICS.

In 2023, Foster co-founded the spinout company Generation NYX to increase access to NICS, renamed NYX DEFENDER, and create a community of users who work together to advance its capabilities. Generation NYX offers services to existing users established during the laboratory's R&D work, and provides a software-as-a-service solution for all new users. NYX DEFENDER improves the ability of local emergency management organizations to manage events such as parades and festivals; supports decision-making during floods and other natural disasters; and expands awareness among community stakeholders such as police, fire, and state officials. 

"NYX DEFENDER offers an innovative tool for local emergency management and public safety agencies and departments to create a common operating picture and foster interoperability, improve communications, and develop and maintain situational awareness during preplanned and no-notice events," says Clara Decerbo, director at the Providence Emergency Management Agency. "Our use of NYX DEFENDER during major City of Providence events has allowed us to integrate situational awareness between multiple public safety entities, private security, and event organizers and assisted us in ensuring our teams have the information they need to provide well-organized and coordinated public safety services to members of our community and visitors."

Generation NYX was recently subcontracted to provide support for a new three-year project that NATO SPS and DHS S&T kicked off earlier this year with the laboratory to establish NICS as the national disaster management platform in BiH. Foster has experience in this area, as she not only led the laboratory technical team who successfully adapted and deployed NICS in the Western Balkans under the 2016 SPS pilot, but also coordinated teams across the four nations. Though BiH participated in the 2016 SPS pilot, this latest effort seeks to expand NICS' adoption more broadly across the country, working within its complex multilevel government structure. NATO SPS is funding a second project, which began in October 2024, that will bring NICS to Albania and Georgia for use in search and rescue, particularly in response to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear events. For both projects, the laboratory team will enhance the open-source NICS code to operate on the edge (i.e., in disconnected communication scenarios) and integrate wearables for monitoring the health of first responders.

Since NICS was released open source on Github, NICS' worldwide usage has continued to grow for a wide range of applications. NICS has been used to locate missing persons in the Miljacka and Bosna Rivers in BiH; to direct ambulances to hypothermic runners at the Los Angeles Marathon; and to provide situational awareness among the National Guard for the Fourth of July celebration in Boston, Massachusetts. NICS has also proven its utility in mine and unexploded ordnance detection and clearance activities; in BiH, an estimated 80,000 explosive remnants of war pose a direct threat to the country's residents. Envisioned applications of NICS include monitoring of critical infrastructure such as utilities.

In recognition of its broader humanitarian impact, NICS was awarded a 2018 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award, Northeast Region, from the Federal Laboratory Consortium and a 2019 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award.

"NICS is a mature product, so what we are thinking about now is outside-the-box use cases for the technology," says the laboratory's Bioanalytics Systems and Technologies Group Leader Kajal Claypool, who is supervising the ongoing NATO SPS and DHS S&T projects. "That is where I see Lincoln Laboratory can bring innovation to bear."

David Schmittlein, an MIT professor of marketing and the MIT Sloan School of Management’s longest-serving dean and a visionary and transformational leader, died March 13, following a long illness. He was 69.

Schmittlein, the John C Head III Dean from 2007 to 2024, guided MIT Sloan through a financial crisis, a global pandemic, and numerous school-wide milestones. During those 17 years, Schmittlein led initiatives introducing several new degree programs, redesigning the academic program portfolio while maintaining the MBA as the flagship degree, and diversifying executive offerings. Under his guidance, the school enhanced alumni engagement, increased philanthropic support, expanded the faculty, oversaw numerous campus capital projects, and opened several international programs. He also championed a centennial celebration of Course 15 — MIT’s designation for management — and led a branding and marketing effort that cemented MIT Sloan’s reputation as a place for smart, open, grounded, and inventive leaders.

In all, he brought MIT Sloan’s value to managers, organizations, and the world into clear focus, positioning and preparing the school to lead in a new era of management education.

“Dave transformed the MIT Sloan School of Management from a niche player to a top five business school and, in the process, drew us closer to the Institute in ways that all of the faculty, staff, and students welcome and support,” says MIT professor of finance Andrew W. Lo. “He greatly expanded our visibility internationally [and] also expanded our footprint from a research and educational and outreach perspective. Really, it gave us the opportunity to define ourselves in ways that we weren’t doing prior to his joining.”

In a letter to the MIT community, President Sally Kornbluth wrote, “Dave helped build MIT Sloan’s reputation and impact around the globe, worked with faculty to create first-rate new management education programs, and substantially improved current students’ educational opportunities.”

Kornbluth, who was appointed MIT president in 2023, noted that she didn’t overlap with Schmittlein for very long before he stepped down in February 2024 due to his illness. But during that year, his “wise, funny, judicious counsel left a lasting impression,” Kornbluth wrote. “I knew I could always call on him as a sounding board and thought partner, and I did.”

Professor Georgia Perakis, who was appointed the John C Head III Dean (Interim) when Schmittlein left last year, says, “Dave was not only an incredible leader for MIT Sloan, but also a mentor, teacher, and friend. Under his leadership, he took MIT Sloan to new heights. I will always be grateful for his guidance and support during my time as interim dean. I know the legacy of his contributions to MIT and MIT Sloan will always stay with us.”

Before coming to MIT Sloan, Schmittlein was a professor of marketing and deputy dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he spent 27 years. Schmittlein, who grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, viewed his appointment as the eighth dean of MIT Sloan as a homecoming in 2007.

From modest roots, and the oldest of six siblings, Schmittlein graduated from Brown University, where he earned a BA in mathematics, and Columbia University, where he was awarded both an MPhil in business and a PhD in marketing.

“Growing up in Massachusetts, MIT was always an icon for me,” Schmittlein later wrote.

“MIT picks an outsider to lead Sloan School”

As The Boston Globe headline announcing his arrival made clear, Schmittlein’s appointment as dean was unusual. He was the first to come from outside MIT since the school’s founding dean, E. Pennell Brooks, was appointed. But, in 2007, Institute leadership determined that there was a need for a fresh perspective at MIT Sloan.

“While most of Dean Schmittlein’s MIT predecessors had risen through the MIT faculty ranks, I directed the search committee to search broadly to identify a leader who could amplify the MIT Sloan School’s impact and extend its reach,” says President Emerita Susan Hockfield, who led MIT from 2004 to 2012. “David Schmittlein emerged with his unusual combination of cerebral and collaborative talents, along with his academic experience at the highest level.”

By the time Schmittlein arrived, the MIT Sloan School, which had its origins in 1914 as an undergraduate major called Engineering Administration, was at an exciting crossroads. Schmittlein’s predecessor, Richard Schmalensee, who had served as dean for nearly a decade, had secured donor funding for the construction of a new central building and established a concise mission statement that would guide the school in the coming decades. MIT’s management school was at a point of reflection and growth.

“I acknowledged head-on that I was coming from a very different school — not to change MIT, but to help it be the best version of its distinctive self,” Schmittlein wrote recently.

Schmittlein quickly identified several critical tasks. In 2007, the school had a group of 96 tenure-line faculty members, but they often left for peer schools, and the small faculty size meant that one person’s exit affected an entire department. There was no real mechanism for highlighting MIT Sloan expert faculty insights. The flagship MBA program was successful, but had challenges with selectivity and scale. And the comparatively small class size meant that the alumni community was challenged in networking, particularly in finance.

Financial crisis and MFin degree

Schmittlein collaborated with the school’s finance faculty to launch the Master of Finance degree program in 2008. Nobel laureate Robert C. Merton, who had begun his career at MIT Sloan but had decamped to Harvard University, returned to the school in 2010 to be involved in the one-year program. Today, the MFin program — known for its selectivity and rigor — offers a range of quantitative courses and features an 18-month option in addition to the original one-year curriculum.

Schmittlein’s arrival at MIT coincided with the global financial crisis of 2007–09. “The entire Institute was reeling from the meltdown,” Lo remembers. “We had to respond … and one of the most impressive things Dave did was to acknowledge the problems with the financial crisis and the financial system. But instead of de-emphasizing finance, he encouraged the finance group to do research on the crisis and to come up with a better version of finance that acknowledged these potential dangers.”

In turn, program enrollment increased, and “a number of our students ultimately went off to regulatory positions, as well as to industry, with a new knowledge of how to deal with financial crises more systematically,” Lo says.

Expansion of executive and other degree programs

In 2010, the long-standing full-time MIT Sloan Fellows MBA program attracted mid-career leaders and managers from around the world to MIT Sloan. That year, Schmittlein shepherded the launch of the 20-month part-time MIT Executive MBA program. This program opened up more opportunities for U.S.-based executives to earn a degree without having to leave their jobs for a full-time program.

Next, MIT Sloan launched the Master of Science in Management Studies program, which allowed graduates and current students from several international partner schools, including Fudan University and Tsinghua University in China, to earn a master’s degree from MIT in nine months.

Rounding out the portfolio of academic programs introduced during Schmittlein’s tenure is the MIT Sloan Master of Business Analytics program, launched in 2016. The program, which bridged MIT Sloan’s classes with MIT’s offerings in computer science, became one of the most competitive master’s degree programs at the Institute.

One distinction for MIT Sloan was “its integration with the university within which it lives,” Schmittlein said in a 2008 interview. “We are different from other schools in that regard. Most other leading schools of management wall off their teaching programs and their research programs from the rest of the university. We simply don’t do that.”

“MIT Sloan in 2025 is very much ‘the house that Dave built,’” says Professor Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan.

“This is nothing short of astonishing, given that Dave came to Sloan from another business school with a distinct mission and culture … What’s more, Sloan was hardly broken — it had several strong deans leading up Dave’s arrival, a sterling reputation, and very proud traditions,” Zuckerman Sivan says.

Zuckerman Sivan, who served as MIT Sloan’s deputy dean and then as an associate dean for teaching and learning from 2015 to 2021, says it was a tremendous privilege to work for Schmittlein, and he notes that Schmittlein often saw potential in others before they saw it in themselves, including him.

“Personally, I hadn’t given a thought to becoming a dean … when Dave popped the question to me. I’m so glad he did, though, because I learned so much from the experience, not least from being able to consult with Dave and see how he thought about different managerial challenges,” Zuckerman Sivan says.

Faculty, capital projects, and international ties

Schmittlein invested in faculty compensation, and by 2012 the MIT Sloan faculty count had grown to 112.

“Dave recognized early on that growth was essential for Sloan to retain and recruit the very best faculty,” Zuckerman Sivan says. “And every move he made, especially with regard to the degree programs, was done in close and deliberate collaboration with faculty leaders. This was absolutely key. He got senior faculty at Sloan on board with the moves that he had recognized were essential for the school, such that now the moves seem obvious and organic.”

Schmittlein also oversaw several capital projects, some of which were already underway when he joined MIT Sloan. When Building E62 opened in 2010, for the first time in history all of MIT Sloan’s faculty members were housed under one roof. The Gold-certified LEED building also included six new classrooms and an executive education suite. Following that, the landmark historic buildings E60 and E52 were renovated and refreshed.

President Emerita Hockfield says that Schmittlein advanced the school in many dimensions. One area that resonates with her was his agility in building and maintaining relationships with international partners and donors. During Schmittlein’s tenure, the MIT Sloan Latin America Office opened in Santiago, Chile, in 2013, and the Asia School of Business was launched in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2015. Schmittlein also helped to lay the groundwork for the launch of the MIT Sloan Office for Southeast Asian Nations, which opened in October 2024 in Bangkok.

The international collaborations increased the school’s visibility throughout the world. Hockfield notes that those international relationships benefited MIT Sloan students.

“For any leader today — being able to foster international relationships has to be a critical part of anyone’s toolkit,” she says. “And [for MIT Sloan students] to see that up close and personal, they can understand how they can make that happen as business leaders.”

Indeed, some MIT Sloan students were introduced firsthand to global business leaders under the guidance of both Hockfield and Schmittlein, who, for the past several years, co-taught an elective course, Corporations at the Crossroads, that featured guest speakers discussing management, strategy, and leadership.

“It was inspiring and just a lot of fun to teach that course with him … Dave possessed the wonderful combination of a brilliant intellect and a profound kindness. While he generously shared both, he more eagerly shared his kindness than his brilliance,” Hockfield says.

Ideas Made to Matter

During Schmittlein’s tenure, MIT Sloan launched a brand identity project with new messaging and the tagline “Ideas Made to Matter,” accompanied by a new website and logo. In the early 2000s, at Wharton, he had championed the online business journal Knowledge at Wharton, which went on to be a standout thought leadership publication. Under Schmittlein’s helm, MIT Sloan launched Ideas Made to Matter, a publication bringing practical insights from MIT Sloan’s faculty to global business leaders.

Hockfield recalls how Schmittlein deftly brought marketing insights to MIT Sloan. “He really understood organizational communications … and he was brilliant [at getting the MIT Sloan story out] with just the right tone,” she says.

Legacy: Principled, innovative leaders who improve the world

Lo says that Schmittlein embodied the example of a principled leader. “He was not only an amazing leader, but he was an amazing human being. He inspired all of us, and will continue to inspire all of us for years to come,” he says.

“Dave gave the Sloan School and MIT a great gift,” Lo continues. “We are now perfectly positioned to reach the next inflection point of changing the role of management education, not only at MIT but around the world.”

Hockfield says, “One of the things I deeply admired about Dave is that his personal ambitions were always secondary or tertiary to his ambitions for the school, the faculty, and the students. And that’s just a wonderful thing to behold. It brings out the best in people … I’m just so grateful that MIT had the benefit of his brilliance and curiosity for the time that we did. It’s a huge loss.”

“We are heartbroken,” MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart says. “For nearly 17 years, the MIT community relied on and benefited from Dave Schmittlein’s inspiring vision, skillful leadership, and kind and collaborative nature. He worked tirelessly to advance MIT Sloan’s mission of developing principled, innovative leaders, all while strengthening the school’s ties to the rest of campus and building partnerships across the country and globe. He will be deeply missed by his friends and colleagues at MIT.”

Schmittlein continually searched for ways to invent and innovate. He often quoted Alfred P. Sloan, the original benefactor of MIT Sloan, who said in 1964, “I hope we all recognize that the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management is not finished. It never will be finished. It is only on its way. Nothing is finished in a world that is moving so rapidly forward …”

Schmittlein is survived by his wife of nearly 33 years, Barbara Bickart, and their children, Brigitte Schmittlein and Gabriel Schmittlein, as well as his siblings, in-laws, several nieces and nephews, and a host of lifelong friends and colleagues.

MIT Sloan is developing plans for a future celebration of Schmittlein’s life, with details for the community to come. To read more about his life and contributions, read his obituary online.

The MIT women's track and field team won its first NCAA Division III National Championship in program history on Saturday, March 15, at the 2025 NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships, hosted by Nazareth College in Rochester, New York.

The Engineers, who entered the meet as the top-ranked team in the nation, scored the most points ever scored by an MIT women's team at a national indoor meet. They finished with 49 points, which earned them a first place finish in a field of 62. They were ahead of Washington University, with 45.5 points; the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, with 37 points; Loras College, with 32 points; and the State University of New York at Geneseo, with 29 points.

“This was such a fun and exciting outcome, and what our team has been working toward all year,” says Julie Heyde, MIT director of track and field and head coach of cross country and track and field. “Since last year, even, the team knew they had a possibility of being national champs. We didn't gear only toward this goal; we have been very process-driven, and that's why this team win is so special. Each and every person competed for each other, representing a total team culture.” 

Field events

On Friday, senior Alexis Boykin (Clayton, Ohio) delivered the second-best mark in NCAA Division III history in the weight throw, claiming her second consecutive NCAA National Championship in the event. Boykin's opening attempt traveled 19.71 m and would have won the event, but the defending national champion followed with three throws of over 20 m on her next four attempts, including a mark of 20.48 (67' 2 1/4") on her second attempt. With her second consecutive national championship in hand, Boykin took aim at the national record on her final attempt, encouraging the crowd to make some noise before delivering with a mark of 2.91 m.

On Saturday, Boykin's third attempt in the shot put was the mark to beat, as the defending national champion registered a mark of 15.31 meters. Senior Emily Ball (Des Moines, Iowa) set a new personal record with a mark of 14.19m (46 feet, 6-3/4 inches) to finish in sixth and earn All-American honors. Ball's second throw was the best attempt for the MIT senior, earning the Engineers three valuable points in the team standings. The win gave Boykin two titles on the weekend and her seventh individual NCAA national championship.

In the pole vault, junior Hailey Surace (Danville, Calif.) set a new collegiate personal record of 3.97 m (13' 0 1/4") to finish as the national runner-up, earning All-America honors in the pole vault and seven points in the team standings. Surace cleared each of the first six progressions on her first attempt at each height. However, national champion Yasmin Ruff of WashU was the only competitor to clear 4.02m (13' 2 1/4").

Junior Nony Otu Ugwu (Katy, Texas) finished ninth in the first flight of the triple jump and did not advance to the final. Otu Ugwu's best mark came on her second jump with a mark of 11.78m (38 feet, 7-3/4 inches).

Running events

On Friday in the 5000-meter race: Junior Rujuta Sane (Chandler, Ariz.) moved from sixth place up to fifth place in the final stretch to earn MIT four points in the event. Sane finished in 16:56.67 to earn All-America accolades. 

In the distance medley relay, senior Christina Crow (Mercer Island, Wash.), senior Marina Miller (Bel Air, Md.), and junior Kate Sanderson (West Hartford, Conn.) finished with a time 11:41.39 to pick up eight points for the Engineers. 

On Saturday, Graduate student Gillian Roeder (Delmar, New York) finished fifth in the mile event in a hard-fought race, earning All-America honors with a time of 4:51.97.

With MIT on the verge of clinching the national title, Roeder, Crow, Sane and Sanderson took to the track in the 3,000-meter event. Sane finished 20th in 10:02.86, with Roeder taking 16th in 9:56.02. Crow and Sanderson held in the middle of the pack for most of the race before Sanderson made a late move, taking over sixth place with just a few laps remaining. Sanderson would hold the position to earn three points and clinch the national championship. Crow took 11th in 9:44.99.

Other numbers of note

Along with the second best mark in Division III history, Boykin set a new personal record, MIT program record, and a facility record at the Golisano Training Center in the weight throw. Otu Ugwu was making her second appearance at indoor nationals and her third overall NCAA appearance. She was 14th in the triple jump at both the indoor and outdoor national championship last year. Roeder was running in the final in the mile for the first time since 2023 indoor nationals, where she also finished fifth. Sanderson qualified for indoor nationals in the 5,000 meters in both 2023 and 2024, but Saturday was her first All-American after finishing 16th in 2024 and 20th in 2023.

MIT will head outside in two weeks, opening the outdoor track and field season Thursday-Saturday, March 27-29, at the Raleigh Relays, hosted by North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

A version of this article first appeared on the MIT Athletics website. 

Olivier Blanchard PhD ’77, the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics Emeritus, has been named a winner of the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management for “profoundly influencing modern macroeconomic analysis by establishing rigorous foundations for the study of business cycle fluctuations,” as described in the BBVA Foundation’s award citation.

Blanchard, who is also senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, shares the award with MIT alumni Jordi Galí PhD ’89 of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 of Columbia University. The three economists were instrumental in developing the New Keynesian model, now widely taught and applied in central banking policy around the world.

The framework builds on classical Keynesian models in part by introducing the role of consumer expectations to macroeconomic policy analysis — in short, using the public’s perception of the future to help inform current policy. The model’s unconventional tools, including greater transparency around monetary policy, were tested by policymakers following the burst of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s and applied by the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Blanchard played a foundational role in the development of New Keynesian economics, beginning with a 1987 paper coauthored with Princeton University’s Nobuhiro Kiyotaki (also a Frontiers of Knowledge laureate) on the effects of monetary policy under monopolistic competition. A decade later, Woodford described optimal monetary policy within the New Keynesian framework, laying key theoretical groundwork for the model, and Galí extended and synthesized the framework, ultimately resulting in a blueprint for designing optimal monetary policy.

Blanchard, who joined the MIT faculty in 1983 and served as head of the Department of Economics from 1998 to 2003, advised and taught decades of macroeconomics students at MIT, including Galí. As chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015, Blanchard used his framework to help design policy during the Global Financial Crisis and the Euro debt crisis. Blanchard’s leadership as a scholar, student advisor, teacher, and policy advisor is at the heart of the trio’s prize-winning research.

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, current head of the economics department, praises Blanchard’s multifaceted contributions.

“Olivier is not only an amazing macroeconomist whose work continues to have profound influence in this time of global macroeconomic uncertainty,” says Gruber, “but also a pillar of the department. His leadership in research and enormous dedication to our program were central in carrying forward the legacy of the department’s early greats and making MIT Economics what it is today.”

Blanchard, Galí, and Woodford share the award’s 400,000-euro prize and will be formally honored at a ceremony in Bilbao, Spain, in June.

The BBVA Foundation works to support scientific research and cultural creation, disseminate knowledge and culture, and recognize talent and innovation, focusing on five strategic areas: environment, biomedicine and health, economy and society, basic sciences and technology, and culture. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize categories, recognize world-class research and cultural creation and aim to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a global public good.

Since 2009, the BBVA has given awards to more than a dozen MIT faculty members, including MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, as well as to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), led by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Ben Olken.

A decade after scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT first began testing whether sensory stimulation of the brain’s 40Hz “gamma” frequency rhythms could treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice, a growing evidence base supporting the idea that it can improve brain health — in humans as well as animals — has emerged from the work of labs all over the world. A new open-access review article in PLOS Biology describes the state of research so far and presents some of the fundamental and clinical questions at the forefront of the noninvasive gamma stimulation now.

“As we’ve made all our observations, many other people in the field have published results that are very consistent,” says Li-Huei Tsai, Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, director of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, and senior author of the new review, with postdoc Jung Park. “People have used many different ways to induce gamma including sensory stimulation, transcranial alternating current stimulation, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, but the key is delivering stimulation at 40 hertz. They all see beneficial effects.”

A decade of discovery at MIT

Starting with a paper in Nature in 2016, a collaboration led by Tsai has produced a series of studies showing that 40Hz stimulation via light, sound, the two combined, or tactile vibration reduces hallmarks of Alzheimer’s pathology such as amyloid and tau proteins, prevents neuron death, decreases synapse loss, and sustains memory and cognition in various Alzheimer’s mouse models. The collaboration’s investigations of the underlying mechanisms that produce these benefits have so far identified specific cellular and molecular responses in many brain cell types including neurons, microglia, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and the brain’s blood vessels. Last year, for instance, the lab reported in Nature that 40Hz audio and visual stimulation induced interneurons in mice to increase release of the peptide VIP, prompting increased clearance of amyloid from brain tissue via the brain’s glymphatic “plumbing” system.

Meanwhile, at MIT and at the MIT spinoff company Cognito Therapeutics, phase II clinical studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s exposed to 40Hz light and sound experienced a significant slowing of brain atrophy and improvements on some cognitive measures, compared to untreated controls. Cognito, which has also measured significant preservation of the brain’s “white matter” in volunteers, has been conducting a pivotal, nationwide phase III clinical trial of sensory gamma stimulation for more than a year.

“Neuroscientists often lament that it is a great time to have AD [Alzheimer’s disease] if you are a mouse,” Park and Tsai wrote in the review. “Our ultimate goal, therefore, is to translate GENUS discoveries into a safe, accessible, and noninvasive therapy for AD patients.” The MIT team often refers to 40Hz stimulation as “GENUS” for Gamma Entrainment Using Sensory Stimulation.

A growing field

As Tsai’s collaboration, which includes MIT colleagues Edward Boyden and Emery N. Brown, has published its results, many other labs have produced studies adding to the evidence that various methods of noninvasive gamma sensory stimulation can combat Alzheimer’s pathology. Among many examples cited in the new review, in 2024 a research team in China independently corroborated that 40Hz sensory stimulation increases glymphatic fluid flows in mice. In another example, a Harvard Medical School-based team in 2022 showed that 40Hz gamma stimulation using Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation significantly reduced the burden of tau in three out of four human volunteers. And in another study involving more than 100 people, researchers in Scotland in 2023 used audio and visual gamma stimulation (at 37.5Hz) to improve memory recall.

Open questions

Amid the growing number of publications describing preclinical studies with mice and clinical trials with people, open questions remain, Tsai and Park acknowledge. The MIT team and others are still exploring the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie GENUS’s effects. Tsai says her lab is looking at other neuropeptide and neuromodulatory systems to better understand the cascade of events linking sensory stimulation to the observed cellular responses. Meanwhile, the nature of how some cells, such as microglia, respond to gamma stimulation and how that affects pathology remains unclear, Tsai adds.

Even with a national phase III clinical trial underway, it is still important to investigate these fundamental mechanisms, Tsai says, because new insights into how noninvasive gamma stimulation affects the brain could improve and expand its therapeutic potential.

“The more we understand the mechanisms, the more we will have good ideas about how to further optimize the treatment,” Tsai says. “And the more we understand its action and the circuits it affects, the more we will know beyond Alzheimer’s disease what other neurological disorders will benefit from this.”

Indeed, the review points to studies at MIT and other institutions providing at least some evidence that GENUS might be able to help with Parkinson’s disease, stroke, anxiety, epilepsy, and the cognitive side effects of chemotherapy and conditions that reduce myelin, such as multiple sclerosis. Tsai’s lab has been studying whether it can help with Down syndrome as well.

The open questions may help define the next decade of GENUS research.

More than 60,000 tons of plastic makes the journey down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean every year. And that doesn’t include what finds its way to the river’s banks, or the microplastics ingested by the region’s abundant and diverse wildlife.

It’s easy to demonize plastic, but it has been crucial in developing the society we live in today. Creating materials that have the benefits of plastics while reducing the harms of traditional production methods is a goal of chemical engineering and materials science labs the world over, including that of Bradley Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Olsen, a Fulbright Amazonia scholar and the faculty lead of MIT-Brazil, works with communities to develop alternative plastics solutions that can be derived from resources within their own environments.

“The word that we use for this is co-design,” says Olsen. “The idea is, instead of engineers just designing something independently, they engage and jointly design the solution with the stakeholders.”

In this case, the stakeholders were small businesses around Manaus in the Brazilian state of Amazonas curious about the feasibility of bioplastics and other alternative packaging.

“Plastics are inherent to modern life and actually perform key functions and have a really beautiful chemistry that we want to be able to continue to leverage, but we want to do it in a way that is more earth-compatible,” says Desirée Plata, MIT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

That’s why Plata joined Olsen in creating the course 1.096/10.496 (Design of Sustainable Polymer Systems) in 2021. Now, as a Global Classroom offering under the umbrella of MISTI since 2023, the class brings MIT students to Manaus during the three weeks of Independent Activities Period (IAP).

“In my work running the Global Teaching Labs in Brazil since 2016, MIT students collaborate closely with Brazilian undergraduates,” says Rosabelli Coelho-Keyssar, managing director of MIT-Brazil and MIT-Amazonia, who also runs MIT’s Global Teaching Labs program in Brazil. “This peer-learning model was incorporated into the Global Classroom in Manaus, ensuring that MIT and Brazilian students worked together throughout the course.”

The class leadership worked with climate scientist and MIT alumnus Carlos Nobre PhD ’83, who facilitated introductions to faculty at the Universidade Estadual de Amazonas (UAE), the state university of Amazonas. The group then scouted businesses in the Amazonas region who would be interested in partnering with the students.

“In the first year, it was Comunidade Julião, a community of people living on the edge of the Tarumã Mirim River west of Manaus,” says Olsen. “This year, we worked with Comunidade Para Maravilha, a community living in the dry land forest east of Manaus.”

A tailored solution

Plastic, by definition, is made up of many small carbon-based molecules, called monomers, linked by strong bonds into larger molecules called polymers. Linking different monomers and polymers in different ways creates different plastics — from trash bags to a swimming pool float to the dashboard of a car. Plastics are traditionally made from petroleum byproducts that are easy to link together, stable, and plentiful.

But there are ways to reduce the use of petroleum-based plastics. Packaging can be made from materials found within the local ecosystem, as was the focus of the 2024 class. Or carbon-based monomers can be extracted from high-starch plant matter through a number of techniques, the goal of the 2025 cohort. But plants that grow well in one location might not in another. And bioplastic production facilities can be tricky to install if the necessary resources aren’t immediately available.

“We can design a whole bunch of new sustainable chemical processes, use brand new top-of-the-line catalysts, but if you can’t actually implement them sustainably inside an environment, it falls short on a lot of the overall goals,” says Brian Carrick, a PhD candidate in the Olsen lab and a teaching assistant for the 2025 course offering.

So, identifying local candidates and tailoring the process is key. The 2025 MIT cohort collaborated with students from throughout the Amazonas state to explore the local flora, study its starch content in the lab, and develop a new plastic-making process — all within the three weeks of IAP.

“It’s easy when you have projects like this to get really locked into the MIT vacuum of just doing what sounds really cool, which isn’t always effective or constructive for people actually living in that environment,” says Claire Underwood, a junior chemical-biological engineering major who took the class. “That’s what really drew me into the project, being able to work with people in Brazil.”

The 31 students visited a protected area of the Amazon rainforest on Day One. They also had chances throughout IAP to visit the Amazon River, where the potential impact of their work became clear as they saw plastic waste collecting on its banks.

“That was a really cool aspect to the class, for sure, being able to actually see what we were working towards protecting and what the goal was,” says Underwood.

They interviewed stakeholders, such as farmers who could provide the feedstock and plastics manufacturers who could incorporate new techniques. Then, they got into the classroom, where massive intellectual ground was covered in a crash course on the sustainable design process, the nitty gritty of plastic production, and the Brazilian cultural context on how building such an industry would affect the community. For the final project, they separated into teams to craft preliminary designs of process and plant using a simplified model of these systems.

Connecting across boundaries

Working in another country brought to the fore how interlinked policy, culture, and technical solutions are.

“I know nothing about economics, and especially not Brazilian economics and politics,” says Underwood. But one of the Brazilian students in her group was a management and finance major. “He was super helpful when we were trying to source things and account for inflation and things like that — knowing what was feasible, and not just academically feasible.”

Before they parted at the end of IAP, each team presented their proposals to a panel of company representatives and Brazilian MIT alumni who chose first-, second-, and third-place winners. While more research is needed before comfortably implementing the ideas, the experience seemed to generate legitimate interest in creating a local bioplastics production facility.

Understanding sustainable design concepts and how to do interdisciplinary work is an important skill to learn. Even if these students don’t wind up working on bioplastics in the heart of the Amazon, being able to work with people of different perspectives — be it a different discipline or a different culture — is valuable in virtually every field.

“The exchange of knowledge across different fields and cultures is essential for developing innovative and sustainable solutions to global challenges such as climate change, waste management, and the development of eco-friendly materials,” says Taisa Sampaio, a PhD candidate in materials chemistry at UEA and a co-instructor for the course. “Programs like this are crucial in preparing professionals who are more aware and better equipped to tackle future challenges.”

Right now, Olsen and Plata are focused on harnessing the deep well of connections and resources they have around Manaus, but they hope to develop that kind of network elsewhere to expand this sustainable design exploration to other regions of the world.

“A lot of sustainability solutions are hyperlocal,” says Plata. “Understanding that not all locales are exactly the same is really powerful and important when we’re thinking about sustainability challenges. And it’s probably where we've gone wrong with the one-size-fits-all or silver-bullet solution — seeking that we’ve been doing for the past many decades.”

Collaborations for the 2026 trip are still in development but, as Olsen says, “we hope this is an experience we can continue to offer long into the future, based on how positive it has been for our students and our Brazilian partners.”

Three outstanding educators have been named MacVicar Faculty Fellows: associate professor in comparative media studies/writing Paloma Duong, associate professor of economics Frank Schilbach, and associate professor of urban studies and planning Justin Steil.

For more than 30 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program has recognized exemplary and sustained contributions to undergraduate education at MIT. The program is named in honor of Margaret MacVicar, MIT’s first dean for undergraduate education and founder of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Fellows are chosen through a highly competitive, annual nomination process. The MIT Registrar’s Office coordinates and administers the award on behalf of the Office of the Vice Chancellor; nominations are reviewed by an advisory committee, and final selections are made by the provost.

Paloma Duong: Equipping students with a holistic, global worldview

Paloma Duong is the Ford International Career Development Associate Professor of Latin American and Media Studies. Her work has helped to reinvigorate Latin American subject offerings, increase the number of Spanish minors, and build community at the Institute.

Duong brings an interdisciplinary perspective to teaching Latin American culture in dialogue with media theory and political philosophy in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) program. Her approach is built on a foundation of respect for each student’s unique academic journey and underscores the importance of caring for the whole student, honoring where they can go as intellectuals, and connecting them to a world bigger than themselves.

Senior Alex Wardle says that Professor Duong “broadened my worldview and made me more receptive to new concepts and ideas … her class has deepened my critical thinking skills in a way that very few other classes at MIT have even attempted to.”

Duong’s Spanish language classes and seminars incorporate a wide range of practices — including cultural analyses, artifacts, guest speakers, and hands-on multimedia projects — to help students engage with the material, think critically, and challenge preconceived notions while learning about Latin American history. CMS/W head and professor of science writing Seth Mnookin notes, “students become conversant with region-specific vocabularies, worldviews, and challenges.” This approach makes students feel “deeply respected” and treats them as “learning partners — interlocutors in their own right,” observes Bruno Perreau, the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies and Language.

Outside the classroom, Duong takes the time to mentor and get to know students by supporting and attending programs connected to MIT Cubanos, Cena a las Seis, and Global Health Alliance. She also serves as an advisor for comparative media studies and Spanish majors, is the undergraduate officer for CMS/W, and is a member of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Education Advisory Committee and the Committee on Curricula.

“Subject areas like Spanish and Latin American Studies play an important role at MIT,” writes T.L. Taylor, professor in comparative media studies/writing and MacVicar Faculty Fellow. “Students find a sense of community and support in these spaces, something that should be at the heart of our attention more than ever these days. We are lucky to have such a dynamic and engaged educator like Professor Duong.”

On receiving this award, Duong says, “I’m positively elated! I’m very grateful to my students and colleagues for the nomination and am honored to become part of such a remarkable group of fellow teachers and mentors. Teaching undergraduates at MIT is always a beautiful challenge and an endless source of learning; I feel super lucky to be in this position.”

Frank Schilbach: Bringing energy and excitement to the curriculum

Frank Schilbach is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. His connection and dedication to undergraduates, combined with his efforts in communicating the importance of economics as a field of study, were key components in the revitalization of Course 14.

When Schilbach arrived at MIT in 2015, there were only three sophomore economics majors. “A less committed teacher would have probably just taken it as a given and got on with their research,” writes professor of economics Abhijit Banerjee. “Frank, instead, took it as a challenge … his patient efforts in convincing students that they need to make economics a part of their general education was a key reason why innovations [to broaden the major] succeeded. The department now has more than 40 sophomores.”

In addition to bolstering enrollment, Schilbach had a hand in curricular improvements. Among them, he created a “next step” for students completing class 14.01 (Principles of Microeconomics) with a revised class 14.13 (Psychology and Economics) that goes beyond classic topics in behavioral economics to explore links with poverty, mental health, happiness, and identity.

Even more significant is the thoughtful and inclusive approach to teaching that Schilbach brings. “He is considerate and careful, listening to everyone, explaining concepts while making students understand that we care about them … it is just a joy to see how the students revel in the activities and the learning,” writes Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. Erin Grela ’20 notes, “Professor Schilbach goes above and beyond to solicit student feedback so that he can make real-time changes to ensure that his classes are serving his students as best they can.”

His impacts extend beyond MIT as well. Professor of economics David Atkin writes: “Many of these students are inspired by their work with Frank to continue their studies at the graduate level, with an incredible 29 of his students going on to PhD studies at many of the best programs in the country. For someone who has only recently been promoted to a tenured professor, this is a remarkable record of advising.”

“I am delighted to be selected as a MacVicar Fellow,” says Schilbach. “I am thrilled that students find my courses valuable, and it brings me great joy to think that my teaching may help some students improve their well-being and inspire them to use their incredible talents to better the lives of others.”

Justin Steil: Experiential learning meets public service

“I am honored to join the MacVicar Faculty Fellows,” writes associate professor of law and urban planning Justin Steil. “I am deeply grateful to have the chance to teach and learn with such hard-working and creative students who are enthusiastic about collaborating to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems, in the classroom and beyond.”

Professor Steil uses his background as a lawyer, a sociologist, and an urban planner to combine experiential learning with opportunities for public service. In class 11.469 (Urban Sociology in Theory and Practice), he connects students with incarcerated individuals to examine inequality at one of the state’s largest prisons, MCI Norfolk. In another undergraduate seminar, students meet with leaders of local groups like GreenRoots in Chelsea, Massachusetts; Alternatives for Community and Environment in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury to work on urban environmental hazards. Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning and MacVicar Faculty Fellow Lawrence Vale calls Steil’s classes “life-altering.”

In addition to teaching, Steil is also a paramedic and has volunteered as an EMT for MIT Emergency Medical Service (EMS), where he continues to transform routine activities into teachable moments. “There are numerous opportunities at MIT to receive mentorship and perform research. Justin went beyond that. My conversations with Justin have inspired me to go to graduate school to research medical devices in the EMS context,” says Abigail Schipper ’24.

“Justin is truly devoted to the complete education of our undergraduate students in ways that meaningfully serve the broader MIT community as well as the residents of Cambridge and Boston,” says Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Biological Engineering Katharina Ribbeck. Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism and director of the Urban Risk Lab, concurs: “through his teaching, advising, mentoring, and connections with community-based organizations and public agencies, Justin has knit together diverse threads into a coherent undergraduate experience.”

Student testimonials also highlight Steil’s ability to make each student feel special by delivering undivided attention and individualized mentorship. A former student writes: “I was so grateful to have met an instructor who believed in his students so earnestly … despite being one of the busiest people I’ve ever known, [he] … unerringly made the students he works with feel certain that he always has time for them.”

Since joining MIT in 2015, Steil has received a Committed to Caring award in 2018; the Harold E. Edgerton Award for exceptional contributions in research, teaching, and service in 2021; and a First Year Advising Award from the Office of the First Year in 2022.

Learn more about the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program on the Registrar’s Office website. 

Professors Emery Brown and Hamsa Balakrishnan work in vastly different fields, but are united by their deep commitment to mentoring students. While each has contributed to major advancements in their respective areas — statistical neuroscience for Brown, and large-scale transportation systems for Balakrishnan — their students might argue that their greatest impact comes from the guidance, empathy, and personal support they provide. 

Emery Brown: Holistic mentorship

Brown is the Edward Hood Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT and a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Brown’s experimental research has made important contributions toward understanding the neuroscience of how anesthetics act in the brain to create the states of general anesthesia. 

One of the biggest challenges in academic environments is knowing how to chart a course. Brown takes the time to connect with students individually, helping them identify meaningful pathways that they may not have considered for themselves. In addition to mentoring his graduate students and postdocs, Brown also hosts clinicians and faculty from around the world. Their presence in the lab exposes students to a number of career opportunities and connections outside of MIT’s academic environment.

Brown also continues to support former students beyond their time in his lab, offering guidance on personal and professional development even after they have moved on to other roles. “Knowing that I have Emery at my back as someone I can always turn to … is such a source of confidence and strength as I go forward into my own career,” one nominator wrote. 

When Brown faced a major career decision recently, he turned to his students to ask how his choice might affect them. He met with students individually to understand the personal impact that each might experience. Brown was adamant in ensuring that his professional advancement would not jeopardize his students, and invested a great deal of thought and effort in ensuring a positive outcome for them. 

Brown is deeply committed to the health and well-being of his students, with many nominators sharing examples of his constant support through challenging personal circumstances. When one student reached out to Brown, overwhelmed by research, recent personal loss, and career uncertainty, Brown created a safe space for vulnerable conversations. 

“He listened, supported me, and encouraged me to reflect on my aspirations for the next five years, assuring me that I should pursue them regardless of any obstacles,” the nominator shared. “Following our conversation, I felt more grounded and regained momentum in my research project.”

In summation, his student felt that Brown’s advice was “simple, yet enlightening, and exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.”

Hamsa Balakrishnan: Unequivocal advocacy

Balakrishnan is the William E. Leonhard Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She leads the Dynamics, Infrastructure Networks, and Mobility (DINaMo) Research Group. Her current research interests are in the design, analysis, and implementation of control and optimization algorithms for large-scale cyber-physical infrastructures, with an emphasis on air transportation systems. 

Her nominators commended Balakrishnan for her efforts to support and advocate for all of her students. In particular, she connects her students to academic mentors within the community, which contributes to their sense of acceptance within the field. 

Balakrishnan’s mindfulness in respecting personal expression and her proactive approach to making everyone feel welcome have made a lasting impact on her students. “Hamsa’s efforts have encouraged me to bring my full self to the workplace,” one student wrote; “I will be forever grateful for her mentorship and kindness as an advisor.”

One student shared their experience of moving from a difficult advising situation to working with Balakrishnan, describing how her mentorship was crucial in the nominator’s successful return to research: “Hamsa’s mentorship has been vital to building up my confidence as a researcher, as she [often] provides helpful guidance and positive affirmation.”

Balakrishnan frequently gives her students freedom to independently explore and develop their research interests. When students wanted to delve into new areas like space research — far removed from her expertise in air traffic management and uncrewed aerial vehicles — Balakrishnan embraced the challenge and learned about these topics in order to provide better guidance. 

One student described how Balakrishnan consistently encouraged the lab to work on topics that interested them. This led the student to develop a novel research topic and publish a first author paper within months of joining the lab. 

Balakrishnan is deeply committed to promoting a healthy work-life balance for her students. She ensures that mentees do not feel compelled to overwork by encouraging them to take time off. Even if students do not have significant updates, Balakrishnan encourages weekly meetings to foster an open line of communication. She helps them set attainable goals, especially when it comes to tasks like paper reading and writing, and never pressures them to work late hours in order to meet paper or conference deadlines. 

Look around, and you’ll see it everywhere: the way trees form branches, the way cities divide into neighborhoods, the way the brain organizes into regions. Nature loves modularity — a limited number of self-contained units that combine in different ways to perform many functions. But how does this organization arise? Does it follow a detailed genetic blueprint, or can these structures emerge on their own?

A new study from MIT Professor Ila Fiete suggests a surprising answer.

In findings published Feb. 18 in Nature, Fiete, an associate investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center at MIT, reports that a mathematical model called peak selection can explain how modules emerge without strict genetic instructions. Her team’s findings, which apply to brain systems and ecosystems, help explain how modularity occurs across nature, no matter the scale.

Joining two big ideas

“Scientists have debated how modular structures form. One hypothesis suggests that various genes are turned on at different locations to begin or end a structure. This explains how insect embryos develop body segments, with genes turning on or off at specific concentrations of a smooth chemical gradient in the insect egg,” says Fiete, who is the senior author of the paper. Mikail Khona PhD '25, a former graduate student and K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center graduate fellow, and postdoc Sarthak Chandra also led the study.

Another idea, inspired by mathematician Alan Turing, suggests that a structure could emerge from competition — small-scale interactions can create repeating patterns, like the spots on a cheetah or the ripples in sand dunes.

Both ideas work well in some cases, but fail in others. The new research suggests that nature need not pick one approach over the other. The authors propose a simple mathematical principle called peak selection, showing that when a smooth gradient is paired with local interactions that are competitive, modular structures emerge naturally. “In this way, biological systems can organize themselves into sharp modules without detailed top-down instruction,” says Chandra.

Modular systems in the brain

The researchers tested their idea on grid cells, which play a critical role in spatial navigation as well as the storage of episodic memories. Grid cells fire in a repeating triangular pattern as animals move through space, but they don’t all work at the same scale — they are organized into distinct modules, each responsible for mapping space at slightly different resolutions.

No one knows how these modules form, but Fiete’s model shows that gradual variations in cellular properties along one dimension in the brain, combined with local neural interactions, could explain the entire structure. The grid cells naturally sort themselves into distinct groups with clear boundaries, without external maps or genetic programs telling them where to go. “Our work explains how grid cell modules could emerge. The explanation tips the balance toward the possibility of self-organization. It predicts that there might be no gene or intrinsic cell property that jumps when the grid cell scale jumps to another module,” notes Khona.

Modular systems in nature

The same principle applies beyond neuroscience. Imagine a landscape where temperatures and rainfall vary gradually over a space. You might expect species to be spread, and also to vary, smoothly over this region. But in reality, ecosystems often form species clusters with sharp boundaries — distinct ecological “neighborhoods” that don’t overlap.

Fiete’s study suggests why: local competition, cooperation, and predation between species interact with the global environmental gradients to create natural separations, even when the underlying conditions change gradually. This phenomenon can be explained using peak selection — and suggests that the same principle that shapes brain circuits could also be at play in forests and oceans.

A self-organizing world

One of the researchers’ most striking findings is that modularity in these systems is remarkably robust. Change the size of the system, and the number of modules stays the same — they just scale up or down. That means a mouse brain and a human brain could use the same fundamental rules to form their navigation circuits, just at different sizes.

The model also makes testable predictions. If it’s correct, grid cell modules should follow simple spacing ratios. In ecosystems, species distributions should form distinct clusters even without sharp environmental shifts.

Fiete notes that their work adds another conceptual framework to biology. “Peak selection can inform future experiments, not only in grid cell research but across developmental biology.”

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, in collaboration with Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) and MIT, have developed a groundbreaking near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent nanosensor capable of simultaneously detecting and differentiating between iron forms — Fe(II) and Fe(III) — in living plants. 

Iron is crucial for plant health, supporting photosynthesis, respiration, and enzyme function. It primarily exists in two forms: Fe(II), which is readily available for plants to absorb and use, and Fe(III), which must first be converted into Fe(II) before plants can utilize it effectively. Traditional methods only measure total iron, missing the distinction between these forms — a key factor in plant nutrition. Distinguishing between Fe(II) and Fe(III) provides insights into iron uptake efficiency, helps diagnose deficiencies or toxicities, and enables precise fertilization strategies in agriculture, reducing waste and environmental impact while improving crop productivity.

The first-of-its-kind nanosensor developed by SMART researchers enables real-time, nondestructive monitoring of iron uptake, transport, and changes between its different forms — providing precise and detailed observations of iron dynamics. Its high spatial resolution allows precise localization of iron in plant tissues or subcellular compartments, enabling the measurement of even minute changes in iron levels within plants — changes that can inform how a plant handles stress and uses nutrients. 

Traditional detection methods are destructive, or limited to a single form of iron. This new technology enables the diagnosis of deficiencies and optimization of fertilization strategies. By identifying insufficient or excessive iron intake, adjustments can be made to enhance plant health, reduce waste, and support more sustainable agriculture. While the nanosensor was tested on spinach and bok choy, it is species-agnostic, allowing it to be applied across a diverse range of plant species without genetic modification. This capability enhances our understanding of iron dynamics in various ecological settings, providing comprehensive insights into plant health and nutrient management. As a result, it serves as a valuable tool for both fundamental plant research and agricultural applications, supporting precision nutrient management, reducing fertilizer waste, and improving crop health.

“Iron is essential for plant growth and development, but monitoring its levels in plants has been a challenge. This breakthrough sensor is the first of its kind to detect both Fe(II) and Fe(III) in living plants with real-time, high-resolution imaging. With this technology, we can ensure plants receive the right amount of iron, improving crop health and agricultural sustainability,” says Duc Thinh Khong, DiSTAP research scientist and co-lead author of the paper.

“In enabling non-destructive real-time tracking of iron speciation in plants, this sensor opens new avenues for understanding plant iron metabolism and the implications of different iron variations for plants. Such knowledge will help guide the development of tailored management approaches to improve crop yield and more cost-effective soil fertilization strategies,” says Grace Tan, TLL research scientist and co-lead author of the paper.

The research, recently published in Nano Letters and titled, “Nanosensor for Fe(II) and Fe(III) Allowing Spatiotemporal Sensing in Planta,” builds upon SMART DiSTAP’s established expertise in plant nanobionics, leveraging the Corona Phase Molecular Recognition (CoPhMoRe) platform pioneered by the Strano Lab at SMART DiSTAP and MIT. The new nanosensor features single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) wrapped in a negatively charged fluorescent polymer, forming a helical corona phase structure that interacts differently with Fe(II) and Fe(III). Upon introduction into plant tissues and interaction with iron, the sensor emits distinct NIR fluorescence signals based on the iron type, enabling real-time tracking of iron movement and chemical changes.

The CoPhMoRe technique was used to develop highly selective fluorescent responses, allowing precise detection of iron oxidation states. The NIR fluorescence of SWNTs offers superior sensitivity, selectivity, and tissue transparency while minimizing interference, making it more effective than conventional fluorescent sensors. This capability allows researchers to track iron movement and chemical changes in real time using NIR imaging. 

“This sensor provides a powerful tool to study plant metabolism, nutrient transport, and stress responses. It supports optimized fertilizer use, reduces costs and environmental impact, and contributes to more nutritious crops, better food security, and sustainable farming practices,” says Professor Daisuke Urano, TLL senior principal investigator, DiSTAP principal investigator, National University of Singapore adjunct assistant professor, and co-corresponding author of the paper.

“This set of sensors gives us access to an important type of signalling in plants, and a critical nutrient necessary for plants to make chlorophyll. This new tool will not just help farmers to detect nutrient deficiency, but also give access to certain messages within the plant. It expands our ability to understand the plant response to its growth environment,” says Professor Michael Strano, DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator, Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and co-corresponding author of the paper.

Beyond agriculture, this nanosensor holds promise for environmental monitoring, food safety, and health sciences, particularly in studying iron metabolism, iron deficiency, and iron-related diseases in humans and animals. Future research will focus on leveraging this nanosensor to advance fundamental plant studies on iron homeostasis, nutrient signaling, and redox dynamics. Efforts are also underway to integrate the nanosensor into automated nutrient management systems for hydroponic and soil-based farming and expand its functionality to detect other essential micronutrients. These advancements aim to enhance sustainability, precision, and efficiency in agriculture.

The research is carried out by SMART, and supported by the National Research Foundation under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise program.

For over 30 years, science photographer Felice Frankel has helped MIT professors, researchers, and students communicate their work visually. Throughout that time, she has seen the development of various tools to support the creation of compelling images: some helpful, and some antithetical to the effort of producing a trustworthy and complete representation of the research. In a recent opinion piece published in Nature magazine, Frankel discusses the burgeoning use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in images and the challenges and implications it has for communicating research. On a more personal note, she questions whether there will still be a place for a science photographer in the research community.

Q: You’ve mentioned that as soon as a photo is taken, the image can be considered “manipulated.” There are ways you’ve manipulated your own images to create a visual that more successfully communicates the desired message. Where is the line between acceptable and unacceptable manipulation?

A: In the broadest sense, the decisions made on how to frame and structure the content of an image, along with which tools used to create the image, are already a manipulation of reality. We need to remember the image is merely a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself. Decisions have to be made when creating the image. The critical issue is not to manipulate the data, and in the case of most images, the data is the structure. For example, for an image I made some time ago, I digitally deleted the petri dish in which a yeast colony was growing, to bring attention to the stunning morphology of the colony. The data in the image is the morphology of the colony. I did not manipulate that data. However, I always indicate in the text if I have done something to an image. I discuss the idea of image enhancement in my handbook, “The Visual Elements, Photography.”

Q: What can researchers do to make sure their research is communicated correctly and ethically?

A: With the advent of AI, I see three main issues concerning visual representation: the difference between illustration and documentation, the ethics around digital manipulation, and a continuing need for researchers to be trained in visual communication. For years, I have been trying to develop a visual literacy program for the present and upcoming classes of science and engineering researchers. MIT has a communication requirement which mostly addresses writing, but what about the visual, which is no longer tangential to a journal submission? I will bet that most readers of scientific articles go right to the figures, after they read the abstract. 

We need to require students to learn how to critically look at a published graph or image and decide if there is something weird going on with it. We need to discuss the ethics of “nudging” an image to look a certain predetermined way. I describe in the article an incident when a student altered one of my images (without asking me) to match what the student wanted to visually communicate. I didn’t permit it, of course, and was disappointed that the ethics of such an alteration were not considered. We need to develop, at the very least, conversations on campus and, even better, create a visual literacy requirement along with the writing requirement.

Q: Generative AI is not going away. What do you see as the future for communicating science visually?

A: For the Nature article, I decided that a powerful way to question the use of AI in generating images was by example. I used one of the diffusion models to create an image using the following prompt:

“Create a photo of Moungi Bawendi’s nano crystals in vials against a black background, fluorescing at different wavelengths, depending on their size, when excited with UV light.”

The results of my AI experimentation were often cartoon-like images that could hardly pass as reality — let alone documentation — but there will be a time when they will be. In conversations with colleagues in research and computer-science communities, all agree that we should have clear standards on what is and is not allowed. And most importantly, a GenAI visual should never be allowed as documentation.

But AI-generated visuals will, in fact, be useful for illustration purposes. If an AI-generated visual is to be submitted to a journal (or, for that matter, be shown in a presentation), I believe the researcher MUST

• clearly label if an image was created by an AI model;
• indicate what model was used;
• include what prompt was used; and
• include the image, if there is one, that was used to help the prompt.

Senior Kevin Guo, a computer science major, and junior Erin Hovendon, studying mechanical engineering, are on widely divergent paths at MIT. But their lives do intersect in one dimension: They share an understanding that their political science and public policy minors provide crucial perspectives on their research and future careers.

For Guo, the connection between computer science and policy emerged through his work at MIT's Election Data and Science Lab. “When I started, I was just looking for a place to learn how to code and do data science,” he reflects. “But what I found was this fascinating intersection where technical skills could directly shape democratic processes.”

Hovendon is focused on sustainable methods for addressing climate change. She is currently participating in a multisemester research project at MIT's Environmental Dynamics Lab (ENDLab) developing monitoring technology for marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR).

She believes the success of her research today and in the future depends on understanding its impact on society. Her academic track in policy provides that grounding. “When you’re developing a new technology, you need to focus as well on how it will be applied,” she says. “This means learning about the policies required to scale it up, and about the best ways to convey the value of what you’re working on to the public.”

Bridging STEM and policy

For both Hovendon and Guo, interdisciplinary study is proving to be a valuable platform for tangibly addressing real-world challenges.

Guo came to MIT from Andover, Massachusetts, the son of parents who specialize in semiconductors and computer science. While math and computer science were a natural track for him, Guo was also keenly interested in geopolitics. He enrolled in class 17.40 (American Foreign Policy). “It was my first engagement with MIT political science and I liked it a lot, because it dealt with historical episodes I wanted to learn more about, like World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam,” says Guo.

He followed up with a class on American Military History and on the Rise of Asia, where he found himself enrolled with graduate students and active duty U.S. military officers. “I liked attending a course with people who had unusual insights,” Guo remarks. “I also liked that these humanities classes were small seminars, and focused a lot on individual students.”

From coding to elections

It was in class 17.835 (Machine Learning and Data Science in Politics) that Guo first realized he could directly connect his computer science and math expertise to the humanities. “They gave us big political science datasets to analyze, which was a pretty cool application of the skills I learned in my major,” he says.

Guo springboarded from this class to a three-year, undergraduate research project in the Election Data and Science Lab. “The hardest part is data collection, which I worked on for an election audit project that looked at whether there were significant differences between original vote counts and audit counts in all the states, at the precinct level,” says Guo. “We had to scrape data, raw PDFs, and create a unified dataset, standardized to our format, that we could publish.”

The data analysis skills he acquired in the lab have come in handy in the professional sphere in which he has begun training: investment finance.

“The workflow is very similar: clean the data to see what you want, analyze it to see if I can find an edge, and then write some code to implement it,” he says. “The biggest difference between finance and the lab research is that the development cycle is a lot faster, where you want to act on a dataset in a few days, rather than weeks or months.”

Engineering environmental solutions

Hovendon, a native of North Carolina with a deep love for the outdoors, arrived at MIT committed “to doing something related to sustainability and having a direct application in the world around me,” she says.

Initially, she headed toward environmental engineering, “but then I realized that pretty much every major can take a different approach to that topic,” she says. “So I ended up switching to mechanical engineering because I really enjoy the hands-on aspects of the field.”

In parallel to her design and manufacturing, and mechanics and materials courses, Hovendon also immersed herself in energy and environmental policy classes. One memorable anthropology class, 21A.404 (Living through Climate Change), asked students to consider whether technological or policy solutions could be fully effective on their own for combating climate change. “It was useful to apply holistic ways of exploring human relations to the environment,” says Hovendon.

Hovendon brings this well-rounded perspective to her research at ENDLab in marine carbon capture and fluid dynamics. She is helping to develop verification methods for mCDR at a pilot treatment plant in California. The facility aims to remove 100 tons of carbon dioxide directly from the ocean by enhancing natural processes. Hovendon hopes to design cost-efficient monitoring systems to demonstrate the efficacy of this new technology. If scaled up, mCDR could enable oceans to store significantly more atmospheric carbon, helping cool the planet.

But Hovendon is well aware that innovation with a major impact cannot emerge on the basis of technical efficacy alone.

“You're going to have people who think that you shouldn't be trying to replicate or interfere with a natural system, and if you're putting one of these facilities somewhere in water, then you're using public spaces and resources,” she says. “It's impossible to come up with any kind of technology, but especially any kind of climate-related technology, without first getting the public to buy into it.”

She recalls class 17.30J (Making Public Policy), which emphasized the importance of both economic and social analysis to the successful passage of highly impactful legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act.

“I think that breakthroughs in science and engineering should be evaluated not just through their technological prowess, but through the success of their implementation for general societal benefit,” she says. “Understanding the policy aspects is vital for improving accessibility for scientific advancements.”

Beyond the dome

Guo will soon set out for a career as a quantitative financial trader, and he views his political science background as essential to his success. While his expertise in data cleaning and analysis will come into play, he believes other skills will as well: “Understanding foreign policy, considering how U.S. policy impacts other places, that's actually very important in finance,” he explains. “Macroeconomic changes and politics affect trading volatility and markets in general, so it's very important to understand what's going on.”

With one year to go, Hovendon is contemplating graduate school in mechanical engineering, perhaps designing renewable energy technologies. “I just really hope that I'm working on something I'm genuinely passionate about, something that has a broader purpose,” she says. “In terms of politics and technology, I also hope that at least some government research and development will still go to climate work, because I'm sure there will be an urgent need for it.”

Treating severe or chronic injury to soft tissues such as skin and muscle is a challenge in health care. Current treatment methods can be costly and ineffective, and the frequency of chronic wounds in general from conditions such as diabetes and vascular disease, as well as an increasingly aging population, is only expected to rise.

One promising treatment method involves implanting biocompatible materials seeded with living cells (i.e., microtissue) into the wound. The materials provide a scaffolding for stem cells, or other precursor cells, to grow into the wounded tissue and aid in repair. However, current techniques to construct these scaffolding materials suffer a recurring setback. Human tissue moves and flexes in a unique way that traditional soft materials struggle to replicate, and if the scaffolds stretch, they can also stretch the embedded cells, often causing those cells to die. The dead cells hinder the healing process and can also trigger an inadvertent immune response in the body.

"The human body has this hierarchical structure that actually un-crimps or unfolds, rather than stretches," says Steve Gillmer, a researcher in MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Mechanical Engineering Group. "That's why if you stretch your own skin or muscles, your cells aren't dying. What's actually happening is your tissues are uncrimping a little bit before they stretch."

Gillmer is part of a multidisciplinary research team that is searching for a solution to this stretching setback. He is working with Professor Ming Guo from MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering and the laboratory's Defense Fabric Discovery Center (DFDC) to knit new kinds of fabrics that can uncrimp and move just as human tissue does.

The idea for the collaboration came while Gillmer and Guo were teaching a course at MIT. Guo had been researching how to grow stem cells on new forms of materials that could mimic the uncrimping of natural tissue. He chose electrospun nanofibers, which worked well, but were difficult to fabricate at long lengths, preventing him from integrating the fibers into larger knit structures for larger-scale tissue repair.

"Steve mentioned that Lincoln Laboratory had access to industrial knitting machines," Guo says. These machines allowed him to switch focus to designing larger knits, rather than individual yarns. "We immediately started to test new ideas through internal support from the laboratory."

Gillmer and Guo worked with the DFDC to discover which knit patterns could move similarly to different types of soft tissue. They started with three basic knit constructions called interlock, rib, and jersey.

"For jersey, think of your T-shirt. When you stretch your shirt, the yarn loops are doing the stretching," says Emily Holtzman, a textile specialist at the DFDC. "The longer the loop length, the more stretch your fabric can accommodate. For ribbed, think of the cuff on your sweater. This fabric construction has a global stretch that allows the fabric to unfold like an accordion."

Interlock is similar to ribbed but is knitted in a denser pattern and contains twice as much yarn per inch of fabric. By having more yarn, there is more surface area on which to embed the cells. "Knit fabrics can also be designed to have specific porosities, or hydraulic permeability, created by the loops of the fabric and yarn sizes," says Erin Doran, another textile specialist on the team. "These pores can help with the healing process as well."

So far, the team has conducted a number of tests embedding mouse embryonic fibroblast cells and mesenchymal stem cells within the different knit patterns and seeing how they behave when the patterns are stretched. Each pattern had variations that affected how much the fabric could uncrimp, in addition to how stiff it became after it started stretching. All showed a high rate of cell survival, and in 2024 the team received an R&D 100 award for their knit designs.

Gillmer explains that although the project began with treating skin and muscle injuries in mind, their fabrics have the potential to mimic many different types of human soft tissue, such as cartilage or fat. The team recently filed a provisional patent that outlines how to create these patterns and identifies the appropriate materials that should be used to make the yarn. This information can be used as a toolbox to tune different knitted structures to match the mechanical properties of the injured tissue to which they are applied.

"This project has definitely been a learning experience for me," Gillmer says. "Each branch of this team has a unique expertise, and I think the project would be impossible without them all working together. Our collaboration as a whole enables us to expand the scope of the work to solve these larger, more complex problems."

Building on more than two decades of research, a study by MIT neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory reports a new way to treat pathology and symptoms of fragile X syndrome, the most common genetically-caused autism spectrum disorder. The team showed that augmenting a novel type of neurotransmitter signaling reduced hallmarks of fragile X in mouse models of the disorder.

The new approach, described in Cell Reports, works by targeting a specific molecular subunit of “NMDA” receptors that they discovered plays a key role in how neurons synthesize proteins to regulate their connections, or “synapses,” with other neurons in brain circuits. The scientists showed that in fragile X model mice, increasing the receptor’s activity caused neurons in the hippocampus region of the brain to increase molecular signaling that suppressed excessive bulk protein synthesis, leading to other key improvements.

Setting the table

“One of the things I find most satisfying about this study is that the pieces of the puzzle fit so nicely into what had come before,” says study senior author Mark Bear, Picower Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Former postdoc Stephanie Barnes, now a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, is the study’s lead author.

Bear’s lab studies how neurons continually edit their circuit connections, a process called “synaptic plasticity” that scientists believe to underlie the brain’s ability to adapt to experience and to form and process memories. These studies led to two discoveries that set the table for the newly published advance. In 2011, Bear’s lab showed that fragile X and another autism disorder, tuberous sclerosis (Tsc), represented two ends of a continuum of a kind of protein synthesis in the same neurons. In fragile X there was too much. In Tsc there was too little. When lab members crossbred fragile X and Tsc mice, in fact, their offspring emerged healthy, as the mutations of each disorder essentially canceled each other out.

More recently, Bear’s lab showed a different dichotomy. It has long been understood from their influential work in the 1990s that the flow of calcium ions through NMDA receptors can trigger a form of synaptic plasticity called “long-term depression” (LTD). But in 2020, they found that another mode of signaling by the receptor — one that did not require ion flow — altered protein synthesis in the neuron and caused a physical shrinking of the dendritic “spine” structures housing synapses.

For Bear and Barnes, these studies raised the prospect that if they could pinpoint how NMDA receptors affect protein synthesis they might identify a new mechanism that could be manipulated therapeutically to address fragile X (and perhaps tuberous sclerosis) pathology and symptoms. That would be an important advance to complement ongoing work Bear’s lab has done to correct fragile X protein synthesis levels via another receptor called mGluR5.

Receptor dissection

In the new study, Bear and Barnes’ team decided to use the non-ionic effect on spine shrinkage as a readout to dissect how NMDARs signal protein synthesis for synaptic plasticity in hippocampus neurons. They hypothesized that the dichotomy of ionic effects on synaptic function and non-ionic effects on spine structure might derive from the presence of two distinct components of NMDA receptors: “subunits” called GluN2A and GluN2B. To test that, they used genetic manipulations to knock out each of the subunits. When they did so, they found that knocking out “2A” or “2B” could eliminate LTD, but that only knocking out 2B affected spine size. Further experiments clarified that 2A and 2B are required for LTD, but that spine shrinkage solely depends on the 2B subunit.

The next task was to resolve how the 2B subunit signals spine shrinkage. A promising possibility was a part of the subunit called the “carboxyterminal domain,” or CTD. So, in a new experiment Bear and Barnes took advantage of a mouse that had been genetically engineered by researchers at the University of Edinburgh so that the 2A and 2B CTDs could be swapped with one another. A telling result was that when the 2B subunit lacked its proper CTD, the effect on spine structure disappeared. The result affirmed that the 2B subunit signals spine shrinkage via its CTD.

Another consequence of replacing the CTD of the 2B subunit was an increase in bulk protein synthesis that resembled findings in fragile X. Conversely, augmenting the non-ionic signaling through the 2B subunit suppressed bulk protein synthesis, reminiscent of Tsc.

Treating fragile X

Putting the pieces together, the findings indicated that augmenting signaling through the 2B subunit might, like introducing the mutation causing Tsc, rescue aspects of fragile X.

Indeed, when the scientists swapped in the 2B subunit CTD of NMDA receptor in fragile X model mice they found correction of not only the excessive bulk protein synthesis, but also altered synaptic plasticity, and increased electrical excitability that are hallmarks of the disease. To see if a treatment that targets NMDA receptors might be effective in fragile X, they tried an experimental drug called Glyx-13. This drug binds to the 2B subunit of NMDA receptors to augment signaling. The researchers found that this treatment can also normalize protein synthesis and reduced sound-induced seizures in the fragile X mice.

The team now hypothesizes, based on another prior study in the lab, that the beneficial effect to fragile X mice of the 2B subunit’s CTD signaling is that it shifts the balance of protein synthesis away from an all-too-efficient translation of short messenger RNAs (which leads to excessive bulk protein synthesis) toward a lower-efficiency translation of longer messenger RNAs.

Bear says he does not know what the prospects are for Glyx-13 as a clinical drug, but he noted that there are some drugs in clinical development that specifically target the 2B subunit of NMDA receptors.

In addition to Bear and Barnes, the study’s other authors are Aurore Thomazeau, Peter Finnie, Max Heinreich, Arnold Heynen, Noboru Komiyama, Seth Grant, Frank Menniti, and Emily Osterweil.

The FRAXA Foundation, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, The Freedom Together Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health funded the study.

When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop — “zookeeper” featured prominently for a while — but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist.

When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents’ Chicago home recently, it felt serendipitous because, by all measures, she has realized that childhood dream. The second-year doctoral student at MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) is studying materials for fusion power plants at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) under the advisement of Michael Short, associate professor at NSE. Dennis Whyte, Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at NSE, serves as co-advisor.

On track to an MIT education

Growing up in Chicago, Fisher had heard her parents remarking on her reasoning abilities. When she was barely a preschooler she argued that she couldn’t have been found in a purple speckled egg, as her parents claimed they had done.

Fisher didn’t put together just how much she had gravitated toward science until a high school physics teacher encouraged her to apply to MIT. Passionate about both the arts and sciences, she initially worried that pursuing science would be very rigid, without room for creativity. But she knows now that exploring solutions to problems requires plenty of creative thinking.

It was a visit to MIT through the Weekend Immersion in Science and Engineering (WISE) that truly opened her eyes to the potential of an MIT education. “It just seemed like the undergraduate experience here is where you can be very unapologetically yourself. There’s no fronting something you don’t want to be like. There’s so much authenticity compared to most other colleges I looked at,” Fisher says. Once admitted, Campus Preview Weekend confirmed that she belonged. “We got to be silly and weird — a version of the Mafia game was a hit — and I was like, ‘These are my people,’” Fisher laughs.

Pursuing fusion at NSE

Before she officially started as a first-year in 2018, Fisher enrolled in the Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP), which starts a week before orientation starts. Each FPOP zooms into one field. “I’d applied to the nuclear one simply because it sounded cool and I didn’t know anything about it,” Fisher says. She was intrigued right away. “They really got me with that ‘star in a bottle’ line,” she laughs. (The quest for commercial fusion is to create the energy equivalent of a star in a bottle). Excited by a talk by Zachary Hartwig, Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor at NSE, Fisher asked if she could work on fusion as an undergraduate as part of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project. She started with modeling solders for power plants and was hooked. When Fisher requested more experimental work, Hartwig put her in touch with Research Scientist David Fischer at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Fisher eventually moved on to explore superconductors, which eventually morphed into research for her master’s thesis.

For her doctoral research, Fisher is extending her master’s work to explore defects in ceramics, specifically in alumina (aluminum oxide). Sapphire coatings are the single-crystal equivalent of alumina, an insulator being explored for use in fusion power plants. “I eventually want to figure out what types of charge defects form in ceramics during radiation damage so we can ultimately engineer radiation-resistant sapphire,” Fisher says.

When you introduce a material in a fusion power plant, stray high-energy neutrons born from the plasma can collide and fundamentally reorder the lattice, which is likely to change a range of thermal, electrical, and structural properties. “Think of a scaffolding outside a building, with each one of those joints as a different atom that holds your material in place. If you go in and you pull a joint out, there’s a chance that you pulled out a joint that wasn’t structurally sound, in which case everything would be fine. But there’s also a chance that you pull a joint out and everything alters. And [such unpredictability] is a problem,” Fisher says. “We need to be able to account for exactly how these neutrons are going to alter the lattice property,” Fisher says, and it’s one of the topics her research explores.

The studies, in turn, can function as a jumping-off point for irradiating superconductors. The goals are two-fold: “I want to figure out how I can make an industry-usable ceramic you can use to insulate the inside of a fusion power plant, and then also figure out if I can take this information that I’m getting with ceramics and make it superconductor-relevant,” Fisher says. “Superconductors are the electromagnets we will use to contain the plasma inside fusion power plants. However, they prove pretty difficult to study. Since they are also ceramic, you can draw a lot of parallels between alumina and yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), the specific superconductor we use,” she adds. Fisher is also excited about the many experiments she performs using a particle accelerator, one of which involves measuring exactly how surface thermal properties change during radiation.

Sailing new paths

It’s not just her research that Fisher loves. As an undergrad, and during her master’s, she was on the varsity sailing team. “I worked my way into sailing with literal Olympians, I did not see that coming,” she says. Fisher participates in Chicago’s Race to Mackinac and the Melges 15 Series every chance she gets. Of all the types of boats she has sailed, she prefers dinghy sailing the most. “It’s more physical, you have to throw yourself around a lot and there’s this immediate cause and effect, which I like,” Fisher says. She also teaches sailing lessons in the summer at MIT’s Sailing Pavilion — you can find her on a small motorboat, issuing orders through a speaker.

Teaching has figured prominently throughout Fisher’s time at MIT. Through MISTI, Fisher has taught high school classes in Germany and a radiation and materials class in Armenia in her senior year. She was delighted by the food and culture in Armenia and by how excited people were to learn new ideas. Her love of teaching continues, as she has reached out to high schools in the Boston area. “I like talking to groups and getting them excited about fusion, or even maybe just the concept of attending graduate school,” Fisher says, adding that teaching the ropes of an experiment one-on-one is “one of the most rewarding things.”

She also learned the value of resilience and quick thinking on various other MISTI trips. Despite her love of travel, Fisher has had a few harrowing experiences with tough situations and plans falling through at the last minute. It’s when she tells herself, “Well, the only thing that you’re gonna do is you’re gonna keep doing what you wanted to do.”

That eyes-on-the-prize focus has stood Fisher in good stead, and continues to serve her well in her research today.

For as long as people have been communicating through writing, they have found ways to keep their messages private. Before the invention of the gummed envelope in 1830, securing correspondence involved letterlocking, an ingenious process of folding a flat sheet of paper to become its own envelope, often using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax. Letter writers from Erasmus to Catherine de’ Medici to Emily Dickinson employed these techniques, which Jana Dambrogio, the MIT Libraries’ Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator, has named “letterlocking.”

“The study of letterlocking very consciously bridges humanities and sciences,” says Dambrogio, who first became interested in the practice as a fellow in the conservation studio of the Vatican Apostolic Archives, where she discovered examples from the 15th and 16th centuries. “It draws on the perspectives of not only conservators and historians, but also engineers, imaging experts, and scientists.”

Now the rich history of this centuries-old document security technology is the subject of a new book, “Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter,” published by the MIT Press and co-authored with Daniel Starza Smith, a lecturer in early modern English literature at King’s College London. Dambrogio and Smith have pioneered the field of letterlocking research over the last 10 years, working with an international and interdisciplinary collection of experts, the Unlocking History Research Group.

With more than 300 images and diagrams, “Letterlocking” explores the practice’s history through real examples from all over the world. It includes a dictionary of 60 technical terms and concepts, systems the authors developed while studying more than 250,000 historic letters. The book aims to be a springboard for new discoveries, whether providing a new lens on history or spurring technological advancements.

In working with the Brienne Collection — a 17th-century postal trunk full of undelivered letters — the Unlocking History Research Group sought to study intact examples of locked letters without destroying them in the process. This stimulated advances in conservation, radiology, and computational algorithms. In 2020, the team collaborated with Amanda Ghassaei SM ’17 and Holly Jackson ’22, working at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, and students and faculty from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering to develop new algorithms that could virtually read an unopened letter, publishing the results in Nature Communications in 2021.

“Letterlocking” also offers a comprehensive guide to making one’s own locked letters. “The best introduction to letterlocking is to make some models,” says Dambrogio. “Feel the shape and the weight; see how easy it would be to conceal or hard to open without being noticed. We’re inviting people to explore and expand this new field of study through ‘mind and hand.’”

When Louis DeRidder was 12 years old, he had a medical emergency that nearly cost him his life. The terrifying experience gave him a close-up look at medical care and made him eager to learn more.

“You can’t always pinpoint exactly what gets you interested in something, but that was a transformative moment,” says DeRidder.

In high school, he grabbed the chance to participate in a medicine-focused program, spending about half of his days during his senior year in high school learning about medical science and shadowing doctors.

DeRidder was hooked. He became fascinated by the technologies that make treatments possible and was particularly interested in how drugs are delivered to the brain, a curiosity that sparked a lifelong passion.

“Here I was, a 17-year-old in high school, and a decade later, that problem still fascinates me,” he says. “That’s what eventually got me into the drug delivery field.”

DeRidder’s interests led him to transfer half-way through his undergraduate studies to Johns Hopkins University, where he performed research he had proposed in a Goldwater Scholarship proposal. The research focused on the development of a nanoparticle-drug conjugate to deliver a drug to brain cells in order to transform them from a pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory phenotype. Such a technology could be valuable in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In 2019, DeRidder entered the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, where he has embarked on a somewhat different type of drug delivery project — developing a device that measures the concentration of a chemotherapy drug in the blood while it is being administered and adjusts the infusion rate so the concentration is optimal for the patient. The system is known as CLAUDIA, or Closed-Loop AUtomated Drug Infusion RegulAtor, and can allow for the personalization of drug dosing for a variety of different drugs.

The project stemmed from discussions with his faculty advisors — Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, and Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They explained to him that chemotherapy dosing is based on a formula developed in 1916 that estimates a patient’s body surface area. The formula doesn’t consider important influences such as differences in body composition and metabolism, or circadian fluctuations that can affect how a drug interacts with a patient.

“Once my advisors presented the reality of how chemotherapies are dosed,” DeRidder says, “I thought, ‘This is insane. How is this the clinical reality?’”

He and his advisors agreed this was a great project for his PhD.

“After they gave me the problem statement, we began to brainstorm ways that we could develop a medical device to improve the lives of patients” DeRidder says, adding, “I love starting with a blank piece of paper and then brainstorming to work out the best solution.”

Almost from the start, DeRidder’s research process involved MATLAB and Simulink, developed by the mathematical computer software company MathWorks.

“MathWorks and Simulink are key to what we do,” DeRidder says. “They enable us to model the drug pharmacokinetics — how the body distributes and metabolizes the drug. We also model the components of our system with their software. That was especially critical for us in the very early days, because it let us know whether it was even possible to control the concentration of the drug. And since then, we’ve continuously improved the control algorithm, using these simulations. You simulate hundreds of different experiments before performing any experiments in the lab.”

With his innovative use of the MATLAB and Simulink tools, DeRidder was awarded MathWorks fellowships both last year and this year. He has also received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

“The fellowships have been critical to our development of the CLAUDIA drug-delivery system,” DeRidder says, adding that he has “had the pleasure of working with a great team of students and researchers in the lab.”

He says he would like to move CLAUDIA toward clinical use, where he thinks it could have significant impact. “Whatever I can do to help push it toward the clinic, including potentially helping to start a company to help commercialize the system, I’m definitely interested in doing it.”

In addition to developing CLAUDIA, DeRidder is working on developing new nanoparticles to deliver therapeutic nucleic acids. The project involves synthesizing new nucleic acid molecules, as well as developing the new polymeric and lipid nanoparticles to deliver the nucleic acids to targeted tissue and cells.

DeRidder says he likes working on technologies at different scales, from medical devices to molecules — all with the potential to improve the practice of medicine.

Meanwhile, he finds time in his busy schedule to do community service. For the past three years, he has spent time helping the homeless on Boston streets.

“It’s easy to lose track of the concrete, simple ways that we can serve our communities when we’re doing research,” DeRidder says, “which is why I have often sought out ways to serve people I come across every day, whether it is a student I mentor in lab, serving the homeless, or helping out the stranger you meet in the store who is having a bad day.”

Ultimately, DeRidder says, he’ll head back to work that also recalls his early exposure to the medical field in high school, where he interacted with a lot of people with different types of dementia and other neurological diseases at a local nursing home.

“My long-term plan includes working on developing devices and molecular therapies to treat neurological diseases, in addition to continuing to work on cancer,” he says. “Really, I’d say that early experience had a big impact on me.”

On Feb. 14, some of the nation’s most talented high school researchers convened in Boston for the annual American Junior Academy of Science (AJAS) conference, held alongside the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. As a highlight of the event, MIT once again hosted its renowned “Breakfast with Scientists,” offering students a unique opportunity to connect with leading scientific minds from around the world.

The AJAS conference began with an opening reception at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, where professor of biology and chemistry Catherine Drennan delivered the keynote address, welcoming 162 high school students from 21 states. Delegates were selected through state Academy of Science competitions, earning the chance to share their work and connect with peers and professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Over breakfast, students engaged with distinguished scientists, including MIT faculty, Nobel laureates, and industry leaders, discussing research, career paths, and the broader impact of scientific discovery.

Amy Keating, MIT biology department head, sat at a table with students ranging from high school juniors to college sophomores. The group engaged in an open discussion about life as a scientist at a leading institution like MIT. One student expressed concern about the competitive nature of innovative research environments, prompting Keating to reassure them, saying, “MIT has a collaborative philosophy rather than a competitive one.”

At another table, Nobel laureate and former MIT postdoc Gary Ruvkun shared a lighthearted moment with students, laughing at a TikTok video they had created to explain their science fair project. The interaction reflected the innate curiosity and excitement that drives discovery at all stages of a scientific career.

Donna Gerardi, executive director of the National Association of Academies of Science, highlighted the significance of the AJAS program. “These students are not just competing in science fairs; they are becoming part of a larger scientific community. The connections they make here can shape their careers and future contributions to science.”

Alongside the breakfast, AJAS delegates participated in a variety of enriching experiences, including laboratory tours, conference sessions, and hands-on research activities.

“I am so excited to be able to discuss my research with experts and get some guidance on the next steps in my academic trajectory,” said Andrew Wesel, a delegate from California.

A defining feature of the AJAS experience was its emphasis on mentorship and collaboration rather than competition. Delegates were officially inducted as lifetime Fellows of the American Junior Academy of Science at the conclusion of the conference, joining a distinguished network of scientists and researchers.

Sponsored by the MIT School of Science and School of Engineering, the breakfast underscored MIT’s longstanding commitment to fostering young scientific talent. Faculty and researchers took the opportunity to encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields, providing insights into the pathways available to them.

“It was a joy to spend time with such passionate students,” says Kristala Prather, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “One of the brightest moments for me was sitting next to a young woman who will be joining MIT in the fall — I just have to convince her to study ChemE!”

MIT Professor Markus J. Buehler has been named the recipient of the 2025 Washington Award, one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed engineering honors. 

The Washington Award is conferred to “an engineer(s) whose professional attainments have preeminently advanced the welfare of humankind,” recognizing those who have made a profound impact on society through engineering innovation. Past recipients of this award include influential figures such as Herbert Hoover, the award’s inaugural recipient in 1919, as well as Orville Wright, Henry Ford, Neil Armstrong, John Bardeen, and renowned MIT affiliates Vannevar Bush, Robert Langer, and software engineer Margaret Hamilton.

Buehler was selected for his “groundbreaking accomplishments in computational modeling and mechanics of biological materials, and his contributions to engineering education and leadership in academia.” Buehler has authored over 500 peer-reviewed publications, pioneering the atomic-level properties and structures of biomaterials such as silk, elastin, and collagen, utilizing computational modeling to characterize, design, and create sustainable materials with features spanning from the nano- to the macro- scale. Buehler was the first to explain how hydrogen bonds, molecular confinement, and hierarchical architectures govern the mechanics of biological materials via the development of a theory that bridges molecular interactions with macroscale properties.

His innovative research includes the development of physics-aware artificial intelligence methods that integrate computational mechanics, bioinformatics, and generative AI to explore universal design principles of biological and bioinspired materials. His work has advanced the understanding of hierarchical structures in nature, revealing the mechanics by which complex biomaterials achieve remarkable strength, flexibility, and resilience through molecular interactions across scales.

Buehler's research included the use of deep learning models to predict and generate new protein structures, self-assembling peptides, and sustainable biomimetic materials. His work on materiomusic — converting molecular structures into musical compositions — has provided new insights into the hidden patterns within biological systems.

Buehler is the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Mechanical Engineering. He served as the department head of CEE from 2013 to 2020, as well as in other leadership roles, including as president of the Society of Engineering Science.

A dedicated educator, Buehler has played a vital role in mentoring future engineers, leading K-12 STEM summer camps to inspire the next generation and serving as an instructor for MIT Professional Education summer courses.

His achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious honors, including the Feynman Prize, the Drucker Medal, the Leonardo da Vinci Award, and the J.R. Rice Medal, and election to the National Academy of Engineering. His work continues to push the boundaries of computational science, materials engineering, and biomimetic design.

The Washington Award was presented during National Engineers Week in February, in a ceremony attended by members of prominent engineering societies, including the Western Society of Engineers; the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers; the American Society of Civil Engineers; the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; the National Society of Professional Engineers; and the American Nuclear Society. The event also celebrated nearly 100 pre-college students recognized for their achievements in regional STEM competitions, highlighting the next generation of engineering talent.

In biology, seeing can lead to understanding, and researchers in Professor Edward Boyden’s lab at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research are committed to bringing life into sharper focus. With a pair of new methods, they are expanding the capabilities of expansion microscopy — a high-resolution imaging technique the group introduced in 2015 — so researchers everywhere can see more when they look at cells and tissues under a light microscope.

“We want to see everything, so we’re always trying to improve it,” says Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT. “A snapshot of all life, down to its fundamental building blocks, is really the goal.” Boyden is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the Yang Tan Collective at MIT. 

With new ways of staining their samples and processing images, users of expansion microscopy can now see vivid outlines of the shapes of cells in their images and pinpoint the locations of many different proteins inside a single tissue sample with resolution that far exceeds that of conventional light microscopy. These advances, both reported in open-access form in the journal Nature Communications, enable new ways of tracing the slender projections of neurons and visualizing spatial relationships between molecules that contribute to health and disease.

Expansion microscopy uses a water-absorbing hydrogel to physically expand biological tissues. After a tissue sample has been permeated by the hydrogel, it is hydrated. The hydrogel swells as it absorbs water, preserving the relative locations of molecules in the tissue as it gently pulls them away from one another. As a result, crowded cellular components appear separate and distinct when the expanded tissue is viewed under a light microscope. The approach, which can be performed using standard laboratory equipment, has made super-resolution imaging accessible to most research teams.

Since first developing expansion microscopy, Boyden and his team have continued to enhance the method — increasing its resolution, simplifying the procedure, devising new features, and integrating it with other tools.

Visualizing cell membranes

One of the team’s latest advances is a method called ultrastructural membrane expansion microscopy (umExM), which they described in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature Communications. With it, biologists can use expansion microscopy to visualize the thin membranes that form the boundaries of cells and enclose the organelles inside them. These membranes, built mostly of molecules called lipids, have been notoriously difficult to densely label in intact tissues for imaging with light microscopy. Now, researchers can use umExM to study cellular ultrastructure and organization within tissues.

Tay Shin SM ’20, PhD ’23, a former graduate student in Boyden’s lab and a J. Douglas Tan Fellow in the Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, led the development of umExM. “Our goal was very simple at first: Let’s label membranes in intact tissue, much like how an electron microscope uses osmium tetroxide to label membranes to visualize the membranes in tissue,” he says. “It turns out that it’s extremely hard to achieve this.”

The team first needed to design a label that would make the membranes in tissue samples visible under a light microscope. “We almost had to start from scratch,” Shin says. “We really had to think about the fundamental characteristics of the probe that is going to label the plasma membrane, and then think about how to incorporate them into expansion microscopy.” That meant engineering a molecule that would associate with the lipids that make up the membrane and link it to both the hydrogel used to expand the tissue sample and a fluorescent molecule for visibility.

After optimizing the expansion microscopy protocol for membrane visualization and extensively testing and improving potential probes, Shin found success one late night in the lab. He placed an expanded tissue sample on a microscope and saw sharp outlines of cells.

Because of the high resolution enabled by expansion, the method allowed Boyden’s team to identify even the tiny dendrites that protrude from neurons and clearly see the long extensions of their slender axons. That kind of clarity could help researchers follow individual neurons’ paths within the densely interconnected networks of the brain, the researchers say.

Boyden calls tracing these neural processes “a top priority of our time in brain science.” Such tracing has traditionally relied heavily on electron microscopy, which requires specialized skills and expensive equipment. Shin says that because expansion microscopy uses a standard light microscope, it is far more accessible to laboratories worldwide.

Shin and Boyden point out that users of expansion microscopy can learn even more about their samples when they pair the new ability to reveal lipid membranes with fluorescent labels that show where specific proteins are located. “That’s important, because proteins do a lot of the work of the cell, but you want to know where they are with respect to the cell’s structure,” Boyden says.

One sample, many proteins

To that end, researchers no longer have to choose just a few proteins to see when they use expansion microscopy. With a new method called multiplexed expansion revealing (multiExR), users can now label and see more than 20 different proteins in a single sample. Biologists can use the method to visualize sets of proteins, see how they are organized with respect to one another, and generate new hypotheses about how they might interact.

A key to that new method, reported Nov. 9, 2024, in Nature Communications, is the ability to repeatedly link fluorescently labeled antibodies to specific proteins in an expanded tissue sample, image them, then strip these away and use a new set of antibodies to reveal a new set of proteins. Postdoc Jinyoung Kang fine-tuned each step of this process, assuring tissue samples stayed intact and the labeled proteins produced bright signals in each round of imaging.

After capturing many images of a single sample, Boyden’s team faced another challenge: how to ensure those images were in perfect alignment so they could be overlaid with one another, producing a final picture that showed the precise positions of all of the proteins that had been labeled and visualized one by one.

Expansion microscopy lets biologists visualize some of cells’ tiniest features — but to find the same features over and over again during multiple rounds of imaging, Boyden’s team first needed to home in on a larger structure. “These fields of view are really tiny, and you’re trying to find this really tiny field of view in a gel that’s actually become quite large once you’ve expanded it,” explains Margaret Schroeder, a graduate student in Boyden’s lab who, with Kang, led the development of multiExR.

To navigate to the right spot every time, the team decided to label the blood vessels that pass through each tissue sample and use these as a guide. To enable precise alignment, certain fine details also needed to consistently appear in every image; for this, the team labeled several structural proteins. With these reference points and customized imaging processing software, the team was able to integrate all of their images of a sample into one, revealing how proteins that had been visualized separately were arranged relative to one another.

The team used multiExR to look at amyloid plaques — the aberrant protein clusters that notoriously develop in brains affected by Alzheimer’s disease. “We could look inside those amyloid plaques and ask, what’s inside of them? And because we can stain for many different proteins, we could do a high-throughput exploration,” Boyden says. The team chose 23 different proteins to view in their images. The approach revealed some surprises, such as the presence of certain neurotransmitter receptors (AMPARs). “Here’s one of the most famous receptors in all of neuroscience, and there it is, hiding out in one of the most famous molecular hallmarks of pathology in neuroscience,” says Boyden. It’s unclear what role, if any, the receptors play in Alzheimer’s disease — but the finding illustrates how the ability to see more inside cells can expose unexpected aspects of biology and raise new questions for research.

Funding for this work came from MIT, Lisa Yang and Y. Eva Tan, John Doerr, the Open Philanthropy Project, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the U.S. Army, Cancer Research U.K., the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Lore McGovern, Good Ventures, Schmidt Futures, Samsung, MathWorks, the Collamore-Rogers Fellowship, the U.S. National Science Foundation, Alana Foundation USA, the Halis Family Foundation, Lester A. Gimpelson, Donald and Glenda Mattes, David B. Emmes, Thomas A. Stocky, Avni U. Shah, Kathleen Octavio, Good Ventures/Open Philanthropy, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program.

The 2025 Times Higher Education World University Ranking has ranked MIT first in three subject categories: Arts and Humanities, Business and Economics, and Social Sciences. 

The Times Higher Education World University Ranking is an annual publication of university rankings by Times Higher Education, a leading British education magazine. The subject rankings are based on 18 rigorous performance indicators. Criteria include teaching, research environment, research volume and influence, industry, and international outlook.

Disciplines included in the 2025 top-ranked subjects are housed in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“The rankings are a testament to the extraordinary quality of the research and teaching that takes place in SHASS and across MIT,” says Agustín Rayo, Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS and professor of philosophy. “There has never been a more important time to ensure that we train students who understand the social, economic, political, and human aspects of the great challenges of our time.”

The Arts and Humanities ranking evaluated 750 universities from 72 countries in the disciplines of languages, literature, and linguistics; history, philosophy, and theology; architecture; archaeology; and art, performing arts, and design. This marks the first time MIT has earned the top spot in this subject since Times Higher Education began publishing rankings in 2011.

The ranking for Business and Economics evaluated 990 institutions from 85 countries and territories across three core disciplines: business and management; accounting and finance; and, economics and econometrics. This is the fourth consecutive year MIT has been ranked first in this subject.

The Social Sciences ranking evaluated 1,093 institutions from 100 countries and territories in the disciplines of political science and international studies; sociology, geography, communication and media studies; and anthropology. The areas under evaluation include political science and international relations; sociology; geography; communication and media studies; and anthropology. MIT claimed the top spot alone in this subject, after tying for first in 2024 with Stanford University.

In other subjects, MIT was also named among the top universities, ranking third in Computer Science, Engineering, and Life Sciences, and fourth in Physical Sciences. Overall, MIT ranked second in the Times Higher Education 2025 World University Ranking.

Michele David has had a long and varied career in medicine. But, she says, it took coming to MIT nine years ago to find “a job that fully engages all of who I am.”

David, a highly accomplished physician, currently serves as chief of clinical quality and patient safety at MIT Health, the Institute’s multispecialty group practice and health resource serving the MIT community — including students, faculty, and staff, as well as affiliated families and retirees. While she began her MIT tenure as a primary care provider in 2015, David now focuses on quality improvement projects for the organization. In particular, she developed and now leads the ambulatory safety net team, which is tasked with creating protocols and workflows for completing health screenings of a variety of disorders and diseases, and for managing abnormal test results.

Much of who David is was shaped by the strong women she looked up to during her childhood in Haiti. Her father died when David was just 6 months old, leaving her mother, a young schoolteacher, with four children, the oldest just 5. Despite having many suitors, she never remarried. In Haiti’s patriarchal society, she later told David, marrying again would have yielded all the power in the household to a man, something she did not want her three young daughters to experience. David’s maternal aunt, who graduated from medical school in Haiti in 1956, completed her residency in the United States, and eventually became chief of pathology at the West Side VA Medical Center in Chicago, was another role model for David who nudged her toward a career in medicine. The death of her infant godson from an easily curable diarrheal illness due to the local hospital’s lack of basic medical supplies further strengthened the then-teenage David’s resolve to become someone who could make a difference.

David’s passion for public health and health equity grew as she earned her medical degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine and completed her residency at the New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan. The hospital where she trained was divided into sections for patients who could pay for their care and those who were uninsured. It was also the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and David saw firsthand how fear of the disease led to bias and discrimination against members of already-marginalized communities. At the time, David was not allowed to donate blood alongside other residents, because she was Haitian.

Her subsequent career included training and working in pulmonary critical care medicine, teaching medical students, researching health disparities among populations of Caribbean and African American women, and caring for patients, with a focus on women’s health. David also contributes her knowledge and energy to causes close to her heart. She is chair of the board for Health Equity International; an advisor to the Resilient Sisterhood Project; and a member of the Massachusetts Public Health Council.

By 2015, disillusioned by what she describes as a combination of “the glass ceiling” and “corporate medicine,” David began planning an early retirement. That’s when a member of the leadership team from MIT Health heard about her plans and gave her a call. “I told him all the reasons I wanted to quit medicine. He said, ‘It won’t be like that at MIT Health. Please come join us.’”

At MIT Health, David started as a primary care provider before gradually assuming additional administrative responsibilities for clinical quality and patient safety. While still seeing patients, she wrote and received a grant to develop an “ambulatory safety net” for the organization, a system of check-ins and procedures to help ensure that patients receive care that maximizes positive health outcomes. David started by assembling a team to create a safety net for colorectal cancer screening, which identified and contacted patients who were overdue for screenings or at high risk. Within the first year of the project, scheduled or completed colonoscopies among MIT Health patients in these groups increased from 29 to 97 percent.

Last spring, David transitioned to a full-time administrative role at MIT Health. Her team recently launched additional safety nets for breast cancer screening and behavioral health and is developing safety nets for prostate cancer and lung cancer.

And as for that early retirement? “I don’t have another 20 years left in me,” David says. “But I’d like to stay at MIT for as long as I can.”

Soundbytes

Q: How did you make the decision to assume your current, full-time role as chief of clinical quality and patient safety?

A: It was a role I already had, but I was doing it part time. I was also caring for a very complex panel of patients. When Chief Health Officer Cecilia Stuopis asked me if I would consider doing it full time, I was somewhat ambivalent, because I’ve always enjoyed taking care of patients. I thought about it and realized that it was another way of doing the same thing.

Q: What do you like about working at MIT?

A: Working at MIT Health feels like the first time I’ve been able to use my entire skill set to do my job. I wear my policy and public health hats when I’m working on ambulatory safety nets. I’m able to mentor and advise students, and I collaborate with my colleagues on patient care. I also feel fully supported by MIT Health’s leadership team. They are truly invested in me, and I feel that my work matters — not only to me and to them, but also to my co-workers and direct reports. Because of this, I am able to bring my best self to work.

Q: Have you been able to keep up with your many outside projects while working at MIT?

A: Yes. I lecture regularly on medical racism and health-care disparities at conferences and at other institutions. I continue to create and exhibit fine art quilts. Last year, in my role with the Resilient Sisterhood Project and in conjunction with “Call and Response,” an exhibition at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, I was able to bring a film and panel discussion to campus. The event focused on the “mothers of gynecology,” three enslaved women — Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy — who were forced to undergo numerous experimental surgeries without anesthesia by J. Marion Sims, the South Carolina doctor long recognized as the “father of gynecology.” This is one of the stories I started telling my medical students in the late 1990s, after one student asked me why African American patients are often so distrustful of health care. This history was not in medical textbooks at that time.

Q: What are you proudest of so far in your time at MIT?

A: Even though I’m no longer seeing my own patients in person, I’m making systemic changes that are improving health outcomes for the entire panel of patients at MIT Health.

For the fifth time in the history of the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and for the fifth year in a row, MIT swept all five of the contest’s top spots.

The top five scorers each year are named Putnam Fellows. Senior Brian Liu and juniors Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille are now three-time Putnam Fellows, sophomore Jiangqi Dai earned his second win, and first-year Qiao Sun earned his first. Each receives a $2,500 award. This is also the fifth time that any school has had all five Putnam Fellows.

MIT’s team also came in first. The team was made up of Lapate, Robitaille, and Sun (in alphabetical order); Lapate and Robitaille were also on last year’s winning team. This is MIT’s ninth first-place win in the past 11 competitions. Teams consist of the three top scorers from each institution. The institution with the first-place team receives a $25,000 award, and each team member receives $1,000.  

First-year Jessica Wan was the top-scoring woman, finishing in the top 25, which earned her the $1,000 Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize. She is the eighth MIT student to receive this honor since the award was created in 1992. This is the sixth year in a row that an MIT woman has won the prize.

In total, 69 MIT students scored within the top 100. Beyond the top five scorers, MIT took nine of the next 11 spots (each receiving a $1,000 award), and seven of the next nine spots (earning $250 awards). Of the 75 receiving honorable mentions, 48 were from MIT. A total of 3,988 students took the exam in December, including 222 MIT students.

This exam is considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the United States and Canada. 

The Putnam is known for its difficulty: While a perfect score is 120, this year’s top score was 90, and the median was just 2. While many MIT students scored well, the Department of Mathematics is proud of everyone who just took the exam, says Professor Michel Goemans, head of the Department of Mathematics. 

“Year after year, I am so impressed by the sheer number of students at MIT that participate in the Putnam competition,” Goemans says. “In no other college or university in the world can one find hundreds of students who get a kick out of thinking about math problems. So refreshing!” 

Adds Professor Bjorn Poonen, who helped MIT students prepare for the exam this year, “The incredible competition performance is just one manifestation of MIT’s vibrant community of students who love doing math and discussing math with each other, students who through their hard work in this environment excel in ways beyond competitions, too.”

While the annual Putnam Competition is administered to thousands of undergraduate mathematics students across the United States and Canada, in recent years around 70 of its top 100 performers have been MIT students. Since 2000, MIT has placed among the top five teams 23 times.  

MIT’s success in the Putnam exam isn’t surprising. MIT’s recent Putnam coaches are four-time Putnam Fellow Bjorn Poonen and three-time Putnam Fellow Yufei Zhao ’10, PhD ’15. 

MIT is also a top destination for medalists participating in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) for high school students. Indeed, over the last decade MIT has enrolled almost every American IMO medalist, and more international IMO gold medalists than the universities of any other single country, according to forthcoming research from the Global Talent Fund (GTF), which offers scholarship and training programs for math Olympiad students and coaches.

IMO participation is a strong predictor of future achievement. According to the International Mathematics Olympiad Foundation, about half of Fields Medal winners are IMO alums — but it’s not the only ingredient.

“Recruiting the most talented students is only the beginning. A top-tier university education — with excellent professors, supportive mentors, and an engaging peer community — is key to unlocking their full potential," says GTF President Ruchir Agarwal. "MIT’s sustained Putnam success shows how the right conditions deliver spectacular results. The catalytic reaction of MIT’s concentration of math talent and the nurturing environment of Building 2 should accelerate advancements in fundamental science for years and decades to come.”

Many MIT mathletes see competitions not only as a way to hone their mathematical aptitude, but also as a way to create a strong sense of community, to help inspire and educate the next generation. 

Chris Peterson SM ’13, director of communications and special projects at MIT Admissions and Student Financial Services, points out that many MIT students with competition math experience volunteer to help run programs for K-12 students including HMMT and Math Prize for Girls, and mentor research projects through the Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science (PRIMES).

Many of the top scorers are also alumni of the PRIMES high school outreach program. Two of this year’s Putnam Fellows, Liu and Robitaille, are PRIMES alumni, as are four of the next top 11, and six out of the next nine winners, along with many of the students receiving honorable mentions. Pavel Etingof, a math professor who is also PRIMES’ chief research advisor, states that among the 25 top winners, 12 (48 percent) are PRIMES alumni.

“We at PRIMES are very proud of our alumnae’s fantastic showing at the Putnam Competition,” says PRIMES director Slava Gerovitch PhD ’99. “PRIMES serves as a pipeline of mathematical excellence from high school through undergraduate studies, and beyond.”

Along the same lines, a collaboration between the MIT Department of Mathematics and MISTI-Africa has sent MIT students with Olympiad experience abroad during the Independent Activities Period (IAP) to coach high school students who hope to compete for their national teams. 

First-years at MIT also take class 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving), known informally as the Putnam Seminar, not only to hone their Putnam exam skills, but also to make new friends. 

“Many people think of math competitions as primarily a way to identify and recognize talent, which of course they are,” says Peterson. “But the community convened by and through these competitions generates educational externalities that collectively exceed the sum of individual accomplishment.”  

Math Community and Outreach Officer Michael King also notes the camaraderie that forms around the test. 

“My favorite time of the Putnam day is right after the problem session, when the students all jump up, run over to their friends, and begin talking animatedly,” says King, who also took the exam as an undergraduate student. “They cheer each other’s successes, debate problem solutions, commiserate over missed answers, and share funny stories. It’s always amazing to work with the best math students in the world, but the most rewarding aspect is seeing the friendships that develop.”   

A full list of the winners can be found on the Putnam website.

Rohit Karnik, the Tata Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named the new director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), effective March 1. Karnik, who has served as associate director of J-WAFS since 2023, succeeds founding director John H. Lienhard V, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering.

Karnik assumes the role of director at a pivotal time for J-WAFS, as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. Announcing the appointment today in a letter to the J-WAFS research community, Vice President for Research Ian A. Waitz noted Karnik’s deep involvement with the lab’s research efforts and programming, as well as his accolades as a researcher, teacher, leader, and mentor. “I am delighted that Rohit will bring his talent and vision to bear on the J-WAFS mission, ensuring the program sustains its direct support of research on campus and its important impact around the world,” Waitz wrote.

J-WAFS is the only program at MIT focused exclusively on water and food research. Since 2015, the lab has made grants totaling approximately $25M to researchers across the Institute, including from all five schools and 40 departments, labs, and centers. It has supported 300 faculty, research staff, and students combined. Furthermore, the J-WAFS Solutions Program, which supports efforts to commercialize innovative water and food technologies, has spun out 12 companies and two open-sourced products. 

“We launched J-WAFS with the aim of building a community of water and food researchers at MIT, taking advantage of MIT’s strengths in so many disciplines that contribute to these most essential human needs,” writes Lienhard, who will retire this June. “After a decade’s work, that community is strong and visible. I am delighted that Rohit has agreed to take the reins. He will bring the program to the next level.” 

Lienhard has served as director since founding J-WAFS in 2014, along with executive director Renee J. Robins ’83, who last fall shared her intent to retire as well. 

“It’s a big change for a program to turn over both the director and executive director roles at the same time,” says Robins. “Having worked alongside Rohit as our associate director for the past couple of years, I am greatly assured that J-WAFS will be in good hands with a new and steady leadership team.”

Karnik became associate director of J-WAFS in July 2023, a move that coincided with the start of a sabbatical for Lienhard. Before that time, Karnik was already well engaged with J-WAFS as a grant recipient, reviewer, and community member. As associate director, Rohit has been integral to J-WAFS operations, planning, and grant management, including the proposal selection process. He was instrumental in planning the second J-WAFS Grand Challenge grant and led workshops at which researchers brainstormed proposal topics and formed teams. Karnik also engaged with J-WAFS’ corporate partners, helped plan lectures and events, and offered project oversight. 

“The experience gave me broad exposure to the amazing ideas and research at MIT in the water and food space, and the collaborations and synergies across departments and schools that enable excellence in research,” says Karnik. “The strengths of J-WAFS lie in being able to support principal investigators in pursuing research to address humanity’s water and food needs; in creating a community of students though the fellowship program and support of student clubs; and in bringing people together at seminars, workshops, and other events. All of this is made possible by the endowment and a dedicated team with close involvement in the projects after the grants are awarded.”

J-WAFS was established through a generous gift from Community Jameel, an independent, global organization advancing science to help communities thrive in a rapidly changing world. The lab was named in honor of the late Abdul Latif Jameel, the founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel company and father of MIT alumnus Mohammed Jameel ’78, who founded and chairs Community Jameel. 

J-WAFS’ operations are carried out by a small but passionate team of people at MIT who are dedicated to the mission of securing water and food systems. That mission is more important than ever, as climate change, urbanization, and a growing global population are putting tremendous stress on the world’s water and food supplies. These challenges drive J-WAFS’ efforts to mobilize the research, innovation, and technology that can sustainably secure humankind’s most vital resources. 

As director, Karnik will help shape the research agenda and key priorities for J-WAFS and usher the program into its second decade.

Karnik originally joined MIT as a postdoc in the departments of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering in October 2006. In September 2007, he became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, before being promoted to associate professor in 2012. His research group focuses on the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and applying that to the design of micro- and nanofluidic systems for applications in water, healthcare, energy, and the environment. Past projects include ones on membranes for water filtration and chemical separations, sensors for water, and water filters from waste wood. Karnik has served as associate department head and interim co-department head in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as faculty director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in the School of Engineering.

Before coming to MIT, Karnik received a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and a master’s and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, all in mechanical engineering. He has authored numerous publications, is co-inventor on several patents, and has received awards and honors including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award, the MIT Office of Graduate Education’s Committed to Caring award, and election to the National Academy of Inventors as a senior member. 

Lienhard, J-WAFS’ outgoing director, has served on the MIT faculty since 1988. His research and educational efforts have focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, thermodynamics, and separation processes. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 90 PhD and master’s theses, and he is the author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and three textbooks. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, most commercialized through startup companies with his students. One of these, the water treatment company Gradiant Corporation, is now valued over $1 billion and employs more than 1,200 people. Lienhard has received many awards, including the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Desalination and Reuse Association.

Since 1998, Renee Robins has worked on the conception, launch, and development of a number of large interdisciplinary, international, and partnership-based research and education collaborations at MIT and elsewhere. She served in roles for the Cambridge MIT Institute, the MIT Portugal Program, the Mexico City Program, the Program on Emerging Technologies, and the Technology and Policy Program. She holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, in biology and humanities/anthropology, and a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She has overseen significant growth in J-WAFS’ activities, funding, staffing, and collaborations over the past decade. In 2021, she was awarded an Infinite Mile Award in the area of the Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research, in recognition of her contributions within her role at J-WAFS to help the Institute carry out its mission.

“John and Renee have done a remarkable job in establishing J-WAFS and bringing it up to its present form,” says Karnik. “I’m committed to making sure that the key aspects of J-WAFS that bring so much value to the MIT community, the nation, and the world continue to function well. MIT researchers and alumni in the J-WAFS community are already having an impact on addressing humanity’s water and food needs, and I believe that there is potential for MIT to have an even greater positive impact on securing humanity’s vital resources in the future.”

The following is a joint announcement from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and GlobalFoundries. 

MIT and GlobalFoundries (GF), a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, have announced a new research agreement to jointly pursue advancements and innovations for enhancing the performance and efficiency of critical semiconductor technologies. The collaboration will be led by MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and GF’s research and development team, GF Labs.

With an initial research focus on artificial intelligence and other applications, the first projects are expected to leverage GF’s differentiated silicon photonics technology, which monolithically integrates radio frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF SOI), CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor), and optical features on a single chip to realize power efficiencies for data centers, and GF’s 22FDX platform, which delivers ultra-low power consumption for intelligent devices at the edge.

“The collaboration between MIT MTL and GF exemplifies the power of academia-industry cooperation in tackling the most pressing challenges in semiconductor research,” says Tomás Palacios, MTL director and the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Palacios will serve as the MIT faculty lead for this research initiative.

“By bringing together MIT's world-renowned capabilities with GF's leading semiconductor platforms, we are positioned to drive significant research advancements in GF’s essential chip technologies for AI,” says Gregg Bartlett, chief technology officer at GF. “This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and highlights our dedication to developing the next generation of talent in the semiconductor industry. Together, we will research transformative solutions in the industry.”

“Integrated circuit technologies are the core driving a broad spectrum of applications ranging from mobile computing and communication devices to automotive, energy, and cloud computing,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT's School of Engineering, chief innovation and strategy officer, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This collaboration allows MIT’s exceptional research community to leverage GlobalFoundries’ wide range of industry domain experts and advanced process technologies to drive exciting innovations in microelectronics across domains — while preparing our students to take on leading roles in the workforce of the future.”

The new research agreement was formalized at a signing ceremony on campus at MIT. It builds upon GF’s successful past and ongoing engagements with the university. GF serves on MTL’s Microsystems Industrial Group, which brings together industry and academia to engage in research. MIT faculty are active participants in GF’s University Partnership Program focused on joint semiconductor research and prototyping. Additionally, GF and MIT collaborate on several workforce development initiatives, including through the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition, a U.S. Department of Defense Microelectronics Commons Hub.

A vast search of natural diversity has led scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to uncover ancient systems with potential to expand the genome editing toolbox. 

These systems, which the researchers call TIGR (Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA) systems, use RNA to guide them to specific sites on DNA. TIGR systems can be reprogrammed to target any DNA sequence of interest, and they have distinct functional modules that can act on the targeted DNA. In addition to its modularity, TIGR is very compact compared to other RNA-guided systems, like CRISPR, which is a major advantage for delivering it in a therapeutic context.  

These findings are reported online Feb. 27 in the journal Science.

“This is a very versatile RNA-guided system with a lot of diverse functionalities,” says Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, who led the research. The TIGR-associated (Tas) proteins that Zhang’s team found share a characteristic RNA-binding component that interacts with an RNA guide that directs it to a specific site in the genome. Some cut the DNA at that site, using an adjacent DNA-cutting segment of the protein. That modularity could facilitate tool development, allowing researchers to swap useful new features into natural Tas proteins.

“Nature is pretty incredible,” says Zhang, who is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a core member of the Broad Institute, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering at MIT, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT. “It’s got a tremendous amount of diversity, and we have been exploring that natural diversity to find new biological mechanisms and harnessing them for different applications to manipulate biological processes,” he says. Previously, Zhang’s team adapted bacterial CRISPR systems into gene editing tools that have transformed modern biology. His team has also found a variety of programmable proteins, both from CRISPR systems and beyond. 

In their new work, to find novel programmable systems, the team began by zeroing in a structural feature of the CRISPR-Cas9 protein that binds to the enzyme’s RNA guide. That is a key feature that has made Cas9 such a powerful tool: “Being RNA-guided makes it relatively easy to reprogram, because we know how RNA binds to other DNA or other RNA,” Zhang explains. His team searched hundreds of millions of biological proteins with known or predicted structures, looking for any that shared a similar domain. To find more distantly related proteins, they used an iterative process: from Cas9, they identified a protein called IS110, which had previously been shown by others to bind RNA. They then zeroed in on the structural features of IS110 that enable RNA binding and repeated their search. 

At this point, the search had turned up so many distantly related proteins that they team turned to artificial intelligence to make sense of the list. “When you are doing iterative, deep mining, the resulting hits can be so diverse that they are difficult to analyze using standard phylogenetic methods, which rely on conserved sequence,” explains Guilhem Faure, a computational biologist in Zhang’s lab. With a protein large language model, the team was able to cluster the proteins they had found into groups according to their likely evolutionary relationships. One group set apart from the rest, and its members were particularly intriguing because they were encoded by genes with regularly spaced repetitive sequences reminiscent of an essential component of CRISPR systems. These were the TIGR-Tas systems.

Zhang’s team discovered more than 20,000 different Tas proteins, mostly occurring in bacteria-infecting viruses. Sequences within each gene’s repetitive region — its TIGR arrays — encode an RNA guide that interacts with the RNA-binding part of the protein. In some, the RNA-binding region is adjacent to a DNA-cutting part of the protein. Others appear to bind to other proteins, which suggests they might help direct those proteins to DNA targets.     

Zhang and his team experimented with dozens of Tas proteins, demonstrating that some can be programmed to make targeted cuts to DNA in human cells. As they think about developing TIGR-Tas systems into programmable tools, the researchers are encouraged by features that could make those tools particularly flexible and precise.

They note that CRISPR systems can only be directed to segments of DNA that are flanked by short motifs known as PAMs (protospacer adjacent motifs). TIGR Tas proteins, in contrast, have no such requirement. “This means theoretically, any site in the genome should be targetable,” says scientific advisor Rhiannon Macrae. The team’s experiments also show that TIGR systems have what Faure calls a “dual-guide system,” interacting with both strands of the DNA double helix to home in on their target sequences, which should ensure they act only where they are directed by their RNA guide. What’s more, Tas proteins are compact — a quarter of the size Cas9, on average — making them easier to deliver, which could overcome a major obstacle to therapeutic deployment of gene editing tools.  

Excited by their discovery, Zhang’s team is now investigating the natural role of TIGR systems in viruses, as well as how they can be adapted for research or therapeutics. They have determined the molecular structure of one of the Tas proteins they found to work in human cells, and will use that information to guide their efforts to make it more efficient. Additionally, they note connections between TIGR-Tas systems and certain RNA-processing proteins in human cells. “I think there’s more there to study in terms of what some of those relationships may be, and it may help us better understand how these systems are used in humans,” Zhang says.

This work was supported by the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics, Broad Institute Programmable Therapeutics Gift Donors, Pershing Square Foundation, William Ackman, Neri Oxman, the Phillips family, J. and P. Poitras, and the BT Charitable Foundation. 

MIT senior Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli and alumnae Abigail (“Abbie”) Schipper ’24 and Rachel Zhang ’21 have been selected as Gates Cambridge Scholars and will begin graduate studies this fall in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K.

Now celebrating its 25th year, the Gates Cambridge program provides fully funded post-graduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside of the U.K. The mission of Gates Cambridge is to build a global network of future leaders committed to changing the world for the better.

Students interested in applying to Gates Cambridge should contact Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships in Career Advising and Professional Development.

Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli

Freudenburg-Puricelli is majoring in Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and minoring in Spanish. Her passion for geoscience has led her to travel to different corners of the world to conduct geologic fieldwork. These experiences have motivated her to pursue a career in developing scientific policy and environmental regulation that can protect those most vulnerable to climate change. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she will pursue an MPhil in environmental policy.

Arriving at MIT, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Terrascope first-year learning community, which focuses on hands-on education relating to global environmental issues. She then became an undergraduate research assistant in the McGee Lab for Paleoclimate and Geochronology, where she gathered and interpreted data used to understand climate features of permafrost across northern Canada.

Following a summer internship in Chile researching volcanoes at the Universidad Católica del Norte, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Gehring Lab for Plant Genetics, Epigenetics, and Seed Biology. Last summer, she traveled to Peru to work with the Department of Paleontology at the Universidad Nacional de Piura, conducting fieldwork and preserving and organizing fossil specimens. Freudenburg-Puricelli has also done fieldwork on sedimentology in New Mexico, geological mapping in the Mojave Desert, and field oceanography onboard the SSV Corwith Cramer.

On campus, Freudenburg-Puricelli is an avid glassblower and has been a teaching assistant at the MIT glassblowing lab. She is also a tour guide for the MIT Office of Admissions and has volunteered with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences’ first-year pre-orientation program.

Abigail “Abbie” Schipper ’24

Originally from Portland, Oregon, Schipper graduated from MIT with a BS in mechanical engineering and a minor in biology. At Cambridge, she will pursue an MPhil in engineering, researching medical devices used in pre-hospital trauma systems in low- and middle-income countries with the Cambridge Health Systems Design group.

At MIT, Schipper was a member of MIT Emergency Medical Services, volunteering on the ambulance and serving as the heartsafe officer and director of ambulance operations. Inspired by her work in CPR education, she helped create the LifeSaveHer project, which aims to decrease the gender disparity in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival outcomes through the creation of female CPR mannequins and associated research. This team was the first-place winner of the 2023 PKG IDEAS Competition and a recipient of the Eloranta Research Fellowship.

Schipper’s work has also focused on designing medical devices for low-resource or extreme environments. As an undergraduate, she performed research in the lab of Professor Giovanni Traverso, where she worked on a project designing a drug delivery implant for regions with limited access to surgery. During a summer internship at the University College London Collaborative Center for Inclusion Health, she worked with the U.K.’s National Health Service to create durable, low-cost carbon dioxide sensors to approximate the risk of airborne infectious disease transmission in shelters for people experiencing homelessness.

After graduation, Schipper interned at SAGA Space Architecture through MISTI Denmark, designing life support systems for an underwater habitat that will be used for astronaut training and oceanographic research.

Schipper was a member of the Concourse learning community, Sigma Kappa Sorority, and her living group, Burton 3rd. In her free time, she enjoys fixing bicycles and playing the piano.

Rachel Zhang ’21

Zhang graduated from MIT with a BS in physics in 2021. During her senior year, she was a recipient of the Joel Matthews Orloff Award. She then earned an MS in astronomy at Northwestern University. An internship at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute deepened her interest in the applications of machine learning for astronomy. At Cambridge, she will pursue a PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. 

MIT physicists report the unexpected discovery of electrons forming crystalline structures in a material only billionths of a meter thick. The work adds to a gold mine of discoveries originating from the material, which the same team discovered about three years ago.

In a paper published Jan. 22 in Nature, the team describes how electrons in devices made, in part, of the material can become solid, or form crystals, by changing the voltage applied to the devices when they are kept at a temperature similar to that of outer space. Under the same conditions, they also showed the emergence of two new electronic states that add to work they reported last year showing that electrons can split into fractions of themselves.

The physicists were able to make the discoveries thanks to new custom-made filters for better insulation of the equipment involved in the work. These allowed them to cool their devices to a temperature an order of magnitude colder than they achieved for the earlier results.

The team also observed all of these phenomena using two slightly different “versions” of the material, one composed of five layers of atomically thin carbon; the other composed of four layers. This indicates “that there’s a family of materials where you can get this kind of behavior, which is exciting,” says Long Ju, an assistant professor in the MIT Department of Physics who led the work. Ju is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and Research Lab of Electronics.

Referring to the material, known as rhombohedral pentalayer graphene, Ju says, “We found a gold mine, and every scoop is revealing something new.”

New material

Rhombohedral pentalayer graphene is essentially a special form of pencil lead. Pencil lead, or graphite, is composed of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. Rhombohedral pentalayer graphene is composed of five layers of graphene stacked in a specific overlapping order.

Since Ju and colleagues discovered the material, they have tinkered with it by adding layers of another material they thought might accentuate the graphene’s properties, or even produce new phenomena. For example, in 2023 they created a sandwich of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene with “buns” made of hexagonal boron nitride. By applying different voltages, or amounts of electricity, to the sandwich, they discovered three important properties never before seen in natural graphite.

Last year, Ju and colleagues reported yet another important and even more surprising phenomenon: Electrons became fractions of themselves upon applying a current to a new device composed of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. This is important because this “fractional quantum Hall effect” has only been seen in a few systems, usually under very high magnetic fields. The Ju work showed that the phenomenon could occur in a fairly simple material without a magnetic field. As a result, it is called the “fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect” (anomalous indicates that no magnetic field is necessary).

New results

In the current work, the Ju team reports yet more unexpected phenomena from the general rhombohedral graphene/boron nitride system when it is cooled to 30 millikelvins (1 millikelvin is equivalent to -459.668 degrees Fahrenheit). In last year’s paper, Ju and colleagues reported six fractional states of electrons. In the current work, they report discovering two more of these fractional states.

They also found another unusual electronic phenomenon: the integer quantum anomalous Hall effect in a wide range of electron densities. The fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect was understood to emerge in an electron “liquid” phase, analogous to water. In contrast, the new state that the team has now observed can be interpreted as an electron “solid” phase — resembling the formation of electronic “ice” — that can also coexist with the fractional quantum anomalous Hall states when the system’s voltage is carefully tuned at ultra-low temperatures.

One way to think about the relation between the integer and fractional states is to imagine a map created by tuning electric voltages: By tuning the system with different voltages, you can create a “landscape” similar to a river (which represents the liquid-like fractional states) cutting through glaciers (which represent the solid-like integer effect), Ju explains.

Ju notes that his team observed all of these phenomena not only in pentalayer rhombohedral graphene, but also in rhombohedral graphene composed of four layers. This creates a family of materials, and indicates that other “relatives” may exist.

“This work shows how rich this material is in exhibiting exotic phenomena. We’ve just added more flavor to this already very interesting material,” says Zhengguang Lu, a co-first author of the paper. Lu, who conducted the work as a postdoc at MIT, is now on the faculty at Florida State University.

In addition to Ju and Lu, other principal authors of the Nature paper are Tonghang Han and Yuxuan Yao, both of MIT. Lu, Han, and Yao are co-first authors of the paper who contributed equally to the work. Other MIT authors are Jixiang Yang, Junseok Seo, Lihan Shi, and Shenyong Ye. Additional members of the team are Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

This work was supported by a Sloan Fellowship, a Mathworks Fellowship, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI, and the World Premier International Research Initiative of Japan. Device fabrication was performed at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems and MIT.nano. 

Nearly three years after Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, escalating a decade-long conflict, Ukrainian cities lie in ruin as the war drags on. The seaside city of Mariupol was particularly hard hit. Bombs hollowed out hospitals and homes and leveled banks and playgrounds. Schools sit charred and empty.

The remaining 30 percent of the population still residing in Mariupol, now under Russian occupation, lack reliable electricity, clean water, and medical care. And of the 65,000 Mariupolites in exile across Ukraine and abroad, many have no home to return to. While Ukraine’s future remains uncertain, its mayors and municipal managers are laser-focused on planning for recovery after the war. “Ukrainian communities know we should build back better when the war is finished, so what is that experience?” says Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol mayor and head of development of de-occupied and temporarily occupied communities for the Association of Ukrainian Cities. To secure funding for rebuilding, “leaders need to prepare good projects with vision and innovation for their communities,” he adds.

Success depends on drawing from cutting-edge research and forward-thinking approaches to urban economic development and planning. To expedite learning, the Kyiv-based Association of Ukrainian Cities, Mariupol City Council, and the nonprofit Mariupol Reborn created a virtual Community Recovery Academy that leans on MIT’s expertise. This online training program for Ukrainian officials includes a series of lectures by professors in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), part of the Institute’s School of Architecture and Planning. Talks include wisdom drawn from case studies coupled with theoretical lessons.

“When I first learned of this opportunity, trying to mobilize a contribution from DUSP was a no-brainer; it’s the very least we can offer,” says Christopher Zegras, DUSP department head and professor of mobility and urban planning. Increasingly destructive weather events and ongoing conflicts worldwide have made post-disaster planning “a global need, and unfortunately probably an increasing global need,” Zegras adds.

An MIT connection

The connection to Ukrainian officials came from Washington-based DUSP alumnus Victor Hoskins MCP ’81. Last spring, the president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority learned about Ukraine’s need from a former colleague he had worked with as deputy mayor of planning and economic development in D.C.

Hoskins has worked internationally, traveling often to Europe and Asia, where his office has branches that work to attract foreign companies to Fairfax County. In prior positions, “a lot of my work has centered around going into jurisdictions that are having trouble and turning them around economically,” Hoskins says.

He set up a call with the vice-mayor of Mariupol, Sergiy Orlov, and staff, who work in exile in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. “They’re in circumstances unimaginable to us,” Hoskins says. “Anything we can do to help is a good thing.” One strategy Hoskins has used in his own planning and development work is consulting academic institutions for guidance. Orlov asked him to suggest a few schools in the United States. “I said, try the best universities in the world,” says Hoskins. “Try MIT.”

Hoskins connected Orlov and Zegras, who pledged DUSP’s support after learning about the project. Officials from 37 communities across Ukraine, especially small- to medium-sized ones, were eager to learn best practices in urban development and about reconstruction planning and funding strategies to support rebuilding.

From Boichenko’s makeshift office, where air alerts are common and missiles often hum overhead, a small team sketched out the Community Recovery Academy’s modules and curriculum. The academy launched in September 2024 with seven MIT professors on board to give lectures as part of the initiative’s second of four modules: “Economic Modeling, Recovery of Cities and Territories.”

DUSP Lecturer Andrew Stokols, whose ancestors hail from Ukraine, helped Zegras coordinate schedules and calls. “It’s important to think about how planners can respond to ongoing conflicts in the world,” Stokols says. “Scholarly exchange is useful, and it’s nice to know we can do something, however small it is, to help out.”

Planning for the future

Lecture topics included transportation resilience and recovery by Jinhua Zhao, professor of cities and transport and director of MIT Mobility Initiative, and revitalizing main streets and small-town economic development strategies by Jeffrey Levine, associate professor of the practice of economic development and planning.

Andres Sevtsuk, associate professor of urban science and planning, spoke on street commerce and designing to create vibrant urban sidewalks. Former special assistant for manufacturing and economic development at the White House National Economic Council and current DUSP professor of the practice Liz Reynolds also spoke on industrial transformation. Timothy Sturgeon, an affiliate with the MIT Industrial Performance Center, ran a session with a Ukrainian counterpart on integrating Ukraine’s software industry with global value chains.

Talks were simultaneously translated into Ukrainian, and participants had ample time to ask pressing questions.

Mary Anne Ocampo, associate professor of the practice of urban design and planning and principal at Sasaki and Associates, shared insights from her work on Kabul’s 2017 to 2019 reconstruction during her presentation for Ukrainian officials.

She spoke about ways to attract investment and build consensus among key organizations and institutions that can support rebuilding, while encouraging Ukrainian leaders to consider how marginalized Ukrainian populations could influence reconstruction. Small, quick-win projects can be key, she said.

Albert Saiz, the Daniel Rose Associate Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate, imparted lessons around urban and housing economics plus the economics of master planning. He drew from examples of cities in the U.S. Midwest that had seen sharp declines, including Detroit and Cleveland. He also delved into Japan and Germany’s recoveries after World War II.

A crucial lesson for Ukraine is the vital role external trade plays in recovery, Saiz says. Post WWII, Japan focused on trade with other countries, and it emerged stronger because of it. “In Japan, cities recovered very quickly,” says Saiz. For Ukraine, “it’s important to reestablish firm-based external, international relationships right now.”

Saiz explained how to structure credit guarantees, which will be essential to helping Ukraine secure international financing. Building temporary structures can be helpful, too, he told officials — for example, constructing FEMA-type homes as an interim solution. Meanwhile, clarity in planning is key.

“I shared that you have to establish a clear path to your stakeholders, but then you have to have flexibility within that path,” Saiz says.

An ongoing collaboration

The Community Recovery Academy is currently underway with the support of the U.K. government under the U.K. International Development and the International Republican Institute (IRI UKRAINE), in collaboration with steel and mining company Metinvest and Ukrainian investment group SCM.

Metinvest and SCM are also supporting planning work that’s been underway through the nonprofit organization Mariupol Reborn. The group’s 2040 urban vision document includes insight from urban planners, architects and other experts. As for the academy, there’s ongoing demand for more lessons. “The request is quite huge,” Boichenko says. Around 100 territorial communities applied to participate in the academy, and the first phase accommodated a few dozen.

Orlov and Zegras hope to produce another set of MIT lectures this spring. Longer term, plans are in the works for a multidisciplinary, multi-departmental fall 2025 MIT practicum during which students would work alongside Ukrainian officials on recovery planning. In the meantime, lectures will be packaged into a free and open-access online learning course.

Zegras says he hopes the learning that’s gone into the work to date helps to provide an initial blueprint for Ukraine’s future, as well as for planning’s potential role in rebuilding in a world where these types of efforts are increasingly needed — whether it be Sudan, Gaza, or Los Angeles.

For Boichenko, the academy has been foundational work. “We are only in the beginning,” he says. “We are building strong relationships, and we are definitely happy to work with MIT.”

The following is part of a series of short interviews from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) featuring a student describing themselves and life at MIT. Today’s interviewee, Titus Roesler, is a senior majoring in electrical science and engineering. As a first-year at MIT, Roesler joined the Experimental Study Group (ESG), a learning community that offers new MIT students the general Institute requirements (GIRs) in a small, tight-knit class setting. Roesler stuck around as an associate advisor in subsequent years for new cohorts of first-year ESG students, as a teaching assistant for classes on calculus and group theory, and as an instructor for special seminars in electrical engineering that he designed from scratch and then taught. Roesler’s commitment to his academic community also goes deep. Besides his teaching work, for which he was recently honored with the EECS Undergraduate Teaching Award, he is a member of the Undergraduate Student Advisory Group in EECS (USAGE), which provides student feedback to the department. 

Q: Tell us about one teacher from your past who had an influence on the person you’ve become.

A: While a student in ESG, I took ES.1801 (Single-Variable Calculus), ES.1802 (Multivariable Calculus), and ES.1803 (Differential Equations), all with Gabrielle Stoy. One morning in late spring, Gabrielle asked me to stick around after class to speak with her. (I wondered which course policy I had violated, and worried throughout the lecture.) Instead, Gabrielle asked me if I would apply to be a teaching assistant for an ESG math class the next semester. I was ecstatic — and thus began my “teaching career” at MIT! Gabrielle formally retired from teaching mathematics in ESG in 2024, but we teamed up again to offer a special seminar on group theory over IAP [Independent Activities Period] 2025.

Q: What is one conversation that changed the trajectory of your life?

A: I’m grateful for all the conversations I’ve had with Prof. Denny Freeman. I appreciate his kindness, wisdom, and willingness to find time to discuss career plans, research, and education with me. I’ve always left his office feeling more ambitious and optimistic than I did when I walked in.

Q: Do you have a bucket list? If so, share one or two of the items on it.

A: Running the Boston Marathon was on my bucket list for a few years, and I checked that off in 2024. Beyond that, I would love to explore Antarctica — perhaps by living and working at a research station for a year.

Q: What’s your favorite key on a standard computer keyboard, and why?

A: The backslash ( \ ) key is my favorite. I use it often for TEX commands when typesetting.

Q: If you suddenly won the lottery, what would you spend some of the money on?

A: A bulk order of Hagoromo chalk — the so-called “Rolls-Royce of chalk!”

Q: If you had to teach a really in-depth class about a niche topic, what would you pick?

A: In the context of signal processing, filters sift out desired frequency bands while attenuating others. I’d be interested in teaching a class on the theory and practice behind filter design — constructing a filter that satisfies a set of specifications. For example, analog or digital? Finite impulse response or infinite impulse response? Group delay? Causality? Stability? Practical implementation? I’m not an expert in filter design myself, but I’d appreciate the opportunity to consolidate what I’ve learned so far and study the topic in greater depth.

MIT senior Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli and recent alumna Abigail (“Abbie”) Schipper ’24 have been selected as Gates Cambridge Scholars and will begin graduate studies this fall in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K.

Now celebrating its 25th year, the Gates Cambridge program provides fully funded post-graduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside of the U.K. The mission of Gates Cambridge is to build a global network of future leaders committed to changing the world for the better.

Students interested in applying to Gates Cambridge should contact Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships in Career Advising and Professional Development.

Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli

Freudenburg-Puricelli is majoring in Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and minoring in Spanish. Her passion for geoscience has led her to travel to different corners of the world to conduct geologic fieldwork. These experiences have motivated her to pursue a career in developing scientific policy and environmental regulation that can protect those most vulnerable to climate change. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she will pursue an MPhil in environmental policy.

Arriving at MIT, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Terrascope first-year learning community, which focuses on hands-on education relating to global environmental issues. She then became an undergraduate research assistant in the McGee Lab for Paleoclimate and Geochronology, where she gathered and interpreted data used to understand climate features of permafrost across northern Canada.

Following a summer internship in Chile researching volcanoes at the Universidad Católica del Norte, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Gehring Lab for Plant Genetics, Epigenetics, and Seed Biology. Last summer, she traveled to Peru to work with the Department of Paleontology at the Universidad Nacional de Piura, conducting fieldwork and preserving and organizing fossil specimens. Freudenburg-Puricelli has also done fieldwork on sedimentology in New Mexico, geological mapping in the Mojave Desert, and field oceanography onboard the SSV Corwith Cramer.

On campus, Freudenburg-Puricelli is an avid glassblower and has been a teaching assistant at the MIT glassblowing lab. She is also a tour guide for the MIT Office of Admissions and has volunteered with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences’ first-year pre-orientation program.

Abigail “Abbie” Schipper ’24

Originally from Portland, Oregon, Schipper graduated from MIT with a BS in mechanical engineering and a minor in biology. At Cambridge, she will pursue an MPhil in engineering, researching medical devices used in pre-hospital trauma systems in low- and middle-income countries with the Cambridge Health Systems Design group.

At MIT, Schipper was a member of MIT Emergency Medical Services, volunteering on the ambulance and serving as the heartsafe officer and director of ambulance operations. Inspired by her work in CPR education, she helped create the LifeSaveHer project, which aims to decrease the gender disparity in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival outcomes through the creation of female CPR mannequins and associated research. This team was the first-place winner of the 2023 PKG IDEAS Competition and a recipient of the Eloranta Research Fellowship.

Schipper’s work has also focused on designing medical devices for low-resource or extreme environments. As an undergraduate, she performed research in the lab of Professor Giovanni Traverso, where she worked on a project designing a drug delivery implant for regions with limited access to surgery. During a summer internship at the University College London Collaborative Center for Inclusion Health, she worked with the U.K.’s National Health Service to create durable, low-cost carbon dioxide sensors to approximate the risk of airborne infectious disease transmission in shelters for people experiencing homelessness.

After graduation, Schipper interned at SAGA Space Architecture through MISTI Denmark, designing life support systems for an underwater habitat that will be used for astronaut training and oceanographic research.

Schipper was a member of the Concourse learning community, Sigma Kappa Sorority, and her living group, Burton 3rd. In her free time, she enjoys fixing bicycles and playing the piano.

Maybe it’s a life hack or a liability, or a little of both. A surprising result in a new MIT study may suggest that people and animals alike share an inherent propensity to keep updating their approach to a task even when they have already learned how they should approach it, and even if the deviations sometimes lead to unnecessary error.

The behavior of “exploring” when one could just be “exploiting” could make sense for at least two reasons, says Mriganka Sur, senior author of the study published Feb. 18 in Current Biology. Just because a task’s rules seem set one moment doesn’t mean they’ll stay that way in this uncertain world, so altering behavior from the optimal condition every so often could help reveal needed adjustments. Moreover, trying new things when you already know what you like is a way of finding out whether there might be something even better out there than the good thing you’ve got going on right now.

“If the goal is to maximize reward, you should never deviate once you have found the perfect solution, yet you keep exploring,” says Sur, the Paul and Lilah Newton Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. “Why? It’s like food. We all like certain foods, but we still keep trying different foods because you never know, there might be something you could discover.”

Predicting timing

Former research technician Tudor Dragoi, now a graduate student at Boston University, led the study in which he and fellow members of the Sur Lab explored how humans and marmosets, a small primate, make predictions about event timing.

Three humans and two marmosets were given a simple task. They’d see an image on a screen for some amount of time — the amount of time varied from one trial to the next within a limited range — and they simply had to hit a button (marmosets poked a tablet while humans clicked a mouse) when the image disappeared. Success was defined as reacting as quickly as possible to the image’s disappearance without hitting the button too soon. Marmosets received a juice reward on successful trials.

Though marmosets needed more training time than humans, the subjects all settled into the same reasonable pattern of behavior regarding the task. The longer the image stayed on the screen, the faster their reaction time to its disappearance. This behavior follows the “hazard model” of prediction in which, if the image can only last for so long, the longer it’s still there, the more likely it must be to disappear very soon. The subjects learned this and overall, with more experience, their reaction times became faster.

But as the experiment continued, Sur and Dragoi’s team noticed something surprising was also going on. Mathematical modeling of the reaction time data revealed that both the humans and marmosets were letting the results of the immediate previous trial influence what they did on the next trial, even though they had already learned what to do. If the image was only on the screen briefly in one trial, on the next round subjects would decrease reaction time a bit (presumably expecting a shorter image duration again) whereas if the image lingered, they’d increase reaction time (presumably because they figured they’d have a longer wait).

Those results add to ones from a similar study Sur’s lab published in 2023, in which they found that even after mice learned the rules of a different cognitive task, they’d arbitrarily deviate from the winning strategy every so often. In that study, like this one, learning the successful strategy didn’t prevent subjects from continuing to test alternatives, even if it meant sacrificing reward.

“The persistence of behavioral changes even after task learning may reflect exploration as a strategy for seeking and setting on an optimal internal model of the environment,” the scientists wrote in the new study.

Relevance for autism

The similarity of the human and marmoset behaviors is an important finding as well, Sur says. That’s because differences in making predictions about one’s environment is posited to be a salient characteristic of autism spectrum disorders. Because marmosets are small, are inherently social, and are more cognitively complex than mice, work has begun in some labs to establish marmoset autism models, but a key component was establishing that they model autism-related behaviors well. By demonstrating that marmosets model neurotypical human behavior regarding predictions, the study therefore adds weight to the emerging idea that marmosets can indeed provide informative models for autism studies.

In addition to Dragoi and Sur, other authors of the paper are Hiroki Sugihara, Nhat Le, Elie Adam, Jitendra Sharma, Guoping Feng, and Robert Desimone.

The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative supported the research through the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT.

As part of a multi-pronged approach toward curbing the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists seek to better understand the impact of rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels on terrestrial ecosystems, particularly tropical forests. To that end, climate scientist César Terrer, the Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at MIT, and colleague Josh Fisher of Chapman University are bringing their scientific minds to bear on a unique setting — an active volcano in Costa Rica — as a way to study carbon dioxide emissions and their influence. 

Elevated CO₂ levels can lead to a phenomenon known as the CO₂ fertilization effect, where plants grow more and absorb greater amounts of carbon, providing a cooling effect. While this effect has the potential to be a natural climate change mitigator, the extent of how much carbon plants can continue to absorb remains uncertain. There are growing concerns from scientists that plants may eventually reach a saturation point, losing their ability to offset increasing atmospheric CO₂. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for accurate climate predictions and developing strategies to manage carbon sequestration. Here, Terrer discusses his innovative approach, his motivations for joining the project, and the importance of advancing this research.

Q: Why did you get involved in this line of research, and what makes it unique?

A: Josh Fisher, a climate scientist and long-time collaborator, had the brilliant idea to take advantage of naturally high CO₂ levels near active volcanoes to study the fertilization effect in real-world conditions. Conducting such research in dense tropical forests like the Amazon — where the largest uncertainties about CO₂ fertilization exist — is challenging. It would require large-scale CO₂ tanks and extensive infrastructure to evenly distribute the gas throughout the towering trees and intricate canopy layers — a task that is not only logistically complex, but also highly costly. Our approach allows us to circumvent those obstacles and gather critical data in a way that hasn't been done before.

Josh was looking for an expert in the field of carbon ecology to co-lead and advance this research with him. My expertise of understanding the dynamics that regulate carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems within the context of climate change made for a natural fit to co-lead and advance this research with him. This field has been central to my research, and was the focus of my PhD thesis.

Our experiments inside the Rincon de la Vieja National Park are particularly exciting because CO₂ concentrations in the areas near the volcano are four times higher than the global average. This gives us a rare opportunity to observe how elevated CO₂ affects plant biomass in a natural setting — something that has never been attempted at this scale.

Q: How are you measuring CO₂ concentrations at the volcano?

A: We have installed a network of 50 sensors in the forest canopy surrounding the volcano. These sensors continuously monitor CO₂ levels, allowing us to compare areas with naturally high CO₂ emissions from the volcano to control areas with typical atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. The sensors are Bluetooth-enabled, requiring us to be in close proximity to retrieve the data. They will remain in place for a full year, capturing a continuous dataset on CO₂ fluctuations. Our next data collection trip is scheduled for March, with another planned a year after the initial deployment.

Q: What are the long-term goals of this research?

A: Our primary objective is to determine whether the CO₂ fertilization effect can be sustained, or if plants will eventually reach a saturation point, limiting their ability to absorb additional carbon. Understanding this threshold is crucial for improving climate models and carbon mitigation strategies.

To expand the scope of our measurements, we are exploring the use of airborne technologies — such as drones or airplane-mounted sensors — to assess carbon storage across larger areas. This would provide a more comprehensive view of carbon sequestration potential in tropical ecosystems. Ultimately, this research could offer critical insights into the future role of forests in mitigating climate change, helping scientists and policymakers develop more accurate carbon budgets and climate projections. If successful, our approach could pave the way for similar studies in other ecosystems, deepening our understanding of how nature responds to rising CO₂ levels.

All biological function is dependent on how different proteins interact with each other. Protein-protein interactions facilitate everything from transcribing DNA and controlling cell division to higher-level functions in complex organisms.

Much remains unclear, however, about how these functions are orchestrated on the molecular level, and how proteins interact with each other — either with other proteins or with copies of themselves.

Recent findings have revealed that small protein fragments have a lot of functional potential. Even though they are incomplete pieces, short stretches of amino acids can still bind to interfaces of a target protein, recapitulating native interactions. Through this process, they can alter that protein’s function or disrupt its interactions with other proteins.

Protein fragments could therefore empower both basic research on protein interactions and cellular processes, and could potentially have therapeutic applications.

Recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a new method developed in the Department of Biology builds on existing artificial intelligence models to computationally predict protein fragments that can bind to and inhibit full-length proteins in E. coli. Theoretically, this tool could lead to genetically encodable inhibitors against any protein.

The work was done in the lab of associate professor of biology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Gene-Wei Li in collaboration with the lab of Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology, professor of biological engineering, and department head Amy Keating.

Leveraging machine learning

The program, called FragFold, leverages AlphaFold, an AI model that has led to phenomenal advancements in biology in recent years due to its ability to predict protein folding and protein interactions.

The goal of the project was to predict fragment inhibitors, which is a novel application of AlphaFold. The researchers on this project confirmed experimentally that more than half of FragFold’s predictions for binding or inhibition were accurate, even when researchers had no previous structural data on the mechanisms of those interactions.

“Our results suggest that this is a generalizable approach to find binding modes that are likely to inhibit protein function, including for novel protein targets, and you can use these predictions as a starting point for further experiments,” says co-first and corresponding author Andrew Savinov, a postdoc in the Li Lab. “We can really apply this to proteins without known functions, without known interactions, without even known structures, and we can put some credence in these models we’re developing.”

One example is FtsZ, a protein that is key for cell division. It is well-studied but contains a region that is intrinsically disordered and, therefore, especially challenging to study. Disordered proteins are dynamic, and their functional interactions are very likely fleeting — occurring so briefly that current structural biology tools can’t capture a single structure or interaction.

The researchers leveraged FragFold to explore the activity of fragments of FtsZ, including fragments of the intrinsically disordered region, to identify several new binding interactions with various proteins. This leap in understanding confirms and expands upon previous experiments measuring FtsZ’s biological activity.

This progress is significant in part because it was made without solving the disordered region’s structure, and because it exhibits the potential power of FragFold.

“This is one example of how AlphaFold is fundamentally changing how we can study molecular and cell biology,” Keating says. “Creative applications of AI methods, such as our work on FragFold, open up unexpected capabilities and new research directions.”

Inhibition, and beyond

The researchers accomplished these predictions by computationally fragmenting each protein and then modeling how those fragments would bind to interaction partners they thought were relevant.

They compared the maps of predicted binding across the entire sequence to the effects of those same fragments in living cells, determined using high-throughput experimental measurements in which millions of cells each produce one type of protein fragment.

AlphaFold uses co-evolutionary information to predict folding, and typically evaluates the evolutionary history of proteins using something called multiple sequence alignments for every single prediction run. The MSAs are critical, but are a bottleneck for large-scale predictions — they can take a prohibitive amount of time and computational power.

For FragFold, the researchers instead pre-calculated the MSA for a full-length protein once, and used that result to guide the predictions for each fragment of that full-length protein.

Savinov, together with Keating Lab alumnus Sebastian Swanson PhD ’23, predicted inhibitory fragments of a diverse set of proteins in addition to FtsZ. Among the interactions they explored was a complex between lipopolysaccharide transport proteins LptF and LptG. A protein fragment of LptG inhibited this interaction, presumably disrupting the delivery of lipopolysaccharide, which is a crucial component of the E. coli outer cell membrane essential for cellular fitness.

“The big surprise was that we can predict binding with such high accuracy and, in fact, often predict binding that corresponds to inhibition,” Savinov says. “For every protein we’ve looked at, we’ve been able to find inhibitors.”

The researchers initially focused on protein fragments as inhibitors because whether a fragment could block an essential function in cells is a relatively simple outcome to measure systematically. Looking forward, Savinov is also interested in exploring fragment function outside inhibition, such as fragments that can stabilize the protein they bind to, enhance or alter its function, or trigger protein degradation.

Design, in principle

This research is a starting point for developing a systemic understanding of cellular design principles, and what elements deep-learning models may be drawing on to make accurate predictions.

“There’s a broader, further-reaching goal that we’re building towards,” Savinov says. “Now that we can predict them, can we use the data we have from predictions and experiments to pull out the salient features to figure out what AlphaFold has actually learned about what makes a good inhibitor?”

Savinov and collaborators also delved further into how protein fragments bind, exploring other protein interactions and mutating specific residues to see how those interactions change how the fragment interacts with its target.

Experimentally examining the behavior of thousands of mutated fragments within cells, an approach known as deep mutational scanning, revealed key amino acids that are responsible for inhibition. In some cases, the mutated fragments were even more potent inhibitors than their natural, full-length sequences.

“Unlike previous methods, we are not limited to identifying fragments in experimental structural data,” says Swanson. “The core strength of this work is the interplay between high-throughput experimental inhibition data and the predicted structural models: the experimental data guides us towards the fragments that are particularly interesting, while the structural models predicted by FragFold provide a specific, testable hypothesis for how the fragments function on a molecular level.”

Savinov is excited about the future of this approach and its myriad applications.

“By creating compact, genetically encodable binders, FragFold opens a wide range of possibilities to manipulate protein function,” Li agrees. “We can imagine delivering functionalized fragments that can modify native proteins, change their subcellular localization, and even reprogram them to create new tools for studying cell biology and treating diseases.” 

Seven MIT faculty and 21 additional MIT alumni are among 126 early-career researchers honored with 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The recipients represent the MIT departments of Biology; Chemical Engineering; Chemistry; Civil and Environmental Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Economics; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Mathematics; and Physics as well as the Music and Theater Arts Section and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The fellowships honor exceptional researchers at U.S. and Canadian educational institutions, whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders. Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship that can be used flexibly to advance the fellow’s research.

“The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition, and rigor that drive discovery forward,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These extraordinary scholars are already making significant contributions, and we are confident they will shape the future of their fields in remarkable ways.”

Including this year’s recipients, a total of 333 MIT faculty have received Sloan Research Fellowships since the program’s inception in 1955. MIT and Northwestern University are tied for having the most faculty in the 2025 cohort of fellows, each with seven. The MIT recipients are: 

Ariel L. Furst is the Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Her lab combines biological, chemical, and materials engineering to solve challenges in human health and environmental sustainability, with lab members developing technologies for implementation in low-resource settings to ensure equitable access to technology. Furst completed her PhD in the lab of Professor Jacqueline K. Barton at Caltech developing new cancer diagnostic strategies based on DNA charge transport. She was then an A.O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Professor Matthew Francis at the University of California at Berkeley, developing sensors to monitor environmental pollutants. She is the recipient of the NIH New Innovator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. She is passionate about STEM outreach and increasing participation of underrepresented groups in engineering.

Mohsen Ghaffari SM ’13, PhD ’17 is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) as well as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research explores the theory of distributed and parallel computation, and he has had influential work on a range of algorithmic problems, including generic derandomization methods for distributed computing and parallel computing (which resolved several decades-old open problems), improved distributed algorithms for graph problems, sublinear algorithms derived via distributed techniques, and algorithmic and impossibility results for massively parallel computation. His work has been recognized with best paper awards at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), and the International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), the European Research Council's Starting Grant, and a Google Faculty Research Award, among others.

Marzyeh Ghassemi PhD ’17 is an associate professor within EECS and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). Ghassemi earned two bachelor’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from New Mexico State University as a Goldwater Scholar; her MS in biomedical engineering from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar; and her PhD in computer science from MIT. Following stints as a visiting researcher with Alphabet’s Verily and an assistant professor at University of Toronto, Ghassemi joined EECS and IMES as an assistant professor in July 2021. (IMES is the home of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.) She is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and CSAIL. Ghassemi’s research in the Healthy ML Group creates a rigorous quantitative framework in which to design, develop, and place machine learning models in a way that is robust and useful, focusing on health settings. Her contributions range from socially-aware model construction to improving subgroup- and shift-robust learning methods to identifying important insights in model deployment scenarios that have implications in policy, health practice, and equity. Among other awards, Ghassemi has been named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 and an AI2050 Fellow, as well as receiving the 2018 Seth J. Teller Award, the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data, a 2024 NSF CAREER Award, and the Google Research Scholar Award. She founded the nonprofit Association for Health, Inference and Learning (AHLI) and her work has been featured in popular press such as Forbes, Fortune, MIT News, and The Huffington Post.

Darcy McRose is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is an environmental microbiologist who draws on techniques from genetics, chemistry, and geosciences to understand the ways microbes control nutrient cycling and plant health. Her laboratory uses small molecules, or “secondary metabolites,” made by plants and microbes as tractable experiments tools to study microbial activity in complex environments like soils and sediments. In the long term, this work aims to uncover fundamental controls on microbial physiology and community assembly that can be used to promote agricultural sustainability, ecosystem health, and human prosperity.

Sarah Millholland, an assistant professor of physics at MIT and member of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, is a theoretical astrophysicist who studies extrasolar planets, including their formation and evolution, orbital dynamics, and interiors/atmospheres. She studies patterns in the observed planetary orbital architectures, referring to properties like the spacings, eccentricities, inclinations, axial tilts, and planetary size relationships. She specializes in investigating how gravitational interactions such as tides, resonances, and spin dynamics sculpt observable exoplanet properties. She is the 2024 recipient of the Vera Rubin Early Career Award for her contributions to the formation and dynamics of extrasolar planetary systems. She plans to use her Sloan Fellowship to explore how tidal physics shape the diversity of orbits and interiors of exoplanets orbiting close to their stars.

Emil Verner is the Albert F. (1942) and Jeanne P. Clear Career Development Associate Professor of Global Management and an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research lies at the intersection of finance and macroeconomics, with a particular focus on understanding the causes and consequences of financial crises over the past 150 years. Verner’s recent work examines the drivers of bank runs and insolvency during banking crises, the role of debt booms in amplifying macroeconomic fluctuations, the effectiveness of debt relief policies during crises, and how financial crises impact political polarization and support for populist parties. Before joining MIT, he earned a PhD in economics from Princeton University.

Christian Wolf, the Rudi Dornbusch Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, works in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometrics. His work focuses on the development and application of new empirical methods to address classic macroeconomic questions and to evaluate how robust the answers are to a range of common modeling assumptions. His research has provided path-breaking insights on monetary transmission mechanisms and fiscal policy. In a separate strand of work, Wolf has substantially deepened our understanding of the appropriate methods macroeconomists should use to estimate impulse response functions — how key economic variables respond to policy changes or unexpected shocks.

The following MIT alumni also received fellowships: 

Jason Altschuler SM ’18, PhD ’22
David Bau III PhD ’21 
Rene Boiteau PhD ’16 
Lynne Chantranupong PhD ’17
Lydia B. Chilton ’06, ’07, MNG ’09 
Jordan Cotler ’15 
Alexander Ji PhD ’17 
Sarah B. King ’10
Allison Z. Koenecke ’14 
Eric Larson PhD ’18
Chen Lian ’15, PhD ’20
Huanqian Loh ’06 
Ian J. Moult PhD ’16
Lisa Olshansky PhD ’15
Andrew Owens SM ’13, PhD ’16 
Matthew Rognlie PhD ’16
David Rolnick ’12, PhD ’18 
Shreya Saxena PhD ’17
Mark Sellke ’18
Amy X. Zhang PhD ’19 
Aleksandr V. Zhukhovitskiy PhD ’16

In the race to reduce climate-warming carbon emissions, the buildings sector is falling behind. While carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in the U.S. electric power sector dropped by 34 percent between 2005 and 2021, emissions in the building sector declined by only 18 percent in that same time period. Moreover, in extremely cold locations, burning natural gas to heat houses can make up a substantial share of the emissions portfolio. Therefore, steps to electrify buildings in general, and residential heating in particular, are essential for decarbonizing the U.S. energy system.

But that change will increase demand for electricity and decrease demand for natural gas. What will be the net impact of those two changes on carbon emissions and on the cost of decarbonizing? And how will the electric power and natural gas sectors handle the new challenges involved in their long-term planning for future operations and infrastructure investments?

A new study by MIT researchers with support from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Future Energy Systems Center unravels the impacts of various levels of electrification of residential space heating on the joint power and natural gas systems. A specially devised modeling framework enabled them to estimate not only the added costs and emissions for the power sector to meet the new demand, but also any changes in costs and emissions that result for the natural gas sector.

The analyses brought some surprising outcomes. For example, they show that — under certain conditions — switching 80 percent of homes to heating by electricity could cut carbon emissions and at the same time significantly reduce costs over the combined natural gas and electric power sectors relative to the case in which there is only modest switching. That outcome depends on two changes: Consumers must install high-efficiency heat pumps plus take steps to prevent heat losses from their homes, and planners in the power and the natural gas sectors must work together as they make long-term infrastructure and operations decisions. Based on their findings, the researchers stress the need for strong state, regional, and national policies that encourage and support the steps that homeowners and industry planners can take to help decarbonize today’s building sector.

A two-part modeling approach

To analyze the impacts of electrification of residential heating on costs and emissions in the combined power and gas sectors, a team of MIT experts in building technology, power systems modeling, optimization techniques, and more developed a two-part modeling framework. Team members included Rahman Khorramfar, a senior postdoc in MITEI and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS); Morgan Santoni-Colvin SM ’23, a former MITEI graduate research assistant, now an associate at Energy and Environmental Economics, Inc.; Saurabh Amin, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and principal investigator in LIDS; Audun Botterud, a principal research scientist in LIDS; Leslie Norford, a professor in the Department of Architecture; and Dharik Mallapragada, a former MITEI principal research scientist, now an assistant professor at New York University, who led the project. They describe their new methods and findings in a paper published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability on Feb. 6.

The first model in the framework quantifies how various levels of electrification will change end-use demand for electricity and for natural gas, and the impacts of possible energy-saving measures that homeowners can take to help. “To perform that analysis, we built a ‘bottom-up’ model — meaning that it looks at electricity and gas consumption of individual buildings and then aggregates their consumption to get an overall demand for power and for gas,” explains Khorramfar. By assuming a wide range of building “archetypes” — that is, groupings of buildings with similar physical characteristics and properties — coupled with trends in population growth, the team could explore how demand for electricity and for natural gas would change under each of five assumed electrification pathways: “business as usual” with modest electrification, medium electrification (about 60 percent of homes are electrified), high electrification (about 80 percent of homes make the change), and medium and high electrification with “envelope improvements,” such as sealing up heat leaks and adding insulation.

The second part of the framework consists of a model that takes the demand results from the first model as inputs and “co-optimizes” the overall electricity and natural gas system to minimize annual investment and operating costs while adhering to any constraints, such as limits on emissions or on resource availability. The modeling framework thus enables the researchers to explore the impact of each electrification pathway on the infrastructure and operating costs of the two interacting sectors.

The New England case study: A challenge for electrification

As a case study, the researchers chose New England, a region where the weather is sometimes extremely cold and where burning natural gas to heat houses contributes significantly to overall emissions. “Critics will say that electrification is never going to happen [in New England]. It’s just too expensive,” comments Santoni-Colvin. But he notes that most studies focus on the electricity sector in isolation. The new framework considers the joint operation of the two sectors and then quantifies their respective costs and emissions. “We know that electrification will require large investments in the electricity infrastructure,” says Santoni-Colvin. “But what hasn’t been well quantified in the literature is the savings that we generate on the natural gas side by doing that — so, the system-level savings.”

Using their framework, the MIT team performed model runs aimed at an 80 percent reduction in building-sector emissions relative to 1990 levels — a target consistent with regional policy goals for 2050. The researchers defined parameters including details about building archetypes, the regional electric power system, existing and potential renewable generating systems, battery storage, availability of natural gas, and other key factors describing New England.

They then performed analyses assuming various scenarios with different mixes of home improvements. While most studies assume typical weather, they instead developed 20 projections of annual weather data based on historical weather patterns and adjusted for the effects of climate change through 2050. They then analyzed their five levels of electrification.

Relative to business-as-usual projections, results from the framework showed that high electrification of residential heating could more than double the demand for electricity during peak periods and increase overall electricity demand by close to 60 percent. Assuming that building-envelope improvements are deployed in parallel with electrification reduces the magnitude and weather sensitivity of peak loads and creates overall efficiency gains that reduce the combined demand for electricity plus natural gas for home heating by up to 30 percent relative to the present day. Notably, a combination of high electrification and envelope improvements resulted in the lowest average cost for the overall electric power-natural gas system in 2050.

Lessons learned

Replacing existing natural gas-burning furnaces and boilers with heat pumps reduces overall energy consumption. Santoni-Colvin calls it “something of an intuitive result” that could be expected because heat pumps are “just that much more efficient than old, fossil fuel-burning systems. But even so, we were surprised by the gains.”

Other unexpected results include the importance of homeowners making more traditional energy efficiency improvements, such as adding insulation and sealing air leaks — steps supported by recent rebate policies. Those changes are critical to reducing costs that would otherwise be incurred for upgrading the electricity grid to accommodate the increased demand. “You can’t just go wild dropping heat pumps into everybody’s houses if you’re not also considering other ways to reduce peak loads. So it really requires an ‘all of the above’ approach to get to the most cost-effective outcome,” says Santoni-Colvin.

Testing a range of weather outcomes also provided important insights. Demand for heating fuel is very weather-dependent, yet most studies are based on a limited set of weather data — often a “typical year.” The researchers found that electrification can lead to extended peak electric load events that can last for a few days during cold winters. Accordingly, the researchers conclude that there will be a continuing need for a “firm, dispatchable” source of electricity; that is, a power-generating system that can be relied on to produce power any time it’s needed — unlike solar and wind systems. As examples, they modeled some possible technologies, including power plants fired by a low-carbon fuel or by natural gas equipped with carbon capture equipment. But they point out that there’s no way of knowing what types of firm generators will be available in 2050. It could be a system that’s not yet mature, or perhaps doesn’t even exist today.

In presenting their findings, the researchers note several caveats. For one thing, their analyses don’t include the estimated cost to homeowners of installing heat pumps. While that cost is widely discussed and debated, that issue is outside the scope of their current project.

In addition, the study doesn’t specify what happens to existing natural gas pipelines. “Some homes are going to electrify and get off the gas system and not have to pay for it, leaving other homes with increasing rates because the gas system cost now has to be divided among fewer customers,” says Khorramfar. “That will inevitably raise equity questions that need to be addressed by policymakers.”

Finally, the researchers note that policies are needed to drive residential electrification. Current financial support for installation of heat pumps and steps to make homes more thermally efficient are a good start. But such incentives must be coupled with a new approach to planning energy infrastructure investments. Traditionally, electric power planning and natural gas planning are performed separately. However, to decarbonize residential heating, the two sectors should coordinate when planning future operations and infrastructure needs. Results from the MIT analysis indicate that such cooperation could significantly reduce both emissions and costs for residential heating — a change that would yield a much-needed step toward decarbonizing the buildings sector as a whole.

MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has transformed the landscape of water and food research at MIT, driving faculty engagement and catalyzing new research and innovation in these critical areas. With philanthropic, corporate, and government support, J-WAFS’ strategic approach spans the entire research life cycle, from support for early-stage research to commercialization grants for more advanced projects.

Over the past decade, J-WAFS has invested approximately $25 million in direct research funding to support MIT faculty pursuing transformative research with the potential for significant impact. “Since awarding our first cohort of seed grants in 2015, it’s remarkable to look back and see that over 10 percent of the MIT faculty have benefited from J-WAFS funding,” observes J-WAFS Executive Director Renee J. Robins ’83. “Many of these professors hadn’t worked on water or food challenges before their first J-WAFS grant.” 

By fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and supporting high-risk, high-reward projects, J-WAFS has amplified the capacity of MIT faculty to pursue groundbreaking research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges facing our water and food systems.

Drawing MIT faculty to water and food research

J-WAFS open calls for proposals enable faculty to explore bold ideas and develop impactful approaches to tackling critical water and food system challenges. Professor Patrick Doyle’s work in water purification exemplifies this impact. “Without J-WAFS, I would have never ventured into the field of water purification,” Doyle reflects. While previously focused on pharmaceutical manufacturing and drug delivery, exposure to J-WAFS-funded peers led him to apply his expertise in soft materials to water purification. “Both the funding and the J-WAFS community led me to be deeply engaged in understanding some of the key challenges in water purification and water security,” he explains.

Similarly, Professor Otto Cordero of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) leveraged J-WAFS funding to pivot his research into aquaculture. Cordero explains that his first J-WAFS seed grant “has been extremely influential for my lab because it allowed me to take a step in a new direction, with no preliminary data in hand.” Cordero’s expertise is in microbial communities. He was previous unfamiliar with aquaculture, but he saw the relevance of microbial communities the health of farmed aquatic organisms.

Supporting early-career faculty

New assistant professors at MIT have particularly benefited from J-WAFS funding and support. J-WAFS has played a transformative role in shaping the careers and research trajectories of many new faculty members by encouraging them to explore novel research areas, and in many instances providing their first MIT research grant.

Professor Ariel Furst reflects on how pivotal J-WAFS’ investment has been in advancing her research. “This was one of the first grants I received after starting at MIT, and it has truly shaped the development of my group’s research program,” Furst explains. With J-WAFS’ backing, her lab has achieved breakthroughs in chemical detection and remediation technologies for water. “The support of J-WAFS has enabled us to develop the platform funded through this work beyond the initial applications to the general detection of environmental contaminants and degradation of those contaminants,” she elaborates. 

Karthish Manthiram, now a professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Caltech, explains how J-WAFS’ early investment enabled him and other young faculty to pursue ambitious ideas. “J-WAFS took a big risk on us,” Manthiram reflects. His research on breaking the nitrogen triple bond to make ammonia for fertilizer was initially met with skepticism. However, J-WAFS’ seed funding allowed his lab to lay the groundwork for breakthroughs that later attracted significant National Science Foundation (NSF) support. “That early funding from J-WAFS has been pivotal to our long-term success,” he notes. 

These stories underscore the broad impact of J-WAFS’ support for early-career faculty, and its commitment to empowering them to address critical global challenges and innovate boldly.

Fueling follow-on funding 

J-WAFS seed grants enable faculty to explore nascent research areas, but external funding for continued work is usually necessary to achieve the full potential of these novel ideas. “It’s often hard to get funding for early stage or out-of-the-box ideas,” notes J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “My hope, when I founded J-WAFS in 2014, was that seed grants would allow PIs [principal investigators] to prove out novel ideas so that they would be attractive for follow-on funding. And after 10 years, J-WAFS-funded research projects have brought more than $21 million in subsequent awards to MIT.”

Professor Retsef Levi led a seed study on how agricultural supply chains affect food safety, with a team of faculty spanning the MIT schools Engineering and Science as well as the MIT Sloan School of Management. The team parlayed their seed grant research into a multi-million-dollar follow-on initiative. Levi reflects, “The J-WAFS seed funding allowed us to establish the initial credibility of our team, which was key to our success in obtaining large funding from several other agencies.”

Dave Des Marais was an assistant professor in the Department of CEE when he received his first J-WAFS seed grant. The funding supported his research on how plant growth and physiology are controlled by genes and interact with the environment. The seed grant helped launch his lab’s work addressing enhancing climate change resilience in agricultural systems. The work led to his Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the NSF, a prestigious honor for junior faculty members. Now an associate professor, Des Marais’ ongoing project to further investigate the mechanisms and consequences of genomic and environmental interactions is supported by the five-year, $1,490,000 NSF grant. “J-WAFS providing essential funding to get my new research underway,” comments Des Marais.

Stimulating interdisciplinary collaboration

Des Marais’ seed grant was also key to developing new collaborations. He explains, “the J-WAFS grant supported me to develop a collaboration with Professor Caroline Uhler in EECS/IDSS [the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science/Institute for Data, Systems, and Society] that really shaped how I think about framing and testing hypotheses. One of the best things about J-WAFS is facilitating unexpected connections among MIT faculty with diverse yet complementary skill sets.”

Professors A. John Hart of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Benedetto Marelli of CEE also launched a new interdisciplinary collaboration with J-WAFS funding. They partnered to join expertise in biomaterials, microfabrication, and manufacturing, to create printed silk-based colorimetric sensors that detect food spoilage. “The J-WAFS Seed Grant provided a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary collaboration,” Hart notes.

Professors Stephen Graves in the MIT Sloan School of Management and Bishwapriya Sanyal in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) partnered to pursue new research on agricultural supply chains. With field work in Senegal, their J-WAFS-supported project brought together international development specialists and operations management experts to study how small firms and government agencies influence access to and uptake of irrigation technology by poorer farmers. “We used J-WAFS to spur a collaboration that would have been improbable without this grant,” they explain. Being part of the J-WAFS community also introduced them to researchers in Professor Amos Winter’s lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering working on irrigation technologies for low-resource settings. DUSP doctoral candidate Mark Brennan notes, “We got to share our understanding of how irrigation markets and irrigation supply chains work in developing economies, and then we got to contrast that with their understanding of how irrigation system models work.”

Timothy Swager, professor of chemistry, and Rohit Karnik, professor of mechanical engineering and J-WAFS associate director, collaborated on a sponsored research project supported by Xylem, Inc. through the J-WAFS Research Affiliate program. The cross-disciplinary research, which targeted the development of ultra-sensitive sensors for toxic PFAS chemicals, was conceived following a series of workshops hosted by J-WAFS. Swager and Karnik were two of the participants, and their involvement led to the collaborative proposal that Xylem funded. “J-WAFS funding allowed us to combine Swager lab’s expertise in sensing with my lab’s expertise in microfluidics to develop a cartridge for field-portable detection of PFAS,” says Karnik. “J-WAFS has enriched my research program in so many ways,” adds Swager, who is now working to commercialize the technology.

Driving global collaboration and impact

J-WAFS has also helped MIT faculty establish and advance international collaboration and impactful global research. By funding and supporting projects that connect MIT researchers with international partners, J-WAFS has not only advanced technological solutions, but also strengthened cross-cultural understanding and engagement.

Professor Matthew Shoulders leads the inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge project. In response to the first J-WAFS call for “Grand Challenge” proposals, Shoulders assembled an interdisciplinary team based at MIT to enhance and provide climate resilience to agriculture by improving the most inefficient aspect of photosynthesis, the notoriously-inefficient carbon dioxide-fixing plant enzyme RuBisCO. J-WAFS funded this high-risk/high-reward project following a competitive process that engaged external reviewers through a several rounds of iterative proposal development. The technical feedback to the team led them to researchers with complementary expertise from the Australian National University. “Our collaborative team of biochemists and synthetic biologists, computational biologists, and chemists is deeply integrated with plant biologists and field trial experts, yielding a robust feedback loop for enzyme engineering,” Shoulders says. “Together, this team will be able to make a concerted effort using the most modern, state-of-the-art techniques to engineer crop RuBisCO with an eye to helping make meaningful gains in securing a stable crop supply, hopefully with accompanying improvements in both food and water security.”

Professor Leon Glicksman and Research Engineer Eric Verploegen’s team designed a low-cost cooling chamber to preserve fruits and vegetables harvested by smallholder farmers with no access to cold chain storage. J-WAFS’ guidance motivated the team to prioritize practical considerations informed by local collaborators, ensuring market competitiveness. “As our new idea for a forced-air evaporative cooling chamber was taking shape, we continually checked that our solution was evolving in a direction that would be competitive in terms of cost, performance, and usability to existing commercial alternatives,” explains Verploegen, who is currently an MIT D-Lab affiliate. Following the team’s initial seed grant, the team secured a J-WAFS Solutions commercialization grant, which Verploegen say “further motivated us to establish partnerships with local organizations capable of commercializing the technology earlier in the project than we might have done otherwise.” The team has since shared an open-source design as part of its commercialization strategy to maximize accessibility and impact.

Bringing corporate sponsored research opportunities to MIT faculty

J-WAFS also plays a role in driving private partnerships, enabling collaborations that bridge industry and academia. Through its Research Affiliate Program, for example, J-WAFS provides opportunities for faculty to collaborate with industry on sponsored research, helping to convert scientific discoveries into licensable intellectual property (IP) that companies can turn into commercial products and services.

J-WAFS introduced professor of mechanical engineering Alex Slocum to a challenge presented by its research affiliate company, Xylem: how to design a more energy-efficient pump for fluctuating flows. With centrifugal pumps consuming an estimated 6 percent of U.S. electricity annually, Slocum and his then-graduate student Hilary Johnson SM '18, PhD '22 developed an innovative variable volute mechanism that reduces energy usage. “Xylem envisions this as the first in a new category of adaptive pump geometry,” comments Johnson. The research produced a pump prototype and related IP that Xylem is working on commercializing. Johnson notes that these outcomes “would not have been possible without J-WAFS support and facilitation of the Xylem industry partnership.” Slocum adds, “J-WAFS enabled Hilary to begin her work on pumps, and Xylem sponsored the research to bring her to this point … where she has an opportunity to do far more than the original project called for.”

Swager speaks highly of the impact of corporate research sponsorship through J-WAFS on his research and technology translation efforts. His PFAS project with Karnik described above was also supported by Xylem. “Xylem was an excellent sponsor of our research. Their engagement and feedback were instrumental in advancing our PFAS detection technology, now on the path to commercialization,” Swager says.

Looking forward

What J-WAFS has accomplished is more than a collection of research projects; a decade of impact demonstrates how J-WAFS’ approach has been transformative for many MIT faculty members. As Professor Mathias Kolle puts it, his engagement with J-WAFS “had a significant influence on how we think about our research and its broader impacts.” He adds that it “opened my eyes to the challenges in the field of water and food systems and the many different creative ideas that are explored by MIT.” 

This thriving ecosystem of innovation, collaboration, and academic growth around water and food research has not only helped faculty build interdisciplinary and international partnerships, but has also led to the commercialization of transformative technologies with real-world applications. C. Cem Taşan, the POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy who is leading a J-WAFS Solutions commercialization team that is about to launch a startup company, sums it up by noting, “Without J-WAFS, we wouldn’t be here at all.”  

As J-WAFS looks to the future, its continued commitment — supported by the generosity of its donors and partners — builds on a decade of success enabling MIT faculty to advance water and food research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Eight MIT researchers are among the 128 new members and 22 international members recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 2025. Thirteen additional MIT alumni were also elected as new members.

One of the highest professional distinctions for engineers, membership in the NAE is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

The eight MIT electees this year include:

Martin Zdenek Bazant, the E.G. Roos (1944) Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for contributions to nonlinear electrochemical and electrokinetic phenomena, including induced charge electroosmosis, shock electrodialysis, capacitive desalination, and energy storage applications.

Moshe E. Ben-Akiva SM ’71, PhD ’73, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was honored for advances in transportation and infrastructure systems modeling and demand analysis. 

Charles L. Cooney SM ’67, PhD ’70, professor emeritus of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for contributions to biochemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing that propelled the establishment and growth of the global biotechnology industry. 

Yoel Fink PhD ’00, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was honored for the design and production of structured photonic fibers, enabling surgeries and the invention of fabrics that sense and communicate. 

Tomás Lozano-Pérez ’73, SM ’77, PhD ’80, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of EECS and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was honored for contributions to robot motion planning and molecular design. 

Kristala L. Prather ’94, the Arthur Dehon Little Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for the development of innovative approaches to regulate metabolic flux in engineered microorganisms with applications to specialty chemicals production. 

Eric Swanson SM ’84, research affiliate at the Research Laboratory of Electronics and mentor for the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, was honored for contributions and entrepreneurship in biomedical imaging and optical communications. 

Evelyn N. Wang ’00, MIT's vice president for climate and Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was honored for contributions to clean energy, water technology, and nanostructure-based phase change heat transfer, and for service to the nation.

“I am thrilled that eight MIT researchers, along with many others from our broader MIT community, have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This is a well-deserved recognition of their outstanding contributions to the field of engineering, and I extend my heartfelt congratulations to them all.”

Thirteen additional alumni were elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year. They are: Gregg T. Beckham SM ’04, PhD ’08; Douglas C. Cameron PhD ’87; Long-Qing Chen PhD ’90; Jennifer R. Cochran PhD ’01; Christopher Richard Doerr ’89, ’90, SM ’90, PhD ’95;  Justin Hanes PhD ’96; Elizabeth Ann Holm SM ’89; Denise C. Johnson SM ’97; Wayne R. Johnson ’68, SM ’68, ScD ’70; Concetta LaMarca '81; Maja J. Matarić SM ’90, PhD ’94; David V. Schaffer PhD ’98; and Lixia Zhang PhD ’89.

A new initiative will offer faculty in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) the opportunity to participate in a semester-long internal fellows program.

The SHASS Faculty Fellows program, administered by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), will provide faculty with time to focus on their research, writing, or artistic production, and to receive collegial support for the same; to foster social and intellectual community within SHASS, including between faculty and students beyond the classroom; and provide informal opportunities to develop intergenerational professional mentorships.

“SHASS faculty have been eager for a supportive, vibrant internal community for the nearly 35 years I’ve been at MIT,” says Anne McCants, the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of History, and Faculty Fellows Program committee chair. “By providing participants with UROPs [Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program projects] and other opportunities to interact with students, we’re demonstrating our commitment to fostering an environment in which faculty can recharge and sustain the high-quality teaching and service our community has come to expect and appreciate.”

The creation of the program was one of the recommendations included in a May 2024 SHASS Programming Initiative Report, an effort led by Keeril Makan, SHASS associate dean for strategic initiatives, and the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor.

The inaugural group of fellows for Spring 2026 includes:

• Héctor Beltrán, Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor, MIT Anthropology
• Volha Charnysh, Ford Career Development Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
• Kevin Dorst, assistant professor, MIT Philosophy
• Richard Nielsen, associate professor, Department of Political Science
• Emily Richmond Pollock, associate professor, MIT Music
• Jessica Ruffin, assistant professor, MIT Literature
• Robin Scheffler, associate professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Tenure-line faculty are eligible to apply, with a maximum of 12 members selected per year, or roughly six participants per term.

Selected faculty will spend a semester outside the classroom while still holding time for sustained interaction with a small cohort of colleagues. Fellows can work with the dedicated students in UROP to advance their research projects while investing in a unique, cross-disciplinary set of conversations.

“I was honored to help design the Fellows Program and to serve on the review committee,” says Arthur Bahr, a professor in the Literature Section and a member of the Faculty Fellows Program Selection Committee. “I was fortunate to have wonderful mentors within Literature, but would have loved the opportunity to get to know and learn from colleagues in other fields, which the Fellows Program will offer.”

“What excites me about the Faculty Fellows Program — beyond the opportunity for faculty to connect with each other across disciplines and units — is that it will spotlight the excellence and centrality of the humanities, arts, and social sciences at MIT,” says Heather Paxson, SHASS associate dean for faculty, and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology. “I look forward to hearing about new ideas sparked, and new friendships made, through participation in the program.”

Organizers say the program signals that MIT takes its investment in the humanities, arts and social sciences as seriously as its peer institutions, most of which have internal fellows programs.

“Given the strong demand for something like this, getting the program up and running is an important signal to SHASS faculty that Dean [Agustín] Rayo hears their concerns and is committed to supporting this type of community development,” McCants notes.

Creating and sustaining fusion reactions — essentially recreating star-like conditions on Earth — is extremely difficult, and Nathan Howard PhD ’12, a principal research scientist at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), thinks it’s one of the most fascinating scientific challenges of our time. “Both the science and the overall promise of fusion as a clean energy source are really interesting. That motivated me to come to grad school [at MIT] and work at the PSFC,” he says.

Howard is member of the Magnetic Fusion Experiments Integrated Modeling (MFE-IM) group at the PSFC. Along with MFE-IM group leader Pablo Rodriguez-Fernandez, Howard and the team use simulations and machine learning to predict how plasma will behave in a fusion device. MFE-IM and Howard’s research aims to forecast a given technology or configuration’s performance before it’s piloted in an actual fusion environment, allowing for smarter design choices. To ensure their accuracy, these models are continuously validated using data from previous experiments, keeping their simulations grounded in reality.

In a recent open-access paper titled “Prediction of Performance and Turbulence in ITER Burning Plasmas via Nonlinear Gyrokinetic Profile Prediction,” published in the January issue of Nuclear Fusion, Howard explains how he used high-resolution simulations of the swirling structures present in plasma, called turbulence, to confirm that the world’s largest experimental fusion device, currently under construction in Southern France, will perform as expected when switched on. He also demonstrates how a different operating setup could produce nearly the same amount of energy output but with less energy input, a discovery that could positively affect the efficiency of fusion devices in general.

The biggest and best of what’s never been built

Forty years ago, the United States and six other member nations came together to build ITER (Latin for “the way”), a fusion device that, once operational, would yield 500 megawatts of fusion power, and a plasma able to generate 10 times more energy than it absorbs from external heating. The plasma setup designed to achieve these goals — the most ambitious of any fusion experiment — is called the ITER baseline scenario, and as fusion science and plasma physics have progressed, ways to achieve this plasma have been refined using increasingly more powerful simulations like the modeling framework Howard used.

In his work to verify the baseline scenario, Howard used CGYRO, a computer code developed by Howard’s collaborators at General Atomics. CGYRO applies a complex plasma physics model to a set of defined fusion operating conditions. Although it is time-intensive, CGYRO generates very detailed simulations on how plasma behaves at different locations within a fusion device.

The comprehensive CGYRO simulations were then run through the PORTALS framework, a collection of tools originally developed at MIT by Rodriguez-Fernandez. “PORTALS takes the high-fidelity [CGYRO] runs and uses machine learning to build a quick model called a ‘surrogate’ that can mimic the results of the more complex runs, but much faster,” Rodriguez-Fernandez explains. “Only high-fidelity modeling tools like PORTALS give us a glimpse into the plasma core before it even forms. This predict-first approach allows us to create more efficient plasmas in a device like ITER.”

After the first pass, the surrogates’ accuracy was checked against the high-fidelity runs, and if a surrogate wasn’t producing results in line with CGYRO’s, PORTALS was run again to refine the surrogate until it better mimicked CGYRO’s results. “The nice thing is, once you have built a well-trained [surrogate] model, you can use it to predict conditions that are different, with a very much reduced need for the full complex runs.” Once they were fully trained, the surrogates were used to explore how different combinations of inputs might affect ITER’s predicted performance and how it achieved the baseline scenario. Notably, the surrogate runs took a fraction of the time, and they could be used in conjunction with CGYRO to give it a boost and produce detailed results more quickly.

“Just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in”

Howard’s work with CGYRO, PORTALS, and surrogates examined a specific combination of operating conditions that had been predicted to achieve the baseline scenario. Those conditions included the magnetic field used, the methods used to control plasma shape, the external heating applied, and many other variables. Using 14 iterations of CGYRO, Howard was able to confirm that the current baseline scenario configuration could achieve 10 times more power output than input into the plasma. Howard says of the results, “The modeling we performed is maybe the highest fidelity possible at this time, and almost certainly the highest fidelity published.”

The 14 iterations of CGYRO used to confirm the plasma performance included running PORTALS to build surrogate models for the input parameters and then tying the surrogates to CGYRO to work more efficiently. It only took three additional iterations of CGYRO to explore an alternate scenario that predicted ITER could produce almost the same amount of energy with about half the input power. The surrogate-enhanced CGYRO model revealed that the temperature of the plasma core — and thus the fusion reactions — wasn’t overly affected by less power input; less power input equals more efficient operation. Howard’s results are also a reminder that there may be other ways to improve ITER’s performance; they just haven’t been discovered yet.

Howard reflects, “The fact that we can use the results of this modeling to influence the planning of experiments like ITER is exciting. For years, I’ve been saying that this was the goal of our research, and now that we actually do it — it’s an amazing arc, and really fulfilling.” 

In the fast-changing world of biotechnology, engineers need more than technical expertise — they need the ability to collaborate across disciplines, tackle complex problems, and define the challenges of tomorrow. That’s the mission of MIT’s class 20.051 (Introduction to NEET: Living Machines), a course within the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program.

The course offers undergraduates a sweeping introduction to the life sciences and biotech industry, equipping them with design, simulation, and experimental methods while fostering the interdisciplinary mindset needed for success. “Probably the most valuable aspect of 20.051,” says chemical-biological engineering major Grace Yang, “was the breadth of topics introduced. The life sciences/biotech industry is incredibly varied, but it’s sometimes hard to learn what the different paths are, especially if you’re just starting out. Being introduced to different fields — synthetic biology, immunology, etc. — definitely helps with exposure to different possibilities.”

Yang adds, “On the more technical side, there are skills like CAD or microfluidics design that I definitely wouldn’t have learned without the class.”

The School of Engineering launched the NEET program in 2017 to prepare undergraduates for the increasingly interdisciplinary environment of real-world work and research. Students start as sophomores in one of four areas of concentration or “threads” — Autonomous Machines, Climate and Sustainability Systems, Digital Cities, and Living Machines — and complete a three-year certificate program emphasizing hands-on learning and collaboration.

In the Living Machines thread, 20.051 stands out for helping students navigate and integrate insights from multiple disciplines. According to Mehdi Salek, a NEET lecturer and the course’s lead instructor, “The main objectives in designing 20.051 was to develop an interdisciplinary mindset and to equip students with essential engineering and communication skills for tackling challenges in biomedical engineering and biotechnology.”

Salek points out that mechanical engineering students, for instance, gain valuable opportunities to learn the language and foundational concepts of biology and chemistry. Meanwhile, students from life sciences disciplines expand their expertise by developing design and technical skills, creating a well-rounded, interdisciplinary learning experience.

The course introduces key topic design and fabrication methods, basic simulation techniques, problem-solving skills, and experimental design, says Salek, “all of which are critical for tackling complex biomedical challenges,” such as developing new treatment strategies to combat human disease.

“A hallmark of 20.051,” says Linda Griffith, the NEET Living Machines founding faculty lead and School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation, is teaching students one of the most challenging skills: “mastering the art of problem definition.” “We guide them to ask critical questions, like: What is the state of the art in the field? What would represent a giant leap forward? Can a single step accelerate progress across the field? Are new engineering approaches the key to transformational change where tools are currently insufficient?”

“We provide students with a graphic apprenticeship in the problem definition process,” Griffith says, “and set them up to solve the problems in their research immersions if they wish.”

Biological engineering major Zixuan Liu says one way in which 20.051 stood out from other classes is in its emphasis on hands-on projects. Working on an interdisciplinary team that included a chemical-biological engineering major and a computer science and molecular biology major, Liu helped design a microfluidics device, or “organ on a chip.” Such devices generally use living cells or tissue that are combined with other living components or chemical agents to replicate and experiment with interactions that can occur in the body. Liu’s team designed a device to model bone marrow. Its intended function was to replicate hematopoiesis — the development and differentiation of blood cells — in a miniature, controlled environment.

Computer science and engineering major Danny Antonelli says that through his 20.051 microfluidics project — which was designed to grow pain neurons in a diabetic medium in order to simulate diabetic neuropathy — “we got experience with simulation software, literature review, design software, 3D printing, and bio lab work, none of which I had done in a class before. And that was just for one of our projects!”

Throughout the class, students have significant opportunities to network, connect with researchers in different disciplines, and become part of a diverse, interdisciplinary community. “The guest lecturers are often PIs [principal investigators] of different labs throughout MIT. It was really helpful to hear their research firsthand, and we had the chance to introduce ourselves after class,” Antonelli says.

This term, 20.051 students are collaborating with Griffith’s lab to investigate the role of Fusobacterium nucleatum in endometriosis, while other students are working with Bryan Bryson, the Phillip and Susan Ragon Career Development Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, to address limitations in tuberculosis research. Bryson’s students are designing human microphysiological models to explore early infection responses, offering alternatives to traditional mouse models.

“The emphasis on interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration, and exposure to emerging technologies, push students to develop new skills and expand their perspectives,” Salek says. “This helps them to gain confidence in their ability to navigate complex challenges, communicate effectively across fields and disciplines, and pursue innovative solutions, which has a lasting effect on their academic and professional growth.”

In a classroom on the third floor of the MIT Media Lab, it’s quiet; the disc jockey is setting up. At the end of a conference table ringed with chairs, there are two turntables on either side of a mixer and a worn crossfader. A MacBook sits to the right of the setup.

Today’s class — CMS.303/803/21M.365 (DJ History, Technique, and Technology) — takes students to the 1970s, which means disco, funk, rhythm and blues, and the breaks that form the foundation of early hip-hop are in the mix. Instructor Philip Tan ’01, SM ’03 starts with a needle drop. Class is about to begin.

Tan is a research scientist with the MIT Game Lab — part of the Institute’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) program. An accomplished DJ and founder of a DJ crew at MIT, he’s been teaching students classic turntable and mixing techniques since 1998. Tan is also an accomplished game designer whose specialties include digital, live-action, and tabletop games, in both production and management. But today’s focus is on two turntables, a mixer, and music.

“DJ’ing is about using the platter as a music instrument,” Tan says as students begin filing into the classroom, “and creating a program for audiences to enjoy.”

Originally from Singapore, Tan arrived in the United States — first as a high school student in 1993, and later as an MIT student in 1997 — to study the humanities. He brought his passion for DJ culture with him.

“A high school friend in Singapore introduced DJ’ing to me in 1993,” he recalls. “We DJ’d a couple of school dances together and entered the same DJ competitions. Before that, though, I made mix tapes, pausing the cassette recorder while cuing up the next song on cassette, compact disc, or vinyl.”

Later, Tan wondered if his passion could translate into a viable course, exploring the idea over several years. “I wanted to find and connect with other folks on campus who might also be interested in DJ’ing,” he says. During MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in 2019, he led a four-week “Discotheque” lecture series at the Lewis Music Library, talking about vinyl records, DJ mixers, speakers, and digital audio. He also ran meetups for campus DJs in the MIT Music Production Collaborative.

“We couldn’t really do meetups and in-person performances during the pandemic, but I had the opportunity to offer a spring Experiential Learning Opportunity for MIT undergraduates, focused on DJ’ing over livestreams,” he says. The CMS/W program eventually let Tan expand the IAP course to a full-semester, full-credit course in spring 2023.

Showing students the basics

In the class, students learn the foundational practices necessary for live DJ mixing. They also explore a chosen contemporary or historical dance scene from around the world. The course investigates the evolution of DJ’ing and the technology used to make it possible. Students are asked to write and present their findings to the class based on historical research and interviews; create a mix tape showcasing their research into a historical development in dance music, mixing technique, or DJ technology; and end the semester with a live DJ event for the MIT community. Access to the popular course is granted via lottery.

“From circuits to signal processing, we have been able to see real-life uses of our course subjects in a fun and exciting way,” says Madeline Leano, a second-year student majoring in computer science and engineering and minoring in mathematics. “I’ve also always had a great love for music, and this class has already broadened my music taste as well as widened my appreciation for how music is produced.”

Leano lauded the class’s connections with her work in engineering and computer science. “[Tan] would always emphasize how all the parts of the mixing board work technically, which would come down to different electrical engineering and physics topics,” she notes. “It was super fun to see the overlap of our technical coursework with this class.”

During today’s class, Tan walks students through the evolution of the DJ’s tools, explaining the shifts in DJ’ing as it occurred alongside technological advances by companies producing the equipment. Tan delves into differences in hardware for disco and hip-hop DJs, how certain equipment like the Bozak CMA-10-2DL mixer lacked a crossfader, for example, while the UREI 1620 music mixer was all knobs. Needs changed as the culture changed, Tan explains, and so did the DJ’s tools.

He’s also immersing the class in music and cultural history, discussing the foundations of disco and hip-hop in the early 1970s and the former’s reign throughout the decade while the latter grew alongside it. Club culture for members of the LGBTQ+ community, safe spaces for marginalized groups to dance and express themselves, and previously unheard stories from these folks are carefully excavated and examined at length.

“Studying meter, reviewing music history, and learning new skills”

Toward the end of the class, each student takes their place behind the turntables. They’re searching by feel for the ease with which Tan switches back and forth between two tracks, trying to get the right blend of beats so they don’t lose the crowd. You can see their confidence growing in real time as he patiently walks them through the process: find the groove, move between them, blend the beat. They come to understand that it’s harder than it might appear.

“I’m not looking for students to become expert scratchers,” Tan says. “We’re studying meter, reviewing music history, and learning new skills.”

“Philip is one of the coolest teachers I have had here at MIT!” Leano exclaims. “You can just tell from the way he holds himself in class how both knowledgeable and passionate he is about DJ history and technology.”

Watching Tan demonstrate techniques to students, it’s easy to appreciate the skill and dexterity necessary to both DJ well and to show others how it’s done. He’s steeped in the craft of DJ’ing, as comfortable with two turntables and a mixer as he is with a digital setup favored by DJs from other genres, like electronic dance music. Students, including Leano, note his skill, ability, and commitment.

“Any question that any classmate may have is always answered in such depth he seems like a walking dictionary,” she says. “Not to mention, he makes the class so interactive with us coming to the front and using the board, making sure everyone gets what is happening.”

Inside MIT’s Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, on the springy blue mat of the gymnastics room, an unconventional anatomy lesson unfolded during an October meeting of class STS.024/CMS.524 (Thinking on Your Feet: Dance as a Learning Science).

Supported by a grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), Thinking on Your Feet was developed and offered for the first time in Fall 2024 by Jennifer S. Light, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology and a professor of Urban Studies and Planning. Light’s vision for the class included a varied lineup of guest instructors. During the last week of October, she handed the reins to Middlebury College Professor Emerita Andrea Olsen, whose expertise bridges dance and science.

Olsen organized the class into small groups. Placing hands on each other’s shoulders conga-line style, participants shuffled across the mat personifying the layers of the nervous system as Olsen had just explained them: the supportive spinal cord and bossy brain of the central nervous system; the sympathetic nervous system responsible for fight-or-flight and its laid-back parasympathetic counterpart; and the literal “gut feelings” of the enteric nervous system. The groups giggled and stumbled as they attempted to stay in character and coordinate their movements.

Unusual as this exercise was, it perfectly suited a class dedicated to movement as a tool for teaching and learning. One of the class’s introductory readings, an excerpt from Annie Murphy Paul’s book “The Extended Mind,” suggests why this was a more effective primer on the nervous system than a standard lecture: “Our memory for what we have heard is remarkably weak. Our memory for what we have done, however — for physical actions we have undertaken — is much more robust.”

Head-to-toe education

Thinking on Your Feet is the third course spun out from Light’s Project on Embodied Education (the other two, developed in collaboration with MIT Director of Physical Education and Wellness Carrie Sampson Moore, examine the history of exercise in relation to schools and medicine, respectively). A historian of science and technology and historian of education for much of her career, Light refocused her scholarship on movement and learning after she’d begun training at Somerville’s Esh Circus Arts to counteract the stress of serving as department head. During her sabbatical a few years later, as part of Esh’s pre-professional program for aspiring acrobats, she took a series of dance classes spanning genres from ballet to hip-hop to Afro modern.

“I started playing with the idea that this is experiential learning — could I bring something like this back to MIT?” she recalls. “There’s a ton of interesting contemporary scientific research on cognition and learning as not just neck-up processes, but whole-body processes.”

Thinking on Your Feet provides an overview of recent scientific studies indicating the surprising extent to which physical activity enhances attention, memory, executive function, and other aspects of mental acuity. Other readings consider dance’s role in the transmission of knowledge throughout human history — from the Native Hawaiian tradition of hula to early forms of ballet in European courts — and describe the ways movement-based instruction can engage underserved populations and neurodiverse learners.

“You can argue for embodied learning on so many dimensions,” says Light. “I want my students to understand that what they’ve been taught about learning is only part of the story, and that contemporary science, ancient wisdom, and non-Western traditions all have a lot to tell us about how we might rethink education to maximize the benefits for all different kinds of students.”

Learning to dance

If you scan the new class’s syllabus, you’re unlikely to miss the word “fun.” It appears twice — bolded, in all caps, and garnished by an exclamation point.

“I’m trying to bring a playful, experimental, ‘you don’t have to be perfect, just be creative’ vibe,” says Light. A dance background is not a prerequisite. The 18 students who registered this fall ranged from experienced dancers to novices.

“I initially took this class just to fulfill my arts requirement,” admits junior physics major Matson Garza, one of the latter group. He was surprised at how much he enjoyed it. “I have an interest in physics education, and I’ve found that beyond introductory courses it’s often lacking intuition. Integrating movement may be one way to solve this problem.”

Similarly, second-year biological engineering major Annabel Tiong found her entry point through an interest in hands-on education, deepened after volunteering with a program that aims to spark curiosity about health-care careers by engaging kids in medical simulations. “While I don’t have an extensive background in dance,” she says, “I was curious how dance, with its free-form and creative nature, could be used to teach STEM topics that appear to be quite concrete and technical.”

To build on each Tuesday’s lectures and discussions, Thursday “lab” sessions focused on overcoming inhibitions, teaching different styles of movement, and connecting dance with academic content. McKersin of Lakaï Arts, a lecturer in dance for the MIT Music and Theater Arts section, led a lab on Haitian harvest dances; Guy Steele PhD ’80 and Clark Baker SM ’80 of the MIT Tech Squares club provided an intro to square dancing and some of its connections to math and programming. Light invited some of her own dance instructors from the circus community, including Johnny Blazes, who specializes (according to their website) in working with “people who have been told implicitly and explicitly that they don’t belong in movement and fitness spaces.” Another, Reba Rosenberg, led the students through basic partner acrobatics that Light says did wonders for the class’s sense of confidence and community.

“Afterwards, several students asked, ‘Could we do this again?’” remembers Light. “None of them thought they could do the thing that by the end of class they were able to do: balance on each other, stand on each other. You can imagine how the need to physically trust someone with your safety yields incredible benefits when we’re back in the classroom.”

Dancing to learn

The culmination of Thinking on Your Feet — a final project constituting 40 percent of students’ grades — required each student to create a dance-based lesson plan on a STEM topic of their choice. Students were exposed throughout the semester to examples of such pedagogy. Olsen’s nervous-system parade was one. Others came courtesy of Lewis Hou of Science Ceilidh, an organization that uses Scottish highland dance to illustrate concepts across the natural and physical sciences, and MIT alumna Yamilée Toussaint ’08, whose nonprofit STEM from Dance helps young women of color create performances with technical components.

As a stepping stone, Light had planned a midterm assignment asking students to adapt existing choreography. But her students surprised her by wanting to jump directly into creating their own dances from scratch. Those first forays weren’t elaborate, but Light was impressed enough by their efforts that she plans to amend the syllabus accordingly.

“One group was doing differential calculus and imagining the floor as a graph,” she recalls, “having dancers think about where they were in relation to each other.” Another group, comprising members of the MIT Ballroom Dance team, choreographed the computer science concept of pipelined processors. “They were giving commands to each other like ‘load’ and ‘execute’ and ‘write back,’” Light says. “The beauty of this is that the students could offer each other feedback on the technical piece of it. Like, ‘OK, I see that you’re trying to explain a clock cycle. Maybe try to do it this way.”

Among the pipelined processing team was senior Kateryna Morhun, a competitive ballroom dancer since age 4 who is earning her degree in artificial intelligence and decision-making. “We wanted to challenge ourselves to teach a specialized, more technical topic that isn’t usually a target of embodied learning initiatives,” Morhun says.

How useful can dance really be in teaching advanced academic content? This was a lively topic of debate among the Thinking on Your Feet cohort. It’s a question Light intends to investigate further with mechanical engineering lecturer Benita Comeau, who audited the class and offered a lab exploring the connections among dance, physics, and martial arts.

“This class sparked many ideas for me, across multiple subject matters and movement styles,” says Comeau. “As an example, the square dance class reminded me of the symmetry groups that are used to describe molecular symmetry in chemistry, and it occurred to me that students could move through symmetry groups and learn about chirality” — a geometric property relevant to numerous branches of science.

For their final presentation, Garza and Tiong’s group tackled substitution mechanisms, a topic from organic chemistry (“notoriously viewed as a very difficult and dreaded class,” according to their write-up). Their lesson plan specified that learners would first need to familiarize themselves with key points through conventional readings and discussion. But then, to bring that material alive, groups of learners representing atoms would take the floor. One, portraying a central carbon atom, would hold out an arm indicating readiness to accept an electron. Another would stand to the side with two balls representing electrons, bonded by a ribbon. Others would rotate in a predetermined order around the central carbon to portray a model’s initial stereochemistry. And so a dance would begin: a three-dimensional, human-scale visualization of a complex chemical process.

The group was asked to summarize what they hoped learners would discover through their dance. “Chemistry is very dynamic!” they wrote. “It’s not mixing chemicals to magically make new ones — it’s a dynamic process of collision, bonding, and molecule-breaking that causes some structures to vanish and others to appear.”

In addition to evaluating the impact of movement in her classes in collaboration with Raechel Soicher from the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab, Light is working on a book about how modern science has rediscovered the ancient wisdom of embodied learning. She hopes her class will kick off a conversation at MIT about incorporating such movement-assisted insights into the educational practices of the future. In fact, she believes MIT’s heritage of innovative pedagogy makes it ripe for these explorations.

As her syllabus puts it: “For all of us, as part of the MIT community, this class invites us to reconsider how our ‘mind and hand’ approach to experiential learning — a product of the 19th century — might be expanded to ‘mind and body’ for the 21st century.”

Proteins are the workhorses that keep our cells running, and there are many thousands of types of proteins in our cells, each performing a specialized function. Researchers have long known that the structure of a protein determines what it can do. More recently, researchers are coming to appreciate that a protein’s localization is also critical for its function. Cells are full of compartments that help to organize their many denizens. Along with the well-known organelles that adorn the pages of biology textbooks, these spaces also include a variety of dynamic, membrane-less compartments that concentrate certain molecules together to perform shared functions. Knowing where a given protein localizes, and who it co-localizes with, can therefore be useful for better understanding that protein and its role in the healthy or diseased cell, but researchers have lacked a systematic way to predict this information.

Meanwhile, protein structure has been studied for over half-a-century, culminating in the artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold, which can predict protein structure from a protein’s amino acid code, the linear string of building blocks within it that folds to create its structure. AlphaFold and models like it have become widely used tools in research.

Proteins also contain regions of amino acids that do not fold into a fixed structure, but are instead important for helping proteins join dynamic compartments in the cell. MIT Professor Richard Young and colleagues wondered whether the code in those regions could be used to predict protein localization in the same way that other regions are used to predict structure. Other researchers have discovered some protein sequences that code for protein localization, and some have begun developing predictive models for protein localization. However, researchers did not know whether a protein’s localization to any dynamic compartment could be predicted based on its sequence, nor did they have a comparable tool to AlphaFold for predicting localization. 

Now, Young, also member of the Whitehead Institute for Biological Research; Young lab postdoc Henry Kilgore; Regina Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and colleagues have built such a model, which they call ProtGPS. In a paper published on Feb. 6 in the journal Science, with first authors Kilgore and Barzilay lab graduate students Itamar Chinn, Peter Mikhael, and Ilan Mitnikov, the cross-disciplinary team debuts their model. The researchers show that ProtGPS can predict to which of 12 known types of compartments a protein will localize, as well as whether a disease-associated mutation will change that localization. Additionally, the research team developed a generative algorithm that can design novel proteins to localize to specific compartments.

“My hope is that this is a first step towards a powerful platform that enables people studying proteins to do their research,” Young says, “and that it helps us understand how humans develop into the complex organisms that they are, how mutations disrupt those natural processes, and how to generate therapeutic hypotheses and design drugs to treat dysfunction in a cell.”

The researchers also validated many of the model’s predictions with experimental tests in cells.

“It really excited me to be able to go from computational design all the way to trying these things in the lab,” Barzilay says. “There are a lot of exciting papers in this area of AI, but 99.9 percent of those never get tested in real systems. Thanks to our collaboration with the Young lab, we were able to test, and really learn how well our algorithm is doing.”

Developing the model

The researchers trained and tested ProtGPS on two batches of proteins with known localizations. They found that it could correctly predict where proteins end up with high accuracy. The researchers also tested how well ProtGPS could predict changes in protein localization based on disease-associated mutations within a protein. Many mutations — changes to the sequence for a gene and its corresponding protein — have been found to contribute to or cause disease based on association studies, but the ways in which the mutations lead to disease symptoms remain unknown.

Figuring out the mechanism for how a mutation contributes to disease is important because then researchers can develop therapies to fix that mechanism, preventing or treating the disease. Young and colleagues suspected that many disease-associated mutations might contribute to disease by changing protein localization. For example, a mutation could make a protein unable to join a compartment containing essential partners.

They tested this hypothesis by feeding ProtGOS more than 200,000 proteins with disease-associated mutations, and then asking it to both predict where those mutated proteins would localize and measure how much its prediction changed for a given protein from the normal to the mutated version. A large shift in the prediction indicates a likely change in localization.

The researchers found many cases in which a disease-associated mutation appeared to change a protein’s localization. They tested 20 examples in cells, using fluorescence to compare where in the cell a normal protein and the mutated version of it ended up. The experiments confirmed ProtGPS’s predictions. Altogether, the findings support the researchers’ suspicion that mis-localization may be an underappreciated mechanism of disease, and demonstrate the value of ProtGPS as a tool for understanding disease and identifying new therapeutic avenues.

“The cell is such a complicated system, with so many components and complex networks of interactions,” Mitnikov says. “It’s super interesting to think that with this approach, we can perturb the system, see the outcome of that, and so drive discovery of mechanisms in the cell, or even develop therapeutics based on that.”

The researchers hope that others begin using ProtGPS in the same way that they use predictive structural models like AlphaFold, advancing various projects on protein function, dysfunction, and disease.

Moving beyond prediction to novel generation

The researchers were excited about the possible uses of their prediction model, but they also wanted their model to go beyond predicting localizations of existing proteins, and allow them to design completely new proteins. The goal was for the model to make up entirely new amino acid sequences that, when formed in a cell, would localize to a desired location. Generating a novel protein that can actually accomplish a function — in this case, the function of localizing to a specific cellular compartment — is incredibly difficult. In order to improve their model’s chances of success, the researchers constrained their algorithm to only design proteins like those found in nature. This is an approach commonly used in drug design, for logical reasons; nature has had billions of years to figure out which protein sequences work well and which do not.

Because of the collaboration with the Young lab, the machine learning team was able to test whether their protein generator worked. The model had good results. In one round, it generated 10 proteins intended to localize to the nucleolus. When the researchers tested these proteins in the cell, they found that four of them strongly localized to the nucleolus, and others may have had slight biases toward that location as well.

“The collaboration between our labs has been so generative for all of us,” Mikhael says. “We’ve learned how to speak each other’s languages, in our case learned a lot about how cells work, and by having the chance to experimentally test our model, we’ve been able to figure out what we need to do to actually make the model work, and then make it work better.”

Being able to generate functional proteins in this way could improve researchers’ ability to develop therapies. For example, if a drug must interact with a target that localizes within a certain compartment, then researchers could use this model to design a drug to also localize there. This should make the drug more effective and decrease side effects, since the drug will spend more time engaging with its target and less time interacting with other molecules, causing off-target effects.

The machine learning team members are enthused about the prospect of using what they have learned from this collaboration to design novel proteins with other functions beyond localization, which would expand the possibilities for therapeutic design and other applications.

“A lot of papers show they can design a protein that can be expressed in a cell, but not that the protein has a particular function,” Chinn says. “We actually had functional protein design, and a relatively huge success rate compared to other generative models. That’s really exciting to us, and something we would like to build on.”

All of the researchers involved see ProtGPS as an exciting beginning. They anticipate that their tool will be used to learn more about the roles of localization in protein function and mis-localization in disease. In addition, they are interested in expanding the model’s localization predictions to include more types of compartments, testing more therapeutic hypotheses, and designing increasingly functional proteins for therapies or other applications.

“Now that we know that this protein code for localization exists, and that machine learning models can make sense of that code and even create functional proteins using its logic, that opens up the door for so many potential studies and applications,” Kilgore says.

“Intelligent, caring, inspiring, and full-of-wisdom,” one student described Kenneth Oye. Another lauded that “We are beyond lucky to have such a caring, supportive, empathetic and compassionate leader” in Maria Yang.

Professors Maria Yang and Kenneth Oye are two of the 2023-25 Committed to Caring cohort, acknowledged for encouraging their students; advocating for meaningful, interesting research; and participating in their research journey from the beginning to end. For MIT graduate students, the Committed to Caring program recognizes those who go above and beyond.

Maria Yang: Inclusion and continual fostering

Professor Maria Yang is the deputy dean of engineering, Kendall Rohsenow Professor, and professor of mechanical engineering. She works in the area of design theory, with a focus on the early stages of the process of design. Her current research interests include the hybrid ways in which humans and AI can collaborate during the design process and also ways in which we can design products to encourage users to behave more sustainably.

Yang has been selected as a recipient of the Committed to Caring award for 2023-25. She is known for her inclusive, interdisciplinary work as well as her continuous fostering of students.

Yang founded and leads the Ideation Laboratory at MIT, which is characterized by interdisciplinary work in design, including product design, engineering design, and system design. Students may not feel like they “fit” in their traditional department, but find a home in the Ideation Laboratory. In Yang’s words, her students “collaborate and connect from their shared experiences.”

Yang is one of the mentors of a student-led research project that works toward understanding how users, and other stakeholders who are traditionally not considered, are embedded in design education and practice, and how to support deeper engagement with such users and stakeholders. Yang supported her students on this project in multiple ways, providing mentorship and feedback as well as supporting her students to apply for grants to continue growing the project.

The students and Yang held a first-ever summit as a part of this project. The summit brought together faculty and students from MIT as well as other universities and companies. All the summit stakeholders are working to support instructors in thoughtfully considering users and stakeholders in their courses, and are striving to create a community for students and instructors engaged in this space.

“Maria will never take credit for the outcomes of the project, giving all the credit to other members of the project team,” the nominator wrote, “but she has been instrumental in supporting us and encouraging us to continue.”

Yang continued to be a supportive and caring mentor, championing and supporting students’ work. When one nominator was still a prospective student, Yang met with them in support of their application. When the student was eventually admitted into the Media Lab rather than mechanical engineering, Yang welcomed the student into her research group.

As the student’s career evolved, Yang became a member of their thesis committee and provided letters of recommendation for their academic job search. The nominator turned to Maria for advice on how to strategize what applications they would submit and which departments were the best fit for them.

Yang took time to sit with the student, practiced their presentation with them, and gave support where the student was lacking confidence. All in all, Yang helped them have the strength to continue to achieve their goals, ultimately enabling them to earn their PhD.

The nominator was grateful for the crucial role Maria played in fostering their growth: “My MIT experience would have been very different without Maria.”

Kenneth Oye: Inspiring advisor and caring mentor

Oye is a professor of political science and data systems and society as well as the director of the Program on Emerging Technologies (PoET). His work revolves around international relations, political economy, and technology policy. His current work in technology policy centers on adaptive management of risks associated with synthetic biology and pharmaceuticals and on equity in health policy.

Oye has been selected as a recipient of the Committed to Caring award for 2023-25. He is a highly effective instructor, influential advisor, and considerate mentor.

Oye teaches with clear and easy-to-follow language filled with personal stories and rich experiences. His lectures are interactive and engaging so that learners can truly internalize the material. His students gain understanding with curiosity and intent.

A nominator wrote that Oye encourages his students to investigate broadly. Oye offers frequent advice on improvements in research design and shared analysis techniques. “He acknowledged my effort and ideas,” the nominator shared, “but also always encouraged me to explore further.”

The student added that parts of their dissertation were challenging, but Oye transformed it into an enjoyable intellectual quest.

Oye emphasized that he cares about the work that is produced; however, he equally attends to his students as individuals. He consistently starts weekly meetings with check-ins and concerns himself with each of his student’s well-being and personal development.

Students feel comfortable coming to Oye when they need to share their strife and seek counsel. Their mentoring relationship had built such trust, one nominator remarked, that when the student faced some personal challenges, “Ken was the first person I thought of that I could share my struggles with safely and ask for advice.”

As an instructor, an advisor, and as a mentor, Oye has helped his students learn and grow beyond the classroom.

One of his students wrote, “Oye’s truly a gem to learn from and work with, and I believe he has been a great asset to MIT’s generations of students.”

The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing has received substantial support for its striking new headquarters on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A major gift from Sebastian Man ’79, SM ’80 will be recognized with the naming of a key space in the building, enriching the academic and research activities of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT.

Man, the first major donor to support the building since Stephen A. Schwarzman’s foundational gift established the Schwarzman College of Computing, is the chair and CEO of Chung Mei International Holdings Ltd., a manufacturer of domestic kitchen electrics and air treatment products for major international brands. Particularly supportive of education, he is a council member of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, serves on the Board of the Morningside College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and was a member of the court of the University of Hong Kong and the chair of the Harvard Business School Association of Hong Kong. His community activities include serving as a council member of The Better Hong Kong Foundation and executive committee member of the International Chamber of Commerce Hong Kong China Business Council, as well as of many other civic and business organizations. Man is also part of the MIT parent community, as his son, Brandon Man, is a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Man’s gift to the college was recognized at a ceremony and luncheon in Hong Kong, where he resides, on Jan. 10. MIT Chancellor for Academic Advancement W. Eric L. Grimson PhD ’80, who hosted the event, noted that in addition to his financial generosity to the Institute, Man has played many important volunteer roles at MIT. “His service includes advancing MIT near and far as a member of the Corporation Development Committee, sharing his expertise through his recent selection as a new member of the Mechanical Engineering Visiting Committee, and, most recently, his acceptance of an invitation to join the Schwarzman College of Computing Dean’s Advisory Council,” he said.

“This new building is a home for the MIT community and a home for the people who are helping shape the future of computing and AI,” said MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Dean Daniel Huttenlocher SM ’84, PhD ’88 in a video greeting to Man and his family. “Thanks to your gift, the college is better positioned to achieve its mission of creating a positive impact on society, and for that we are deeply grateful.”

The state-of-the-art MIT Schwarzman College of Computing headquarters was designed to reflect the mission of meeting rapidly changing needs in computing through new approaches to research, education, and real-world engagement. The space provides MIT’s campus with a home base for computing research groups, new classrooms, and convening and event spaces.

Those at the Hong Kong event also enjoyed a video message from Stephen A. Schwarzman, chair, CEO, and co-founder of Blackstone and the college’s founding donor. “When we first announced the new college at MIT,” he said, “MIT said it was reshaping itself for the future. That future has come even faster than we all thought. Today, AI is part of the daily vernacular, and MIT’s ability to impact its development with your support is more tangible than ever.”

Sebastian Man spoke fondly of his years at the Institute. “The place really opened my eyes … and sharpened my intellect. It offered me a whole brave, new world. Everything was interesting and everything was exciting!

“I come from a family where my father taught us that one should always be grateful to those people and places that have helped you to become who you are today,” Man continued. “MIT instilled in me unending intellectual curiosity and the love for the unknown, and I am honored and privileged to be associated with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.”

During a meeting of class 6.C40/24.C40 (Ethics of Computing), Professor Armando Solar-Lezama poses the same impossible question to his students that he often asks himself in the research he leads with the Computer Assisted Programming Group at MIT:

"How do we make sure that a machine does what we want, and only what we want?"

At this moment, what some consider the golden age of generative AI, this may seem like an urgent new question. But Solar-Lezama, the Distinguished Professor of Computing at MIT, is quick to point out that this struggle is as old as humankind itself.

He begins to retell the Greek myth of King Midas, the monarch who was granted the godlike power to transform anything he touched into solid gold. Predictably, the wish backfired when Midas accidentally turned everyone he loved into gilded stone.

"Be careful what you ask for because it might be granted in ways you don't expect," he says, cautioning his students, many of them aspiring mathematicians and programmers.

Digging into MIT archives to share slides of grainy black-and-white photographs, he narrates the history of programming. We hear about the 1970s Pygmalion machine that required incredibly detailed cues, to the late '90s computer software that took teams of engineers years and an 800-page document to program.

While remarkable in their time, these processes took too long to reach users. They left no room for spontaneous discovery, play, and innovation.

Solar-Lezama talks about the risks of building modern machines that don't always respect a programmer's cues or red lines, and that are equally capable of exacting harm as saving lives.

Titus Roesler, a senior majoring in electrical engineering, nods knowingly. Roesler is writing his final paper on the ethics of autonomous vehicles and weighing who is morally responsible when one hypothetically hits and kills a pedestrian. His argument questions underlying assumptions behind technical advances, and considers multiple valid viewpoints. It leans on the philosophy theory of utilitarianism. Roesler explains, "Roughly, according to utilitarianism, the moral thing to do brings about the most good for the greatest number of people."

MIT philosopher Brad Skow, with whom Solar-Lezama developed and is team-teaching the course, leans forward and takes notes.

A class that demands technical and philosophical expertise

Ethics of Computing, offered for the first time in Fall 2024, was created through the Common Ground for Computing Education, an initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing that brings multiple departments together to develop and teach new courses and launch new programs that blend computing with other disciplines.

The instructors alternate lecture days. Skow, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, brings his discipline's lens for examining the broader implications of today's ethical issues, while Solar-Lezama, who is also the associate director and chief operating officer of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, offers perspective through his.

Skow and Solar-Lezama attend one another's lectures and adjust their follow-up class sessions in response. Introducing the element of learning from one another in real time has made for more dynamic and responsive class conversations. A recitation to break down the week's topic with graduate students from philosophy or computer science and a lively discussion combine the course content.

"An outsider might think that this is going to be a class that will make sure that these new computer programmers being sent into the world by MIT always do the right thing," Skow says. However, the class is intentionally designed to teach students a different skill set.

Determined to create an impactful semester-long course that did more than lecture students about right or wrong, philosophy professor Caspar Hare conceived the idea for Ethics of Computing in his role as an associate dean of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. Hare recruited Skow and Solar-Lezama as the lead instructors, as he knew they could do something more profound than that.

"Thinking deeply about the questions that come up in this class requires both technical and philosophical expertise. There aren't other classes at MIT that place both side-by-side,” Skow says.

That's exactly what drew senior Alek Westover to enroll. The math and computer science double major explains, "A lot of people are talking about how the trajectory of AI will look in five years. I thought it was important to take a class that will help me think more about that."

Westover says he's drawn to philosophy because of an interest in ethics and a desire to distinguish right from wrong. In math classes, he's learned to write down a problem statement and receive instant clarity on whether he's successfully solved it or not. However, in Ethics of Computing, he has learned how to make written arguments for "tricky philosophical questions" that may not have a single correct answer.

For example, "One problem we could be concerned about is, what happens if we build powerful AI agents that can do any job a human can do?" Westover asks. "If we are interacting with these AIs to that degree, should we be paying them a salary? How much should we care about what they want?"

There's no easy answer, and Westover assumes he'll encounter many other dilemmas in the workplace in the future.

“So, is the internet destroying the world?”

The semester began with a deep dive into AI risk, or the notion of "whether AI poses an existential risk to humanity," unpacking free will, the science of how our brains make decisions under uncertainty, and debates about the long-term liabilities, and regulation of AI. A second, longer unit zeroed in on "the internet, the World Wide Web, and the social impact of technical decisions." The end of the term looks at privacy, bias, and free speech.

One class topic was devoted to provocatively asking: "So, is the internet destroying the world?"

Senior Caitlin Ogoe is majoring in Course 6-9 (Computation and Cognition). Being in an environment where she can examine these types of issues is precisely why the self-described "technology skeptic" enrolled in the course.

Growing up with a mom who is hearing impaired and a little sister with a developmental disability, Ogoe became the default family member whose role it was to call providers for tech support or program iPhones. She leveraged her skills into a part-time job fixing cell phones, which paved the way for her to develop a deep interest in computation, and a path to MIT. However, a prestigious summer fellowship in her first year made her question the ethics behind how consumers were impacted by the technology she was helping to program. 

"Everything I've done with technology is from the perspective of people, education, and personal connection," Ogoe says. "This is a niche that I love. Taking humanities classes around public policy, technology, and culture is one of my big passions, but this is the first course I've taken that also involves a philosophy professor."

The following week, Skow lectures on the role of bias in AI, and Ogoe, who is entering the workforce next year, but plans to eventually attend law school to focus on regulating related issues, raises her hand to ask questions or share counterpoints four times.

Skow digs into examining COMPAS, a controversial AI software that uses an algorithm to predict the likelihood that people accused of crimes would go on to re-offend. According to a 2018 ProPublica article, COMPAS was likely to flag Black defendants as future criminals and gave false positives at twice the rate as it did to white defendants.

The class session is dedicated to determining whether the article warrants the conclusion that the COMPAS system is biased and should be discontinued. To do so, Skow introduces two different theories on fairness:

"Substantive fairness is the idea that a particular outcome might be fair or unfair," he explains. "Procedural fairness is about whether the procedure by which an outcome is produced is fair." A variety of conflicting criteria of fairness are then introduced, and the class discusses which were plausible, and what conclusions they warranted about the COMPAS system.

Later on, the two professors go upstairs to Solar-Lezama's office to debrief on how the exercise had gone that day.

"Who knows?" says Solar-Lezama. "Maybe five years from now, everybody will laugh at how people were worried about the existential risk of AI. But one of the themes I see running through this class is learning to approach these debates beyond media discourse and getting to the bottom of thinking rigorously about these issues." 

Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into solving some of the world’s toughest challenges started with a simple love for puzzles. By high school, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to computer science. Through her participation in an entrepreneurship and leadership program, she built apps and twice made it to the semifinals of the program’s global competition.

Her early successes made a computer science career seem like an obvious choice, but Raghavan says a significant competing interest left her torn.

“Computer science sparks that puzzle-, problem-solving part of my brain,” says Raghavan ’24, an Accenture Fellow and a PhD candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “But while I always felt like building mobile apps was a fun little hobby, it didn’t feel like I was directly solving societal challenges.”

Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Research Opportunity in the Photovoltaic Research Laboratory, now known as the Accelerated Materials Laboratory for Sustainability. There, she discovered how computational techniques like machine learning could optimize materials for solar panels — a direct application of her skills toward mitigating climate change.

“This lab had a very diverse group of people, some from a computer science background, some from a chemistry background, some who were hardcore engineers. All of them were communicating effectively and working toward one unified goal — building better renewable energy systems,” Raghavan says. “It opened my eyes to the fact that I could use very technical tools that I enjoy building and find fulfillment in that by helping solve major climate challenges.”

With her sights set on applying machine learning and optimization to energy and climate, Raghavan joined Cathy Wu’s lab when she started her PhD in 2023. The lab focuses on building more sustainable transportation systems, a field that resonated with Raghavan due to its universal impact and its outsized role in climate change — transportation accounts for roughly 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

“If we were to throw all of the intelligent systems we are exploring into the transportation networks, by how much could we reduce emissions?” she asks, summarizing a core question of her research.

Wu, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, stresses the value of Raghavan's work.

“Transportation is a critical element of both the economy and climate change, so potential changes to transportation must be carefully studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s research into smart congestion management is important because it takes a data-driven approach to add rigor to the broader research supporting sustainability.”

Raghavan’s contributions have been recognized with the Accenture Fellowship, a cornerstone of the MIT-Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology. 

As an Accenture Fellow, she is exploring the potential impact of technologies for avoiding stop-and-go traffic and its emissions, using systems such as networked autonomous vehicles and digital speed limits that vary according to traffic conditions — solutions that could advance decarbonization in the transportation section at relatively low cost and in the near term.

Raghavan says she appreciates the Accenture Fellowship not only for the support it provides, but also because it demonstrates industry involvement in sustainable transportation solutions.

“It’s important for the field of transportation, and also energy and climate as a whole, to synergize with all of the different stakeholders,” she says. “I think it’s important for industry to be involved in this issue of incorporating smarter transportation systems to decarbonize transportation.”

Raghavan has also received a fellowship supporting her research from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

“I think it’s really exciting that there’s interest from the policy side with the Department of Transportation and from the industry side with Accenture,” she says.

Raghavan believes that addressing climate change requires collaboration across disciplines. “I think with climate change, no one industry or field is going to solve it on its own. It’s really got to be each field stepping up and trying to make a difference,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any silver-bullet solution to this problem. It’s going to take many different solutions from different people, different angles, different disciplines.”

With that in mind, Raghavan has been very active in the MIT Energy and Climate Club since joining about three years ago, which, she says, “was a really cool way to meet lots of people who were working toward the same goal, the same climate goals, the same passions, but from completely different angles.”

This year, Raghavan is on the community and education team, which works to build the community at MIT that is working on climate and energy issues. As part of that work, Raghavan is launching a mentorship program for undergraduates, pairing them with graduate students who help the undergrads develop ideas about how they can work on climate using their unique expertise.

“I didn’t foresee myself using my computer science skills in energy and climate,” Raghavan says, “so I really want to give other students a clear pathway, or a clear sense of how they can get involved.”

Raghavan has embraced her area of study even in terms of where she likes to think.

“I love working on trains, on buses, on airplanes,” she says. “It’s really fun to be in transit and working on transportation problems.”

Anticipating a trip to New York to visit a cousin, she holds no dread for the long train trip.

“I know I’m going to do some of my best work during those hours,” she says. “Four hours there. Four hours back.”

The ancient Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle once concluded that the human heart is tri-chambered and that it was the single most important organ in the entire body, governing motion, sensation, and thought.

Today, we know that the human heart actually has four chambers and that the brain largely controls motion, sensation, and thought. But Aristotle was correct in observing that the heart is a vital organ, pumping blood to the rest of the body to reach other vital organs. When a life-threatening condition like heart failure strikes, the heart gradually loses the ability to supply other organs with enough blood and nutrients that enables them to function.

Researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School recently published an open-access paper in Nature Communications Medicine, introducing a noninvasive deep learning approach that analyzes electrocardiogram (ECG) signals to accurately predict a patient’s risk of developing heart failure. In a clinical trial, the model showed results with accuracy comparable to gold-standard but more-invasive procedures, giving hope to those at risk of heart failure. The condition has recently seen a sharp increase in mortality, particularly among young adults, likely due to the growing prevalence of obesity and diabetes.

“This paper is a culmination of things I’ve talked about in other venues for several years,” says the paper’s senior author Collin Stultz, director of Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology and affiliate of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic). “The goal of this work is to identify those who are starting to get sick even before they have symptoms so that you can intervene early enough to prevent hospitalization.”

Of the heart’s four chambers, two are atria and two are ventricles — the right side of the heart has one atrium and one ventricle, and vice versa. In a healthy human heart, these chambers operate in a rhythmic synchrony: oxygen-poor blood flows into the heart via the right atrium. The right atrium contracts and the pressure generated pushes the blood into the right ventricle where the blood is then pumped into the lungs to be oxygenated. The oxygen-rich blood from the lungs then drains into the left atrium, which contracts, pumping the blood into the left ventricle. Another contraction follows, and the blood is ejected from the left ventricle via the aorta, flowing into veins branching out to the rest of the body.

“When the left atrial pressures become elevated, the blood drain from the lungs into the left atrium is impeded because it’s a higher-pressure system,” Stultz explains. In addition to being a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Stultz is also a practicing cardiologist at Mass General Hospital (MGH). “The higher the pressure in the left atrium, the more pulmonary symptoms you develop — shortness of breath and so forth. Because the right side of the heart pumps blood through the pulmonary vasculature to the lungs, the elevated pressures in the left atrium translate to elevated pressures in the pulmonary vasculature.”

The current gold standard for measuring left atrial pressure is right heart catheterization (RHC), an invasive procedure that requires a thin tube (the catheter) attached to a pressure transmitter to be inserted into the right heart and pulmonary arteries. Physicians often prefer to assess risk noninvasively before resorting to RHC, by examining the patient’s weight, blood pressure, and heart rate.

But in Stultz’s view, these measures are coarse, as evidenced by the fact that one-in-four heart failure patients is readmitted to the hospital within 30 days. “What we are seeking is something that gives you information like that of an invasive device, other than a simple weight scale,” Stultz says.

In order to gather more comprehensive information on a patient’s heart condition, physicians typically use a 12-lead ECG, in which 10 adhesive patches are stuck onto the patient and linked with a machine that produces information from 12 different angles of the heart. However, 12-lead ECG machines are only accessible in clinical settings and they are also not typically used to assess heart failure risk.

Instead, what Stultz and other researchers propose is a Cardiac Hemodynamic AI monitoring System (CHAIS), a deep neural network capable of analyzing ECG data from a single lead — in other words, the patient only needs to have a single adhesive, commercially-available patch on their chest that they can wear outside of the hospital, untethered to a machine.

To compare CHAIS with the current gold standard, RHC, the researchers selected patients who were already scheduled for a catheterization and asked them to wear the patch 24 to 48 hours before the procedure, although patients were asked to remove the patch before catheterization took place. “When you get to within an hour-and-a-half [before the procedure], it’s 0.875, so it’s very, very good,” Stultz explains. “Thereby a measure from the device is equivalent and gives you the same information as if you were cathed in the next hour-and-a-half.”

“Every cardiologist understands the value of left atrial pressure measurements in characterizing cardiac function and optimizing treatment strategies for patients with heart failure,” says Aaron Aguirre SM '03, PhD '08, a cardiologist and critical care physician at MGH. “This work is important because it offers a noninvasive approach to estimating this essential clinical parameter using a widely available cardiac monitor.”

Aguirre, who completed a PhD in medical engineering and medical physics at MIT, expects that with further clinical validation, CHAIS will be useful in two key areas: first, it will aid in selecting patients who will most benefit from more invasive cardiac testing via RHC; and second, the technology could enable serial monitoring and tracking of left atrial pressure in patients with heart disease. “A noninvasive and quantitative method can help in optimizing treatment strategies in patients at home or in hospital,” Aguirre says. “I am excited to see where the MIT team takes this next.”

But the benefits aren’t just limited to patients — for patients with hard-to-manage heart failure, it becomes a challenge to keep them from being readmitted to the hospital without a permanent implant, taking up more space and more time of an already beleaguered and understaffed medical workforce.

The researchers have another ongoing clinical trial using CHAIS with MGH and Boston Medical Center that they hope to conclude soon to begin data analysis.

“In my view, the real promise of AI in health care is to provide equitable, state-of-the-art care to everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic status, background, and where they live,” Stultz says. “This work is one step towards realizing this goal.”

When the late professor emeritus Woodie Flowers SM ’68, MEng ’71, PhD ’73 was a student at MIT, most of his classes involved paper-and-pencil exercises with predetermined solutions. Flowers had an affinity for making things, and for making them work. When he transitioned from student to teacher, he chose to carry this approach into his method of instruction and, in doing so, he helped change the way engineering students are educated — at MIT, and around the world. 

Flowers passed away in 2019, but his legacy lives on, and the magnitude of the educational revolution he helped to evolve was profound.

In the 1970s, Flowers took over instruction of 2.70, now called class 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing I). The capstone course is one that many first-year students today look forward to taking, but that wasn’t always the case. Before Flowers took over instruction, class instruction relied heavily on chalkboard demonstrations.

“Their idea of design at the time was to draw drawings of parts,” explains Professor Emeritus David Gossard PhD ’75, Flowers’ longtime friend and colleague. “Woody had a different idea. Give the entire class a kit of materials [and] a common goal, which was to build a machine — to climb a hill, or pick up golf balls, or whatever it did — and make a contest out of it. It was a phenomenal success. The kids loved it, the faculty loved it, the Institute loved it. And over a period of years, it became, I think it's fair to say, an institution.”

With Flowers at the lead, 2.70 transformed into a project-based, get-your-hands-dirty, robotics-competition-focused experience. By all accounts, he also made the experience incredibly fun — something he valued in his own life. He was fond of skydiving and was often seen rollerblading through the Infinite Corridor. The course, informed by his unique style, was at the forefront of a revolution in engineering education, and it quickly helped solidify the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s reputation for innovative education.

“A lot of kids had never started from scratch and built anything,” Flowers once told The Boston Globe. His advisor, Robert Mann, had similar beliefs in a hands-on, modern pedagogy. Building on Mann’s philosophy, and incorporating his own approach, Flowers breathed new life and provided a new foundation for “the MIT way” of teaching. This was a reinvigoration at the right place and the right time that ultimately had a global butterfly effect on the popularity of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) instruction.

“Over the years lectures had displaced the hands-on stuff, and Woodie brought it back,” says Sanjay Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor in Mechanical Engineering. “I can’t think of a single person to have impacted the field of robotics and design in undergraduate, or high school, education as much as Woodie.”

Flowers became interested in mechanical engineering and design at a young age, thanks in large part to his parents. His father was a welder with a penchant for tinkering, inventing, and building, his mother was an elementary school teacher. Flowers grew up taking things apart and putting them back together — an activity which he seemed to believe made students better engineers.

Speaking in 2010 with InfiniteMIT, a digital archive of Institute history made possible by the generosity of Jane and A. Neil Pappalardo ’64, Flowers shared a story about a student who had accepted the task in her group of finding out whether a piece of reinforcement steel rebar could be bent into a tight loop and serve as a bearing.

“She came into lab and I was there early, and she had a slightly bent piece of rebar. It had been heated — you could tell that it had been hot, and she was going to report that she really can’t do that, it just kind of doesn’t work,” Flowers recalled. He suggested they try another approach.

“We went out in the lab and I found another big steel bar and I found the biggest vice I could find,” he continued. Flowers cranked the rebar down against the piece of steel he was going to wrap it around, then took a four-pound sledgehammer to it. “My father had a blacksmith pit, so that was familiar to me. I wrapped [the rebar around the steel and] made a fine bearing. As I finish the last blow, I looked up and three of the best students in the class — really sharp people — were standing there with their jaw open. They’d never seen anyone hit a piece of steel hard enough to just mold it.”

He continued, “that visceral understanding of the behavior of mechanics is really important. It doesn’t fall out of the sky and it certainly doesn’t come out of a textbook, it comes through real interaction. I believe I had been so lucky because when I encountered Castiglione’s theorem about deflection of materials, it kind of made sense.”

Course 2.70/2.007 is considered a landmark class in engineering education. It was one of the first hands-on classes to teach students not only how to design an object, but also how to build it and, by demonstrating the value of practical, project-based learning and robotics competitions, it has influenced the approach taken by many other programs. Today, it continues to develop students’ competence and self-confidence as design engineers, with an emphasis on the creative design process bolstered by application of physical laws, robustness, and manufacturability.

Notably, the course also served as the inspiration for development of the FIRST Robotics program, which Flowers and inventor Dean Kamen started in 1989. FIRST has programs for preschool through high school students and, to date, more than 3.2 million youth from more than 100 countries have participated in FIRST competitions.

In the 1970s, the parts kit — or as Flowers fondly referred to it, the “bag of junk” — included things like springs, tongue depressors, and rubber bands. Flowers’ wife Margaret recalls spending many nights packing these kits and hosting advisees in their home. “We considered ourselves a team,” she says.

Today, in addition to using the kit of mechanical parts and materials, students in 2.007 might develop 3D printed components, and they incorporate electronics in their robots for an autonomous portion of the final competition.

The spring 2024 competition, themed after Cartoon Network’s popular animated science fiction sitcom “Rick and Morty,” featured a spaceship that students’ robots could interact with for points, vats of “acid” where balls could be collected and placed in tubes, and game pieces that paid homage to iconic episodes. The final task required the robot to travel up an elevator and send a character down a zipline.

In recent years, other themes have centered on tasks related to stories ranging from “Star Wars” to “Back to the Future” and “Wakanda Forever.” The 2022 theme, however, may have been the most poignant theme to date: “Legacy,” a celebration of Flowers’ life and work.

“[Woodie] revealed, unambiguously, that designing, fabricating, assembling and building things was fun,” says Gossard. “It was arguably the essence of engineering. There was joy in it.”

A version of this article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of MechE Connects, the magazine of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. 

A lot has changed in the 15 years since Kaiming He was a PhD student.

“When you are in your PhD stage, there is a high wall between different disciplines and subjects, and there was even a high wall within computer science,” He says. “The guy sitting next to me could be doing things that I completely couldn’t understand.”

In the seven months since he joined the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing as the Douglas Ross (1954) Career Development Professor of Software Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, He says he is experiencing something that in his opinion is “very rare in human scientific history” — a lowering of the walls that expands across different scientific disciplines.

“There is no way I could ever understand high-energy physics, chemistry, or the frontier of biology research, but now we are seeing something that can help us to break these walls,” He says, “and that is the creation of a common language that has been found in AI.”

Building the AI bridge

According to He, this shift began in 2012 in the wake of the “deep learning revolution,” a point when it was realized that this set of machine-learning methods based on neural networks was so powerful that it could be put to greater use.

“At this point, computer vision — helping computers to see and perceive the world as if they are human beings — began growing very rapidly, because as it turns out you can apply this same methodology to many different problems and many different areas,” says He. “So the computer vision community quickly grew really large because these different subtopics were now able to speak a common language and share a common set of tools.”

From there, He says the trend began to expand to other areas of computer science, including natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, creating the foundation for ChatGPT and other progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“All of this has happened over the last decade, leading us to a new emerging trend that I am really looking forward to, and that is watching AI methodology propagate other scientific disciplines,” says He.

One of the most famous examples, He says, is AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence program developed by Google DeepMind, which performs predictions of protein structure.

“It’s a very different scientific discipline, a very different problem, but people are also using the same set of AI tools, the same methodology to solve these problems,” He says, “and I think that is just the beginning.”

The future of AI in science

Since coming to MIT in February 2024, He says he has talked to professors in almost every department. Some days he finds himself in conversation with two or more professors from very different backgrounds.

“I certainly don’t fully understand their area of research, but they will just introduce some context and then we can start to talk about deep learning, machine learning, [and] neural network models in their problems,” He says. “In this sense, these AI tools are like a common language between these scientific areas: the machine learning tools ‘translate’ their terminology and concepts into terms that I can understand, and then I can learn their problems and share my experience, and sometimes propose solutions or opportunities for them to explore.”

Expanding to different scientific disciplines has significant potential, from using video analysis to predict weather and climate trends to expediting the research cycle and reducing costs in relation to new drug discovery.

While AI tools provide a clear benefit to the work of He’s scientist colleagues, He also notes the reciprocal effect they can have, and have had, on the creation and advancement of AI.

“Scientists provide new problems and challenges that help us continue to evolve these tools,” says He. “But it is also important to remember that many of today’s AI tools stem from earlier scientific areas — for example, artificial neural networks were inspired by biological observations; diffusion models for image generation were motivated from the physics term.”

“Science and AI are not isolated subjects. We have been approaching the same goal from different perspectives, and now we are getting together.”

And what better place for them to come together than MIT.

“It is not surprising that MIT can see this change earlier than many other places,” He says. “[The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing] created an environment that connects different people and lets them sit together, talk together, work together, exchange their ideas, while speaking the same language — and I’m seeing this begin to happen.”

In terms of when the walls will fully lower, He notes that this is a long-term investment that won’t happen overnight.

“Decades ago, computers were considered high tech and you needed specific knowledge to understand them, but now everyone is using a computer,” He says. “I expect in 10 or more years, everyone will be using some kind of AI in some way for their research — it’s just their basic tools, their basic language, and they can use AI to solve their problems.”

A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label large tissue samples in a single day. In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across large tissue samples can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods.

Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience, and related fields because the proteins a cell is expressing at a given moment can reflect the functions the cell is trying to perform or its response to its circumstances, such as disease or treatment. As much as microscopy and labeling technologies have advanced, enabling innumerable discoveries, scientists have still lacked a reliable and practical way of tracking protein expression at the level of millions of densely packed individual cells in whole, 3D intact tissues. Often confined to thin tissue sections under slides, scientists therefore haven’t had tools to thoroughly appreciate cellular protein expression in the whole, connected systems in which it occurs.

“Conventionally, investigating the molecules within cells requires dissociating tissue into single cells or slicing it into thin sections, as light and chemicals required for analysis cannot penetrate deep into tissues. Our lab developed technologies such as CLARITY and SHIELD, which enable investigation of whole organs by rendering them transparent, but we now needed a way to chemically label whole organs to gain useful scientific insights,” says study senior author Kwanghun Chung, associate professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the departments of Chemical Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. “If cells within a tissue are not uniformly processed, they cannot be quantitatively compared. In conventional protein labeling, it can take weeks for these molecules to diffuse into intact organs, making uniform chemical processing of organ-scale tissues virtually impossible and extremely slow.”

The new approach, called “CuRVE,” represents a major advance — years in the making — toward that goal by demonstrating a fundamentally new approach to uniformly processing large and dense tissues whole. In the study, the researchers explain how they overcame the technical barriers via an implementation of CuRVE called “eFLASH,” and provide copious vivid demonstrations of the technology, including how it yielded new neuroscience insights.

“This is a significant leap, especially in terms of the actual performance of the technology,” says co-lead author Dae Hee Yun PhD '24, a recent MIT graduate student who is now a senior application engineer at LifeCanvas Technologies, a startup company Chung founded to disseminate the tools his lab invents. The paper’s other lead author is Young-Gyun Park, a former MIT postdoc who’s now an assistant professor at KAIST in South Korea.

Clever chemistry

The fundamental reason why large, 3D tissue samples are hard to label uniformly is that antibodies seep into tissue very slowly, but are quick to bind to their target proteins. The practical effect of this speed mismatch is that simply soaking a brain in a bath of antibodies will mean that proteins are intensely well labeled on the outer edge of the tissue, but virtually none of the antibodies will find cells and proteins deeper inside.

To improve labeling, the team conceived of a way — the conceptual essence of CuRVE — to resolve the speed mismatch. The strategy was to continuously control the pace of antibody binding while at the same time speeding up antibody permeation throughout the tissue. To figure out how this could work and to optimize the approach, they built and ran a sophisticated computational simulation that enabled them to test different settings and parameters, including different binding rates and tissue densities and compositions.

Then they set out to implement their approach in real tissues. Their starting point was a previous technology, called “SWITCH,” in which Chung’s lab devised a way of temporarily turning off antibody binding, letting the antibodies permeate the tissue, and then turning binding back on. As well as it worked, Yun says, the team realized there could be substantial improvements if antibody binding speed could be controlled constantly, but the chemicals used in SWITCH were too harsh for such ongoing treatment. So the team screened a library of similar chemicals to find one that could more subtly and continuously throttle antibody binding speed. They found that deoxycholic acid was an ideal candidate. Using that chemical, the team could not only modulate antibody binding by varying the chemical’s concentration, but also by varying the labeling bath’s pH (or acidity).

Meanwhile, to speed up antibody movement through tissues, the team used another prior technology invented in the Chung Lab: stochastic electrotransport. That technology accelerates the dispersion of antibodies through tissue by applying electric fields.

Implementing this eFLASH system of accelerated dispersion with continuously modifiable binding speed produced the wide variety of labeling successes demonstrated in the paper. In all, the team reported using more than 60 different antibodies to label proteins in cells across large tissue samples.

Notably, each of these specimens was labeled within a day, an “ultra-fast” speed for whole, intact organs, the authors say. Moreover, different preparations did not require new optimization steps.

Valuable visualizations

Among the ways the team put eFLASH to the test was by comparing their labeling to another often-used method: genetically engineering cells to fluoresce when the gene for a protein of interest is being transcribed. The genetic method doesn’t require dispersing antibodies throughout tissue, but it can be prone to discrepancies because reporting gene transcription and actual protein production are not exactly the same thing. Yun added that while antibody labeling reliably and immediately reports on the presence of a target protein, the genetic method can be much less immediate and persistent, still fluorescing even when the actual protein is no longer present.

In the study the team employed both kinds of labeling simultaneously in samples. Visualizing the labels that way, they saw many examples in which antibody labeling and genetic labeling differed widely. In some areas of mouse brains, they found that two-thirds of the neurons expressing PV (a protein prominent in certain inhibitory neurons) according to antibody labeling, did not show any genetically-based fluorescence. In another example, only a tiny fraction of cells that reported expression via the genetic method of a protein called ChAT also reported it via antibody labeling. In other words, there were cases where genetic labeling both severely underreported or overreported protein expression compared to antibody labeling.

The researchers don’t mean to impugn the clear value of using the genetic reporting methods, but instead suggest that also using organ-wide antibody labeling, as eFLASH allows, can help put that data in a richer, more complete context. “Our discovery of large regionalized loss of PV-immunoreactive neurons in healthy adult mice and with high individual variability emphasizes the importance of holistic and unbiased phenotyping,” the authors write.

Or as Yun puts it, the two different kinds of labeling are “two different tools for the job.”

In addition to Yun, Park, and Chung, the paper’s other authors are Jae Hun Cho, Lee Kamentsky, Nicholas Evans, Nicholas DiNapoli, Katherine Xie, Seo Woo Choi, Alexandre Albanese, Yuxuan Tian, Chang Ho Sohn, Qiangge Zhang, Minyoung Kim, Justin Swaney, Webster Guan, Juhyuk Park, Gabi Drummond, Heejin Choi, Luzdary Ruelas, and Guoping Feng.

Funding for the study came from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Searle Scholars Program, a Packard Award in Science and Engineering, a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the McKnight Foundation, the Freedom Together Foundation, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the NCSOFT Cultural Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery was drawn to the Institute’s commitment to “computing for the planet,” and set out to bring her methods to global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring.

In the Pacific Northwest, salmon have a disproportionate impact on the health of their ecosystems, and their complex reproductive needs have attracted Beery’s attention. Each year, millions of salmon embark on a migration to spawn. Their journey begins in freshwater stream beds where the eggs hatch. Young salmon fry (newly hatched salmon) make their way to the ocean, where they spend several years maturing to adulthood. As adults, the salmon return to the streams where they were born in order to spawn, ensuring the continuation of their species by depositing their eggs in the gravel of the stream beds. Both male and female salmon die shortly after supplying the river habitat with the next generation of salmon. 

Throughout their migration, salmon support a wide range of organisms in the ecosystems they pass through. For example, salmon bring nutrients like carbon and nitrogen from the ocean upriver, enhancing their availability to those ecosystems. In addition, salmon are key to many predator-prey relationships: They serve as a food source for various predators, such as bears, wolves, and birds, while helping to control other populations, like insects, through predation. After they die from spawning, the decomposing salmon carcasses also replenish valuable nutrients to the surrounding ecosystem. The migration of salmon not only sustains their own species but plays a critical role in the overall health of the rivers and oceans they inhabit. 

At the same time, salmon populations play an important role both economically and culturally in the region. Commercial and recreational salmon fisheries contribute significantly to the local economy. And for many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific northwest, salmon hold notable cultural value, as they have been central to their diets, traditions, and ceremonies. 

Monitoring salmon migration

Increased human activity, including overfishing and hydropower development, together with habitat loss and climate change, have had a significant impact on salmon populations in the region. As a result, effective monitoring and management of salmon fisheries is important to ensure balance among competing ecological, cultural, and human interests. Accurately counting salmon during their seasonal migration to their natal river to spawn is essential in order to track threatened populations, assess the success of recovery strategies, guide fishing season regulations, and support the management of both commercial and recreational fisheries. Precise population data help decision-makers employ the best strategies to safeguard the health of the ecosystem while accommodating human needs. Monitoring salmon migration is a labor-intensive and inefficient undertaking.

Beery is currently leading a research project that aims to streamline salmon monitoring using cutting-edge computer vision methods. This project fits within Beery’s broader research interest, which focuses on the interdisciplinary space between artificial intelligence, the natural world, and sustainability. Its relevance to fisheries management made it a good fit for funding from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Beery’s 2023 J-WAFS seed grant was the first research funding she was awarded since joining the MIT faculty.  

Historically, monitoring efforts relied on humans to manually count salmon from riverbanks using eyesight. In the past few decades, underwater sonar systems have been implemented to aid in counting the salmon. These sonar systems are essentially underwater video cameras, but they differ in that they use acoustics instead of light sensors to capture the presence of a fish. Use of this method requires people to set up a tent alongside the river to count salmon based on the output of a sonar camera that is hooked up to a laptop. While this system is an improvement to the original method of monitoring salmon by eyesight, it still relies significantly on human effort and is an arduous and time-consuming process. 

Automating salmon monitoring is necessary for better management of salmon fisheries. “We need these technological tools,” says Beery. “We can’t keep up with the demand of monitoring and understanding and studying these really complex ecosystems that we work in without some form of automation.”

In order to automate counting of migrating salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, the project team, including Justin Kay, a PhD student in EECS, has been collecting data in the form of videos from sonar cameras at different rivers. The team annotates a subset of the data to train the computer vision system to autonomously detect and count the fish as they migrate. Kay describes the process of how the model counts each migrating fish: “The computer vision algorithm is designed to locate a fish in the frame, draw a box around it, and then track it over time. If a fish is detected on one side of the screen and leaves on the other side of the screen, then we count it as moving upstream.” On rivers where the team has created training data for the system, it has produced strong results, with only 3 to 5 percent counting error. This is well below the target that the team and partnering stakeholders set of no more than a 10 percent counting error. 

Testing and deployment: Balancing human effort and use of automation

The researchers’ technology is being deployed to monitor the migration of salmon on the newly restored Klamath River. Four dams on the river were recently demolished, making it the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. The dams came down after a more than 20-year-long campaign to remove them, which was led by Klamath tribes, in collaboration with scientists, environmental organizations, and commercial fishermen. After the removal of the dams, 240 miles of the river now flow freely and nearly 800 square miles of habitat are accessible to salmon. Beery notes the almost immediate regeneration of salmon populations in the Klamath River: “I think it was within eight days of the dam coming down, they started seeing salmon actually migrate upriver beyond the dam.” In a collaboration with California Trout, the team is currently processing new data to adapt and create a customized model that can then be deployed to help count the newly migrating salmon.

One challenge with the system revolves around training the model to accurately count the fish in unfamiliar environments with variations such as riverbed features, water clarity, and lighting conditions. These factors can significantly alter how the fish appear on the output of a sonar camera and confuse the computer model. When deployed in new rivers where no data have been collected before, like the Klamath, the performance of the system degrades and the margin of error increases substantially to 15-20 percent. 

The researchers constructed an automatic adaptation algorithm within the system to overcome this challenge and create a scalable system that can be deployed to any site without human intervention. This self-initializing technology works to automatically calibrate to the new conditions and environment to accurately count the migrating fish. In testing, the automatic adaptation algorithm was able to reduce the counting error down to the 10 to 15 percent range. The improvement in counting error with the self-initializing function means that the technology is closer to being deployable to new locations without much additional human effort. 

Enabling real-time management with the “Fishbox”

Another challenge faced by the research team was the development of an efficient data infrastructure. In order to run the computer vision system, the video produced by sonar cameras must be delivered via the cloud or by manually mailing hard drives from a river site to the lab. These methods have notable drawbacks: a cloud-based approach is limited due to lack of internet connectivity in remote river site locations, and shipping the data introduces problems of delay. 

Instead of relying on these methods, the team has implemented a power-efficient computer, coined the “Fishbox,” that can be used in the field to perform the processing. The Fishbox consists of a small, lightweight computer with optimized software that fishery managers can plug into their existing laptops and sonar cameras. The system is then capable of running salmon counting models directly at the sonar sites without the need for internet connectivity. This allows managers to make hour-by-hour decisions, supporting more responsive, real-time management of salmon populations.

Community development

The team is also working to bring a community together around monitoring for salmon fisheries management in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s just pretty exciting to have stakeholders who are enthusiastic about getting access to [our technology] as we get it to work and having a tighter integration and collaboration with them,” says Beery. “I think particularly when you’re working on food and water systems, you need direct collaboration to help facilitate impact, because you're ensuring that what you develop is actually serving the needs of the people and organizations that you are helping to support.”

This past June, Beery’s lab organized a workshop in Seattle that convened nongovernmental organizations, tribes, and state and federal departments of fish and wildlife to discuss the use of automated sonar systems to monitor and manage salmon populations. Kay notes that the workshop was an “awesome opportunity to have everybody sharing different ways that they're using sonar and thinking about how the automated methods that we’re building could fit into that workflow.” The discussion continues now via a shared Slack channel created by the team, with over 50 participants. Convening this group is a significant achievement, as many of these organizations would not otherwise have had an opportunity to come together and collaborate. 

Looking forward

As the team continues to tune the computer vision system, refine their technology, and engage with diverse stakeholders — from Indigenous communities to fishery managers — the project is poised to make significant improvements to the efficiency and accuracy of salmon monitoring and management in the region. And as Beery advances the work of her MIT group, the J-WAFS seed grant is helping to keep challenges such as fisheries management in her sights.  

“The fact that the J-WAFS seed grant existed here at MIT enabled us to continue to work on this project when we moved here,” comments Beery, adding “it also expanded the scope of the project and allowed us to maintain active collaboration on what I think is a really important and impactful project.” 

As J-WAFS marks its 10th anniversary this year, the program aims to continue supporting and encouraging MIT faculty to pursue innovative projects that aim to advance knowledge and create practical solutions with real-world impacts on global water and food system challenges. 

David McGee, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, was recently appointed head of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), effective Jan. 15. He assumes the role from Professor Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, who led the department for 13 years.

McGee specializes in applying isotope geochemistry and geochronology to reconstruct Earth’s climate history, helping to ground-truth our understanding of how the climate system responds during periods of rapid change. He has also been instrumental in the growth of the department’s community and culture, having served as EAPS associate department head since 2020.

“David is an amazing researcher who brings crucial, data-based insights to aid our response to climate change,” says dean of the School of Science and the Curtis (1963) and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics Nergis Mavalvala. “He is also a committed and caring educator, providing extraordinary investment in his students’ learning experiences, and through his direction of Terrascope, one of our unique first-year learning communities focused on generating solutions to sustainability challenges.”   

“I am energized by the incredible EAPS community, by Rob’s leadership over the last 13 years, and by President Kornbluth’s call for MIT to innovate effective and wise responses to climate change,” says McGee. “EAPS has a unique role in this time of reckoning with planetary boundaries — our collective path forward needs to be guided by a deep understanding of the Earth system and a clear sense of our place in the universe.”

McGee’s research seeks to understand the Earth system’s response to past climate changes. Using geochemical analysis and uranium-series dating, McGee and his group investigate stalagmites, ancient lake deposits, and deep-sea sediments from field sites around the world to trace patterns of wind and precipitation, water availability in drylands, and permafrost stability through space and time. Armed with precise chronologies, he aims to shed light on drivers of historical hydroclimatic shifts and provide quantitative tests of climate model performance.

Beyond research, McGee has helped shape numerous Institute initiatives focused on environment, climate, and sustainability, including serving on the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Faculty Steering Committee and the faculty advisory board for the MIT Environment and Sustainability Minor.

In April 2023, the working group hosted the MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education, featuring talks by McGee and others on how colleges and universities can innovate and help students develop the skills, capacities, and perspectives they’ll need to live, lead, and thrive in a world being remade by the accelerating climate crisis.

“David is reimagining MIT undergraduate education to include meaningful collaborations with communities outside of MIT, teaching students that scientific discovery is important, but not always enough to make impact for society,” says van der Hilst. “He will help shape the future of the department with this vital perspective.”

From the start of his career, McGee has been dedicated to sharing his love of exploration with students. He earned a master’s degree in teaching and spent seven years as a teacher in middle school and high school classrooms before earning his PhD in Earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University. He joined the MIT faculty in 2012, and in 2018 received the Excellence in Mentoring Award from MIT’s Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming office. In 2015, he became the director of MIT’s Terrascope first-year learning community.

“David's exemplary teaching in Terrascope comes through his understanding that effective solutions must be found where science intersects with community engagement to forge ethical paths forward,” adds van der Hilst. In 2023, for his work with Terrascope, McGee received the school’s highest award, the School of Science Teaching Prize. In 2022, he was named a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, the highest teaching honor at MIT.

Across a career’s worth of pioneering product designs, Doug Field’s work has shaped the experience of anyone who’s ever used a MacBook Air, ridden a Segway, or driven a Tesla Model 3.

But his newest project is his most ambitious yet: reinventing the Ford automobile, one of the past century’s most iconic pieces of technology.

As Ford’s chief electric vehicle (EV), digital, and design officer, Field is tasked with leading the development of the company’s electric vehicles, while making new software platforms central to all Ford models.

To bring Ford Motor Co. into that digital and electric future, Field effectively has to lead a fast-moving startup inside the legacy carmaker. “It is incredibly hard, figuring out how to do ‘startups’ within large organizations,” he concedes.

If anyone can pull it off, it’s likely to be Field. Ever since his time in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations (then known as “Leaders in Manufacturing”) program studying organizational behavior and strategy, Field has been fixated on creating the conditions that foster innovation.

“The natural state of an organization is to make it harder and harder to do those things: to innovate, to have small teams, to go against the grain,” he says. To overcome those forces, Field has become a master practitioner of the art of curating diverse, talented teams and helping them flourish inside of big, complex companies.

“It’s one thing to make a creative environment where you can come up with big ideas,” he says. “It’s another to create an execution-focused environment to crank things out. I became intrigued with, and have been for the rest of my career, this question of how can you have both work together?”

Three decades after his first stint as a development engineer at Ford Motor Co., Field now has a chance to marry the manufacturing muscle of Ford with the bold approach that helped him rethink Apple’s laptops and craft Tesla’s Model 3 sedan. His task is nothing less than rethinking how cars are made and operated, from the bottom up.

“If it’s only creative or execution, you’re not going to change the world,” he says. “If you want to have a huge impact, you need people to change the course you’re on, and you need people to build it.”

A passion for design

From a young age, Field had a fascination with automobiles. “I was definitely into cars and transportation more generally,” he says. “I thought of cars as the place where technology and art and human design came together — cars were where all my interests intersected.”

With a mother who was an artist and musician and an engineer father, Field credits his parents’ influence for his lifelong interest in both the aesthetic and technical elements of product design. “I think that’s why I’m drawn to autos — there’s very much an aesthetic aspect to the product,” he says. 

After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University, Field took a job at Ford in 1987. The big Detroit automakers of that era excelled at mass-producing cars, but weren’t necessarily set up to encourage or reward innovative thinking. Field chafed at the “overstructured and bureaucratic” operational culture he encountered.

The experience was frustrating at times, but also valuable and clarifying. He realized that he “wanted to work with fast-moving, technology-based businesses.”

“My interest in advancing technical problem-solving didn’t have a place in the auto industry” at the time, he says. “I knew I wanted to work with passionate people and create something that didn’t exist, in an environment where talent and innovation were prized, where irreverence was an asset and not a liability. When I read about Silicon Valley, I loved the way they talked about things.”

During that time, Field took two years off to enroll in MIT’s LGO program, where he deepened his technical skills and encountered ideas about manufacturing processes and team-driven innovation that would serve him well in the years ahead.

“Some of core skill sets that I developed there were really, really important,” he says, “in the context of production lines and production processes.” He studied systems engineering and the use of Monte Carlo simulations to model complex manufacturing environments. During his internship with aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, he worked on automated design in computer-aided design (CAD) systems, long before those techniques became standard practice.

Another powerful tool he picked up was the science of probability and statistics, under the tutelage of MIT Professor Alvin Drake in his legendary course 6.041/6.431 (Probabilistic Systems Analysis). Field would go on to apply those insights not only to production processes, but also to characterizing variability in people’s aptitudes, working styles, and talents, in the service of building better, more innovative teams. And studying organizational strategy catalyzed his career-long interest in “ways to look at innovation as an outcome, rather than a random spark of genius.”

“So many things I was lucky to be exposed to at MIT,” Field says, were “all building blocks, pieces of the puzzle, that helped me navigate through difficult situations later on.”

Learning while leading

After leaving Ford in 1993, Field worked at Johnson and Johnson Medical for three years in process development. There, he met Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who was working on a project called the iBOT, a gyroscopic powered wheelchair that could climb stairs.

When Kamen spun off Segway to develop a new personal mobility device using the same technology, Field became his first hire. He spent nearly a decade as the firm’s chief technology officer.

At Segway, Field’s interests in vehicles, technology, innovation, process, and human-centered design all came together.

“When I think about working now on electric cars, it was a real gift,” he says. The problems they tackled prefigured the ones he would grapple with later at Tesla and Ford. “Segway was very much a precursor to a modern EV. Completely software controlled, with higher-voltage batteries, redundant systems, traction control, brushless DC motors — it was basically a miniature Tesla in the year 2000.”

At Segway, Field assembled an “amazing” team of engineers and designers who were as passionate as he was about pushing the envelope. “Segway was the first place I was able to hand-pick every single person I worked with, define the culture, and define the mission.”

As he grew into this leadership role, he became equally engrossed with cracking another puzzle: “How do you prize people who don’t fit in?”

“Such a fundamental part of the fabric of Silicon Valley is the love of embracing talent over a traditional organization’s ways of measuring people,” he says. “If you want to innovate, you need to learn how to manage neurodivergence and a very different set of personalities than the people you find in large corporations.”

Field still keeps the base housing of a Segway in his office, as a reminder of what those kinds of teams — along with obsessive attention to detail — can achieve.

Before joining Apple in 2008, he showed that component, with its clean lines and every minuscule part in its place in one unified package, to his prospective new colleagues. “They were like, “OK, you’re one of us,’” he recalls.

He soon became vice president of hardware development for all Mac computers, leading the teams behind the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and eventually overseeing more than 2,000 employees. “Making things really simple and really elegant, thinking about the product as an integrated whole, that really took me into Apple.”

The challenge of giving the MacBook Air its signature sleek and light profile is an example.

“The MacBook Air was the first high-volume consumer electronic product built out of a CNC-machined enclosure,” says Field. He worked with industrial design and technology teams to devise a way to make the laptop from one solid piece of aluminum and jettison two-thirds of the parts found in the iMac. “We had material cut away so that every single screw and piece of electronics sat down into it an integrated way. That’s how we got the product so small and slim.”

“When I interviewed with Jony Ive” — Apple’s legendary chief design officer — “he said your ability to zoom out and zoom in was the number one most important ability as a leader at Apple.” That meant zooming out to think about “the entire ethos of this product, and the way it will affect the world” and zooming all the way back in to obsess over, say, the physical shape of the laptop itself and what it feels like in a user’s hands.

“That thread of attention to detail, passion for product, design plus technology rolled directly into what I was doing at Tesla,” he says. When Field joined Tesla in 2013, he was drawn to the way the brash startup upended the approach to making cars. “Tesla was integrating digital technology into cars in a way nobody else was. They said, ‘We’re not a car company in Silicon Valley, we’re a Silicon Valley company and we happen to make cars.’”

Field assembled and led the team that produced the Model 3 sedan, Tesla’s most affordable vehicle, designed to have mass-market appeal.

That experience only reinforced the importance, and power, of zooming in and out as a designer — in a way that encompasses the bigger human resources picture.

“You have to have a broad sense of what you’re trying to accomplish and help people in the organization understand what it means to them,” he says. “You have to go across and understand operations enough to glue all of those (things) together — while still being great at and focused on something very, very deeply. That’s T-shaped leadership.”

He credits his time at LGO with providing the foundation for the “T-shaped leadership” he practices.

“An education like the one I got at MIT allowed me to keep moving that ‘T’, to focus really deep, learn a ton, teach as much as I can, and after something gets more mature, pull out and bed down into other areas where the organization needs to grow or where there’s a crisis.”

The power of marrying scale to a “startup mentality”

In 2018, Field returned to Apple as a vice president for special projects. “I left Tesla after Model 3 and Y started to ramp, as there were people better than me to run high-volume manufacturing,” he says. “I went back to Apple hoping what Tesla had learned would motivate Apple to get into a different market.”

That market was his early love: cars. Field quietly led a project to develop an electric vehicle at Apple for three years.

Then Ford CEO Jim Farley came calling. He persuaded Field to return to Ford in late 2021, partly by demonstrating how much things had changed since his first stint as the carmaker.

“Two things came through loud and clear,” Field says. “One was humility. ‘Our success is not assured.’” That attitude was strikingly different from Field’s early experience in Detroit, encountering managers who were resistant to change. “The other thing was urgency. Jim and Bill Ford said the exact same thing to me: ‘We have four or five years to completely remake this company.’”

“I said, ‘OK, if the top of company really believes that, then the auto industry may be ready for what I hope to offer.’”

So far, Field is energized and encouraged by the appetite for reinvention he’s encountered this time around at Ford.

“If you can combine what Ford does really well with what a Tesla or Rivian can do well, this is something to be reckoned with,” says Field. “Skunk works have become one of the fundamental tools of my career,” he says, using an industry term that describes a project pursued by a small, autonomous group of people within a larger organization.

Ford has been developing a new, lower-cost, software-enabled EV platform — running all of the car’s sensors and components from a central digital operating system — with a “skunk works” team for the past two years. The company plans to build new sedans, SUVs, and small pickups based on this new platform.

With other legacy carmakers like Volvo racing into the electric future and fierce competition from EV leaders Tesla and Rivian, Field and his colleagues have their work cut out for them.

If he succeeds, leveraging his decades of learning and leading from LGO to Silicon Valley, then his latest chapter could transform the way we all drive — and secure a spot for Ford at the front of the electric vehicle pack in the process.

“I’ve been lucky to feel over and over that what I’m doing right now — they are going to write a book about it,” say Field. “This is a big deal, for Ford and the U.S. auto industry, and for American industry, actually.”

When people think about fiber optic cables, its usually about how they’re used for telecommunications and accessing the internet. But fiber optic cables — strands of glass or plastic that allow for the transmission of light — can be used for another purpose: imaging the ground beneath our feet.

MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) PhD student Hilary Chang recently used the MIT fiber optic cable network to successfully image the ground underneath campus using a method known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). By using existing infrastructure, DAS can be an efficient and effective way to understand ground composition, a critical component for assessing the seismic hazard of areas, or how at risk they are from earthquake damage.

“We were able to extract very nice, coherent waves from the surroundings, and then use that to get some information about the subsurface,” says Chang, the lead author of a recent paper describing her work that was co-authored with EAPS Principal Research Scientist Nori Nakata. 

Dark fibers

The MIT campus fiber optic system, installed from 2000 to 2003, services internal data transport between labs and buildings as well as external transport, such as the campus internet (MITNet). There are three major cable hubs on campus from which lines branch out into buildings and underground, much like a spiderweb.

The network allocates a certain number of strands per building, some of which are “dark fibers,” or cables that are not actively transporting information. Each campus fiber hub has redundant backbone cables between them so that, in the event of a failure, network transmission can switch to the dark fibers without loss of network services.

DAS can use existing telecommunication cables and ambient wavefields to extract information about the materials they pass through, making it a valuable tool for places like cities or the ocean floor, where conventional sensors can’t be deployed. Chang, who studies earthquake waveforms and the information we can extract from them, decided to try it out on the MIT campus.

In order to get access to the fiber optic network for the experiment, Chang reached out to John Morgante, a manager of infrastructure project engineering with MIT Information Systems and Technology (IS&T). Morgante has been at MIT since 1998 and was involved with the original project installing the fiber optic network, and was thus able to provide personal insight into selecting a route.

“It was interesting to listen to what they were trying to accomplish with the testing,” says Morgante. While IS&T has worked with students before on various projects involving the school’s network, he said that “in the physical plant area, this is the first that I can remember that we’ve actually collaborated on an experiment together.”

They decided on a path starting from a hub in Building 24, because it was the longest running path that was entirely underground; above-ground wires that cut through buildings wouldn’t work because they weren’t grounded, and thus were useless for the experiment. The path ran from east to west, beginning in Building 24, traveling under a section of Massachusetts Ave., along parts of Amherst and Vassar streets, and ending at Building W92.

“[Morgante] was really helpful,” says Chang, describing it as “a very good experience working with the campus IT team.”

Locating the cables

After renting an interrogator, a device that sends laser pulses to sense ambient vibrations along the fiber optic cables, Chang and a group of volunteers were given special access to connect it to the hub in Building 24. They let it run for five days.

To validate the route and make sure that the interrogator was working, Chang conducted a tap test, in which she hit the ground with a hammer several times to record the precise GPS coordinates of the cable. Conveniently, the underground route is marked by maintenance hole covers that serve as good locations to do the test. And, because she needed the environment to be as quiet as possible to collect clean data, she had to do it around 2 a.m.

“I was hitting it next to a dorm and someone yelled ‘shut up,’ probably because the hammer blows woke them up,” Chang recalls. “I was sorry.” Thankfully, she only had to tap at a few spots and could interpolate the locations for the rest.

During the day, Chang and her fellow students — Denzel Segbefia, Congcong Yuan, and Jared Bryan — performed an additional test with geophones, another instrument that detects seismic waves, out on Brigg’s Field where the cable passed under it to compare the signals. It was an enjoyable experience for Chang; when the data were collected in 2022, the campus was coming out of pandemic measures, with remote classes sometimes still in place. “It was very nice to have everyone on the field and do something with their hands,” she says.

The noise around us

Once Chang collected the data, she was able to see plenty of environmental activity in the waveforms, including the passing of cars, bikes, and even when the train that runs along the northern edge of campus made its nightly passes.

After identifying the noise sources, Chang and Nakata extracted coherent surface waves from the ambient noises and used the wave speeds associated with different frequencies to understand the properties of the ground the cables passed through. Stiffer materials allow fast velocities, while softer material slows it.

“We found out that the MIT campus is built on soft materials overlaying a relatively hard bedrock,” Chang says, which confirms previously known, albeit lower-resolution, information about the geology of the area that had been collected using seismometers.

Information like this is critical for regions that are susceptible to destructive earthquakes and other seismic hazards, including the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has experienced earthquakes as recently as this past week. Areas of Boston and Cambridge characterized by artificial fill during rapid urbanization are especially at risk due to its subsurface structure being more likely to amplify seismic frequencies and damage buildings. This non-intrusive method for site characterization can help ensure that buildings meet code for the correct seismic hazard level.

“Destructive seismic events do happen, and we need to be prepared,” she says.

MIT senior Mishael Quraishi has been selected as a 2025-26 Churchill Scholar and will undertake an MPhil in archaeological research at Cambridge University in the U.K. this fall.

Quraishi, who is majoring in material sciences and archaeology with a minor in ancient and medieval studies, envisions a future career as a materials scientist, using archeological methods to understand how ancient techniques can be applied to modern problems.

At the Masic Lab at MIT, Quraishi was responsible for studying Egyptian blue, the world’s oldest synthetic pigment, to uncover ancient methods for mass production. Through this research, she secured an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Scientific Research, where she characterized pigments on the Amathus sarcophagus. Last fall, she presented her findings to kick off the International Roundtable on Polychromy at the Getty Museum. Quraishi has continued research in the Masic lab and her work on the “Blue Room” of Pompeii was featured on NBC nightly news.

Outside of research, Quraishi has been active in MIT’s makerspace and art communities. She has created engravings and acrylic pourings in the MIT MakerWorkshop, metal sculptures in the MIT Forge, and colored glass rods in the MIT Metropolis makerspace. Quraishi also plays the piano and harp and has sung with the Harvard Summer Chorus and the Handel and Haydn Society. She currently serves as the president of the Society for Undergraduates in Materials Science (SUMS) and captain of the lightweight women’s rowing team that won MIT’s first Division I national championship title in 2022.

“We are delighted that Mishael will have the opportunity to expand her important and interesting research at Cambridge University,” says Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships. “Her combination of scientific inquiry, humanistic approach, and creative spirit make her an ideal representative of MIT.”

The Churchill Scholarship is a highly competitive fellowship that annually offers 16 American students the opportunity to pursue a funded graduate degree in science, mathematics, or engineering at Churchill College within Cambridge University. The scholarship, which was established in 1963, honors former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s vision of U.S.-U.K. scientific exchange. Since 2017, two additional Kanders Churchill Scholarships have been awarded each year for studies in science policy.

MIT students interested in learning more about the Churchill Scholarship should contact Benard in MIT Career Advising and Professional Development.

Senior Audrey Lorvo is researching AI safety, which seeks to ensure increasingly intelligent AI models are reliable and can benefit humanity. The growing field focuses on technical challenges like robustness and AI alignment with human values, as well as societal concerns like transparency and accountability. Practitioners are also concerned with the potential existential risks associated with increasingly powerful AI tools.

“Ensuring AI isn’t misused or acts contrary to our intentions is increasingly important as we approach artificial general intelligence (AGI),” says Lorvo, a computer science, economics, and data science major. AGI describes the potential of artificial intelligence to match or surpass human cognitive capabilities.

An MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) scholar, Lorvo looks closely at how AI might automate AI research and development processes and practices. A member of the Big Data research group, she’s investigating the social and economic implications associated with AI’s potential to accelerate research on itself and how to effectively communicate these ideas and potential impacts to general audiences including legislators, strategic advisors, and others.

Lorvo emphasizes the need to critically assess AI’s rapid advancements and their implications, ensuring organizations have proper frameworks and strategies in place to address risks. “We need to both ensure humans reap AI’s benefits and that we don’t lose control of the technology,” she says. “We need to do all we can to develop it safely.”

Her participation in efforts like the AI Safety Technical Fellowship reflect her investment in understanding the technical aspects of AI safety. The fellowship provides opportunities to review existing research on aligning AI development with considerations of potential human impact. “The fellowship helped me understand AI safety’s technical questions and challenges so I can potentially propose better AI governance strategies,” she says. According to Lorvo, companies on AI’s frontier continue to push boundaries, which means we’ll need to implement effective policies that prioritize human safety without impeding research.

Value from human engagement

When arriving at MIT, Lorvo knew she wanted to pursue a course of study that would allow her to work at the intersection of science and the humanities. The variety of offerings at the Institute made her choices difficult, however.

“There are so many ways to help advance the quality of life for individuals and communities,” she says, “and MIT offers so many different paths for investigation.”

Beginning with economics — a discipline she enjoys because of its focus on quantifying impact — Lorvo investigated math, political science, and urban planning before choosing Course 6-14.

“Professor Joshua Angrist’s econometrics classes helped me see the value in focusing on economics, while the data science and computer science elements appealed to me because of the growing reach and potential impact of AI,” she says. “We can use these tools to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems and hopefully overcome serious challenges.”

Lorvo has also pursued concentrations in urban studies and planning and international development.

As she’s narrowed her focus, Lorvo finds she shares an outlook on humanity with other members of the MIT community like the MIT AI Alignment group, from whom she learned quite a bit about AI safety. “Students care about their marginal impact,” she says.

Marginal impact, the additional effect of a specific investment of time, money, or effort, is a way to measure how much a contribution adds to what is already being done, rather than focusing on the total impact. This can potentially influence where people choose to devote their resources, an idea that appeals to Lorvo.

“In a world of limited resources, a data-driven approach to solving some of our biggest challenges can benefit from a tailored approach that directs people to where they’re likely to do the most good,” she says. “If you want to maximize your social impact, reflecting on your career choice’s marginal impact can be very valuable.”

Lorvo also values MIT’s focus on educating the whole student and has taken advantage of opportunities to investigate disciplines like philosophy through MIT Concourse, a program that facilitates dialogue between science and the humanities. Concourse hopes participants gain guidance, clarity, and purpose for scientific, technical, and human pursuits.

Student experiences at the Institute

Lorvo invests her time outside the classroom in creating memorable experiences and fostering relationships with her classmates. “I’m fortunate that there’s space to balance my coursework, research, and club commitments with other activities, like weightlifting and off-campus initiatives,” she says. “There are always so many clubs and events available across the Institute.”

These opportunities to expand her worldview have challenged her beliefs and exposed her to new interest areas that have altered her life and career choices for the better. Lorvo, who is fluent in French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, also applauds MIT for the international experiences it provides for students.

“I’ve interned in Santiago de Chile and Paris with MISTI and helped test a water vapor condensing chamber that we designed in a fall 2023 D-Lab class in collaboration with the Madagascar Polytechnic School and Tatirano NGO [nongovernmental organization],” she says, “and have enjoyed the opportunities to learn about addressing economic inequality through my International Development and D-Lab classes.”

As president of MIT’s Undergraduate Economics Association, Lorvo connects with other students interested in economics while continuing to expand her understanding of the field. She enjoys the relationships she’s building while also participating in the association’s events throughout the year. “Even as a senior, I’ve found new campus communities to explore and appreciate,” she says. “I encourage other students to continue exploring groups and classes that spark their interests throughout their time at MIT.”

After graduation, Lorvo wants to continue investigating AI safety and researching governance strategies that can help ensure AI’s safe and effective deployment.

“Good governance is essential to AI’s successful development and ensuring humanity can benefit from its transformative potential,” she says. “We must continue to monitor AI’s growth and capabilities as the technology continues to evolve.”

Understanding technology’s potential impacts on humanity, doing good, continually improving, and creating spaces where big ideas can see the light of day continue to drive Lorvo. Merging the humanities with the sciences animates much of what she does. “I always hoped to contribute to improving people’s lives, and AI represents humanity’s greatest challenge and opportunity yet,” she says. “I believe the AI safety field can benefit from people with interdisciplinary experiences like the kind I’ve been fortunate to gain, and I encourage anyone passionate about shaping the future to explore it.”

Eleven MIT faculty, including nine from the School of Engineering and two from the School of Science, were awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Fifteen additional MIT alumni were also honored. 

Established in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, the PECASE is awarded to scientists and engineers “who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their research careers.” The latest recipients were announced by the White House on Jan. 14 under President Joe Biden. Fourteen government agencies recommended researchers for the award.

The MIT faculty and alumni honorees are among 400 scientists and engineers recognized for innovation and scientific contributions. Those from the School of Engineering and School of Science who were honored are:

• Tamara Broderick, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), was nominated by the Office of Naval Research for her project advancing “Lightweight representations for decentralized learning in data-rich environments.”
   
• Michael James Carbin SM ’09, PhD ’15, associate professor in the Department of EECS, was nominated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his CAREER award, a project that developed techniques to execute programs reliably on approximate and unreliable computation substrates.
   
• Christina Delimitrou, the KDD Career Development Professor in Communications and Technology and associate Professor in the Department of EECS, was nominated by the NSF for her group’s work on redesigning the cloud system stack given new cloud programming frameworks like microservices and serverless compute, as well as designing hardware acceleration techniques that make cloud data centers more predictable and resource-efficient.
   
• Netta Engelhardt, the Biedenharn Career Development Associate Professor of Physics, was nominated by the Department of Energy for her research on the black hole information paradox and its implications for the fundamental quantum structure of space and time.
   
• Robert Gilliard Jr., the Novartis Associate Professor of Chemistry, was selected based the results generated from his 2020 National Science Foundation CAREER award entitled: "CAREER: Boracycles with Unusual Bonding as Creative Strategies for Main-Group Functional Materials.”
   
• Heather Janine Kulik PD ’09, PhD ’09, the Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering, was nominated by the NSF for her 2019 proposal entitled “CAREER: Revealing spin-state-dependent reactivity in open-shell single atom catalysts with systematically-improvable computational tools.”
   
• Nuno Loureiro, professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Physics, was nominated by the NSF for his work on the generation and amplification of magnetic fields in the universe.
   
• Robert Macfarlane, associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was nominated by the Department of Defense (DoD)’s Air Force Office of Scientific Research. His research focuses on making new materials using molecular and nanoscale building blocks.
   
• Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was nominated by the DoD for her ARO-funded research that explored leveraging biological actuators in next-generation robots that can sense and adapt to their environments.
   
• Ellen Roche, the Latham Family Career Development Professor and associate department head in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was nominated by the NSF for her CAREER award, a project that aims to create a cutting-edge benchtop model combining soft robotics and organic tissue to accurately simulate the motions of the heart and diaphragm.
   
• Justin Wilkerson, a visiting associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was nominated by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for his research primarily related to the design and optimization of novel multifunctional composite materials that can survive extreme environments.

Additional MIT alumni who were honored include: Ambika Bajpayee MNG ’07, PhD ’15; Katherine Bouman SM ’13, PhD ’17; Walter Cheng-Wan Lee ’95, MNG ’95, PhD ’05; Ismaila Dabo PhD ’08; Ying Diao SM ’10, PhD ’12; Eno Ebong ’99; Soheil Feizi- Khankandi SM ’10, PhD ’16; Mark Finlayson SM ’01, PhD ’12; Chelsea B. Finn ’14; Grace Xiang Gu SM ’14, PhD ’18; David Michael Isaacson PhD ’06, AF ’16; Lewei Lin ’05; Michelle Sander PhD ’12; Kevin Solomon SM ’08, PhD ’12; and Zhiting Tian PhD ’14.

From crafting complex code to revolutionizing the hiring process, generative artificial intelligence is reshaping industries faster than ever before — pushing the boundaries of creativity, productivity, and collaboration across countless domains.

Enter the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium, a collaboration between industry leaders and MIT’s top minds. As MIT President Sally Kornbluth highlighted last year, the Institute is poised to address the societal impacts of generative AI through bold collaborations. Building on this momentum and established through MIT’s Generative AI Week and impact papers, the consortium aims to harness AI’s transformative power for societal good, tackling challenges before they shape the future in unintended ways.

“Generative AI and large language models [LLMs] are reshaping everything, with applications stretching across diverse sectors,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, who leads the consortium. “As we push forward with newer and more efficient models, MIT is committed to guiding their development and impact on the world.”

Chandrakasan adds that the consortium’s vision is rooted in MIT’s core mission. “I am thrilled and honored to help advance one of President Kornbluth’s strategic priorities around artificial intelligence,” he says. “This initiative is uniquely MIT — it thrives on breaking down barriers, bringing together disciplines, and partnering with industry to create real, lasting impact. The collaborations ahead are something we’re truly excited about.”

Developing the blueprint for generative AI’s next leap

The consortium is guided by three pivotal questions, framed by Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and co-chair of the GenAI Dean’s oversight group, that go beyond AI’s technical capabilities and into its potential to transform industries and lives:

1. How can AI-human collaboration create outcomes that neither could achieve alone?
2. What is the dynamic between AI systems and human behavior, and how do we maximize the benefits while steering clear of risks?
3. How can interdisciplinary research guide the development of better, safer AI technologies that improve human life?

Generative AI continues to advance at lightning speed, but its future depends on building a solid foundation. “Everybody recognizes that large language models will transform entire industries, but there's no strong foundation yet around design principles,” says Tim Kraska, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and co-faculty director of the consortium.

“Now is a perfect time to look at the fundamentals — the building blocks that will make generative AI more effective and safer to use,” adds Kraska.

"What excites me is that this consortium isn’t just academic research for the distant future — we’re working on problems where our timelines align with industry needs, driving meaningful progress in real time," says Vivek F. Farias, the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-faculty director of the consortium.

A “perfect match” of academia and industry

At the heart of the Generative AI Impact Consortium are six founding members: Analog Devices, The Coca-Cola Co., OpenAI, Tata Group, SK Telecom, and TWG Global. Together, they will work hand-in-hand with MIT researchers to accelerate breakthroughs and address industry-shaping problems.

The consortium taps into MIT’s expertise, working across schools and disciplines — led by MIT’s Office of Innovation and Strategy, in collaboration with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and all five of MIT’s schools.

“This initiative is the ideal bridge between academia and industry,” says Chandrakasan. “With companies spanning diverse sectors, the consortium brings together real-world challenges, data, and expertise. MIT researchers will dive into these problems to develop cutting-edge models and applications into these different domains.”

Industry partners: Collaborating on AI’s evolution

At the core of the consortium’s mission is collaboration — bringing MIT researchers and industry partners together to unlock generative AI’s potential while ensuring its benefits are felt across society.

Among the founding members is OpenAI, the creator of the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

“This type of collaboration between academics, practitioners, and labs is key to ensuring that generative AI evolves in ways that meaningfully benefit society,” says Anna Makanju, vice president of global impact at OpenAI, adding that OpenAI “is eager to work alongside MIT’s Generative AI Consortium to bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and the real-world expertise of diverse industries.”

The Coca-Cola Co. recognizes an opportunity to leverage AI innovation on a global scale. “We see a tremendous opportunity to innovate at the speed of AI and, leveraging The Coca-Cola Company's global footprint, make these cutting-edge solutions accessible to everyone,” says Pratik Thakar, global vice president and head of generative AI. “Both MIT and The Coca-Cola Company are deeply committed to innovation, while also placing equal emphasis on the legally and ethically responsible development and use of technology.”

For TWG Global, the consortium offers the ideal environment to share knowledge and drive advancements. “The strength of the consortium is its unique combination of industry leaders and academia, which fosters the exchange of valuable lessons, technological advancements, and access to pioneering research,” says Drew Cukor, head of data and artificial intelligence transformation. Cukor adds that TWG Global “is keen to share its insights and actively engage with leading executives and academics to gain a broader perspective of how others are configuring and adopting AI, which is why we believe in the work of the consortium.”

The Tata Group views the collaboration as a platform to address some of AI’s most pressing challenges. “The consortium enables Tata to collaborate, share knowledge, and collectively shape the future of generative AI, particularly in addressing urgent challenges such as ethical considerations, data privacy, and algorithmic biases,” says Aparna Ganesh, vice president of Tata Sons Ltd.

Similarly, SK Telecom sees its involvement as a launchpad for growth and innovation. Suk-geun (SG) Chung, SK Telecom executive vice president and chief AI global officer, explains, “Joining the consortium presents a significant opportunity for SK Telecom to enhance its AI competitiveness in core business areas, including AI agents, AI semiconductors, data centers (AIDC), and physical AI,” says Chung. “By collaborating with MIT and leveraging the SK AI R&D Center as a technology control tower, we aim to forecast next-generation generative AI technology trends, propose innovative business models, and drive commercialization through academic-industrial collaboration.”

Alan Lee, chief technology officer of Analog Devices (ADI), highlights how the consortium bridges key knowledge gaps for both his company and the industry at large. “ADI can’t hire a world-leading expert in every single corner case, but the consortium will enable us to access top MIT researchers and get them involved in addressing problems we care about, as we also work together with others in the industry towards common goals,” he says.

The consortium will host interactive workshops and discussions to identify and prioritize challenges. “It’s going to be a two-way conversation, with the faculty coming together with industry partners, but also industry partners talking with each other,” says Georgia Perakis, the John C Head III Dean (Interim) of the MIT Sloan School of Management and professor of operations management, operations research and statistics, who serves alongside Huttenlocher as co-chair of the GenAI Dean’s oversight group.

Preparing for the AI-enabled workforce of the future

With AI poised to disrupt industries and create new opportunities, one of the consortium’s core goals is to guide that change in a way that benefits both businesses and society.

“When the first commercial digital computers were introduced [the UNIVAC was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951], people were worried about losing their jobs,” says Kraska. “And yes, jobs like large-scale, manual data entry clerks and human ‘computers,’ people tasked with doing manual calculations, largely disappeared over time. But the people impacted by those first computers were trained to do other jobs.”

The consortium aims to play a key role in preparing the workforce of tomorrow by educating global business leaders and employees on generative AI evolving uses and applications. With the pace of innovation accelerating, leaders face a flood of information and uncertainty.

“When it comes to educating leaders about generative AI, it’s about helping them navigate the complexity of the space right now, because there’s so much hype and hundreds of papers published daily,” says Kraska. “The hard part is understanding which developments could actually have a chance of changing the field and which are just tiny improvements. There's a kind of FOMO [fear of missing out] for leaders that we can help reduce.”

Defining success: Shared goals for generative AI impact

Success within the initiative is defined by shared progress, open innovation, and mutual growth. “Consortium participants recognize, I think, that when I share my ideas with you, and you share your ideas with me, we’re both fundamentally better off,” explains Farias. “Progress on generative AI is not zero-sum, so it makes sense for this to be an open-source initiative.”

While participants may approach success from different angles, they share a common goal of advancing generative AI for broad societal benefit. “There will be many success metrics,” says Perakis. “We’ll educate students, who will be networking with companies. Companies will come together and learn from each other. Business leaders will come to MIT and have discussions that will help all of us, not just the leaders themselves.”

For Analog Devices’ Alan Lee, success is measured in tangible improvements that drive efficiency and product innovation: “For us at ADI, it’s a better, faster quality of experience for our customers, and that could mean better products. It could mean faster design cycles, faster verification cycles, and faster tuning of equipment that we already have or that we’re going to develop for the future. But beyond that, we want to help the world be a better, more efficient place.”

Ganesh highlights success through the lens of real-world application. “Success will also be defined by accelerating AI adoption within Tata companies, generating actionable knowledge that can be applied in real-world scenarios, and delivering significant advantages to our customers and stakeholders,” she says.

Generative AI is no longer confined to isolated research labs — it’s driving innovation across industries and disciplines. At MIT, the technology has become a campus-wide priority, connecting researchers, students, and industry leaders to solve complex challenges and uncover new opportunities. “It's truly an MIT initiative,” says Farias, “one that’s much larger than any individual or department on campus.”

David L. Darmofal SM ’91, PhD ’93 will serve as MIT’s next vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education, effective Feb. 17. Chancellor Melissa Nobles announced Darmofal’s appointment today in a letter to the MIT community.

Darmofal succeeds Ian A. Waitz, who stepped down in May to become MIT’s vice president for research, and Daniel E. Hastings, who has been serving in an interim capacity.

A creative innovator in research-based teaching and learning, Darmofal is the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Since 2017, he and his wife Claudia have served as heads of house at The Warehouse, an MIT graduate residence.

“Dave knows the ins and outs of education and student life at MIT in a way that few do,” Nobles says. “He’s a head of house, an alum, and the parent of a graduate. Dave will bring decades of first-hand experience to the role.”

“An MIT education is incredibly special, combining passionate students, staff, and faculty striving to use knowledge and discovery to drive positive change for the world,” says Darmofal. “I am grateful for this opportunity to play a part in supporting MIT’s academic mission.”

Darmofal’s leadership experience includes service from 2008 to 2011 as associate and interim department head in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, overseeing undergraduate and graduate programs. He was the AeroAstro director of digital education from 2020 to 2022, including leading the department’s response to remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. He currently serves as director of the MIT Aerospace Computational Science and Engineering Laboratory and is a member of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE) in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.

As an MIT faculty member and administrator, Darmofal has been involved in designing more flexible degree programs, developing open digital-learning opportunities, creating first-year advising seminars, and enhancing professional and personal development opportunities for students. He also contributed his expertise in engineering pedagogy to the development of the Schwarzman College of Computing’s Common Ground efforts, to address the need for computing education across many disciplines.

“MIT students, staff, and faculty share a common bond as problem solvers. Talk to any of us about an MIT education, and you will get an earful on not only what we need to do better, but also how we can actually do it. The Office of the Vice Chancellor can help bring our community of problem solvers together to enable improvements in our academics,” says Darmofal.

Overseeing the academic arm of the Chancellor’s Office, the vice chancellor’s portfolio is extensive. Darmofal will lead professionals across more than a dozen units, covering areas such as recruitment and admissions, financial aid, student systems, advising, professional and career development, pedagogy, experiential learning, and support for MIT’s more than 100 graduate programs. He will also work collaboratively with many of MIT’s student organizations and groups, including with the leaders of the Undergraduate Association and the Graduate Student Council, and administer the relationship with the graduate student union.

“Dave will be a critical part of my office’s efforts to strengthen and expand critical connections across all areas of student life and learning,” Nobles says. She credits the search advisory group, co-chaired by professors Laurie Boyer and Will Tisdale, in setting the right tenor for such an important role and leading a thorough, inclusive process.

Darmofal’s research is focused on computational methods for partial differential equations, especially fluid dynamics. He earned his SM and PhD degrees in aeronautics and astronautics in 1991 and 1993, respectively, from MIT, and his BS in aerospace engineering in 1989 from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining MIT in 1998, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University from 1995 to 1998. Currently, he is the chair of AeroAstro’s Undergraduate Committee and the graduate officer for the CCSE PhD program.

“I want to echo something that Dan Hastings said recently,” Darmofal says. “We have a lot to be proud of when it comes to an MIT education. It’s more accessible than it has ever been. It’s innovative, with unmatched learning opportunities here and around the world. It’s home to academic research labs that attract the most talented scholars, creators, experimenters, and engineers. And ultimately, it prepares graduates who do good.”

In medical school, Matthew Dolan ’81 briefly considered specializing in orthopedic surgery because of the materials science nature of the work — but he soon realized that he didn’t have the innate skills required for that type of work.

“I’ll be honest with you — I can’t parallel park,” he jokes. “You can consider a lot of things, but if you find the things that you’re good at and that excite you, you can hopefully move forward with those.”

Dolan certainly has, tackling problems from bench to bedside and beyond. Both in the United States and abroad through the U.S. Air Force, Dolan has emerged as a leader in immunology and virology, and has served as director of the Defense Institute for Medical Operations. He’s worked on everything from foodborne illnesses and Ebola to biological weapons and Covid-19, and has even been a guest speaker on NPR’s “Science Friday.”

“This is fun and interesting, and I believe that, and I work hard to convey that — and it’s contagious,” he says. “You can affect people with that excitement.”

Pieces of the puzzle

Dolan fondly recalls his years at MIT, and is still in touch with many of the “brilliant” and “interesting” friends he made while in Cambridge.

He notes that the challenges that were the most rewarding in his career were also the ones that MIT had uniquely prepared him for. Dolan, a Course 7 major, naturally took many classes outside of biology as part of his undergraduate studies: organic chemistry was foundational for understanding toxicology while studying chemical weapons, while pathogens like Legionella, which causes pneumonia and can spread through water systems such as ice machines or air conditioners, are solved at the interface between public health and ecology.

“I learned that learning can be a high-intensity experience,” Dolan recalls. “You can be aggressive in your learning; you can learn and excel in a wide variety of things and gather up all the knowledge and knowledgeable people to work together towards solutions.”

Dolan, for example, worked in the Amazon Basin in Peru on a public health crisis of a sharp rise in childhood mortality due to malaria. The cause was a few degrees removed from the immediate problem: human agriculture had affected the Amazon’s tributaries, leading to still and stagnant water where before there had been rushing streams and rivers. This change in the environment allowed a certain mosquito species of “avid human biters” to thrive. 

“It can be helpful and important for some people to have a really comprehensive and contextual view of scientific problems and biological problems,” he says. “It’s very rewarding to put the pieces in a puzzle like that together.”

Choosing To serve

Dolan says a key to finding meaning in his work, especially during difficult times, is a sentiment from Alsatian polymath and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer: “The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

One of Dolan’s early formative experiences was working in the heart of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, at a time when there was no effective treatment. No matter how hard he worked, the patients would still die.

“Failure is not an option — unless you have to fail. You can’t let the failures destroy you,” he says. “There are a lot of other battles out there, and it’s self-indulgent to ignore them and focus on your woe.”

Lasting impacts

Dolan couldn’t pick a favorite country, but notes that he’s always impressed seeing how people value the chance to excel with science and medicine when offered resources and respect. Ultimately, everyone he’s worked with, no matter their differences, was committed to solving problems and improving lives.

Dolan worked in Russia after the Berlin Wall fell, on HIV/AIDS in Moscow and tuberculosis in the Russian Far East. Although relations with Russia are currently tense, to say the least, Dolan remains optimistic for a brighter future.

“People that were staunch adversaries can go on to do well together,” he says. “Sometimes, peace leads to partnership. Remembering that it was once possible gives me great hope.”

Dolan understands that the most lasting impact he has had is, likely, teaching: Time marches on, and discoveries can be lost to history, but teaching and training people continues and propagates. In addition to guiding the next generation of health-care specialists, Dolan also developed programs in laboratory biosafety and biosecurity with the U.S. departments of State and Defense, and taught those programs around the world.

“Working in prevention gives you the chance to take care of process problems before they become people problems — patient care problems,” he says. “I have been so impressed with the courageous and giving people that have worked with me.” 

Highly energetic explosions in the sky are commonly attributed to gamma-ray bursts. We now understand that these bursts originate from either the merger of two neutron stars or the collapse of a massive star. In these scenarios, a newborn black hole is formed, emitting a jet that travels at nearly the speed of light. When these jets are directed toward Earth, we can observe them from vast distances — sometimes billions of light-years away — due to a relativistic effect known as Doppler boosting. Over the past decade, thousands of such gamma-ray bursts have been detected.

Since its launch in 2024, the Einstein Probe — an X-ray space telescope developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in partnership with European Space Agency (ESA) and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics — has been scanning the skies looking for energetic explosions, and in April the telescope observed an unusual event designated as EP240408A. Now an international team of astronomers, including Dheeraj Pasham from MIT, Igor Andreoni from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Brendan O’Connor from Carnegie Mellon University, and others have investigated this explosion using a slew of ground-based and space-based telescopes, including NuSTAR, Swift, Gemini, Keck, DECam, VLA, ATCA, and NICER, which was developed in collaboration with MIT. 

An open-access report of their findings, published Jan. 27 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, indicates that the characteristics of this explosion do not match those of typical gamma-ray bursts. Instead, it may represent a rare new class of powerful cosmic explosion — a jetted tidal disruption event, which occurs when a supermassive black hole tears apart a star. 

“NICER’s ability to steer to pretty much any part of the sky and monitor for weeks has been instrumental in our understanding of these unusual cosmic explosions,” says Pasham, a research scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

While a jetted tidal disruption event is plausible, the researchers say the lack of radio emissions from this jet is puzzling. O’Connor surmises, “EP240408a ticks some of the boxes for several different kinds of phenomena, but it doesn’t tick all the boxes for anything. In particular, the short duration and high luminosity are hard to explain in other scenarios. The alternative is that we are seeing something entirely new!”

According to Pasham, the Einstein Probe is just beginning to scratch the surface of what seems possible. “I’m excited to chase the next weird explosion from the Einstein Probe”, he says, echoing astronomers worldwide who look forward to the prospect of discovering more unusual explosions from the farthest reaches of the cosmos.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently announced that MIT Associate Professor Evelina Fedorenko will receive a 2025 Troland Research Award for her groundbreaking contributions toward understanding the language network in the human brain.

The Troland Research Award is given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.

Fedorenko, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a McGovern Institute for Brain Research investigator, is interested in how minds and brains create language. Her lab is unpacking the internal architecture of the brain’s language system and exploring the relationship between language and various cognitive, perceptual, and motor systems. Her novel methods combine precise measures of an individual’s brain organization with innovative computational modeling to make fundamental discoveries about the computations that underlie the uniquely human ability for language.

Fedorenko has shown that the language network is selective for language processing over diverse non-linguistic processes that have been argued to share computational demands with language, such as math, music, and social reasoning. Her work has also demonstrated that syntactic processing is not localized to a particular region within the language network, and every brain region that responds to syntactic processing is at least as sensitive to word meanings.

She has also shown that representations from neural network language models, such as ChatGPT, are similar to those in the human language brain areas. Fedorenko also highlighted that although language models can master linguistic rules and patterns, they are less effective at using language in real-world situations. In the human brain, that kind of functional competence is distinct from formal language competence, she says, requiring not just language-processing circuits but also brain areas that store knowledge of the world, reason, and interpret social interactions. Contrary to a prominent view that language is essential for thinking, Fedorenko argues that language is not the medium of thought and is primarily a tool for communication.

Ultimately, Fedorenko’s cutting-edge work is uncovering the computations and representations that fuel language processing in the brain. She will receive the Troland Award this April, during the annual meeting of the NAS in Washington.

Imagine a boombox that tracks your every move and suggests music to match your personal dance style. That’s the idea behind “Be the Beat,” one of several projects from MIT course 4.043/4.044 (Interaction Intelligence), taught by Marcelo Coelho in the Department of Architecture, that were presented at the 38th annual NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference in December 2024. With over 16,000 attendees converging in Vancouver, NeurIPS is a competitive and prestigious conference dedicated to research and science in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and a premier venue for showcasing cutting-edge developments.

The course investigates the emerging field of large language objects, and how artificial intelligence can be extended into the physical world. While “Be the Beat” transforms the creative possibilities of dance, other student submissions span disciplines such as music, storytelling, critical thinking, and memory, creating generative experiences and new forms of human-computer interaction. Taken together, these projects illustrate a broader vision for artificial intelligence: one that goes beyond automation to catalyze creativity, reshape education, and reimagine social interactions.

Be the Beat 

Last year the Earth exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial times, a threshold beyond which wildfires, droughts, floods, and other climate impacts are expected to escalate in frequency, intensity, and lethality. To cap global warming at 1.5 C and avert that scenario, the nearly 200 signatory nations of the Paris Agreement on climate change will need to not only dramatically lower their greenhouse gas emissions, but also take measures to remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and durably store it at or below the Earth’s surface.

Past analyses of the climate mitigation potential, costs, benefits, and drawbacks of different carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options have focused primarily on three strategies: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which CO₂-absorbing plant matter is converted into fuels or directly burned to generate energy, with some of the plant’s carbon content captured and then stored safely and permanently; afforestation/reforestation, in which CO₂-absorbing trees are planted in large numbers; and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), a technology that captures and separates CO₂ directly from ambient air, and injects it into geological reservoirs or incorporates it into durable products. 

To provide a more comprehensive and actionable analysis of CDR, a new study by researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) first expands the option set to include biochar (charcoal produced from plant matter and stored in soil) and enhanced weathering (EW) (spreading finely ground rock particles on land to accelerate storage of CO₂ in soil and water). The study then evaluates portfolios of all five options — in isolation and in combination — to assess their capability to meet the 1.5 C goal, and their potential impacts on land, energy, and policy costs.

The study appears in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Aided by their global multi-region, multi-sector Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, the MIT CS3 researchers produce three key findings.

First, the most cost-effective, low-impact strategy that policymakers can take to achieve global net-zero emissions — an essential step in meeting the 1.5 C goal — is to diversify their CDR portfolio, rather than rely on any single option. This approach minimizes overall cropland and energy consumption, and negative impacts such as increased food insecurity and decreased energy supplies.

By diversifying across multiple CDR options, the highest CDR deployment of around 31.5 gigatons of CO₂ per year is achieved in 2100, while also proving the most cost-effective net-zero strategy. The study identifies BECCS and biochar as most cost-competitive in removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, followed by EW, with DACCS as uncompetitive due to high capital and energy requirements. While posing logistical and other challenges, biochar and EW have the potential to improve soil quality and productivity across 45 percent of all croplands by 2100.

“Diversifying CDR portfolios is the most cost-effective net-zero strategy because it avoids relying on a single CDR option, thereby reducing and redistributing negative impacts on agriculture, forestry, and other land uses, as well as on the energy sector,” says Solene Chiquier, lead author of the study who was a CS3 postdoc during its preparation.

The second finding: There is no optimal CDR portfolio that will work well at global and national levels. The ideal CDR portfolio for a particular region will depend on local technological, economic, and geophysical conditions. For example, afforestation and reforestation would be of great benefit in places like Brazil, Latin America, and Africa, by not only sequestering carbon in more acreage of protected forest but also helping to preserve planetary well-being and human health.

“In designing a sustainable, cost-effective CDR portfolio, it is important to account for regional availability of agricultural, energy, and carbon-storage resources,” says Sergey Paltsev, CS3 deputy director, MIT Energy Initiative senior research scientist, and supervising co-author of the study. “Our study highlights the need for enhancing knowledge about local conditions that favor some CDR options over others.”

Finally, the MIT CS3 researchers show that delaying large-scale deployment of CDR portfolios could be very costly, leading to considerably higher carbon prices across the globe — a development sure to deter the climate mitigation efforts needed to achieve the 1.5 C goal. They recommend near-term implementation of policy and financial incentives to help fast-track those efforts.

The MIT Press has announced that Direct to Open (D2O) will open access to over 80 new monographs and edited book collections in the spring and fall publishing seasons, after reaching its full funding goal for 2025.

“It has been one of the greatest privileges of my career to contribute to this program and demonstrate that our academic community can unite to publish high-quality open-access monographs at scale,” says Amy Harris, senior manager of library relations and sales at the MIT Press. “We are deeply grateful to all of the consortia that have partnered with us and to the hundreds of libraries that have invested in this program. Together, we are expanding the public knowledge commons in ways that benefit scholars, the academy, and readers around the world.”

Among the highlights from the MIT Press’s fourth D2O funding cycle is a new three-year, consortium-wide commitment from the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) and a renewed three-year commitment from the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). These long-term collaborations will play a pivotal role in supporting the press’s open-access efforts for years to come.

“The Florida Virtual Campus is honored to participate in D2O in order to provide this collection of high-quality scholarship to more than 1.2 million students and faculty at the 28 state colleges and 12 state universities of Florida,” says Elijah Scott, executive director of library services for the Florida Virtual Campus. “The D2O program allows FLVC to make this research collection available to our member libraries while concurrently fostering the larger global aspiration of sustainable and equitable access to information.”

“The libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance are committed to supporting the creation of open-access content,” adds Kate McCready, program director for open publishing at the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library. “We're thrilled that our participation in D2O contributes to the opening of this collection, as well as championing the exploration of new models for opening scholarly monographs.”

In 2025, hundreds of libraries renewed their support thanks to the teams at consortia around the world, including the Council of Australasian University Librarians, the CBB Library Consortium, the California Digital Library, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, CRL/NERL, the Greater Western Library Alliance, Jisc, Lyrasis, MOBIUS, PALCI, SCELC, and the Tri-College Library Consortium.

Launched in 2021, D2O is an innovative sustainable framework for open-access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single e-books, to a collaborative, library-supported open-access model. 

Many other models offer open-access opportunities on a title-by-title basis or within specific disciplines. D2O’s particular advantage is that it enables a press to provide open access to its entire list of scholarly books at scale, embargo-free, during each funding cycle. Thanks to D2O, all MIT Press monograph authors have the opportunity for their work to be published open access, with equal support to traditionally underserved and underfunded disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.  

The MIT Press will now turn its attention to its fifth funding cycle and invites libraries and library consortia to participate. For details, please visit the MIT Press website or contact the Library Relations team.

Gerald E. Schneider, a professor emeritus of psychology and member of the MIT community for over 60 years, passed away on Dec. 11, 2024. He was 84.

Schneider was an authority on the relationships between brain structure and behavior, concentrating on neuronal development, regeneration or altered growth after brain injury, and the behavioral consequences of altered connections in the brain.

Using the Syrian golden hamster as his test subject of choice, Schneider made numerous contributions to the advancement of neuroscience. He laid out the concept of two visual systems — one for locating objects and one for the identification of objects — in a 1969 issue of Science, a milestone in the study of brain-behavior relationships. In 1973, he described a “pruning effect” in the optic tract axons of adult hamsters who had brain lesions early in life. In 2006, his lab reported a previously undiscovered nanobiomedical technology for tissue repair and restoration in Biological Sciences. The paper showed how a designed self-assembling peptide nanofiber scaffold could create a permissive environment for axons, not only to regenerate through the site of an acute injury in the optic tract of hamsters, but also to knit the brain tissue together.

His work shaped the research and thinking of numerous colleagues and trainees. Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and former Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) department head, recalls how Schneider’s paper, “Is it really better to have your brain lesion early? A revision of the ‘Kennard Principle,’” published in 1979 in the journal Neuropsychologia, influenced his work on rewiring retinal projections to the auditory thalamus, which was used to derive principles of functional plasticity in the cortex.

“Jerry was an extremely innovative thinker. His hypothesis of two visual systems — for detailed spatial processing and for movement processing — based on his analysis of visual pathways in hamsters presaged and inspired later work on form and motion pathways in the primate brain,” Sur says. “His description of conservation of axonal arbor during development laid the foundation for later ideas about homeostatic mechanisms that co-regulate neuronal plasticity.”

Institute Professor Ann Graybiel was a colleague of Schneider’s for over five decades. She recalls early in her career being asked by Schneider to help make a map of the superior colliculus.

“I took it as an honor to be asked, and I worked very hard on this, with great excitement. It was my first such mapping, to be followed by much more in the future,” Graybiel recalls. “Jerry was fascinated by animal behavior, and from early on he made many discoveries using hamsters as his main animals of choice. He found that they could play. He found that they could operate in ways that seemed very sophisticated. And, yes, he mapped out pathways in their brains.”

Schneider was raised in Wheaton, Illinois, and graduated from Wheaton College in 1962 with a degree in physics. He was recruited to MIT by Hans-Lukas Teuber, one of the founders of the Department of Psychology, which eventually became the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Walle Nauta, another founder of the department, taught Schneider neuroanatomy. The pair were deeply influential in shaping his interests in neuroscience and his research.

“He admired them both very much and was very attached to them,” his daughter, Nimisha Schneider, says. “He was an interdisciplinary scholar and he liked that aspect of neuroscience, and he was fascinated by the mysteries of the human brain.”

Shortly after completing his PhD in psychology in 1966, he was hired as an assistant professor in 1967. He was named an associate professor in 1970, received tenure in 1975, and was appointed a full professor in 1977.

After his retirement in 2017, Schneider remained involved with the Department of BCS. Professor Pawan Sinha brought Schneider to campus for what would be his last on-campus engagement, as part of the “SilverMinds Series,” an initiative in the Sinha Lab to engage with scientists now in their “silver years.”

Schneider’s research made an indelible impact on Sinha, beginning as a graduate student when he was inspired by Schneider’s work linking brain structure and function. His work on nerve regeneration, which merged fundamental science and real-world impact, served as a “North Star” that guided Sinha’s own work as he established his lab as a junior faculty member.

“Even through the sadness of his loss, I am grateful for the inspiring example he has left for us of a life that so seamlessly combined brilliance, kindness, modesty, and tenacity,” Sinha says. “He will be missed.”

Schneider’s life centered around his research and teaching, but he also had many other skills and hobbies. Early in his life, he enjoyed painting, and as he grew older he was drawn to poetry. He was also skilled in carpentry and making furniture. He built the original hamster cages for his lab himself, along with numerous pieces of home furniture and shelving. He enjoyed nature anywhere it could be found, from the bees in his backyard to hiking and visiting state and national parks.

He was a Type 1 diabetic, and at the time of his death, he was nearing the completion of a book on the effects of hypoglycemia on the brain, which his family hopes to have published in the future. He was also the author of “Brain Structure and Its Origins,” published in 2014 by MIT Press.

He is survived by his wife, Aiping; his children, Cybele, Aniket, and Nimisha; and step-daughter Anna. He was predeceased by a daughter, Brenna. He is also survived by eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. A memorial in his honor was held on Jan. 11 at Saint James Episcopal Church in Cambridge.

In biology textbooks, the endoplasmic reticulum is often portrayed as a distinct, compact organelle near the nucleus, and is commonly known to be responsible for protein trafficking and secretion. In reality, the ER is vast and dynamic, spread throughout the cell and able to establish contact and communication with and between other organelles. These membrane contacts regulate processes as diverse as fat metabolism, sugar metabolism, and immune responses.

Exploring how pathogens manipulate and hijack essential processes to promote their own life cycles can reveal much about fundamental cellular functions and provide insight into viable treatment options for understudied pathogens.

New research from the Lamason Lab in the Department of Biology at MIT recently published in the Journal of Cell Biology has shown that Rickettsia parkeri, a bacterial pathogen that lives freely in the cytosol, can interact in an extensive and stable way with the rough endoplasmic reticulum, forming previously unseen contacts with the organelle.

It’s the first known example of a direct interkingdom contact site between an intracellular bacterial pathogen and a eukaryotic membrane.

The Lamason Lab studies R. parkeri as a model for infection of the more virulent Rickettsia rickettsii. R. rickettsii, carried and transmitted by ticks, causes Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Left untreated, the infection can cause symptoms as severe as organ failure and death.

Rickettsia is difficult to study because it is an obligate pathogen, meaning it can only live and reproduce inside living cells, much like a virus. Researchers must get creative to parse out fundamental questions and molecular players in the R. parkeri life cycle, and much remains unclear about how R. parkeri spreads.

Detour to the junction

First author Yamilex Acevedo-Sánchez, a BSG-MSRP-Bio program alum and a graduate student at the time, stumbled across the ER and R. parkeri interactions while trying to observe Rickettsia reaching a cell junction.

The current model for Rickettsia infection involves R. parkeri spreading cell to cell by traveling to the specialized contact sites between cells and being engulfed by the neighboring cell in order to spread. Listeria monocytogenes, which the Lamason Lab also studies, uses actin tails to forcefully propel itself into a neighboring cell. By contrast, R. parkeri can form an actin tail, but loses it before reaching the cell junction. Somehow, R. parkeri is still able to spread to neighboring cells.

After an MIT seminar about the ER’s lesser-known functions, Acevedo-Sánchez developed a cell line to observe whether Rickettsia might be spreading to neighboring cells by hitching a ride on the ER to reach the cell junction.

Instead, she saw an unexpectedly high percentage of R. parkeri surrounded and enveloped by the ER, at a distance of about 55 nanometers. This distance is significant because membrane contacts for interorganelle communication in eukaryotic cells form connections from 10-80 nanometers wide. The researchers ruled out that what they saw was not an immune response, and the sections of the ER interacting with the R. parkeri were still connected to the wider network of the ER.

“I’m of the mind that if you want to learn new biology, just look at cells,” Acevedo-Sánchez says. “Manipulating the organelle that establishes contact with other organelles could be a great way for a pathogen to gain control during infection.” 

The stable connections were unexpected because the ER is constantly breaking and reforming connections, lasting seconds or minutes. It was surprising to see the ER stably associating around the bacteria. As a cytosolic pathogen that exists freely in the cytosol of the cells it infects, it was also unexpected to see R. parkeri surrounded by a membrane at all.

Small margins

Acevedo-Sánchez collaborated with the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard University to view her initial observations at higher resolution using focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy. FIB-SEM involves taking a sample of cells and blasting them with a focused ion beam in order to shave off a section of the block of cells. With each layer, a high-resolution image is taken. The result of this process is a stack of images.

From there, Acevedo-Sánchez marked what different areas of the images were — such as the mitochondria, Rickettsia, or the ER — and a program called ORS Dragonfly, a machine learning program, sorted through the thousand or so images to identify those categories. That information was then used to create 3D models of the samples. 

Acevedo-Sánchez noted that less than 5 percent of R. parkeri formed connections with the ER — but small quantities of certain characteristics are known to be critical for R. parkeri infection. R. parkeri can exist in two states: motile, with an actin tail, and nonmotile, without it. In mutants unable to form actin tails, R. parkeri are unable to progress to adjacent cells — but in nonmutants, the percentage of R. parkeri that have tails starts at about 2 percent in early infection and never exceeds 15 percent at the height of it.

The ER only interacts with nonmotile R. parkeri, and those interactions increased 25-fold in mutants that couldn’t form tails.

Creating connections

Co-authors Acevedo-Sánchez, Patrick Woida, and Caroline Anderson also investigated possible ways the connections with the ER are mediated. VAP proteins, which mediate ER interactions with other organelles, are known to be co-opted by other pathogens during infection.

During infection by R. parkeri, VAP proteins were recruited to the bacteria; when VAP proteins were knocked out, the frequency of interactions between R. parkeri and the ER decreased, indicating R. parkeri may be taking advantage of these cellular mechanisms for its own purposes during infection.

Although Acevedo-Sánchez now works as a senior scientist at AbbVie, the Lamason Lab is continuing the work of exploring the molecular players that may be involved, how these interactions are mediated, and whether the contacts affect the host or bacteria’s life cycle.

Senior author and associate professor of biology Rebecca Lamason noted that these potential interactions are particularly interesting because bacteria and mitochondria are thought to have evolved from a common ancestor. The Lamason Lab has been exploring whether R. parkeri could form the same membrane contacts that mitochondria do, although they haven’t proven that yet. So far, R. parkeri is the only cytosolic pathogen that has been observed behaving this way.

“It’s not just bacteria accidentally bumping into the ER. These interactions are extremely stable. The ER is clearly extensively wrapping around the bacterium, and is still connected to the ER network,” Lamason says. “It seems like it has a purpose — what that purpose is remains a mystery.” 

“There is no treatment available for your son. We can’t do anything to help him.”

When Fernando Goldsztein MBA ’03 heard those words, something inside him snapped.

“I refused to accept what the doctors were saying. I transformed my fear into my greatest strength and started fighting.”

Goldsztein’s 12-year-old son Frederico was diagnosed with relapsing medulloblastoma, a life-threatening pediatric brain tumor. Goldsztein's life — and career plan — changed in an instant. He had to learn to become a different kind of leader altogether.

While Goldsztein never set out to become a founder, the MIT Sloan School of Management taught him the importance of networking, building friendships, and making career connections with peers and faculty from all walks of life. He began using those skills in a new way — boldly reaching out to the top medulloblastoma doctors and scientists at hospitals around the world to ask for help.

“I knew that I had to do something to save Frederico, but also the other estimated 15,000 children diagnosed with the disease around the world each year,” he says.

In 2021, Goldsztein launched The Medulloblastoma Initiative (MBI), a nonprofit organization dedicated to finding a cure using a remarkable new model for funding rare disease research.

In just 18 months, the organization — which is still in startup mode — has raised $11 million in private funding and brought together 14 of the world’s most prestigious labs and hospitals from across North America, Europe, and Brazil.

Two promising trials will launch in the coming months, and three additional trials are in the pipeline and currently awaiting U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.

All of this in an industry that is notorious for bureaucratic red tape, and where the timeline from an initial lab discovery to a patient receiving a first treatment averages seven to 15 years.

While government research grants typically allocate just 4 cents on the dollar toward pediatric cancer research — pennies doled out across multiple labs pursuing uncoordinated efforts — MBI is laser-focused on pushing 100 percent of their funding toward a singular goal, without any overhead or administrative costs.

“There is no time to lose,” Goldsztein says. “We are making science move faster than it ever has before.”

The MBI blueprint for funding cures for rare diseases is replicable, and likely to disrupt the standard way health care research is funded and carried out by radically shortening the timeline.

From despair to strength

After his initial diagnosis at age 9, Frederico went through a nine-hour brain surgery and came to the United States to receive standard treatment. Goldsztein looked on helplessly as his son received radiation and then nine grueling rounds of chemotherapy.

First pioneered in the 1980s, this standard treatment protocol cures 70 percent of children. Still, it leaves most of them with lifelong side effects like cognitive problems, endocrine issues that stunt growth, and secondary tumors. Frederico was on the wrong side of that statistic. Just three years later, his tumor relapsed.

Goldsztein grimaces as he recalls the prognosis he and his wife heard from the doctors.

“It was unbelievable to me that there had been almost no discoveries in 40 years,” he says.

Ultimately, he found hope and partnership in Roger Packer, the director of the Brain Tumor Institute and the Gilbert Family Neurofibromatosis Institute of Children’s National Hospital. He is also the very doctor who created the standard treatment years before.

Packer explains that finding effective therapies for medulloblastoma was complex for 30 years because it is an umbrella term for 13 types of tumors. Frederico suffers from the most common one, Group 4.

Part of the reason the treatment has not changed is that, until recently, medicine has not advanced enough to detect differences between the different tumor types. Packer explains, “Now with molecular genetic testing and methylation, which is a way to essentially sort tumors, that has changed.”

The problem for Frederico was that very few researchers were working on Group 4, the sub-type of medulloblastoma that is the most common tumor, yet also the one that scientists know the least about.

Goldsztein challenged Packer: “If I can get you the funding, what can your lab do to advance medulloblastoma research quickly?”

An open-source consortium model

Packer advised that they work together to “try something different,” instead of just throwing money at research without any guideposts.

“We set up a consortium of leading institutions around the world doing medulloblastoma research, asked them to change their lab approach to focus on the Group 4 tumor, and assigned each lab a question to answer. We charged them with coming up with therapy — not in seven to 10 years, which is the normal transition from discovery to developing a drug and getting it to a patient, but within a two-year timeline,” he says.

Initially, seven labs signed on. Today, the Cure Group 4 Consortium is made up of 14 partners and reads like a who’s who of medulloblastoma heavy hitters: Children’s National Hospital, SickKids, Hopp Children’s Cancer Center, and Texas Children’s Hospital.

Labs can only join the consortium if they agree to follow some unusual rules. As Goldsztein explains, “To be accepted into this group and receive funding, there are no silos, and there is no duplicated work. Everyone has a piece of the puzzle, and we work together to move fast. That is the magic of our model.”

Inspired by MIT’s open-source methods, researchers must share data freely with one another to accelerate the group’s overall progress. This kind of partnership across labs and borders is unprecedented in a highly competitive sector.

Mariano Gargiulo MBA ’03 met Goldsztein on the first day of their MIT Sloan Fellows MBA program orientation and has been his dear friend ever since. An early-stage donor to MBI and a Houston-based executive in the energy sector, Gargiulo sat down with Goldsztein as he first conceptualized MBI’s operating model.

“Usually, startup business models plot out the next 10-15 years; Fernando’s timeline was only two years, and his benchmarks were in three-month increments.” It was audaciously optimistic, says Gargiulo, but so was the founder.

“When I saw it, I did not doubt that he would achieve his goals. I’m seeing Fernando hit those first targets now and it’s amazing to watch,” Gargiulo says.

Children’s National Hospital endorsed MBI in 2023 and invited Goldsztein to sit on its foundation’s board, adding credibility to the initiative and his ability to fundraise more ambitiously.

According to Packer, in the next few months, the first two MBI protocols will reach patients for the first time: an immunotherapy protocol, which “leverages the body’s immune response to target cancer cells more effectively and safely than traditional therapies,” and a medulloblastoma vaccine, which “adapts similar methodologies used in Covid-19 vaccine development. This approach aims to provide a versatile and mobile treatment that could be distributed globally.”

A matter of when

When Goldsztein is not with his own family in Brazil, fundraising, or managing MBI, he is on Zoom with a network of more than 70 other families with children with relapsed medulloblastoma. “I’m not a doctor and I don’t give out medical advice, but with these trials, we are giving each other hope,” he explains.

Hope and purpose are commodities that Goldsztein has in spades. “I don’t understand the idea of doing business and accumulating assets, but not helping others,” he says. He shared that message with an auditorium of his fellow alumni at his 2023 MIT Sloan Reunion.

Frederico, who defied all odds and lived with the threat of recurrence, recently graduated high school. He is interested in international relations and passionate about photography. “This is about finding a cure for Frederico and for all kids,” Goldsztein says.

When asked how the world would be impacted if MBI found a cure for medulloblastoma, Goldsztein shakes his head.

“We are going to find the cure. It’s not if, it’s a matter of when.”

His next goal is to scale MBI and have it serve as a resource for groups that want to replicate its playbook to solve other childhood diseases.

“I’m never going to stop,” he says.

When Youyeon Choi was in high school, she discovered she really liked “thinking in geometry.” The shapes, the dimensions … she was into all of it. Today, geometry plays a prominent role in her doctoral work under the guidance of Professor Koroush Shirvan, as she explores ways to increase the competitiveness of small modular reactors (SMRs).

Central to the thesis is metallic nuclear fuel in a helical cruciform shape, which improves surface area and lowers heat flux as compared to the traditional cylindrical equivalent.

A childhood in a prominent nuclear energy country

Her passion for geometry notwithstanding, Choi admits she was not “really into studying” in middle school. But that changed when she started excelling in technical subjects in her high school years. And because it was the natural sciences that first caught Choi’s eye, she assumed she would major in the subject when she went to university.

This focus, too, would change. Growing up in Seoul, Choi was becoming increasingly aware of the critical role nuclear energy played in meeting her native country’s energy needs. Twenty-six reactors provide nearly a third of South Korea’s electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association. The country is also one of the world’s most prominent nuclear energy entities.

In such an ecosystem, Choi understood the stakes at play, especially with electricity-guzzling technologies such as AI and electric vehicles on the rise. Her father also discussed energy-related topics with Choi when she was in high school. Being soaked in that atmosphere eventually led Choi to nuclear engineering.

Early work in South Korea

Excelling in high school math and science, Choi was a shoo-in for college at Seoul National University. Initially intent on studying nuclear fusion, Choi switched to fission because she saw that the path to fusion was more convoluted and was still in the early stages of exploration.

Choi went on to complete her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nuclear engineering from the university. As part of her master’s thesis, she worked on a multi-physics modeling project involving high-fidelity simulations of reactor physics and thermal hydraulics to analyze reactor cores.

South Korea exports its nuclear know-how widely, so work in the field can be immensely rewarding. Indeed, after graduate school, Choi moved to Daejeon, which has the moniker “Science City.” As an intern at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), she conducted experimental studies on the passive safety systems of nuclear reactors. Choi then moved to the Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control, where she worked as a researcher developing nuclear security programs for countries. Given South Korea’s dominance in the field, other countries would tap its knowledge resource to tap their own nuclear energy programs. The focus was on international training programs, an arm of which involved cybersecurity and physical protection.

While the work was impactful, Choi found she missed the modeling work she did as part of her master’s thesis. Looking to return to technical research, she applied to the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). “MIT has the best nuclear engineering program in the States, and maybe even the world,” Choi says, explaining her decision to enroll as a doctoral student.

Innovative research at MIT

At NSE, Choi is working to make SMRs more price competitive as compared to traditional nuclear energy power plants.

Due to their smaller size, SMRs are able to serve areas where larger reactors might not work, but they’re more expensive. One way to address costs is to squeeze more electricity out of a unit of fuel — to increase the power density. Choi is doing so by replacing the traditional uranium dioxide ceramic fuel in a cylindrical shape with a metal one in a helical cruciform. Such a replacement potentially offers twin advantages: the metal fuel has high conductivity, which means the fuel will operate even more safely at lower temperatures. And the twisted shape gives more surface area and lower heat flux. The net result is more electricity for the same volume.

The project receives funding from a collaboration between Lightbridge Corp., which is exploring how advanced fuel technologies can improve the performance of water-cooled SMRs, and the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University Program.

With SMR efficiencies in mind, Choi is indulging her love of multi-physics modeling, and focusing on reactor physics, thermal hydraulics, and fuel performance simulation. “The goal of this modeling and simulation is to see if we can really use this fuel in the SMR,” Choi says. “I’m really enjoying doing the simulations because the geometry is really hard to model. Because the shape is twisted, there’s no symmetry at all,” she says. Always up for a challenge, Choi learned the various aspects of physics and a variety of computational tools, including the Monte Carlo code for reactor physics.

Being at MIT has a whole roster of advantages, Choi says, and she especially appreciates the respect researchers have for each other. She appreciates being able to discuss projects with Shirvan and his focus on practical applications of research. At the same time, Choi appreciates the “exotic” nature of her project. “Even assessing if this SMR fuel is at all feasible is really hard, but I think it’s all possible because it’s MIT and my PI [principal investigator] is really invested in innovation,” she says.

It’s an exciting time to be in nuclear engineering, Choi says. She serves as one of the board members of the student section of the American Nuclear Society and is an NSE representative of the Graduate Student Council for the 2024-25 academic year.

Choi is excited about the global momentum toward nuclear as more countries are exploring the energy source and trying to build more nuclear power plants on the path to decarbonization. “I really do believe nuclear energy is going to be a leading carbon-free energy. It’s very important for our collective futures,” Choi says.

MIT physicists have created a new ultrathin, two-dimensional material with unusual magnetic properties that initially surprised the researchers before they went on to solve the complicated puzzle behind those properties’ emergence. As a result, the work introduces a new platform for studying how materials behave at the most fundamental level — the world of quantum physics.

Ultrathin materials made of a single layer of atoms have riveted scientists’ attention since the discovery of the first such material — graphene, composed of carbon — about 20 years ago. Among other advances since then, researchers have found that stacking individual sheets of the 2D materials, and sometimes twisting them at a slight angle to each other, can give them new properties, from superconductivity to magnetism. Enter the field of twistronics, which was pioneered at MIT by Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT.

In the current research, reported in the Jan. 7 issue of Nature Physics, the scientists, led by Jarillo-Herrero, worked with three layers of graphene. Each layer was twisted on top of the next at the same angle, creating a helical structure akin to the DNA helix or a hand of three cards that are fanned apart.

“Helicity is a fundamental concept in science, from basic physics to chemistry and molecular biology. With 2D materials, one can create special helical structures, with novel properties which we are just beginning to understand. This work represents a new twist in the field of twistronics, and the community is very excited to see what else we can discover using this helical materials platform!” says Jarillo-Herrero, who is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory.

Do the twist

Twistronics can lead to new properties in ultrathin materials because arranging sheets of 2D materials in this way results in a unique pattern called a moiré lattice. And a moiré pattern, in turn, has an impact on the behavior of electrons.

“It changes the spectrum of energy levels available to the electrons and can provide the conditions for interesting phenomena to arise,” says Sergio C. de la Barrera, one of three co-first authors of the recent paper. De la Barrera, who conducted the work while a postdoc at MIT, is now an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

In the current work, the helical structure created by the three graphene layers forms two moiré lattices. One is created by the first two overlapping sheets; the other is formed between the second and third sheets.

The two moiré patterns together form a third moiré, a supermoiré, or “moiré of a moiré,” says Li-Qiao Xia, a graduate student in MIT physics and another of the three co-first authors of the Nature Physics paper. “It’s like a moiré hierarchy.” While the first two moiré patterns are only nanometers, or billionths of a meter, in scale, the supermoiré appears at a scale of hundreds of nanometers superimposed over the other two. You can only see it if you zoom out to get a much wider view of the system.

A major surprise

The physicists expected to observe signatures of this moiré hierarchy. They got a huge surprise, however, when they applied and varied a magnetic field. The system responded with an experimental signature for magnetism, one that arises from the motion of electrons. In fact, this orbital magnetism persisted to -263 degrees Celsius — the highest temperature reported in carbon-based materials to date.

But that magnetism can only occur in a system that lacks a specific symmetry — one that the team’s new material should have had. “So the fact that we saw this was very puzzling. We didn’t really understand what was going on,” says Aviram Uri, an MIT Pappalardo postdoc in physics and the third co-first author of the new paper.

Other authors of the paper include MIT professor of physics Liang Fu; Aaron Sharpe of Sandia National Laboratories; Yves H. Kwan of Princeton University; Ziyan Zhu, David Goldhaber-Gordon, and Trithep Devakul of Stanford University; and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

What was happening?

It turns out that the new system did indeed break the symmetry that prohibits the orbital magnetism the team observed, but in a very unusual way. “What happens is that the atoms in this system aren’t very comfortable, so they move in a subtle orchestrated way that we call lattice relaxation,” says Xia. And the new structure formed by that relaxation does indeed break the symmetry locally, on the moiré length scale.

This opens the possibility for the orbital magnetism the team observed. However, if you zoom out to view the system on the supermoiré scale, the symmetry is restored. “The moiré hierarchy turns out to support interesting phenomena at different length scales,” says de la Barrera.

Concludes Uri: “It’s a lot of fun when you solve a riddle and it’s such an elegant solution. We’ve gained new insights into how electrons behave in these complex systems, insights that we couldn’t have had unless our experimental observations forced to think about these things.”

This work was supported by the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Ross M. Brown Family Foundation, an MIT Pappalardo Fellowship, the VATAT Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellowship in Quantum Science and Technology, the JSPS KAKENHI, and a Stanford Science Fellowship. This work was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano facilities.

MIT.nano has announced seven new companies to join START.nano, a program aimed at speeding the transition of hard-tech innovation to market. The program supports new ventures through discounted use of MIT.nano’s facilities and access to the MIT innovation ecosystem.

The advancements pursued by the newly engages startups include wearables for health care, green alternatives to fossil fuel-based energy, novel battery technologies, enhancements in data systems, and interconnecting nanofabrication knowledge networks, among others.

“The transition of the grand idea that is imagined in the laboratory to something that a million people can use in their hands is a journey fraught with many challenges,” MIT.nano Director Vladimir Bulović said at the 2024 Nano Summit, where nine START.nano companies presented their work. The program provides resources to ease startups over the first two hurdles — finding stakeholders and building a well-developed prototype.

In addition to access to laboratory tools necessary to advance their technologies, START.nano companies receive advice from MIT.nano expert staff, are connected to MIT.nano Consortium companies, gain a broader exposure at MIT conferences and community events, and are eligible to join the MIT Startup Exchange.

“MIT.nano has allowed us to push our project to the frontiers of sensing by implementing advanced fabrication techniques using their machinery,” said Uroš Kuzmanović, CEO and founder of Biosens8. “START.nano has surrounded us with exciting peers, a strong support system, and a spotlight to present our work. By taking advantage of all that the program has to offer, BioSens8 is moving faster than we could anywhere else.”

Here are the seven new START.nano participants:

Analog Photonics is developing lidar and optical communications technology using silicon photonics.

Biosens8 is engineering novel devices to enable health ownership. Their research focuses on multiplexed wearables for hormones, neurotransmitters, organ health markers, and drug use that will give insight into the body's health state, opening the door to personalized medicine and proactive, data-driven health decisions.

Casimir, Inc. is working on power-generating nanotechnology that interacts with quantum fields to create a continuous source of power. The team compares their technology to a solar panel that works in the dark or a battery that never needs to be recharged.

Central Spiral focuses on lossless data compression. Their technology allows for the compression of any type of data, including those that are already compressed, reducing data storage and transmission costs, lowering carbon dioxide emissions, and enhancing efficiency.

FabuBlox connects stakeholders across the nanofabrication ecosystem and resolves issues of scattered, unorganized, and isolated fab knowledge. Their cloud-based platform combines a generative process design and simulation interface with GitHub-like repository building capabilities.

Metal Fuels is converting industrial waste aluminum to onsite energy and high-value aluminum/aluminum-oxide powders. Their approach combines existing mature technologies of molten metal purification and water atomization to develop a self-sustaining reactor that produces alumina of higher value than our input scrap aluminum feedstock, while also collecting the hydrogen off-gas.

PolyJoule, Inc. is an energy storage startup working on conductive polymer battery technology. The team’s goal is a grid battery of the future that is ultra-safe, sustainable, long living, and low-cost.

In addition to the seven startups that are actively using MIT.nano, nine other companies have been invited to join the latest START.nano cohort:

• Acorn Genetics
• American Boronite Corp.
• Copernic Catalysts
• Envoya Bio
• Helix Carbon
• Minerali
• Plaid Semiconductors
• Quantum Network Technologies
• Wober Tech

Launched in 2021, START.nano now comprises over 20 companies and eight graduates — ventures that have moved beyond the initial startup stages and some into commercialization. 

Steven Strang, a writer and literary scholar who founded MIT’s Writing and Communication Center in 1981 and directed it for 40 years, died with family at his side on Dec. 29, 2024. He was 77.

His vision for the center was ambitious. After an MIT working group identified gaps between the students’ technical knowledge and their ability to communicate it — particularly once in positions of leadership — Strang advocated an even broader approach rarely used at other universities. Rather than student-tutors working with peers, Strang hired instructors with doctorates, subject matter expertise, and teaching experience to help train all MIT community members for the current and future careers becoming increasingly reliant on persuasion and the need to communicate with varied audiences.

“He made an indelible mark on the MIT community,” wrote current director Elena Kallestinova in a message to WCC staff soon after Strang’s death. “He was deeply respected as a leader, educator, mentor, and colleague.”

Beginning his professional life as a journalist with the Bangor Daily News, Strang soon shifted to academia, receiving a PhD in English from Brown University and over the decades publishing countless pieces of fiction, poetry, and criticism, in addition to his pedagogical articles on writing and rhetoric. 

But the Writing and Communication Center is his legacy. At a retirement party, longtime MIT lecturer and colleague Thalia Rubio called the WCC “Steve’s creation,” pointing out that it went on to serve many thousands of students and others. Another colleague, Bob Irwin, described in a note Strang’s commitment to making the WCC “a place that offered both friendliness and the highest professional standards of advice and consultation on all communication tasks and issues. Steve himself was conscientious, a respectful director, and a warm and reliable mentor to me and others. I think he was exemplary in his job.”

MIT recognized Strang’s major contributions with a Levitan Teaching Award, an Infinite Mile Award, and an Excellence Award. In nomination letters and testimonials, students and peers alike told of a “tireless commitment,” that “they might not have graduated, or been hired to the job they have today, or gained admittance to graduate school had it not been for the help of The Writing Center.” 

Strang is also remembered for his work founding the MIT Writers Group, which he first offered as a creative writing workshop for Independent Activities Period in 2002. In yet another example of Strang recognizing and meeting a community need, about 70 people from across the Institute showed up that first year.

Strang is survived by a large extended family, including his wife Ayni and her two children, Elly and Marta, whom Strang adopted as his own. Donations in his memory can be made to The Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Materials like car tires, human tissues, and spider webs are diverse in composition, but all contain networks of interconnected strands. A long-standing question about the durability of these materials asks: What is the energy required to fracture these diverse networks? A recently published paper by MIT researchers offers new insights.

“Our findings reveal a simple, general law that governs the fracture energy of networks across various materials and length scales,” says Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor and professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT. “This discovery has significant implications for the design of new materials, structures, and metamaterials, allowing for the creation of systems that are incredibly tough, soft, and stretchable.”

Despite an established understanding of the importance of failure resistance in design of such networks, no existing physical model effectively linked strand mechanics and connectivity to predict bulk fracture — until now. This new research reveals a universal scaling law that bridges length scales and makes it possible to predict the intrinsic fracture energy of diverse networks.

“This theory helps us predict how much energy it takes to break these networks by advancing a crack,” says graduate student Chase Hartquist, one of the paper’s lead authors. “It turns out that you can design tougher versions of these materials by making the strands longer, more stretchable, or resistant to higher forces before breaking.”

To validate their results, the team 3D-printed a giant, stretchable network, allowing them to demonstrate fracture properties in practice. They found that despite the differences in the networks, they all followed a simple and predictable rule. Beyond the changes to the strands themselves, a network can also be toughened by connecting the strands into larger loops.

“By adjusting these properties, car tires could last longer, tissues could better resist injury, and spider webs could become more durable,” says Hartquist.

Shu Wang, a postdoc in Zhao’s lab and fellow lead author of the paper, called the research findings “an extremely fulfilling moment ... it meant that the same rules could be applied to describe a wide variety of materials, making it easier to design the best material for a given situation.”

The researchers explain that this work represents progress in an exciting and emerging field called “architected materials,” where the structure within the material itself gives it unique properties. They say the discovery sheds light on how to make these materials even tougher, by focusing on designing the segments within the architecture stronger and more stretchable. The strategy is adaptable for materials across fields and can be applied to improve durability of soft robotic actuators, enhance the toughness of engineered tissues, or even create resilient lattices for aerospace technology.

Their open-access paper, “Scaling Law for Intrinsic Fracture Energy of Diverse Stretchable Networks,” is available now in Physical Review X, a leading journal in interdisciplinary physics.

Bia Adams, a London-based neuropsychologist, former professional ballet dancer, and MIT Open Learning learner, has built her career across decades of diverse, interconnected experiences and an emphasis on lifelong learning. She earned her bachelor’s degree in clinical and behavioral psychology, and then worked as a psychologist and therapist for several years before taking a sabbatical in her late 20s to study at the London Contemporary Dance School and The Royal Ballet — fulfilling a long-time dream.

“In hindsight, I think what drew me most to ballet was not so much the form itself,” says Adams, “but more of a subconscious desire to make sense of my body moving through space and time, my emotions and motivations — all within a discipline that is rigorous, meticulous, and routine-based. It’s an endeavor to make sense of the world and myself.”

After acquiring some dance-related injuries, Adams returned to psychology. She completed an online certificate program specializing in medical neuroscience via Duke University, focusing on how pathology arises out of the way the brain computes information and generates behavior.

In addition to her clinical practice, she has also worked at a data science and AI consultancy for neural network research.

In 2022, in search of new things to learn and apply to both her work and personal life, Adams discovered MIT OpenCourseWare within MIT Open Learning. She was drawn to class 8.04 (Quantum Physics I), which specifically focuses on quantum mechanics, as she was hoping to finally gain some understanding of complex topics that she had tried to teach herself in the past with limited success. She credits the course’s lectures, taught by Allan Adams (physicist and principal investigator of the MIT Future Ocean Lab), with finally making these challenging topics approachable.

“I still talk to my friends at length about exciting moments in these lectures,” says Adams. “After the first class, I was hooked.”

Adams’s journey through MIT Open Learning’s educational resources quickly led to a deeper interest in computational neuroscience. She learned how to use tools from mathematics and computer science to better understand the brain, nervous system, and behavior.

She says she gained many new insights from class 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence), particularly in watching the late Professor Patrick Winston’s lectures. She appreciated learning more about the cognitive psychology aspect of AI, including how pioneers in the field looked at how the brain processes information and aimed to build programs that could solve problems. She further enhanced her understanding of AI with the Minds and Machines course on MITx Online, part of Open Learning.

Adams is now in the process of completing Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python, taught by John Guttag; Eric Grimson, former interim vice president for Open Learning; and Ana Bell.

“I am multilingual, and I think the way my brain processes code is similar to the way computers code,” says Adams. “I find learning to code similar to learning a foreign language: both exhilarating and intimidating. Learning the rules, deciphering the syntax, and building my own world through code is one of the most fascinating challenges of my life.”

Adams is also pursuing a master’s degree at Duke and the University College of London, focusing on the neurobiology of sleep and looking particularly at how the biochemistry of the brain can affect this critical function. As a complement to this research, she is currently exploring class 9.40 (Introduction to Neural Computation), taught by Michale Fee and Daniel Zysman, which introduces quantitative approaches to understanding brain and cognitive functions and neurons and covers foundational quantitative tools of data analysis in neuroscience.

In addition to the courses related more directly to her field, MIT Open Learning also provided Adams an opportunity to explore other academic areas. She delved into philosophy for the first time, taking Paradox and Infinity, taught by Professor Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Digital Learning Lab Fellow David Balcarras, which looks at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics. She also was able to explore in more depth immunology, which had always been of great interest to her, through Professor Adam Martin’s lectures on this topic in class 7.016 (Introductory Biology).

“I am forever grateful for MIT Open Learning,” says Adams, “for making knowledge accessible and fostering a network of curious minds, all striving to share, expand, and apply this knowledge for the greater good.”

Amid the benefits that algorithmic decision-making and artificial intelligence offer — including revolutionizing speed, efficiency, and predictive ability in a vast range of fields — Manish Raghavan is working to mitigate associated risks, while also seeking opportunities to apply the technologies to help with preexisting social concerns.

“I ultimately want my research to push towards better solutions to long-standing societal problems,” says Raghavan, the Drew Houston Career Development Professor who is a shared faculty member between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as a principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

A good example of Raghavan’s intention can be found in his exploration of the use AI in hiring.

Raghavan says, “It’s hard to argue that hiring practices historically have been particularly good or worth preserving, and tools that learn from historical data inherit all of the biases and mistakes that humans have made in the past.”

Here, however, Raghavan cites a potential opportunity.

“It’s always been hard to measure discrimination,” he says, adding, “AI-driven systems are sometimes easier to observe and measure than humans, and one goal of my work is to understand how we might leverage this improved visibility to come up with new ways to figure out when systems are behaving badly.”

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area with parents who both have computer science degrees, Raghavan says he originally wanted to be a doctor. Just before starting college, though, his love of math and computing called him to follow his family example into computer science. After spending a summer as an undergraduate doing research at Cornell University with Jon Kleinberg, professor of computer science and information science, he decided he wanted to earn his PhD there, writing his thesis on “The Societal Impacts of Algorithmic Decision-Making.”

Raghavan won awards for his work, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program award, a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, and the Cornell University Department of Computer Science PhD Dissertation Award.

In 2022, he joined the MIT faculty.

Perhaps hearkening back to his early interest in medicine, Raghavan has done research on whether the determinations of a highly accurate algorithmic screening tool used in triage of patients with gastrointestinal bleeding, known as the Glasgow-Blatchford Score (GBS), are improved with complementary expert physician advice.

“The GBS is roughly as good as humans on average, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t individual patients, or small groups of patients, where the GBS is wrong and doctors are likely to be right,” he says. “Our hope is that we can identify these patients ahead of time so that doctors’ feedback is particularly valuable there.”

Raghavan has also worked on how online platforms affect their users, considering how social media algorithms observe the content a user chooses and then show them more of that same kind of content. The difficulty, Raghavan says, is that users may be choosing what they view in the same way they might grab bag of potato chips, which are of course delicious but not all that nutritious. The experience may be satisfying in the moment, but it can leave the user feeling slightly sick.

Raghavan and his colleagues have developed a model of how a user with conflicting desires — for immediate gratification versus a wish of longer-term satisfaction — interacts with a platform. The model demonstrates how a platform’s design can be changed to encourage a more wholesome experience. The model won the Exemplary Applied Modeling Track Paper Award at the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Economics and Computation.

“Long-term satisfaction is ultimately important, even if all you care about is a company’s interests,” Raghavan says. “If we can start to build evidence that user and corporate interests are more aligned, my hope is that we can push for healthier platforms without needing to resolve conflicts of interest between users and platforms. Of course, this is idealistic. But my sense is that enough people at these companies believe there’s room to make everyone happier, and they just lack the conceptual and technical tools to make it happen.”

Regarding his process of coming up with ideas for such tools and concepts for how to best apply computational techniques, Raghavan says his best ideas come to him when he’s been thinking about a problem off and on for a time. He would advise his students, he says, to follow his example of putting a very difficult problem away for a day and then coming back to it.

“Things are often better the next day,” he says.

When he's not puzzling out a problem or teaching, Raghavan can often be found outdoors on a soccer field, as a coach of the Harvard Men’s Soccer Club, a position he cherishes.

“I can’t procrastinate if I know I’ll have to spend the evening at the field, and it gives me something to look forward to at the end of the day,” he says. “I try to have things in my schedule that seem at least as important to me as work to put those challenges and setbacks into context.”

As Raghavan considers how to apply computational technologies to best serve our world, he says he finds the most exciting thing going on his field is the idea that AI will open up new insights into “humans and human society.”

“I’m hoping,” he says, “that we can use it to better understand ourselves.”

Faith Brooks, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, has had a clear dream since the age of 4: to become a pilot.

“At around 8 years old, my neighbor knew I wanted to fly and showed me pictures of her dad landing a jet on an aircraft carrier, and I was immediately captivated,” says Brooks. Further inspired by her grandfather’s experience in the U.S. Navy (USN), and owing to a lifelong fascination with aviation, she knew nothing would stand in her way.

Brooks explored several different paths to becoming a pilot, but she says one conversation with her longtime mentor, Capt. Matt Skone, USN (Ret.), changed the trajectory of her life.

“He asked if I had heard of the Naval Academy,” she recalls. “At the time, I hadn’t … I immediately knew that that was where I wanted to go, and everything else I learned about United States Naval Academy (USNA) reinforced that for me.”

In her “firstie” (senior) year at the USNA, Brooks was selected to go to Pensacola, Florida, and train to become a naval pilot as a student naval aviator, taking her one step closer to her dream. The USNA also helped guide her path to MIT. Her journey to joining the MIT-WHOI Joint Program began with the USNA’s professional knowledge curriculum, where she read about retired Capt. Wendy Lawrence SM ’88, a naval aviator and astronaut.

“Reading her bio prompted me to look into the program, and it sounded like the perfect program for me — where else could you get a better education in ocean engineering than MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution [WHOI]?”

In the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, Brooks is researching the impact of coastal pond breaching on preventing and mitigating harmful algal blooms. Her work focuses on the biannual mechanical breaching of Nantucket’s Sesachacha Pond to the ocean and the resultant impact on the pond’s water quality. This practice aims to improve water quality and mitigate harmful algal blooms (HABs), especially in summer.

Breaching in coastal ponds is a process that was initially used to enhance salinity for herring and shellfish habitats, but has since shifted to address water quality concerns. Traditionally, an excavator creates a breach in the pond, which naturally closes within one to five days, influenced by sediment transport and weather conditions. High winds and waves can accelerate sediment movement, limiting ocean water exchange and potentially increasing eutrophication, where excessive nutrients lead to dense plant growth and depletion of oxygen. In brackish water environments, harmful algal blooms are often driven by elevated nitrogen levels and higher temperatures, with higher nitrogen concentrating leading to more frequent and severe blooms as temperatures rise.

The Nantucket Natural Resources Department (NRD) has been collaborating with local homeowners to investigate the pond breaching process. Existing data are mainly anecdotal evidence and NRD’s monthly sampling since 2022, which has not shown the expected decrease in eutrophication. Brooks’ research will focus on data before, during, and after the breach at two pond sites to assess water changes to evaluate its effectiveness in improving water quality.

When Brooks isn’t knee-deep in the waters of the Sesachacha or training with her MIT Triathlon team, she takes additional opportunities to further her education. Last year, Brooks participated in the MIT-Portugal Marine Robotics Summer School in Faial, Azores, in Portugal, and immersed herself in a combination of a hands-on design projects and lectures on a variety of topics related to oceanography, engineering, and marine robotics.

“My favorite part of the program was how interdisciplinary it was. We had a combination of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer scientists, marine biologists, and oceanographers, and we had teams that included each of these specialties,” she says. “Our project involved designing a lander equipped with an underwater camera connected to a surface buoy that would transmit the footage. Having worked in mostly just engineering teams previously, it was a great experience to work with a more diverse group and I gained a much better understanding of how to design instruments and systems in accordance with what the marine biologists need.”

Brooks also earned her Part 107 Small Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) license to operate the lab’s drone with a multispectral camera for her upcoming fieldwork. When she graduates from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program next September, she’ll report to the Naval Aviation Schools Command in Pensacola, Florida, to begin flight training.

While she says she’ll miss Boston’s charm and history, as well as the Shining Sea Bikeway on crisp fall days in Woods Hole, Brooks is looking forward to putting her uniform back on, and starting her naval career and flight school. The time Brooks has spent at MIT will support her in these future endeavors. She advises others interested in a similar path to focus on research within their areas of interest.

“The biggest lesson that I’ve learned from both research theses is that any research project will change over time, and it’s often a good idea to take a step back and look at how your work fits into the larger picture,” she says. “I couldn’t recommend doing research more; it’s such a great opportunity to dig into something that you’re interested in, and is also very fulfilling.” 

According to the International Energy Agency, aviation accounts for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and aviation emissions are expected to double by mid-century as demand for domestic and international air travel rises. To sharply reduce emissions in alignment with the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has set a goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Which raises the question: Are there technologically feasible and economically viable strategies to reach that goal within the next 25 years?

To begin to address that question, a team of researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) and the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment has spent the past year analyzing aviation decarbonization options in Latin America, where air travel is expected to more than triple by 2050 and thereby double today’s aviation-related emissions in the region.

Chief among those options is the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuel. Currently produced from low- and zero-carbon sources (feedstock) including municipal waste and non-food crops, and requiring practically no alteration of aircraft systems or refueling infrastructure, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has the potential to perform just as well as petroleum-based jet fuel with as low as 20 percent of its carbon footprint.

Focused on Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, the researchers assessed SAF feedstock availability, the costs of corresponding SAF pathways, and how SAF deployment would likely impact fuel use, prices, emissions, and aviation demand in each country. They also explored how efficiency improvements and market-based mechanisms could help the region to reach decarbonization targets. The team’s findings appear in a CS3 Special Report.

SAF emissions, costs, and sources

Under an ambitious emissions mitigation scenario designed to cap global warming at 1.5 C and raise the rate of SAF use in Latin America to 65 percent by 2050, the researchers projected aviation emissions to be reduced by about 60 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario in which existing climate policies are not strengthened. To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, other measures would be required, such as improvements in operational and air traffic efficiencies, airplane fleet renewal, alternative forms of propulsion, and carbon offsets and removals.

As of 2024, jet fuel prices in Latin America are around $0.70 per liter. Based on the current availability of feedstocks, the researchers projected SAF costs within the six countries studied to range from $1.11 to $2.86 per liter. They cautioned that increased fuel prices could affect operating costs of the aviation sector and overall aviation demand unless strategies to manage price increases are implemented.

Under the 1.5 C scenario, the total cumulative capital investments required to build new SAF producing plants between 2025 and 2050 were estimated at $204 billion for the six countries (ranging from $5 billion in Ecuador to $84 billion in Brazil). The researchers identified sugarcane- and corn-based ethanol-to-jet fuel, palm oil- and soybean-based hydro-processed esters and fatty acids as the most promising feedstock sources in the near term for SAF production in Latin America.

“Our findings show that SAF offers a significant decarbonization pathway, which must be combined with an economy-wide emissions mitigation policy that uses market-based mechanisms to offset the remaining emissions,” says Sergey Paltsev, lead author of the report, MIT CS3 deputy director, and senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative.

Recommendations

The researchers concluded the report with recommendations for national policymakers and aviation industry leaders in Latin America.

They stressed that government policy and regulatory mechanisms will be needed to create sufficient conditions to attract SAF investments in the region and make SAF commercially viable as the aviation industry decarbonizes operations. Without appropriate policy frameworks, SAF requirements will affect the cost of air travel. For fuel producers, stable, long-term-oriented policies and regulations will be needed to create robust supply chains, build demand for establishing economies of scale, and develop innovative pathways for producing SAF.

Finally, the research team recommended a region-wide collaboration in designing SAF policies. A unified decarbonization strategy among all countries in the region will help ensure competitiveness, economies of scale, and achievement of long-term carbon emissions-reduction goals.

“Regional feedstock availability and costs make Latin America a potential major player in SAF production,” says Angelo Gurgel, a principal research scientist at MIT CS3 and co-author of the study. “SAF requirements, combined with government support mechanisms, will ensure sustainable decarbonization while enhancing the region’s connectivity and the ability of disadvantaged communities to access air transport.”

Financial support for this study was provided by LATAM Airlines and Airbus.

Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), and the founder and co-leader of the Advanced Vehicle Technology Consortium and the Human Factors Evaluator for Automotive Demand Consortium in the MIT AgeLab, has been appointed to the Task Force on Human Factors in Aviation Safety Aviation Rulemaking Committee (HF Task Force ARC). The HF Task Force ARC will provide recommendations to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on the most significant human factors and the relative contribution of these factors to aviation safety risk.

Reimer, who has worked at MIT since 2003, joins a committee whose operational or academic expertise includes air carrier operations, air traffic control, pilot experience, aeronautical information, aircraft maintenance and mechanics psychology, human-machine integration, and general aviation operations. Their recommendations to the FAA will help ensure safety for passengers, aircraft crews, and cargo for years to come. His appointment follows a year of serving on the Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee (TTAC) for the U.S. Department of Transportation, where he has taken on the role of vice chair on the Artificial Intelligence subcommittee. The TTAC recently released a report to the Secretary of Transportation in response to its charter.

As a mobility and technology futurist working at the intersection of technology, human behavior, and public policy, Reimer brings his expertise in human-machine integration, transportation safety, and AI to the committee. The committee, chartered by congressional mandate through the bipartisan FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, specifically calls for a portion of the committee to have expertise on human factors but whose experience and training are not primarily in aviation, which Reimer will provide.

MIT CTL creates supply chain innovation and drives it into practice through the three pillars of research, outreach, and education, working with businesses, government, and nongovernmental organizations. As a longtime advocate of collaboration across public and private sectors to ensure consumers’ safety in transportation, Reimer’s particular expertise will help the FAA more broadly consider the human element of aviation safety. Yossi Sheffi, director of MIT CTL, says, “Aviation plays a critical role in the rapid and reliable transportation of goods across vast distances, making it essential for delivering time-sensitive products globally. We must understand the current human factors involved in this process to help ensure smooth operation of this indispensable service amid potential disruptions.”

Reimer recently discussed his research on an episode of The Ojo-Yoshida Report with Phil Koopman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

HF Task Force ARC members will serve a two-year term. The first ARC plenary meeting was held Jan. 15-16 in Washington.

Artificial intelligence has become vital in business and financial dealings, medical care, technology development, research, and much more. Without realizing it, consumers rely on AI when they stream a video, do online banking, or perform an online search. Behind these capabilities are more than 10,000 data centers globally, each one a huge warehouse containing thousands of computer servers and other infrastructure for storing, managing, and processing data. There are now over 5,000 data centers in the United States, and new ones are being built every day — in the U.S. and worldwide. Often dozens are clustered together right near where people live, attracted by policies that provide tax breaks and other incentives, and by what looks like abundant electricity.

And data centers do consume huge amounts of electricity. U.S. data centers consumed more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2023, and by 2030 that fraction could rise to 9 percent, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. A single large data center can consume as much electricity as 50,000 homes.

The sudden need for so many data centers presents a massive challenge to the technology and energy industries, government policymakers, and everyday consumers. Research scientists and faculty members at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) are exploring multiple facets of this problem — from sourcing power to grid improvement to analytical tools that increase efficiency, and more. Data centers have quickly become the energy issue of our day.

Unexpected demand brings unexpected solutions

Several companies that use data centers to provide cloud computing and data management services are announcing some surprising steps to deliver all that electricity. Proposals include building their own small nuclear plants near their data centers and even restarting one of the undamaged nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, which has been shuttered since 2019. (A different reactor at that plant partially melted down in 1979, causing the nation’s worst nuclear power accident.) Already the need to power AI is causing delays in the planned shutdown of some coal-fired power plants and raising prices for residential consumers. Meeting the needs of data centers is not only stressing power grids, but also setting back the transition to clean energy needed to stop climate change.

There are many aspects to the data center problem from a power perspective. Here are some that MIT researchers are focusing on, and why they’re important.

An unprecedented surge in the demand for electricity

“In the past, computing was not a significant user of electricity,” says William H. Green, director of MITEI and the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. “Electricity was used for running industrial processes and powering household devices such as air conditioners and lights, and more recently for powering heat pumps and charging electric cars. But now all of a sudden, electricity used for computing in general, and by data centers in particular, is becoming a gigantic new demand that no one anticipated.”

Why the lack of foresight? Usually, demand for electric power increases by roughly half-a-percent per year, and utilities bring in new power generators and make other investments as needed to meet the expected new demand. But the data centers now coming online are creating unprecedented leaps in demand that operators didn’t see coming. In addition, the new demand is constant. It’s critical that a data center provides its services all day, every day. There can be no interruptions in processing large datasets, accessing stored data, and running the cooling equipment needed to keep all the packed-together computers churning away without overheating.

Moreover, even if enough electricity is generated, getting it to where it’s needed may be a problem, explains Deepjyoti Deka, a MITEI research scientist. “A grid is a network-wide operation, and the grid operator may have sufficient generation at another location or even elsewhere in the country, but the wires may not have sufficient capacity to carry the electricity to where it’s wanted.” So transmission capacity must be expanded — and, says Deka, that’s a slow process.

Then there’s the “interconnection queue.” Sometimes, adding either a new user (a “load”) or a new generator to an existing grid can cause instabilities or other problems for everyone else already on the grid. In that situation, bringing a new data center online may be delayed. Enough delays can result in new loads or generators having to stand in line and wait for their turn. Right now, much of the interconnection queue is already filled up with new solar and wind projects. The delay is now about five years. Meeting the demand from newly installed data centers while ensuring that the quality of service elsewhere is not hampered is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Finding clean electricity sources

To further complicate the challenge, many companies — including so-called “hyperscalers” such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — have made public commitments to having net-zero carbon emissions within the next 10 years. Many have been making strides toward achieving their clean-energy goals by buying “power purchase agreements.” They sign a contract to buy electricity from, say, a solar or wind facility, sometimes providing funding for the facility to be built. But that approach to accessing clean energy has its limits when faced with the extreme electricity demand of a data center.

Meanwhile, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in many states. There are simply not enough sources of renewable energy to serve both the hyperscalers and the existing users, including individual consumers. As a result, conventional plants fired by fossil fuels such as coal are needed more than ever.

As the hyperscalers look for sources of clean energy for their data centers, one option could be to build their own wind and solar installations. But such facilities would generate electricity only intermittently. Given the need for uninterrupted power, the data center would have to maintain energy storage units, which are expensive. They could instead rely on natural gas or diesel generators for backup power — but those devices would need to be coupled with equipment to capture the carbon emissions, plus a nearby site for permanently disposing of the captured carbon.

Because of such complications, several of the hyperscalers are turning to nuclear power. As Green notes, “Nuclear energy is well matched to the demand of data centers, because nuclear plants can generate lots of power reliably, without interruption.”

In a much-publicized move in September, Microsoft signed a deal to buy power for 20 years after Constellation Energy reopens one of the undamaged reactors at its now-shuttered nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, the site of the much-publicized nuclear accident in 1979. If approved by regulators, Constellation will bring that reactor online by 2028, with Microsoft buying all of the power it produces. Amazon also reached a deal to purchase power produced by another nuclear plant threatened with closure due to financial troubles. And in early December, Meta released a request for proposals to identify nuclear energy developers to help the company meet their AI needs and their sustainability goals.

Other nuclear news focuses on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), factory-built, modular power plants that could be installed near data centers, potentially without the cost overruns and delays often experienced in building large plants. Google recently ordered a fleet of SMRs to generate the power needed by its data centers. The first one will be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.

Some hyperscalers are betting on new technologies. For example, Google is pursuing next-generation geothermal projects, and Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase electricity from a startup’s fusion power plant beginning in 2028 — even though the fusion technology hasn’t yet been demonstrated.

Reducing electricity demand

Other approaches to providing sufficient clean electricity focus on making the data center and the operations it houses more energy efficient so as to perform the same computing tasks using less power. Using faster computer chips and optimizing algorithms that use less energy are already helping to reduce the load, and also the heat generated.

Another idea being tried involves shifting computing tasks to times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid. Deka explains: “If a task doesn’t have to be completed immediately, but rather by a certain deadline, can it be delayed or moved to a data center elsewhere in the U.S. or overseas where electricity is more abundant, cheaper, and/or cleaner? This approach is known as ‘carbon-aware computing.’” We’re not yet sure whether every task can be moved or delayed easily, says Deka. “If you think of a generative AI-based task, can it easily be separated into small tasks that can be taken to different parts of the country, solved using clean energy, and then be brought back together? What is the cost of doing this kind of division of tasks?”

That approach is, of course, limited by the problem of the interconnection queue. It’s difficult to access clean energy in another region or state. But efforts are under way to ease the regulatory framework to make sure that critical interconnections can be developed more quickly and easily.

What about the neighbors?

A major concern running through all the options for powering data centers is the impact on residential energy consumers. When a data center comes into a neighborhood, there are not only aesthetic concerns but also more practical worries. Will the local electricity service become less reliable? Where will the new transmission lines be located? And who will pay for the new generators, upgrades to existing equipment, and so on? When new manufacturing facilities or industrial plants go into a neighborhood, the downsides are generally offset by the availability of new jobs. Not so with a data center, which may require just a couple dozen employees.

There are standard rules about how maintenance and upgrade costs are shared and allocated. But the situation is totally changed by the presence of a new data center. As a result, utilities now need to rethink their traditional rate structures so as not to place an undue burden on residents to pay for the infrastructure changes needed to host data centers.

MIT’s contributions

At MIT, researchers are thinking about and exploring a range of options for tackling the problem of providing clean power to data centers. For example, they are investigating architectural designs that will use natural ventilation to facilitate cooling, equipment layouts that will permit better airflow and power distribution, and highly energy-efficient air conditioning systems based on novel materials. They are creating new analytical tools for evaluating the impact of data center deployments on the U.S. power system and for finding the most efficient ways to provide the facilities with clean energy. Other work looks at how to match the output of small nuclear reactors to the needs of a data center, and how to speed up the construction of such reactors.

MIT teams also focus on determining the best sources of backup power and long-duration storage, and on developing decision support systems for locating proposed new data centers, taking into account the availability of electric power and water and also regulatory considerations, and even the potential for using what can be significant waste heat, for example, for heating nearby buildings. Technology development projects include designing faster, more efficient computer chips and more energy-efficient computing algorithms.

In addition to providing leadership and funding for many research projects, MITEI is acting as a convenor, bringing together companies and stakeholders to address this issue. At MITEI’s 2024 Annual Research Conference, a panel of representatives from two hyperscalers and two companies that design and construct data centers together discussed their challenges, possible solutions, and where MIT research could be most beneficial.

As data centers continue to be built, and computing continues to create an unprecedented increase in demand for electricity, Green says, scientists and engineers are in a race to provide the ideas, innovations, and technologies that can meet this need, and at the same time continue to advance the transition to a decarbonized energy system.

When you ask MIT students to tell you the story of how they came to Cambridge, you might hear some common themes: a favorite science teacher; an interest in computers that turned into an obsession; a bedroom decorated with NASA posters and glow-in-the-dark stars.

But for a few, the road to MIT starts with an invitation to a special summer program: not a camp with canoes or cabins or campgrounds, but instead one taking place in classrooms and labs with discussions of Arduinos, variable scope and aliasing, and Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics. The classroom and labs are in Barbados at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies, and all the students are gifted Caribbean high schoolers, ages 16-18, who’ve been selected for the extremely competitive Student Program for Innovation in Science and Engineering (SPISE). Their summer will not include much time for leisure or lots of sleep; instead, they’ll be tackling a five-week high-intensity curriculum with courses in university-level calculus, physics, biochemistry, computer programming, electronics and entrepreneurship, including hands-on projects in the last three. For several students currently on campus, SPISE was their gateway to MIT.

“The full story is even bigger,” says Cardinal Warde, MIT professor of electrical engineering and founder of SPISE, who is originally from Barbados in the Caribbean. “Over the past 10 years, exactly 30 of the 245 students in total from the SPISE program have attended MIT as undergrads and/or graduate students.”

While many SPISE alumni have gone on to Harvard University, Stanford University, Caltech, Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and other prestigious schools, the emphasis on science and technology creates a natural pipeline to MIT, whose faculty and instructors volunteered their time and expertise to help Warde design a curriculum that was both challenging and engaging.

Jacob White, the Cecil H. Green Professor in Electrical Engineering, was one of the first of those volunteers. “When Covid forced SPISE to run remotely, Professor Warde felt it was critical to continue having hands-on engineering labs, and sought my help,” White explains. “Kits were cobbled together using EECS-donated microcontroller boards, motors and magnets; Dinah Sah (the SPISE director) got those kits to students spread over half-a-dozen islands.” White, and several of his graduate students, collaborated to write a curriculum that would give the students enough grounding in fundamentals to empower them to create their own designs.

When SPISE returned to in-person education, Steve Leeb, the Emanuel E. Landsman (1958) Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), was inspired by the challenge of teaching electronics remotely.

“SPISE is exactly the kind of opportunity we're looking for in the RLE educational outreach programs: bright, enthusiastic young folks who would benefit from new perspectives on science and engineering — a community of folks where we can bring new perspectives, share energy and excitement, and, ideally, make lifelong connections to our academic programs here at MIT. It's a natural fit that benefits us all,” says Leeb, who, together with his graduate students, adapted the portable “take-home” Electronics FIRST curriculum pioneered at MIT and taught in course 6.2030. “The Electronics FIRST exercises and lectures are designed to connect electronic circuit techniques — digital gates, microcontrollers, and other electronics technologies — that are recognizable as elements of commercial products,” says Leeb. “So the projects naturally engage students in building with components that have a connection to commercial products and product ideas. This flows naturally into a 'final project' that the students create in SPISE, a product of their own conception, for example a music synthesizer.”

Crucially, the curriculum isn’t simplified for the high school students. “We adapted the projects to fit the different program length — SPISE is shorter than a full MIT term,” says Leeb. “We did not reduce the rigor or challenge of the activities, and, in fact, have brought new ideas from the SPISE students back to campus to improve 6.2030.”

Departments beyond EECS pitched in to develop SPISE, with major teaching contributions coming from the Department of Physics, where Lecturer Alex Shvonski, Senior Technical Instructor Caleb Bonyun, and Senior Technical Instructor Joshua Wolfe, who also manages the Physics Instructional Resource Lab, collaborated on developing hands-on projects and on the teaching for both Physics I and Calculus I courses. Additional supplies came from the MIT Sea Grant Program, which supplied underwater robots to SPISE for six consecutive years before the Covid-19 pandemic. (In the wake of the pandemic, the program pivoted to focus on embedded systems.)

But the core inspiration for SPISE doesn’t come from an academic department at all. “SPISE was based on a model that’s proven to work: MITES,” explains Ebony Hearn, executive director of the MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science. “The program, which offers access and opportunity to intensive courses in science, technology, engineering, and math for talented high school students in every zip code, has helped thousands of students for nearly 50 years gain admission to top universities and pursue successful careers in STEM while being immersed in a community of caring mentors and leaders in the profession.”

The shared DNA of the two programs is no coincidence. Cardinal Warde has been the faculty director of MITES for the past 27 years, and took the lessons of five decades of the transformative pre-college experience into account when envisioning an equivalent program in the Caribbean. Much like MITES, SPISE encourages its participants to develop a sense of belonging in STEM and to picture the possibilities at top schools; over the years, the program has added sessions with admissions officers from MIT, Columbia, Princeton, and U Penn. “SPISE changed my perspective of myself,” says Chenise Harper, a first-year student at MIT who is currently interested in Course 6-5 (Electrical Engineering With Computing). “It gave me the confidence to apply to universities I thought were completely out of my reach.”

Harper’s trajectory is exactly what the designers of the program hoped for. “We have been very successful with the shorter-term goal of increasing the numbers of Caribbean students pursuing advanced degrees in STEM and grooming the next generation of STEM and business leaders in the Region,” says Dinah Sah ’81, director of the program (and wife of Cardinal Warde). “We have SPISE graduates who have, or are currently pursuing, graduate degrees at the top universities around the world, including (but not limited to) MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and Oxford, including a Rhodes Scholar. We fully believe that SPISE graduates represent part of the next generation of STEM and business leaders in the Caribbean and that SPISE has played a significant role in their trajectories.”

Notably, the SPISE program also includes an element of entrepreneurship, encouraging students to envision tech-based solutions to problems in their own backyards. Keonna Simon, who hails from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, developed a business pitch with other SPISE participants for an innovative “reverse vending machine.” “In the Caribbean, tourism is a key contributor to the economy, but littering is an issue that detracts from the beauty of our islands and harms our abundant marine life,” explains Simon, now a junior majoring in Course 6-7 (Computer Science and Molecular Biology). “Our project aimed to tackle this by placing reverse vending machines in heavily polluted areas. People could deposit recyclable plastic bottles, and the machine would convert the weight of the plastic into cash rewards on a card, redeemable for discounts at supermarkets.”

One SPISE alum, Quilee Simeon, decided to work on a renewable energy system at SPISE as a way of addressing global warming’s effects on his homeland of St. Lucia. “I chose to work on the renewable energy project, where we designed and built a prototype wind turbine using low-resource materials like PVC pipes. It was exciting because I thought it had real applications to developing island states like ours, where we don’t have an abundance of the manufacturing materials used in larger countries, and we are disproportionately affected by climate change,” says Simeon. “So building cheap and effective renewable energy resources was, in my view, an important problem to tackle.”

As Simeon worked on his prototype turbine and tackled late nights with his new classmates at SPISE, he realized how different the experience was from his prior schooling. For most students, the summer program is a first time away from home — but for all, it is the first exposure to the firehose-like experience of tackling multiple college-level courses with simultaneous assignments and problem sets. “It was honestly a primer to MIT,” says Simeon. “They not only challenged us with rigorous math and science, but also provided guidance on college applications and explained the vast opportunities a STEM degree could unlock. SPISE changed my view of myself as a scholar, though probably in an unexpected way. I thought I was smart before attending SPISE, but I realized how much I didn’t know and how many things were lacking or wrong with the style of education I had grown used to (rote learning, memorization, etc.). SPISE made me realize that being a scholar isn’t just about consuming knowledge — it's about creating and applying it.”

The difficulty of the SPISE curriculum is a deliberate choice, made to aid students in preparing for higher education, confirms Sah. “When we started SPISE in 2012, [we decided] to focus on teaching the fundamentals in each of the courses … The homework problems and the quizzes would require the application of these fundamentals to solving challenging problems. This is in distinct contrast to rote memorization of facts, which is the method of learning these students had generally been exposed to. So, yes, this was in fact a very deliberate choice, and a critical change that we wanted to bring to these very high-potential students in their approach to learning and thinking.”

MIT’s emphasis on creative, outside-the-box thinking was just the beginning of the culture shocks that awaited SPISE students who made the transition to an American university from the summer program. Many are surprised by the American students’ habit of referring to their professors by first name, which would be considered disrespectful at home. Conversely, small daily interactions in the Northeast can feel remote and chilly to Caribbean students. “Moving from a small island with just around 100,000 people to Harvard was initially jarring,” says Gerard Porter, who participated in SPISE in 2017 before attending Harvard for his undergraduate degree. “In my first year, I was often met with puzzled stares when I greeted strangers in an elevator or students in my dorm whom I did not know personally. I quickly learned that politeness meant something very different in the Northeastern United States compared to the warm Caribbean.”

Other SPISE alumni report experiencing similar chilliness — literally. Quilee Simeon’s first winter in Cambridge was jarring. “I knew about the concept of winter and was told to expect cold weather, but I never actually knew how cold 'cold' was until I felt it myself,” says Simeon. “That was terrible!” Ronaldo Lee, a first-year from Jamaica interested in computer science and electrical engineering, found warmth among fellow SPISE alumni here at MIT. “Nothing beats the tropical climate! But honestly, the community at MIT has been amazing. I was surprised by how quickly I felt comfortable, thanks to the incredible people around me. The Black and Caribbean community especially made me feel at home; I’ve met some truly fascinating, driven, and like-minded people who’ve become close friends. One of the biggest surprises was discovering how similar we all are, despite our different cultural backgrounds. Everyone here is incredibly smart and shares a common drive to make the world a better place and pursue exciting STEM projects.”

The common drive to improve the world through STEM is evident in the paths the SPISE alumni have taken.

Gerard Porter, now a graduate student in the Kiessling Group within the Department of Chemistry at MIT, conducts research “focusing on unraveling the biological roles of glycans that cover all cells on Earth. I work on developing chemical tools to study critical regions of the bacterial cell wall that have been relatively unexplored.” Porter hopes that learning more about the molecular mechanisms at play within cell walls will open the doorway to the development of novel antibiotics.

Quilee Simeon has discovered an affinity for computational neuroscience, and is currently developing a computational model of the C. elegans nervous system. “My hope is that this model organism will prove fruitful for computational neuroscience research as it has for biology,” says Simeon, who plans to work in industry after graduation.

Computational biology has also captured the attention of junior Keonna Simon, who is excited to take courses such as 6.8711 (Computational Systems Biology: Deep Learning in the Life Sciences), saying, “This nexus holds a lot of potential for solving complex biological problems through computational methods, and I’m eager to dive deeper into that space!”

Chenise Harper found SPISE’s emphasis on bringing tech entrepreneurship home inspiring. “Living in the Caribbean has stimulated a dream of a future where robots are partners in rebuilding our community after natural disasters,” she says. “There are also so many issues that I would like to one day contribute to, like climate change issues and even cybersecurity. Electrical Engineering with Computing is the kind of major that will allow me to at least touch on the areas I am interested in, and allow me to explore both software and hardware concepts that excite me and will inspire me to develop a concrete way to give back to the community that has lifted me up to where I am now.”

Ronaldo Lee also found his academic home in computer science and electrical engineering, fabricating and characterizing perovskite solar cells in his Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project and building a small offshore wind turbine for the Collegiate Wind Competition as part of the MIT WIND team. “I’d love to focus on the energy sector, particularly in improving the grid system and integrating renewable energy sources to ensure more reliable access,” says Lee. “I want to help make energy access more sustainable and inclusive, driving development for the region as a whole.”

Lee’s plans are perfectly in line with the long-term goals set by Warde and Sah as they planned SPISE. “Diversifying the economies of the region and raising the standard of living by stimulating more technology-based entrepreneurship will take time,” says Sah. “We are optimistic that our SPISE graduates will, with time, change the world to make it a better place for all, including the Caribbean.”

The MIT Global Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence (SCALE) Network has once again been ranked as the world’s top master’s program for supply chain and logistics management by Eduniversal’s 2024/2025 Best Masters Rankings. This recognition marks the eighth consecutive No. 1 ranking since 2016, reaffirming MIT’s unparalleled leadership in supply chain education, research, and practice.

Eduniversal evaluates more than 20,000 postgraduate programs globally each year, considering academic reputation, graduate employability, and student satisfaction.

The MIT SCALE Network’s sustained top ranking reflects its commitment to fostering international diversity; delivering hands-on, project-based learning; and success in developing a generation of supply chain leaders ready to tackle global supply chain challenges.

A growing global network with local impact

This year’s ranking coincides with the MIT SCALE Network’s expansion of its global footprint, highlighted by the recent announcement of the UK SCALE Centre at Loughborough University. The center, which will welcome its inaugural cohort in fall 2025, underscores MIT’s commitment to advancing supply chain innovation and creating transformative opportunities for students and researchers.

The UK SCALE Centre joins the network’s global community of centers in the United States, China, Spain, Colombia, and Luxembourg. Together, these centers deliver world-class education and practical solutions that address critical supply chain challenges across industries, empowering a global alumni base of more than 1,900 leaders representing over 50 different countries.

"The launch of the UK SCALE Centre represents a fantastic opportunity for Loughborough University to showcase our cutting-edge research and data-driven, forward-thinking approach to supporting the U.K. supply chain industry,” says Jan Godsell, dean of Loughborough Business School. “Through projects like the InterAct Network and our implementation of the Made Smarter Innovation 'Leading Digital Transformation' program, we’re offering businesses and industry professionals the essential training and leading insights into the future of the supply chain ecosystem, which I’m excited to build on with the creation of this new MSc in supply chain management."

Other MIT SCALE centers also emphasized the network’s transformative impact:

“The MIT SCALE Network provides NISCI students with the tools, expertise, and global connections to lead in today’s rapidly evolving supply chain environment,” says Jay Guo, director of the Ningbo China Institute for Supply Chain Innovation.

Susana Val, director of Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC), highlights the program’s reach and influence: “For the last 21 years, ZLC has educated over 5,000 logistics professionals from more than 90 nationalities. We are proud of this recognition and look forward to continuing our alliance with the MIT SCALE Network, upholding the rigor and quality that define our teaching.”

From Luxembourg, Benny Mantin, director of the Luxembourg Center for Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LCL), adds, “Our students greatly appreciate the LCL’s SCALE Network membership as it provides them with superb experience and ample opportunities to network and expand their scope.”

The global presence and collaborative approach of the MIT SCALE Network help define its mission: to deliver education and research that drive transformative impact in every corner of the world.

A legacy of leadership

This latest recognition from Eduniversal underscores the MIT SCALE Network’s leadership in supply chain education. For over two decades, its master’s programs have shaped graduates who tackle pressing challenges across industries and geographies.

"This recognition reflects the dedication of our faculty, researchers, and global partners to delivering excellence in supply chain education," says Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. “The MIT SCALE Network’s alumni are proof of the program’s impact, applying their skills to tackle challenges across every industry and continent.”

Maria Jesus Saenz, executive director of the MIT SCM Master’s Program, emphasizes the strength of the global alumni network: “The MIT SCALE Network doesn’t just prepare graduates — it connects them to a global community of supply chain leaders. This powerful ecosystem fosters collaboration and innovation that transcends borders, enabling our graduates to tackle the world’s most pressing supply chain challenges.”

Founded in 2003, the MIT SCALE Network connects world-class research centers across multiple continents, offering top-ranked master’s and executive education programs that combine academic rigor with real-world application. Graduates are among the most sought-after professionals in the global supply chain field.

Amid the benefits that algorithmic decision-making and artificial intelligence offer — including revolutionizing speed, efficiency, and predictive ability in a vast range of fields — Manish Raghavan is working to mitigate associated risks, while also seeking opportunities to apply the technologies to help with preexisting social concerns.

“I ultimately want my research to push towards better solutions to long-standing societal problems,” says Raghavan, the Drew Houston Career Development Professor who is a shared faculty member between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, as well as a principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

A good example of Raghavan’s intention can be found in his exploration of the use AI in hiring.

Raghavan says, “It’s hard to argue that hiring practices historically have been particularly good or worth preserving, and tools that learn from historical data inherit all of the biases and mistakes that humans have made in the past.”

Here, however, Raghavan cites a potential opportunity.

“It’s always been hard to measure discrimination,” he says, adding, “AI-driven systems are sometimes easier to observe and measure than humans, and one goal of my work is to understand how we might leverage this improved visibility to come up with new ways to figure out when systems are behaving badly.”

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area with parents who both have computer science degrees, Raghavan says he originally wanted to be a doctor. Just before starting college, though, his love of math and computing called him to follow his family example into computer science. After spending a summer as an undergraduate doing research at Cornell University with Jon Kleinberg, professor of computer science and information science, he decided he wanted to earn his PhD there, writing his thesis on “The Societal Impacts of Algorithmic Decision-Making.”

Raghavan won awards for his work, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program award, a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, and the Cornell University Department of Computer Science PhD Dissertation Award.

In 2022, he joined the MIT faculty.

Perhaps hearkening back to his early interest in medicine, Raghavan has done research on whether the determinations of a highly accurate algorithmic screening tool used in triage of patients with gastrointestinal bleeding, known as the Glasgow-Blatchford Score (GBS), are improved with complementary expert physician advice.

“The GBS is roughly as good as humans on average, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t individual patients, or small groups of patients, where the GBS is wrong and doctors are likely to be right,” he says. “Our hope is that we can identify these patients ahead of time so that doctors’ feedback is particularly valuable there.”

Raghavan has also worked on how online platforms affect their users, considering how social media algorithms observe the content a user chooses and then show them more of that same kind of content. The difficulty, Raghavan says, is that users may be choosing what they view in the same way they might grab bag of potato chips, which are of course delicious but not all that nutritious. The experience may be satisfying in the moment, but it can leave the user feeling slightly sick.

Raghavan and his colleagues have developed a model of how a user with conflicting desires — for immediate gratification versus a wish of longer-term satisfaction — interacts with a platform. The model demonstrates how a platform’s design can be changed to encourage a more wholesome experience. The model won the Exemplary Applied Modeling Track Paper Award at the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Economics and Computation.

“Long-term satisfaction is ultimately important, even if all you care about is a company’s interests,” Raghavan says. “If we can start to build evidence that user and corporate interests are more aligned, my hope is that we can push for healthier platforms without needing to resolve conflicts of interest between users and platforms. Of course, this is idealistic. But my sense is that enough people at these companies believe there’s room to make everyone happier, and they just lack the conceptual and technical tools to make it happen.”

Regarding his process of coming up with ideas for such tools and concepts for how to best apply computational techniques, Raghavan says his best ideas come to him when he’s been thinking about a problem off and on for a time. He would advise his students, he says, to follow his example of putting a very difficult problem away for a day and then coming back to it.

“Things are often better the next day,” he says.

When he's not puzzling out a problem or teaching, Raghavan can often be found outdoors on a soccer field, as a coach of the Harvard Men’s Soccer Club, a position he cherishes.

“I can’t procrastinate if I know I’ll have to spend the evening at the field, and it gives me something to look forward to at the end of the day,” he says. “I try to have things in my schedule that seem at least as important to me as work to put those challenges and setbacks into context.”

As Raghavan considers how to apply computational technologies to best serve our world, he says he finds the most exciting thing going on his field is the idea that AI will open up new insights into “humans and human society.”

“I’m hoping,” he says, “that we can use it to better understand ourselves.”

Karl K. Berggren, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, has been named the new faculty head of electrical engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), effective Jan. 15.

“Karl’s exceptional interdisciplinary research combining electrical engineering, physics, and materials science, coupled with his experience working with industry and government organizations, makes him an ideal fit to head electrical engineering. I’m confident electrical engineering will continue to grow under his leadership,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of engineering, and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“Karl has made an incredible impact as a researcher and educator over his two decades in EECS. Students and faculty colleagues praise his thoughtful approach to teaching, and the care with which he oversaw the teaching labs in his prior role as undergraduate lab officer for the department. He will undoubtedly be an excellent leader, bringing his passion for education and collaborative spirit to this new role,” adds Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Berggren 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, computer science, and artificial intelligence and decision-making. 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.

A member of the EECS faculty since 2003, Berggren has taught a range of subjects in the department, including 6.02 (Digital Communications), 6.002 (Circuits and Electronics), 6.1010 (Fundamentals of Programming), 6.6400 (Applied Quantum and Statistical Physics), 6.9010 (Introduction to EECS via Interconnected Embedded Systems), 6.2400 (Introduction to Quantum Systems Engineering), and 6.6600 (Nanostructure Fabrication). Before joining EECS, Berggren worked as a staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for seven years. Berggren also maintains an active consulting practice and has experience working with industrial and government organizations.

Berggren’s current research focuses on superconductive circuits, electronic devices, single-photon detectors for quantum applications, and electron-optical systems. He heads the Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group, which develops nanofabrication technology at the few-nanometer length scale. The group uses these technologies to push the envelope of what is possible with photonic and electrical devices, focusing on superconductive and free-electron devices.

Berggren has received numerous prestigious awards and honors throughout his career. Most recently, he was named an MIT MacVicar Fellow in 2024. Berggren is also a fellow of the AAAS, IEEE, and the Kavli Foundation, and a recipient of the 2015 Paul T. Forman Team Engineering Award from the Optical Society of America (now Optica). In 2016, he received a Bose Fellowship and was also a recipient of the EECS department’s Frank Quick Innovation Fellowship and the Burgess (’52) & Elizabeth Jamieson Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Berggren succeeds Joel Voldman, who has served as the inaugural electrical engineering faculty head since January 2020.

“Joel has been in leadership roles since 2018, when he was named associate department head of EECS. I am deeply grateful to him for his invaluable contributions to EECS since that time,” says Asu Ozdaglar, MathWorks Professor and head of EECS, who also serves as the deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “I look forward to working with Karl now and continuing along the amazing path we embarked on in 2019.”

Advisors are meant to guide students academically, supporting their research and career objectives. For MIT graduate students, the Committed to Caring program recognizes those who go above and beyond.

Professors Iain Stewart and Roberto Fernandez are two of the 2023-25 Committed to Caring cohort, supporting their students through self-doubt, developing a welcoming environment, and serving as a friend.

Iain Stewart: Supportive, equitable, and inclusive

Iain Stewart is the Otto and Jane Morningstar Professor of Science and former director of the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP). His research interests center around nuclear and particle physics, where he develops and applies effective field theories to understand interactions between elementary particles and particularly strong interactions described by quantum chromodynamics.

Stewart shows faith in his students’ abilities even when they doubt themselves. According to his nominators, the field of physics, like many areas of intellectual pursuit, can attract a wide range of personalities, including those who are highly confident as well as those who may grapple with self-doubt. He explains concepts in a down-to-earth manner and does not make his students feel less than they are.

For his students, Stewart’s research group comes as a refreshing change. Stewart emphasizes that graduate school is for learning, and that one is not expected to know everything from the onset.

Stewart shows a great level of empathy and emotional support for his students. For example, one of the nominators recounted a story about preparing for their oral qualification exam. The student had temporarily suspended research, and another faculty member made a disparaging comment about the student’s grasp of their research. The student approached Stewart in distress.

"As your advisor,” Stewart reassured them, “I can tell you confidently that you know your research and you are doing well, and it’s totally OK to put it off for a while to prepare for the qual."

Stewart’s words gave the student a sense of relief and validation, reminding them that progress is a journey, not a race, and that taking time to prepare thoughtfully was both wise and necessary.

Always emphasizing positivity in his feedback, Stewart reminds advisees of their achievements and progress, helping them develop a more optimistic mindset. Stewart’s mentorship style recognizes individual student needs, a trait that his students find uncommon. His research group flourishes due to this approach, and a large number of his graduate and postdoc students have achieved great success.

During his six years as director, Stewart has made significant contributions to the CTP. He has improved the culture and demographics due to strong and inclusive leadership. In particular, a noteworthy number of women have joined the CTP.

In his own research group, a large number of international and female students have found a place, which is uncommon for groups in theoretical physics. Currently, three out of seven group members are female in a field where fewer than 10 percent are women.

Stewart’s nominators believe that given the number of women he has mentored in his career, he is single-handedly contributing to improving the diversity in his field. His nominators say he supports diverse backgrounds, and financially supports and encourages participation for marginalized groups.

Roberto Fernandez: Professor and friend

Roberto Fernandez is the William F. Pounds Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the co-director of the Economic Sociology PhD Program. His research focuses on organizations, social networks, and race and gender stratification. He has extensive experience doing field research in organizations, and he currently focuses on the organizational processes surrounding the hiring of new talent.

Fernandez describes himself as a “full-service professor.” He tries to attend to differing needs and circumstances of students and the situations they find themselves in, offering advice and consolation.

Fernandez is very understanding of his students, and is happy to speak to them about academic and personal problems alike. He acknowledges that each student comes from a different background with individual experience, and Fernandez attempts to accommodate each one in an ideal manner.

He advises in a way that respects a student’s personal life, but still expects a reasonable amount of produced work that motivates the student, allows for them to excel, and keeps them to a high standard.

Fernandez says, “It is just my sense of duty to pay forward how my mentors treated me. I feel like I would dishonor their work if I were not to pass it on.”

A nominator shared that Fernandez serves as both a professor and a friend. He has gone out of his way to check in and chat with them. They said that Fernandez is the only professor who has taken the time to truly get to know their story, and Fernandez speaks to students like an equal.

The nominator noted that many people at MIT enjoy a high level of privilege. Despite the differences in their circumstances, however, the nominator feels comfortable talking to Fernandez.

Happily, the professor continued to touch base with the nominator long after their class had finished, and he is the one person who really made them feel like MIT was their home. This experience stood out as unique for the nominator, and played a large role in their experience.

In addition to providing genuine connections, Fernandez advises incoming graduate students about the need for a mindset shift. Graduate school is not like undergrad. Being an excellent student is necessary, but it is not sufficient to succeed in a PhD program. Excellent undergraduate students are consumers of knowledge; on the other hand, excellent graduate students are producers of knowledge.

The nominator enthused, “[Fernandez] really went above and beyond, and this means a lot.”

MIT philosopher Sally Haslanger has been named the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Philip L. Quinn Prize from the American Philosophical Association (APA).

The award recognizes Haslanger’s lifelong contributions to philosophy and philosophers. Haslanger, the Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies, says she is deeply honored by the recognition.

“So many philosophers I deeply respect have come before me as awardees, including Judith Jarvis Thomson, my former colleague and lifelong inspiration,” Haslanger says. “Judy and I both were deeply engaged in doing metaphysics with an eye toward the moral/political domain. Both of us were committed feminists in a time when it was not professionally easy. Both of us believed in the power of institutions, such as the APA and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), to sustain a flourishing intellectual community. Both of us have demanded that institutions we are part of abide by their values.”

Haslanger joined the MIT faculty in 1998.

Her research features explorations of the social construction of categories like gender, race, and the family; social explanation and social structure; and topics in feminist epistemology. She has also published in metaphysics and critical race theory. Broadly speaking, her work links issues of social justice with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

Her book, “Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique” (Oxford University Press, 2012), was awarded the Joseph B. Gittler prize for outstanding work in the philosophy of social science. She also co-authored “What is Race: Four Philosophical Views” (Oxford University Press, 2019). Her current book, “Doing Justice to the Social” (under contract with Oxford University Press), develops an account of social practices and structures, emphasizing their materiality, the role of ideology, and potential grounds for critique. She continues to document and ameliorate the underrepresentation of women and other minorities in philosophy.

Haslanger, a former president of the Eastern Division of the APA, singles out the collaborative nature of the field while also celebrating her peers’ recognition, noting her work is “inspired, nourished, and scaffolded by others.”

“Judy was a notable inspiration (and a clear example of how hard such work can be), but there are so many others who have been on this journey with me and kept me going, including feminist colleagues across the country and abroad, graduate students, staff members, and allies from many different disciplines and professions,” Haslanger says.

Awarded annually since 2007, the Quinn Prize honors the memory of Philip L. Quinn, a noted philosopher from the University of Notre Dame who served as president of the APA Central Division for many years. The prize carries a $2,500 award and an engraved plaque.

Kieran Setiya, the Peter de Florez Professor of Philosophy and head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, says Haslanger has played a “transformative role in philosophy.”

“Sally’s influence on the field has been vast. Bridging a deep divide, she has brought critical social theory into conversation with analytic philosophy, arguing for an account of social structures and practices that does justice to their materiality,” Setiya says. “This work earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with invitations to give lectures named after canonical philosophers past and present: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Hempel, Kant, Spinoza, and others.”

Setiya noted Haslanger’s substantial contributions to the field, including her role in founding the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI) in Boston, which for 10 years has brought diverse undergraduates to MIT to show them that graduate study in philosophy is a meaningful option for them and to mentor them as they apply to graduate school.

“As Sally’s colleague, I am in awe not just of her extraordinary philosophical and professional achievements, but of her integrity and the seemingly limitless energy she invests in her students, in the Philosophy Section, in MIT, in the profession, and in fighting for social justice in the world from which academia is inextricable,” Setiya adds.

Three MIT students — Yutao Gong, Brandon Man, and Andrii Zahorodnii — have been awarded 2025 Schwarzman Scholarships and will join the program’s 10th cohort to pursue a master’s degree in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

The MIT students were selected from a pool of over 5,000 applicants. This year’s class of 150 scholars represents 38 countries and 105 universities from around the world.

The Schwarzman Scholars program aims to develop leadership skills and deepen understanding of China’s changing role in the world. The fully funded one-year master’s program at Tsinghua University emphasizes leadership, global affairs, and China. Scholars also gain exposure to China through mentoring, internships, and experiential learning.

MIT’s Schwarzman Scholar applicants receive guidance and mentorship from the distinguished fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development and the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships.

Yutao Gong will graduate this spring from the Leaders for Global Operations program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, earning a dual MBA and a MS degree in civil and environmental engineering with a focus on manufacturing and operations. Gong, who hails from Shanghai, China, has academic, work, and social engagement experiences in China, the United States, Jordan, and Denmark. She was previously a consultant at Boston Consulting Group working on manufacturing, agriculture, sustainability, and renewable energy-related projects, and spent two years in Chicago and one year in Greater China as a global ambassador. Gong graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with double majors in environmental science and statistics, where she organized the Duke China-U.S. Summit.

Brandon Man, from Canada and Hong Kong, is a master’s student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where he studies generative artificial intelligence (genAI) for engineering design. Previously, he graduated from Cornell University magna cum laude with honors in computer science. With a wealth of experience in robotics — from assistive robots to next-generation spacesuits for NASA to Tencent’s robot dog, Max — he is now a co-founder of Sequestor, a genAI-powered data aggregation platform that enables carbon credit investors to perform faster due diligence. His goal is to bridge the best practices of the Eastern and Western tech worlds.

Andrii Zahorodnii, from Ukraine, will graduate this spring with a bachelor of science and a master of engineering degree in computer science and cognitive sciences. An engineer as well as a neuroscientist, he has conducted research at MIT with Professor Guangyu Robert Yang’s MetaConscious Group and the Fiete Lab. Zahorodnii is passionate about using AI to uncover insights into human cognition, leading to more-informed, empathetic, and effective global decision-making and policy. Besides driving the exchange of ideas as a TEDxMIT organizer, he strives to empower and inspire future leaders internationally and in Ukraine through the Ukraine Leadership and Technology Academy he founded.

Quantum computing promises to solve complex problems exponentially faster than a classical computer, by using the principles of quantum mechanics to encode and manipulate information in quantum bits (qubits).

Qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer. One challenge to scaling, however, is that qubits are highly sensitive to background noise and control imperfections, which introduce errors into the quantum operations and ultimately limit the complexity and duration of a quantum algorithm. To improve the situation, MIT researchers and researchers worldwide have continually focused on improving qubit performance. 

In new work, using a superconducting qubit called fluxonium, MIT researchers in the Department of Physics, the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) developed two new control techniques to achieve a world-record single-qubit fidelity of 99.998 percent. This result complements then-MIT researcher Leon Ding’s demonstration last year of a 99.92 percent two-qubit gate fidelity. 

The paper’s senior authors are David Rower PhD ’24, a recent physics postdoc in MIT’s Engineering Quantum Systems (EQuS) group and now a research scientist at the Google Quantum AI laboratory; Leon Ding PhD ’23 from EQuS, now leading the Calibration team at Atlantic Quantum; and William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of EECS and professor of physics, leader of EQuS, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and RLE associate director. The paper recently appeared in the journal PRX Quantum.

Decoherence and counter-rotating errors

A major challenge with quantum computation is decoherence, a process by which qubits lose their quantum information. For platforms such as superconducting qubits, decoherence stands in the way of realizing higher-fidelity quantum gates.

Quantum computers need to achieve high gate fidelities in order to implement sustained computation through protocols like quantum error correction. The higher the gate fidelity, the easier it is to realize practical quantum computing.

MIT researchers are developing techniques to make quantum gates, the basic operations of a quantum computer, as fast as possible in order to reduce the impact of decoherence. However, as gates get faster, another type of error, arising from counter-rotating dynamics, can be introduced because of the way qubits are controlled using electromagnetic waves. 

Single-qubit gates are usually implemented with a resonant pulse, which induces Rabi oscillations between the qubit states. When the pulses are too fast, however, “Rabi gates” are not so consistent, due to unwanted errors from counter-rotating effects. The faster the gate, the more the counter-rotating error is manifest. For low-frequency qubits such as fluxonium, counter-rotating errors limit the fidelity of fast gates.

“Getting rid of these errors was a fun challenge for us,” says Rower. “Initially, Leon had the idea to utilize circularly polarized microwave drives, analogous to circularly polarized light, but realized by controlling the relative phase of charge and flux drives of a superconducting qubit. Such a circularly polarized drive would ideally be immune to counter-rotating errors.”

While Ding’s idea worked immediately, the fidelities achieved with circularly polarized drives were not as high as expected from coherence measurements.

“Eventually, we stumbled on a beautifully simple idea,” says Rower. “If we applied pulses at exactly the right times, we should be able to make counter-rotating errors consistent from pulse-to-pulse. This would make the counter-rotating errors correctable. Even better, they would be automatically accounted for with our usual Rabi gate calibrations!”

They called this idea “commensurate pulses,” since the pulses needed to be applied at times commensurate with intervals determined by the qubit frequency through its inverse, the time period. Commensurate pulses are defined simply by timing constraints and can be applied to a single linear qubit drive. In contrast, circularly polarized microwaves require two drives and some extra calibration.

“I had much fun developing the commensurate technique,” says Rower. “It was simple, we understood why it worked so well, and it should be portable to any qubit suffering from counter-rotating errors!”

“This project makes it clear that counter-rotating errors can be dealt with easily. This is a wonderful thing for low-frequency qubits such as fluxonium, which are looking more and more promising for quantum computing.”

Fluxonium’s promise

Fluxonium is a type of superconducting qubit made up of a capacitor and Josephson junction; unlike transmon qubits, however, fluxonium also includes a large “superinductor,” which by design helps protect the qubit from environmental noise. This results in performing logical operations, or gates, with greater accuracy.

Despite having higher coherence, however, fluxonium has a lower qubit frequency that is generally associated with proportionally longer gates.

“Here, we’ve demonstrated a gate that is among the fastest and highest-fidelity across all superconducting qubits,” says Ding. “Our experiments really show that fluxonium is a qubit that supports both interesting physical explorations and also absolutely delivers in terms of engineering performance.”

With further research, they hope to reveal new limitations and yield even faster and higher-fidelity gates.

“Counter-rotating dynamics have been understudied in the context of superconducting quantum computing because of how well the rotating-wave approximation holds in common scenarios,” says Ding. “Our paper shows how to precisely calibrate fast, low-frequency gates where the rotating-wave approximation does not hold.”

Physics and engineering team up

“This is a wonderful example of the type of work we like to do in EQuS, because it leverages fundamental concepts in both physics and electrical engineering to achieve a better outcome,” says Oliver. “It builds on our earlier work with non-adiabatic qubit control, applies it to a new qubit — fluxonium — and makes a beautiful connection with counter-rotating dynamics.”

The science and engineering teams enabled the high fidelity in two ways. First, the team demonstrated “commensurate” (synchronous) non-adiabatic control, which goes beyond the standard “rotating wave approximation” of standard Rabi approaches. This leverages ideas that won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for ultrafast “attosecond” pulses of light.

Secondly, they demonstrated it using an analog to circularly polarized light. Rather than a physical electromagnetic field with a rotating polarization vector in real x-y space, they realized a synthetic version of circularly polarized light using the qubit’s x-y space, which in this case corresponds to its magnetic flux and electric charge.

The combination of a new take on an existing qubit design (fluxonium) and the application of advanced control methods applied to an understanding of the underlying physics enabled this result.

Platform-independent and requiring no additional calibration overhead, this work establishes straightforward strategies for mitigating counter-rotating effects from strong drives in circuit quantum electrodynamics and other platforms, which the researchers expect to be helpful in the effort to realize high-fidelity control for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Adds Oliver, “With the recent announcement of Google’s Willow quantum chip that demonstrated quantum error correction beyond threshold for the first time, this is a timely result, as we have pushed performance even higher. Higher-performant qubits will lead to lower overhead requirements for implementing error correction.”  

Other researchers on the paper are RLE’s Helin Zhang, Max Hays, Patrick M. Harrington, Ilan T. Rosen, Simon Gustavsson, Kyle Serniak, Jeffrey A. Grover, and Junyoung An, who is also with EECS; and MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Jeffrey M. Gertler, Thomas M. Hazard, Bethany M. Niedzielski, and Mollie E. Schwartz.

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.  

Angelina Wu has been taking Japanese classes at MIT since arriving as a first-year student.

“I have had such a wonderful experience learning the language, getting to know my classmates, and interacting with the Japanese community at MIT,” says Wu, now a senior majoring in computer science and engineering.

“It’s been an integral part of my MIT experience, supplementing my other technical skills and also giving me opportunities to meet many people outside my major that I likely wouldn’t have had otherwise. As a result, I feel like I get to understand a much broader, more complete version of MIT.”

Now, Wu is sharing her experience and giving back as a Global Languages Student Ambassador. At a recent Global Languages preregistration fair, Wu spoke with other students interested in pursuing Japanese studies.

“I could not be happier to help promote such an experience to curious students and the greater MIT community,” Wu says.

Global Language Student Ambassadors is a group of students who lead outreach efforts to help increase visibility for the program.

In addition to disseminating information and promotional materials to the MIT undergraduate community, student ambassadors are asked to organize and host informal gatherings for Global Languages students around themes related to language and cultural exploration to build community and provide opportunities for learning and fun outside of the classroom.

Global Languages director Per Urlaub isn’t surprised that the Student Ambassadors program is popular with both students and the MIT community.

“The Global Languages program brings people together,” he says. “Providing a caring learning environment and creating a sense of belonging are central to our mission.”

What’s also central to the Global Languages’ mission is centering students’ work and creating spaces in which language learning can help create connections across academic areas. Students who study languages may improve their understanding of the cultural facets that underlie communication across cultures and open new worlds.

“An engaging community that fosters a deep sense of belonging doesn’t just happen automatically,” Urlaub notes. “A stronger community elevates our students’ proficiency gains, and also makes language learning more meaningful and fun.”

Each student ambassador serves for a single academic year in their area of language focus. They work closely with MIT’s academic administrators to plan, communicate, and stage events.

“I love exploring the richness of the Arabic language, especially how it connects to my culture and heritage,” says Heba Hussein, a student ambassador studying Arabic and majoring in electrical science and engineering. “I believe that having a strong grasp of languages and cultural awareness will help me work effectively in diverse teams.”

Student ambassadors, alongside other language learners, discover how other languages, cultures, and countries can guide their communications with others while shaping how they understand the world.

“My Spanish courses at MIT have been a highlight of my college experience thus far — the opportunity to connect on a deeper level with other cultures and force myself out of my comfort zone in conversations is important to me,” says Katie Kempff, another student ambassador who is majoring in climate system science and engineering and Spanish.

“As a heritage speaker, learning Chinese has been a way for me to connect with my culture and my roots,” adds Zixuan Liu, a double major in biological engineering and biology, and a Chinese student ambassador, who says that as a heritage speaker, learning Chinese has been a way for her to connect with her culture and her roots.

“I would highly recommend diving into languages and culture at MIT, where the support and the community really enhances the experience,” Liu says.

Back in the old days — the really old days — the task of designing materials was laborious. Investigators, over the course of 1,000-plus years, tried to make gold by combining things like lead, mercury, and sulfur, mixed in what they hoped would be just the right proportions. Even famous scientists like Tycho Brahe, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton tried their hands at the fruitless endeavor we call alchemy.

Materials science has, of course, come a long way. For the past 150 years, researchers have had the benefit of the periodic table of elements to draw upon, which tells them that different elements have different properties, and one can’t magically transform into another. Moreover, in the past decade or so, machine learning tools have considerably boosted our capacity to determine the structure and physical properties of various molecules and substances. New research by a group led by Ju Li — the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor of Nuclear Engineering at MIT and professor of materials science and engineering — offers the promise of a major leap in capabilities that can facilitate materials design. The results of their investigation are reported in a December 2024 issue of Nature Computational Science.

At present, most of the machine-learning models that are used to characterize molecular systems are based on density functional theory (DFT), which offers a quantum mechanical approach to determining the total energy of a molecule or crystal by looking at the electron density distribution — which is, basically, the average number of electrons located in a unit volume around each given point in space near the molecule. (Walter Kohn, who co-invented this theory 60 years ago, received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 1998.) While the method has been very successful, it has some drawbacks, according to Li: “First, the accuracy is not uniformly great. And, second, it only tells you one thing: the lowest total energy of the molecular system.”

“Couples therapy” to the rescue

His team is now relying on a different computational chemistry technique, also derived from quantum mechanics, known as coupled-cluster theory, or CCSD(T). “This is the gold standard of quantum chemistry,” Li comments. The results of CCSD(T) calculations are much more accurate than what you get from DFT calculations, and they can be as trustworthy as those currently obtainable from experiments. The problem is that carrying out these calculations on a computer is very slow, he says, “and the scaling is bad: If you double the number of electrons in the system, the computations become 100 times more expensive.” For that reason, CCSD(T) calculations have normally been limited to molecules with a small number of atoms — on the order of about 10. Anything much beyond that would simply take too long.

That’s where machine learning comes in. CCSD(T) calculations are first performed on conventional computers, and the results are then used to train a neural network with a novel architecture specially devised by Li and his colleagues. After training, the neural network can perform these same calculations much faster by taking advantage of approximation techniques. What’s more, their neural network model can extract much more information about a molecule than just its energy. “In previous work, people have used multiple different models to assess different properties,” says Hao Tang, an MIT PhD student in materials science and engineering. “Here we use just one model to evaluate all of these properties, which is why we call it a ‘multi-task’ approach.”

The “Multi-task Electronic Hamiltonian network,” or MEHnet, sheds light on a number of electronic properties, such as the dipole and quadrupole moments, electronic polarizability, and the optical excitation gap — the amount of energy needed to take an electron from the ground state to the lowest excited state. “The excitation gap affects the optical properties of materials,” Tang explains, “because it determines the frequency of light that can be absorbed by a molecule.” Another advantage of their CCSD-trained model is that it can reveal properties of not only ground states, but also excited states. The model can also predict the infrared absorption spectrum of a molecule related to its vibrational properties, where the vibrations of atoms within a molecule are coupled to each other, leading to various collective behaviors.

The strength of their approach owes a lot to the network architecture. Drawing on the work of MIT Assistant Professor Tess Smidt, the team is utilizing a so-called E(3)-equivariant graph neural network, says Tang, “in which the nodes represent atoms and the edges that connect the nodes represent the bonds between atoms. We also use customized algorithms that incorporate physics principles — related to how people calculate molecular properties in quantum mechanics — directly into our model.”

Testing, 1, 2 3

When tested on its analysis of known hydrocarbon molecules, the model of Li et al. outperformed DFT counterparts and closely matched experimental results taken from the published literature.

Qiang Zhu — a materials discovery specialist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (who was not part of this study) — is impressed by what’s been accomplished so far. “Their method enables effective training with a small dataset, while achieving superior accuracy and computational efficiency compared to existing models,” he says. “This is exciting work that illustrates the powerful synergy between computational chemistry and deep learning, offering fresh ideas for developing more accurate and scalable electronic structure methods.”

The MIT-based group applied their model first to small, nonmetallic elements — hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and fluorine, from which organic compounds can be made — and has since moved on to examining heavier elements: silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, and even platinum. After being trained on small molecules, the model can be generalized to bigger and bigger molecules. “Previously, most calculations were limited to analyzing hundreds of atoms with DFT and just tens of atoms with CCSD(T) calculations,” Li says. “Now we’re talking about handling thousands of atoms and, eventually, perhaps tens of thousands.”

For now, the researchers are still evaluating known molecules, but the model can be used to characterize molecules that haven’t been seen before, as well as to predict the properties of hypothetical materials that consist of different kinds of molecules. “The idea is to use our theoretical tools to pick out promising candidates, which satisfy a particular set of criteria, before suggesting them to an experimentalist to check out,” Tang says.

It’s all about the apps

Looking ahead, Zhu is optimistic about the possible applications. “This approach holds the potential for high-throughput molecular screening,” he says. “That’s a task where achieving chemical accuracy can be essential for identifying novel molecules and materials with desirable properties.”

Once they demonstrate the ability to analyze large molecules with perhaps tens of thousands of atoms, Li says, “we should be able to invent new polymers or materials” that might be used in drug design or in semiconductor devices. The examination of heavier transition metal elements could lead to the advent of new materials for batteries — presently an area of acute need.

The future, as Li sees it, is wide open. “It’s no longer about just one area,” he says. “Our ambition, ultimately, is to cover the whole periodic table with CCSD(T)-level accuracy, but at lower computational cost than DFT. This should enable us to solve a wide range of problems in chemistry, biology, and materials science. It’s hard to know, at present, just how wide that range might be.”

This work was supported by the Honda Research Institute. Hao Tang acknowledges support from the Mathworks Engineering Fellowship. The calculations in this work were performed, in part, on the Matlantis high-speed universal atomistic simulator, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the MIT SuperCloud, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing.

When sound waves reach the inner ear, neurons there pick up the vibrations and alert the brain. Encoded in their signals is a wealth of information that enables us to follow conversations, recognize familiar voices, appreciate music, and quickly locate a ringing phone or crying baby.

Neurons send signals by emitting spikes — brief changes in voltage that propagate along nerve fibers, also known as action potentials. Remarkably, auditory neurons can fire hundreds of spikes per second, and time their spikes with exquisite precision to match the oscillations of incoming sound waves.

With powerful new models of human hearing, scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research have determined that this precise timing is vital for some of the most important ways we make sense of auditory information, including recognizing voices and localizing sounds.

The open-access findings, reported Dec. 4 in the journal Nature Communications, show how machine learning can help neuroscientists understand how the brain uses auditory information in the real world. MIT professor and McGovern investigator Josh McDermott, who led the research, explains that his team’s models better-equip researchers to study the consequences of different types of hearing impairment and devise more effective interventions.

Science of sound

The nervous system’s auditory signals are timed so precisely, researchers have long suspected that timing is important to our perception of sound. Sound waves oscillate at rates that determine their pitch: Low-pitched sounds travel in slow waves, whereas high-pitched sound waves oscillate more frequently. The auditory nerve that relays information from sound-detecting hair cells in the ear to the brain generates electrical spikes that correspond to the frequency of these oscillations. “The action potentials in an auditory nerve get fired at very particular points in time relative to the peaks in the stimulus waveform,” explains McDermott, who is also associate head of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

This relationship, known as phase-locking, requires neurons to time their spikes with sub-millisecond precision. But scientists haven’t really known how informative these temporal patterns are to the brain. Beyond being scientifically intriguing, McDermott says, the question has important clinical implications: “If you want to design a prosthesis that provides electrical signals to the brain to reproduce the function of the ear, it’s arguably pretty important to know what kinds of information in the normal ear actually matter,” he says.

This has been difficult to study experimentally; animal models can’t offer much insight into how the human brain extracts structure in language or music, and the auditory nerve is inaccessible for study in humans. So McDermott and graduate student Mark Saddler PhD ’24 turned to artificial neural networks.

Artificial hearing

Neuroscientists have long used computational models to explore how sensory information might be decoded by the brain, but until recent advances in computing power and machine learning methods, these models were limited to simulating simple tasks. “One of the problems with these prior models is that they’re often way too good,” says Saddler, who is now at the Technical University of Denmark. For example, a computational model tasked with identifying the higher pitch in a pair of simple tones is likely to perform better than people who are asked to do the same thing. “This is not the kind of task that we do every day in hearing,” Saddler points out. “The brain is not optimized to solve this very artificial task.” This mismatch limited the insights that could be drawn from this prior generation of models.

To better understand the brain, Saddler and McDermott wanted to challenge a hearing model to do things that people use their hearing for in the real world, like recognizing words and voices. That meant developing an artificial neural network to simulate the parts of the brain that receive input from the ear. The network was given input from some 32,000 simulated sound-detecting sensory neurons and then optimized for various real-world tasks.

The researchers showed that their model replicated human hearing well — better than any previous model of auditory behavior, McDermott says. In one test, the artificial neural network was asked to recognize words and voices within dozens of types of background noise, from the hum of an airplane cabin to enthusiastic applause. Under every condition, the model performed very similarly to humans.

When the team degraded the timing of the spikes in the simulated ear, however, their model could no longer match humans’ ability to recognize voices or identify the locations of sounds. For example, while McDermott’s team had previously shown that people use pitch to help them identify people’s voices, the model revealed that that this ability is lost without precisely timed signals. “You need quite precise spike timing in order to both account for human behavior and to perform well on the task,” Saddler says. That suggests that the brain uses precisely timed auditory signals because they aid these practical aspects of hearing.

The team’s findings demonstrate how artificial neural networks can help neuroscientists understand how the information extracted by the ear influences our perception of the world, both when hearing is intact and when it is impaired. “The ability to link patterns of firing in the auditory nerve with behavior opens a lot of doors,” McDermott says.

“Now that we have these models that link neural responses in the ear to auditory behavior, we can ask, ‘If we simulate different types of hearing loss, what effect is that going to have on our auditory abilities?’” McDermott says. “That will help us better diagnose hearing loss, and we think there are also extensions of that to help us design better hearing aids or cochlear implants.” For example, he says, “The cochlear implant is limited in various ways — it can do some things and not others. What’s the best way to set up that cochlear implant to enable you to mediate behaviors? You can, in principle, use the models to tell you that.”

MIT physicists and colleagues have for the first time measured the geometry, or shape, of electrons in solids at the quantum level. Scientists have long known how to measure the energies and velocities of electrons in crystalline materials, but until now, those systems’ quantum geometry could only be inferred theoretically, or sometimes not at all.

The work, reported in the Nov. 25 issue of Nature Physics, “opens new avenues for understanding and manipulating the quantum properties of materials,” says Riccardo Comin, MIT’s Class of 1947 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics and leader of the work.

“We’ve essentially developed a blueprint for obtaining some completely new information that couldn’t be obtained before,” says Comin, who is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and the Research Laboratory of Electronics.

The work could be applied to “any kind of quantum material, not just the one we worked with,” says Mingu Kang PhD ’23, first author of the Nature Physics paper who conducted the work as an MIT graduate student and who is now a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. 

Kang was also invited to write an accompanying research briefing on the work, including its implications, for the Nov. 25 issue of Nature Physics.

A weird world

In the weird world of quantum physics, an electron can be described as both a point in space and a wave-like shape. At the heart of the current work is a fundamental object known as a wave function that describes the latter. “You can think of it like a surface in a three-dimensional space,” says Comin.

There are different types of wave functions, ranging from the simple to the complex. Think of a ball. That is analogous to a simple, or trivial, wave function. Now picture a Mobius strip, the kind of structure explored by M.C. Escher in his art. That’s analogous to a complex, or nontrivial, wave function. And the quantum world is filled with materials composed of the latter.

But until now, the quantum geometry of wave functions could only be inferred theoretically, or sometimes not at all. And the property is becoming more and more important as physicists find more and more quantum materials with potential applications in everything from quantum computers to advanced electronic and magnetic devices.

The MIT team solved the problem using a technique called angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, or ARPES. Comin, Kang, and some of the same colleagues had used the technique in other research. For example, in 2022 they reported discovering the “secret sauce” behind exotic properties of a new quantum material known as a kagome metal. That work, too, appeared in Nature Physics. In the current work, the team adapted ARPES to measure the quantum geometry of a kagome metal.

Close collaborations

Kang stresses that the new ability to measure the quantum geometry of materials “comes from the close cooperation between theorists and experimentalists.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, too, had an impact. Kang, who is from South Korea, was based in that country during the pandemic. “That facilitated a collaboration with theorists in South Korea,” says Kang, an experimentalist.

The pandemic also led to an unusual opportunity for Comin. He traveled to Italy to help run the ARPES experiments at the Italian Light Source Elettra, a national laboratory. The lab was closed during the pandemic, but was starting to reopen when Comin arrived. He found himself alone, however, when Kang tested positive for Covid and couldn’t join him. So he inadvertently ran the experiments himself with the support of local scientists. “As a professor, I lead projects, but students and postdocs actually carry out the work. So this is basically the last study where I actually contributed to the experiments themselves,” he says with a smile.

In addition to Kang and Comin, additional authors of the Nature Physics paper are Sunje Kim of Seoul National University (Kim is a co-first author with Kang); Paul M. Neves, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Physics; Linda Ye of Stanford University; Junseo Jung of Seoul National University; Denny Puntel of the University of Trieste; Federico Mazzola of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; Shiang Fang of Google DeepMind; Chris Jozwiak, Aaron Bostwick, and Eli Rotenberg of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jun Fuji and Ivana Vobornik of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche; Jae-Hoon Park of Max Planck POSTECH/Korea Research Initiative and Pohang University of Science and Technology; Joseph G. Checkelsky, associate professor of physics at MIT; and Bohm-Jung Yang of Seoul National University, who co-led the research project with Comin.

This work was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the Heising-Simons Physics Research Fellow Program, the Tsinghua Education Foundation, the NFFA-MUR Italy Progetti Internazionali facility, the Samsung Foundation of Culture, and the Kavli Institute at Cornell.

Vijay Gadepally, a senior staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, leads a number of projects at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) to make computing platforms, and the artificial intelligence systems that run on them, more efficient. Here, Gadepally discusses the increasing use of generative AI in everyday tools, its hidden environmental impact, and some of the ways that Lincoln Laboratory and the greater AI community can reduce emissions for a greener future.

Q: What trends are you seeing in terms of how generative AI is being used in computing?

A: Generative AI uses machine learning (ML) to create new content, like images and text, based on data that is inputted into the ML system. At the LLSC we design and build some of the largest academic computing platforms in the world, and over the past few years we've seen an explosion in the number of projects that need access to high-performance computing for generative AI. We're also seeing how generative AI is changing all sorts of fields and domains — for example, ChatGPT is already influencing the classroom and the workplace faster than regulations can seem to keep up.

We can imagine all sorts of uses for generative AI within the next decade or so, like powering highly capable virtual assistants, developing new drugs and materials, and even improving our understanding of basic science. We can't predict everything that generative AI will be used for, but I can certainly say that with more and more complex algorithms, their compute, energy, and climate impact will continue to grow very quickly.

Q: What strategies is the LLSC using to mitigate this climate impact?

A: We're always looking for ways to make computing more efficient, as doing so helps our data center make the most of its resources and allows our scientific colleagues to push their fields forward in as efficient a manner as possible.

As one example, we've been reducing the amount of power our hardware consumes by making simple changes, similar to dimming or turning off lights when you leave a room. In one experiment, we reduced the energy consumption of a group of graphics processing units by 20 percent to 30 percent, with minimal impact on their performance, by enforcing a power cap. This technique also lowered the hardware operating temperatures, making the GPUs easier to cool and longer lasting.

Another strategy is changing our behavior to be more climate-aware. At home, some of us might choose to use renewable energy sources or intelligent scheduling. We are using similar techniques at the LLSC — such as training AI models when temperatures are cooler, or when local grid energy demand is low.

We also realized that a lot of the energy spent on computing is often wasted, like how a water leak increases your bill but without any benefits to your home. We developed some new techniques that allow us to monitor computing workloads as they are running and then terminate those that are unlikely to yield good results. Surprisingly, in a number of cases we found that the majority of computations could be terminated early without compromising the end result.

Q: What's an example of a project you've done that reduces the energy output of a generative AI program?

A: We recently built a climate-aware computer vision tool. Computer vision is a domain that's focused on applying AI to images; so, differentiating between cats and dogs in an image, correctly labeling objects within an image, or looking for components of interest within an image.

In our tool, we included real-time carbon telemetry, which produces information about how much carbon is being emitted by our local grid as a model is running. Depending on this information, our system will automatically switch to a more energy-efficient version of the model, which typically has fewer parameters, in times of high carbon intensity, or a much higher-fidelity version of the model in times of low carbon intensity.

By doing this, we saw a nearly 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions over a one- to two-day period. We recently extended this idea to other generative AI tasks such as text summarization and found the same results. Interestingly, the performance sometimes improved after using our technique!

Q: What can we do as consumers of generative AI to help mitigate its climate impact?

A: As consumers, we can ask our AI providers to offer greater transparency. For example, on Google Flights, I can see a variety of options that indicate a specific flight's carbon footprint. We should be getting similar kinds of measurements from generative AI tools so that we can make a conscious decision on which product or platform to use based on our priorities.

We can also make an effort to be more educated on generative AI emissions in general. Many of us are familiar with vehicle emissions, and it can help to talk about generative AI emissions in comparative terms. People may be surprised to know, for example, that one image-generation task is roughly equivalent to driving four miles in a gas car, or that it takes the same amount of energy to charge an electric car as it does to generate about 1,500 text summarizations.

There are many cases where customers would be happy to make a trade-off if they knew the trade-off's impact.

Q: What do you see for the future?

A: Mitigating the climate impact of generative AI is one of those problems that people all over the world are working on, and with a similar goal. We're doing a lot of work here at Lincoln Laboratory, but its only scratching at the surface. In the long term, data centers, AI developers, and energy grids will need to work together to provide "energy audits" to uncover other unique ways that we can improve computing efficiencies. We need more partnerships and more collaboration in order to forge ahead.

If you're interested in learning more, or collaborating with Lincoln Laboratory on these efforts, please contact Vijay Gadepally.

On the first day of your vacation in a new city, your explorations expose you to innumerable individual places. While the memories of these spots (like a beautiful garden on a quiet side street) feel immediately indelible, it might be days before you have enough intuition about the neighborhood to direct a newer tourist to that same site and then maybe to the café you discovered nearby. A new study of mice by MIT neuroscientists at The Picower Insitute for Learning and Memory provides new evidence for how the brain forms cohesive cognitive maps of whole spaces and highlights the critical importance of sleep for the process.

Scientists have known for decades that the brain devotes neurons in a region called the hippocampus to remembering specific locations. So-called “place cells” reliably activate when an animal is at the location the neuron is tuned to remember. But more useful than having markers of specific spaces is having a mental model of how they all relate in a continuous overall geography. Though such “cognitive maps” were formally theorized in 1948, neuroscientists have remained unsure of how the brain constructs them. The new study in the December edition of Cell Reports finds that the capability may depend upon subtle but meaningful changes over days in the activity of cells that are only weakly attuned to individual locations, but that increase the robustness and refinement of the hippocampus’s encoding of the whole space. With sleep, the study’s analyses indicate, these “weakly spatial” cells increasingly enrich neural network activity in the hippocampus to link together these places into a cognitive map.

“On Day 1, the brain doesn’t represent the space very well,” says lead author Wei Guo, a research scientist in the lab of senior author Matthew Wilson, the Sherman Fairchild Professor in The Picower Institute and MIT’s departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Neurons represent individual locations, but together they don’t form a map. But on Day 5 they form a map. If you want a map, you need all these neurons to work together in a coordinated ensemble.”

Mice mapping mazes

To conduct the study, Guo and Wilson, along with labmates Jie “Jack” Zhang and Jonathan Newman, introduced mice to simple mazes of varying shapes and let them explore them freely for about 30 minutes a day for several days. Importantly, the mice were not directed to learn anything specific through the offer of any rewards. They just wandered. Previous studies have shown that mice naturally demonstrate “latent learning” of spaces from this kind of unrewarded experience after several days.

To understand how latent learning takes hold, Guo and his colleagues visually monitored hundreds of neurons in the CA1 area of the hippocampus by engineering cells to flash when a buildup of calcium ions made them electrically active. They not only recorded the neurons’ flashes when the mice were actively exploring, but also while they were sleeping. Wilson’s lab has shown that animals “replay” their previous journeys during sleep, essentially refining their memories by dreaming about their experiences.

Analysis of the recordings showed that the activity of the place cells developed immediately and remained strong and unchanged over several days of exploration. But this activity alone wouldn’t explain how latent learning or a cognitive map evolves over several days. So unlike in many other studies where scientists focus solely on the strong and clear activity of place cells, Guo extended his analysis to the more subtle and mysterious activity of cells that were not so strongly spatially tuned. 

Using an emerging technique called “manifold learning” he was able to discern that many of the “weakly spatial” cells gradually correlated their activity not with locations, but with activity patterns among other neurons in the network. As this was happening, Guo’s analyses showed, the network encoded a cognitive map of the maze that increasingly resembled the literal, physical space.

“Although not responding to specific locations like strongly spatial cells, weakly spatial cells specialize in responding to ‘‘mental locations,’’ i.e., specific ensemble firing patterns of other cells,” the study authors wrote. “If a weakly spatial cell’s mental field encompasses two subsets of strongly spatial cells that encode distinct locations, this weakly spatial cell can serve as a bridge between these locations.”

In other words, the activity of the weakly spatial cells likely stitches together the individual locations represented by the place cells into a mental map.

The need for sleep

Studies by Wilson’s lab and many others have shown that memories are consolidated, refined, and processed by neural activity, such as replay, that occurs during sleep and rest. Guo and Wilson’s team therefore sought to test whether sleep was necessary for the contribution of weakly spatial cells to latent learning of cognitive maps.

To do this they let some mice explore a new maze twice during the same day with a three-hour siesta in between. Some of the mice were allowed to sleep but some were not. The ones that did showed a significant refinement of their mental map, but the ones that weren’t allowed to sleep showed no such improvement. Not only did the network encoding of the map improve, but also measures of the tuning of individual cells during showed that sleep helped cells become better attuned both to places and to patterns of network activity, so-called “mental places” or “fields.”

Mental map meaning

The “cognitive maps” the mice encoded over several days were not literal, precise maps of the mazes, Guo notes. Instead they were more like schematics. Their value is that they provide the brain with a topology that can be explored mentally, without having to be in the physical space. For instance, once you’ve formed your cognitive map of the neighborhood around your hotel, you can plan the next morning’s excursion (e.g., you could imagine grabbing a croissant at the bakery you observed a few blocks west and then picture eating it on one of those benches you noticed in the park along the river).

Indeed, Wilson hypothesized that the weakly spatial cells’ activity may be overlaying salient non-spatial information that brings additional meaning to the maps (i.e., the idea of a bakery is not spatial, even if it’s closely linked to a specific location). The study, however, included no landmarks within the mazes and did not test any specific behaviors among the mice. But now that the study has identified that weakly spatial cells contribute meaningfully to mapping, Wilson said future studies can investigate what kind of information they may be incorporating into the animals’ sense of their environments. We seem to intuitively regard the spaces we inhabit as more than just sets of discrete locations.

“In this study we focused on animals behaving naturally and demonstrated that during freely exploratory behavior and subsequent sleep, in the absence of reinforcement, substantial neural plastic changes at the ensemble level still occur,” the authors concluded. “This form of implicit and unsupervised learning constitutes a crucial facet of human learning and intelligence, warranting further in-depth investigations.”

The Freedom Together Foundation, The Picower Institute, and the National Institutes of Health funded the study.

Does the United States have a “moral responsibility” for providing aid to poor nations — which have a significantly smaller carbon footprint and face catastrophic climate events at a much higher rate than wealthy countries?

A study published Dec. 11 in Climatic Change explores U.S. public opinion on global climate policies considering our nation’s historic role as a leading contributor of carbon emissions. The randomized, experimental survey specifically investigates American attitudes toward such a moral responsibility. 

The work was led by MIT Professor Evan Lieberman, the Total Chair on Contemporary African Politics and director of the MIT Center for International Studies, and Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science, and was co-authored with MIT political science PhD student Jared Kalow and University of Pennsylvania postdoc Erin Walk PhD ’24. Here, Lieberman describes the team's research and insights, and offers recommendations that could result in more effective climate advocacy.

Q: What are the key findings — and any surprises — of your recent work on climate attitudes among the U.S. population?

A: A big question at the COP29 Climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan was: Who will pay the trillions of dollars needed to help lower-income countries adapt to climate change? During past meetings, global leaders have come to an increasing consensus that the wealthiest countries should pay, but there has been little follow-through on commitments. In countries like the United States, popular opinion about such policies can weigh heavily on politicians' minds, as citizens focus on their own challenges at home.

Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda is one of many who views such transfers as a matter of moral responsibility, explaining that many rich countries see climate finance as “a random act of charity ... not recognizing that they have a moral obligation to provide funding, especially the historical emitters and even those who currently have large emissions.”

In our study, we set out to measure American attitudes towards climate-related foreign aid, and explicitly to test the impact of this particular moral responsibility narrative. We did this on an experimental basis, so subjects were randomly assigned to receive different messages.

One message emphasized what we call a “climate justice” frame, and it argued that Americans should contribute to helping poor countries because of the United States’ disproportionate role in the emissions of greenhouse gasses that have led to global warming. That message had a positive impact on the extent to which citizens supported the use of foreign aid for climate adaptation in poor countries. However, when we looked at who was actually moved by the message, we found that the effect was larger and statistically significant only among Democrats, but not among Republicans.

We were surprised that a message emphasizing solidarity, the idea that “we are all in this together,” had no overall effect on citizen attitudes, Democrats or Republicans. 

Q: What are your recommendations toward addressing the attitudes on global climate policies within the U.S.?

A: First, given limited budgets and attention for communications campaigns, our research certainly suggests that emphasizing a bit of blaming and shaming is more powerful than more diffuse messages of shared responsibility.

But our research also emphasized how critically important it is to find new ways to communicate with Republicans about climate change and about foreign aid. Republicans were overwhelmingly less supportive of climate aid and yet even from that low baseline, a message that moved Democrats had a much more mixed reception among Republicans. Researchers and those working on the front lines of climate communications need to do more to better understand Republican perspectives. Younger Republicans, for example, might be more movable on key climate policies.

Q: With an incoming Trump administration, what are some of the specific hurdles and/or opportunities we face in garnering U.S. public support for international climate negotiations?

A: Not only did Trump demonstrate his disdain for international action on climate change by withdrawing from the Paris agreement during his first term in office, but he has indicated his intention to double down on such strategies in his second term. And the idea that he would support assistance for the world’s poorest countries harmed by climate change? This seems unlikely. Because we find Republican public opinion so firmly in line with these perspectives, frankly, it is hard to be optimistic.

Those Americans concerned with the effects of climate change may need to look to state-level, non-government, corporate, and more global organizations to support climate justice efforts.

Q: Are there any other takeaways you’d like to share?

A: Those working in the climate change area may need to rethink how we talk and message about the challenges the world faces. Right now, almost anything that sounds like “climate change” is likely to be rejected by Republican leaders and large segments of American society. Our approach of experimenting with different types of messages is a relatively low-cost strategy for identifying more promising strategies, targeted at Americans and at citizens in other wealthy countries.

But our study, in line with other work, also demonstrates that partisanship — identifying as a Republican or Democrat — is by far the strongest predictor of attitudes toward climate aid. While climate justice messaging can move attitudes slightly, the effects are still modest relative to the contributions of party identification itself. Just as Republican party elites were once persuaded to take leadership in the global fight against HIV and AIDS, a similar challenge lies ahead for climate aid.

Awed as a young child by the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, civil engineer and MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Fellow Zane Schemmer has retained his fascination with bridges: what they look like, why they work, and how they’re designed and built.

He weighed the choice between architecture and engineering when heading off to college, but, motivated by the why and how of structural engineering, selected the latter. Now he incorporates design as an iterative process in the writing of algorithms that perfectly balance the forces involved in discrete portions of a structure to create an overall design that optimizes function, minimizes carbon footprint, and still produces a manufacturable result.

While this may sound like an obvious goal in structural design, it’s not. It’s new. It’s a more holistic way of looking at the design process that can optimize even down to the materials, angles, and number of elements in the nodes or joints that connect the larger components of a building, bridge, tower, etc.

According to Schemmer, there hasn’t been much progress on optimizing structural design to minimize embodied carbon, and the work that exists often results in designs that are “too complex to be built in real life,” he says. The embodied carbon of a structure is the total carbon dioxide emissions of its life cycle: from the extraction or manufacture of its materials to their transport and use and through the demolition of the structure and disposal of the materials. Schemmer, who works with Josephine V. Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, is focusing on the portion of that cycle that runs through construction.

In September, at the IASS 2024 symposium "Redefining the Art of Structural Design in Zurich," Schemmer and Carstensen presented their work on Discrete Topology Optimization algorithms that are able to minimize the embodied carbon in a bridge or other structure by up to 20 percent. This comes through materials selection that considers not only a material’s appearance and its ability to get the job done, but also the ease of procurement, its proximity to the building site, and the carbon embodied in its manufacture and transport.

“The real novelty of our algorithm is its ability to consider multiple materials in a highly constrained solution space to produce manufacturable designs with a user-specified force flow,” Schemmer says. “Real-life problems are complex and often have many constraints associated with them. In traditional formulations, it can be difficult to have a long list of complicated constraints. Our goal is to incorporate these constraints to make it easier to take our designs out of the computer and create them in real life.”

Take, for instance, a steel tower, which could be a “super lightweight, efficient design solution,” Schemmer explains. Because steel is so strong, you don’t need as much of it compared to concrete or timber to build a big building. But steel is also very carbon-intensive to produce and transport. Shipping it across the country or especially from a different continent can sharply increase its embodied carbon price tag. Schemmer’s topology optimization will replace some of the steel with timber elements or decrease the amount of steel in other elements to create a hybrid structure that will function effectively and minimize the carbon footprint. “This is why using the same steel in two different parts of the world can lead to two different optimized designs,” he explains.

Schemmer, who grew up in the mountains of Utah, earned a BS and MS in civil and environmental engineering from University of California at Berkeley, where his graduate work focused on seismic design. He describes that education as providing a “very traditional, super-strong engineering background that tackled some of the toughest engineering problems,” along with knowledge of structural engineering’s traditions and current methods.

But at MIT, he says, a lot of the work he sees “looks at removing the constraints of current societal conventions of doing things, and asks how could we do things if it was in a more ideal form; what are we looking at then? Which I think is really cool,” he says. “But I think sometimes too, there’s a jump between the most-perfect version of something and where we are now, that there needs to be a bridge between those two. And I feel like my education helps me see that bridge.”

The bridge he’s referring to is the topology optimization algorithms that make good designs better in terms of decreased global warming potential.

“That’s where the optimization algorithm comes in,” Schemmer says. “In contrast to a standard structure designed in the past, the algorithm can take the same design space and come up with a much more efficient material usage that still meets all the structural requirements, be up to code, and have everything we want from a safety standpoint.”

That’s also where the MAD Design Fellowship comes in. The program provides yearlong fellowships with full financial support to graduate students from all across the Institute who network with each other, with the MAD faculty, and with outside speakers who use design in new ways in a surprising variety of fields. This helps the fellows gain a better understanding of how to use iterative design in their own work.

“Usually people think of their own work like, ‘Oh, I had this background. I’ve been looking at this one way for a very long time.’ And when you look at it from an outside perspective, I think it opens your mind to be like, ‘Oh my God. I never would have thought about doing this that way. Maybe I should try that.’ And then we can move to new ideas, new inspiration for better work,” Schemmer says.

He chose civil and structural engineering over architecture some seven years ago, but says that “100 years ago, I don’t think architecture and structural engineering were two separate professions. I think there was an understanding of how things looked and how things worked, and it was merged together. Maybe from an efficiency standpoint, it’s better to have things done separately. But I think there’s something to be said for having knowledge about how the whole system works, potentially more intermingling between the free-form architectural design and the mathematical design of a civil engineer. Merging it back together, I think, has a lot of benefits.”

Which brings us back to the Golden Gate Bridge, Schemmer’s longtime favorite. You can still hear that excited 3-year-old in his voice when he talks about it.

“It’s so iconic,” he says. “It’s connecting these two spits of land that just rise straight up out of the ocean. There’s this fog that comes in and out a lot of days. It's a really magical place, from the size of the cable strands and everything. It’s just, ‘Wow.’ People built this over 100 years ago, before the existence of a lot of the computational tools that we have now. So, all the math, everything in the design, was all done by hand and from the mind. Nothing was computerized, which I think is crazy to think about.”

As Schemmer continues work on his doctoral degree at MIT, the MAD fellowship will expose him to many more awe-inspiring ideas in other fields, leading him to incorporate some of these in some way with his engineering knowledge to design better ways of building bridges and other structures.

In 2018, when Inc. Magazine named Boston one of the country’s top places to start a business, it highlighted one significant reason: Boston is an innovation hub for products and services catering toward the aging population. The “longevity economy” represents a massive chunk of economic opportunity: As of 2020, the over-50 market contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34 percent of the total, according to AARP and Economist Impact.

What makes Boston such a good place to do business in aging? One important factor, according to the Inc. story, was MIT — specifically, MIT’s AgeLab, a research organization devoted to creating a high quality of life for the world’s growing aging population.

Inspired by that claim, AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin, AgeLab science writer and researcher Luke Yoquinto, and The Boston Globe organized a yearlong series of articles to explore what makes Boston such a fertile ground for businesses in the longevity economy — and what might make its soil even richer. The series, titled “The Longevity Hub,” had a big goal in mind: describing what would be necessary to transform Boston into the “Silicon Valley of aging.”

The articles from the Globe series stand as a primer on key issues related to the wants, needs, and economic capabilities of older people, not just in Boston but for any community with an aging population. Importantly, creating a business and research environment conducive to innovation on behalf of older users and customers would create the opportunity to serve national and global aging markets far larger than just Boston or New England.

But that project with the Globe raised a new question for the MIT AgeLab: What communities, Boston aside, were ahead of the curve in their support of aging innovation? More likely than Boston standing as the world’s lone longevity hub, there were doubtless many international communities that could be identified using similar terms. But where were they? And what makes them successful?

Now The MIT Press has published “Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging,” an edited volume that collects the original articles from The Boston Globe series, as well as a set of new essays. In addition to AgeLab researchers Coughlin, Yoquinto, and Lisa D’Ambrosio, this work includes essays by members of the MIT community including Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory; the author team of Rafi Segal (associate professor of architecture and urbanism) and Marisa Moràn Jahn (senior researcher at MIT Future Urban Collectives); as well as Elise Selinger, MIT’s director of residential renewal and renovation.

In addition to these Boston Globe articles, the book also includes a new collection of essays from an international set of contributors. These new essays highlight sites around the world that have developed a reputation for innovation in the longevity economy. 

The innovative activity described throughout the book may exemplify a phenomenon called clustering: when businesses within a given sector emerge or congregate close to one another geographically. On its face, industrial or innovation clustering is something that ought not to happen, since, when businesses get physically close to one another, rent and congestion costs increase — incentivizing their dispersal. For clustering to occur, then, additional mechanisms must be at play, outweighing these natural costs. One possible explanation, many researchers have theorized, is that clusters tend to occur where useful, tacit knowledge flows among organizations.

In the case of longevity hubs, the editors hypothesize that two sorts of tacit knowledge are being shared. First is the simple awareness that the older market is worth serving. Second is insight into how best to meet its needs — a trickier proposition than many would-be elder-market conquerors realize. An earlier book by Coughlin, “The Longevity Economy” (PublicAffairs, 2017), discusses a long history of failed attempts by companies to design products and services for older adults. Speaking to the longevity economy is not easy, but these international longevity hubs represent successful, ongoing efforts to address the needs of older consumers.   

The book’s opening chapters on the Greater Boston longevity hub encompass a swathe of sectors including biotech, health care, housing, transportation, and financial services. “Although life insurance is perhaps the clearest example of a financial services industry whose interests align with consumer longevity, it is far from the only one,” writes Brooks Tingle, president and CEO of John Hancock, in his entry. “Financial companies — especially those in Boston's increasingly longevity-aware business community — should dare to think big and join the effort to build a better old age.”

The book’s other contributions range far beyond Boston. They highlight, for example, Louisville, Kentucky, which is “the country’s largest hot spot for businesses specializing in aging care,” writes contributor and Humana CEO Bruce Broussard, in a chapter describing the city’s mix of massive health-care companies and smaller, nimbler startups. In Newcastle, in the U.K., a thriving biomedical industry laid the groundwork for a burst of innovation around the idea of aging as an economic opportunity, with initial funding from the public sector and academic research giving way to business development in the city. In Brazil’s São Paulo, meanwhile, in the absence of public funding from the national government, a grassroots network of academics, companies, and other institutions called Envelhecimento 2.0 is the main driver of aging innovation in the country.

“We are seeing a Cambrian explosion of efforts to provide a high quality of life for the world’s booming aging population,” says Coughlin. “And that explosion includes not just startups and companies, but also different regional economic approaches to taking the longevity dividend of living longer, and transforming it into an opportunity for everyone to live longer, better.”

By 2034, for the first time in history, older adults will outnumber children in the United States. That demographic shift represents an enormous societal challenge, and a grand economic opportunity. Greater Boston stands as a premier global longevity hub, but, as Coughlin and Yoquinto’s volume illustrates, there are potential competitors — and collaborators — popping up left and right. If and when innovation clusters befitting the title of “the Silicon Valley of longevity” do arise, it remains to be seen where they will appear first.

If there’s a through line in Sydney Dolan’s pursuits, it’s a fervent belief in being a good steward — both in space and on Earth.

As a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), Dolan is developing a model that aims to mitigate satellite collisions. They see space as a public good, a resource for everyone. “There’s a real concern that you could be potentially desecrating a whole orbit if enough collisions were to happen,” they say. “We have to be very thoughtful about trying maintain people’s access, to be able to use space for all the different applications that it has today.”

Here on the Blue Planet, Dolan is passionate about building community and ensuring that students in the department have what they need to succeed. To that end, they have been deeply invested in mentoring other students; leading and participating in affinity groups for women and the LGBTQ+ community; and creating communications resources to help students navigate grad school.

Launching into new territories

Dolan’s interest in aerospace began as a high school student in Centerville, Virginia. A close friend asked them to go to a model rocket club meeting because she didn’t want to go alone. “I ended up going with her and really liking it, and it ended up becoming more of my thing than her kind of thing!” they say with a laugh. Building rockets and launching them in rural Virginia gave Dolan formative, hands-on experience in aerospace engineering and convinced them to pursue the field in college.

They attended Purdue University, lured by the beautiful aerospace building and the school’s stature as a leading producer of astronauts. While they’re grateful for the education they received at Purdue, the dearth of other women in the department was glaring.

That gender imbalance motivated Dolan to launch Purdue Women in Aerospace, to facilitate connections and work on changing the department’s culture. The group worked to make study spaces more welcoming to women and planned the inaugural Amelia Earhart Summit to celebrate women’s contributions to the field. Several hundred students, alumni, and others gathered for a full day of inspiring speakers, academic and industry panels, and networking opportunities.

During their junior year, Dolan was accepted into the Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship Program, which places students with a commercial space company and pairs them with a career mentor. They interned at Nanoracks over the summer, developing a small cubesat payload that went on the International Space Station. Through the internship they met an MIT AeroAstro PhD alumna, Natalya Bailey ’14. Since Dolan was leaning toward going to graduate school, Bailey provided valuable advice about where to consider applying and what goes into an application package — as well as a plug for MIT.

Although they applied to other schools, MIT stood out. “At the time, I really wasn’t sure if I wanted to be more in systems engineering or if I wanted to specialize more in guidance, navigation, controls, and autonomy. And I really like that the program at MIT has strength in both of those areas,” Dolan explains, adding that few schools have both specialties. That way, they would always have the option to switch from one to the other if their interests changed. 

Being a good space actor

That option would come in handy. For their master’s degree, they conducted two research projects in systems engineering. In their first year, they joined the Engineering Systems Laboratory, comparing lunar and Martian mission architectures to identify which technologies could be successfully deployed both on the moon and Mars to, as Dolan says, “get our bang for the buck.” Next, they worked on the Media Lab’s TESSERAE project, which aims to create tiles that can autonomously self-assemble to form science labs, zero-gravity habitats, and other applications in space. Dolan worked on the controls for the tiles and the feasibility of using computer vision for them.

Ultimately, Dolan decided to switch their focus to autonomy for their PhD, with a focus on satellite traffic applications. They joined the DINaMo Research Group, working with Hamsa Balakrishnan, associate dean of the School of Engineering and the William Leonhard (1940) Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Managing space traffic has become increasingly complex. As the cost to get to space decreases and new launch providers like SpaceX have spun up, the number of satellites has grown over the last few decades — as well as the risk of collisions. Traveling at approximately 17,000 miles per hour, satellites can cause catastrophic damage and create debris that, in turn, poses an additional hazard. The European Space Agency has estimated that there are roughly 11,500 satellites in orbit (2,500 of which are not active) and over 35,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters. Last February, there was a near-collision — missing by only 33 feet — between a NASA satellite and a non-operational Russian spy satellite.

Despite these risks, there’s no centralized governing body monitoring satellite maneuvers, and many operators are reluctant to share their satellite’s exact location, although they will provide limited information, Dolan says. Their doctoral thesis aims to address these issues through a model that enables satellites to independently make decisions on maneuvers to avoid collisions, using information they glean from nearby satellites. Dolan’s approach is interdisciplinary, using reinforcement learning, game theory, and optimal control to abstract a graph representation of the space environment.

Dolan sees the model as a potential tool that could provide decentralized oversight and inform policy: “I’m largely just all in favor of being a good space actor, thinking of space as a protected resource, just like the national parks. And here’s a mathematical tool we can use to really validate that this sort of information would be helpful.”

Finding a natural fit

Now wrapping up their fifth year, Dolan has been deeply involved in the MIT AeroAstro community since arriving in 2019. They have served as a peer mediator in the dREFS program (Department Resources for Easing Friction and Stress); mentored other women students; and served as co-president of the Graduate Women in Aerospace Engineering group. As a communication fellow in the AeroAstro Communications Lab, Dolan has created and offered workshops, coaching, and other resources to help students with journal articles, fellowship applications, posters, resumes, and other forms of science communications. “I just believe so firmly that all people should have the same resources to succeed in grad school,” Dolan says. “MIT does a really great job providing a lot of resources, but sometimes it can be daunting to figure out what they are and who to ask.”

In 2020, they helped found an LGBTQ+ affinity group called QuASAR (Queer Advocacy Space in AeroAstro). Unlike most MIT clubs, QuASAR is open to everyone in the department — undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff. Members gather several times a year for social events, and QuASAR has hosted academic and industry panels to better reflect the variety of identities in the aerospace field.

In their spare time Dolan loves ultrarunning — that is, running distances greater than a marathon. To date, they’ve run 50-kilometer and 50-mile races, and recently, a whopping 120 miles in a backyard ultramarathon (“basically, run ’til you drop,” Dolan says). It’s a great antidote to stress, and, curiously, they’ve noticed there are a lot of PhD students in ultrarunning. “I was talking with my advisor about it one time and she’s like, ‘Sydney, you’re crazy, why on Earth would you do anything like that?’ She said this respectfully! And I’m like, ‘Yeah, why would I ever want to do a task that has an ambiguous end date and that requires a lot of work and discipline?’” Dolan says, grinning.

Their hard work and discipline will pay off as they prepare to complete their MIT journey. After wrapping up their degree program, Dolan hopes to land a faculty position at a college or university. Being a professor feels like a natural fit, they say, combining their fascination with aerospace engineering with their passion for teaching and mentoring. As to where they will end up, Dolan waxes philosophical: “I’m throwing a lot of darts at the wall, and we’ll see … it’s with the universe now.”

Yari Golden-Castaño first learned about the moon, planets, and space while her grandmother in Mexico, Barbarita, taught her how to read from an encyclopedia. Golden-Castaño had already earned the nickname “little astronaut” among her family because of an astronaut onesie that her mother dressed her in. By third grade, she had read a book stating that one needed to be a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer in order to become an astronaut.

“Something was put in my head as a little kid, and I actually wanted it,” says Golden-Castaño. “I didn’t think I could be a doctor, and I didn’t want to be a teacher. I liked to build things and felt like physics and math came easy to me, so I decided I would become an engineer.”

A dream deferred

Although STEM-oriented, Golden-Castaño didn't experience STEM in a hands-on way until eighth grade, when she was selected for the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program. She grew up in a part of Southern California where funding for STEM activities was scarce. Through the GATE program for advanced science students, she saw concepts learned in the classroom come to life.

“Not everyone understands how things work just by reading a textbook. Personally, I need a visualization. Had I not been selected for this program, I wouldn’t have known that I could be doing these hands-on activities,” she says.

For Golden-Castaño, the GATE program was difficult not because of the STEM concepts covered, but because of the English language barrier. By high school, she was better able to express herself and was excelling in all of her Advanced Placement classes. Yet, when she asked one of her teachers how to become an astronaut, he laughed in her face. “Are you high? What are you taking? You'll never be an engineer or astronaut as a girl,” the teacher said. Other teachers shared his sentiment, pushing Golden-Castaño to attend a liberal arts college and suggesting that she study Spanish — in case she changed her mind.

“His response made me feel stupid,” Golden-Castaño says. “In that moment, I decided I would stop telling people that I wanted to be an astronaut one day. I would just go to engineering school and focus on getting my degree. I never once thought about getting out of engineering.”

Mission to Mars

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from Smith College in 2010, Golden-Castaño joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory as a data analyst in a group developing air traffic control systems. At the laboratory, she was surrounded by like-minded individuals who shared her aspiration to journey to space.

“Shortly after I arrived, I heard that NASA had put out a call for astronaut applications, and many of my colleagues were applying,” Golden-Castaño says. “That gave me hope and inspired me to open back up about my dream.”

In 2013, when the Mars One mission to establish the first human colony on the Red Planet was announced, Golden-Castaño jumped at the chance to obtain a one-way ticket there. By 2015, the 200,000 initial applicants had been whittled down to 100: 50 men and 50 women. On the short list of women was Golden-Castaño’s name. (The Mars 100 were eventually supposed to be down-selected to 24 finalists, but the company backing the mission declared bankruptcy in 2019.)

The supportive laboratory community and excitement surrounding the prospect of venturing to Mars formed the perfect combination for Golden-Castaño to share her passion for space. She started giving talks at schools across Boston, and even in Mexico, about her dream to become an astronaut and her path into engineering.

“Having the Mars tag gave me a wider platform to reach out,” Golden-Castaño says. “I now had something to share with students. When I saw their reaction — wow, you’re one of us, you’re a girl, and you didn't stop chasing your dreams when someone told you that you weren’t capable — I realized that I had their attention and should do something more than just talk.”

Golden-Castaño had engaged in some educational outreach while serving as vice president of Smith College’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE) during her senior year. She ran a four-workshop version of SWE’s annual Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. Though the event went well, she thought that would be her first and last encounter with educational outreach.

“I was really shy. I didn’t want to stand in front of anyone, let alone have them rely on me for information,” Golden-Castaño explains.

Upon joining the laboratory, she instead became involved in community outreach, including volunteering at a Boston food pantry, cleaning up the Charles River, and helping local farms prepare their soil for farming. But now that she was a face of the Mars One mission, she felt compelled to get back into educational outreach and tell her story.

Golden-Castaño volunteered at an Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day event run by laboratory colleague Damaris Toepel. Within a few years, Golden-Castaño took over running the event and began noticing that the fifth through eighth grade girls were bored with the content and complaining that they had already done these sorts of workshops.

“Their feedback made me realize that these are girls who have access and opportunity; they are the daughters of our engineers, and attend schools where teachers can afford materials for hands-on demos,” Golden-Castaño says.

Poised for blastoff

Disheartened by this realization and remembering her own limited opportunities as a student, Golden-Castaño in May 2017 created a spinoff of this event called Girls Space Day Adventure. With other volunteers, she assembled eight hands-on space-related demonstrations to bring to MIT in collaboration with women in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. To recruit participants, they contacted schools in the Greater Boston area, aiming to reach underserved students (targeting but not limiting to girls) who could easily travel to MIT campus via subway. A coed turnout of around 60 students rotated through the demonstrations. However, recreating that event proved difficult because many of the volunteers subsequently left the laboratory. Small-scale versions of Girls Space Day Adventure have since run onsite and at nearby schools, as the demonstrations were formatted to be presented independently.

In parallel, Golden-Castaño began an external eight-week program for second and third graders, called “Mission to Mars.” Each week focuses on a different aspect of what it takes to go to Mars, such as living under the planet’s gravity, designing a suitable habitat, and growing vegetables that can flourish in Martian soil. On the last day, the students don an astronaut suit and navigate an obstacle course as they communicate with their “ground control” partner via walkie-talkie.

Supporting Golden-Castaño as these outreach efforts took off was her now-husband, R. Daniel, whom she met through Mars One. He helped her build many of the demonstrations, even before he started working as a contractor in the laboratory’s Laser Communications Group.

After hosting Girls Space Day Adventure and Mission to Mars, Golden-Castaño had an idea to make outreach more self-sustaining over the long term by having demonstrations ready for volunteers to deploy at different schools. From that idea, the Girls’ Innovation Research Laboratory (G.I.R.L.) was born at Lincoln Laboratory in 2019. The program sought to create standalone hands-on workshops on diverse STEM topics, encourage disadvantaged girls to take part (though events are coed), and support women or any laboratory staff members willing to volunteer as STEM role models.

“The goals of G.I.R.L. are to inspire girls to innovate technologies that serve our communities and empower them with the skills, knowledge, resources, and confidence to pursue STEM. For me, another goal is to give women the confidence to volunteer and learn a topic that they may be unfamiliar with, and then go teach it,” says Golden-Castaño, who had to step outside her own comfort zone to do just that.

A vast space

Since its inception, G.I.R.L. has hosted about 50 workshops and reached more than 300 students. Staff from the laboratory's Communications and Community Outreach Office have established relationships with several Greater Boston area schools; organizations including Brookview House, Girls Inc., Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and House of Hope; and events such as Science on State Street and the Christa McAuliffe Center STEM Week Open House. G.I.R.L. provides the resources and materials volunteers need for their demonstrations.

“We have a reservoir of smart women at the lab, and they have knowledge that can be shared. Volunteers can propose demonstrations on topics of their choosing and independently take them to schools or organizations. We now have a full 'menu' of demonstrations that we can run at any time. Having kids access these hands-on activities that I didn't get to experience outside of the GATE program is inspiring.”

Workshops have spanned diverse fields, including programming, mechanical and electrical engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, optics, forensics, planetary science, and chemistry. One workshop, on Scratch programming with a Makey Makey Board (controller board), teaches students how to assemble a circuit and program a musical instrument to play when they touch keys on the board. In an artificial intelligence-themed workshop, students play an AI-or-not guessing game and sort items such as candies to mimic how a decision-tree algorithm works. A workshop covering cybersecurity and internet safety teaches students to see the risks of putting personal information online, decrypt messages, physically pick locks, and understand internet protocols. In a workshop on the basics of light, students assemble light-emitting diode (LED) color-mixing crystals and then use light-diffraction glasses to observe how light splits into different colors at various angles. 

More recently, G.I.R.L. launched a workshop on chemical reactions, in which students make their own color reactions and learn about chemiluminescence. The latest workshop focused on mechanics, with students assembling a mechanical arm out of cardboard by tracing a hand template and using string to move the fingers through a mechanism similar to a puppeteer controlling a marionette’s limbs. Students also attached a strip of LED onto the back of the arm; Golden-Castaño wrote code to make the light change color depending on which finger is curled.

For Golden-Castaño, one of the most fulfilling parts of G.I.R.L. is capturing the attention of students, especially those who initially seem disinterested.

“I’ve arrived in many classrooms where the kids are being disrespectful and talking over us,” Golden-Castaño says. “Then, we start the demo, and even the loudest kid is now attentive and asking relevant questions. Watching them engage with the program is rewarding.”

To keep this momentum going, all G.I.R.L. workshops send students home with follow-up links or materials providing additional learning resources. The volunteers also share their academic and career journeys so that students can envision a path forward.

“One important lesson I’ve learned is that kids don’t want to hear you've known from the beginning what you want to be when you grow up and everything has worked out for you,” Golden-Castaño says. “For many students, G.I.R.L. represents their first hands-on experience with STEM or the first time they are hearing they can do STEM. So, I’m always honest with them. I tell them that I didn't have straight As, and it’s not too late for them to start today.”

Besides the lack of exposure to STEM, some G.I.R.L. participants face a language barrier, which Golden-Castaño knows all too well. Fluent in conversational Spanish but lacking a technical vocabulary in that language, she has been trying on the fly to translate lessons delivered in English into Spanish. Earlier this year, she prepared ahead of time a presentation in Spanish for a chemistry workshop.

To infinity and beyond

Five years in, the G.I.R.L. program is still going strong, having withstood the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, which necessitated running the workshops virtually and shipping materials like pre-made kits to classrooms.

“We have a system that works overall,” she says. “But we’re at a point where I'd like to see another burst of participation from a new set of volunteers coming up with new demonstrations.”

Noting the diverse work ongoing at the laboratory across its R&D areas, Golden-Castaño has several future workshop topics in mind: smart fabrics, biochemistry for threat identification, underwater laser communication, rapid prototyping, technology solutions for climate change, and safety with AI. The possibilities are endless.

Golden-Castaño, in collaboration with the group that led the Girls Space Day Adventure on MIT campus, also has an app idea for matching volunteers to classrooms in a more automated, targeted way. The app would feature profiles of volunteers — stating their STEM background, demonstrations they lead, and scheduling availability — that teachers could scroll through to determine who complements their classroom curriculum. For example, a teacher of an environmental science class may request the volunteer leading a weather station workshop.

“G.I.R.L. has been a really good journey. Thank you to everyone who made it all possible. I’m grateful to have the support of the many volunteers, instructors, my group leaders, and the Outreach Office,” says Golden-Castaño, now part of the laboratory’s Systems Engineering Group, where she focuses on the assembly, integration, and testing of laser communication systems.

While keeping an eye out for the next opportunity to pursue her dream of becoming an astronaut, Golden-Castaño considers her work at the laboratory as foundational for future space exploration: “I’m working on technology that could enable future human missions to space.”

Elaine Jutamulia ’24 took a sip of coffee with a few drops of anise extract. It was her second try.

“What do you think?” asked Omar Orozco, standing at a lab table in MIT’s Breakerspace, surrounded by filters, brewing pots, and other coffee paraphernalia.

“I think when I first tried it, it was still pretty bitter,” Jutamulia said thoughtfully. “But I think now that it’s steeped for a little bit — it took out some of the bitterness.”

Jutamulia and current MIT senior Orozco were part of class 3.000 (Coffee Matters: Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup), a new MIT course that debuted in spring 2024. The class combines lectures on chemistry and the science of coffee with hands-on experimentation and group projects. Their project explored how additives such as anise, salt, and chili oil influence coffee extraction — the process of dissolving flavor compounds from ground coffee into water — to improve taste and correct common brewing errors.

Alongside tasting, they used an infrared spectrometer to identify the chemical compounds in their coffee samples that contribute to flavor. Does anise make bitter coffee smoother? Could chili oil balance the taste?

“Generally speaking, if we could make a recommendation, that’s what we’re trying to find,” Orozco said.

A three-unit “discovery class” designed to help first-year students explore majors, 3.000 was widely popular, enrolling more than 50 students. Its success was driven by the beverage at its core and the class’s hands-on approach, which pushes students to ask and answer questions they might not have otherwise.

For aeronautics and astronautics majors Gabi McDonald and McKenzie Dinesen, coffee was the draw, but the class encouraged them to experiment and think in new ways. “It’s easy to drop people like us in, who love coffee, and, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s this class where we can go make coffee half the time and try all different kinds of things?’” McDonald says.

Percolating knowledge

The class pairs weekly lectures on topics such as coffee chemistry, the anatomy and composition of a coffee bean, the effects of roasting, and the brewing process with tasting sessions — students sample coffee brewed from different beans, roasts, and grinds. In the MIT Breakerspace, a new space on campus conceived and managed by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), students use equipment such as a digital optical microscope to examine ground coffee particles and a scanning electron microscope, which shoots beams of electrons at samples to reveal cross-sections of beans in stunning detail.

Once students learn to operate instruments for guided tasks, they form groups and design their own projects.

“The driver for those projects is some question they have about coffee raised by one of the lectures or the tasting sessions, or just something they’ve always wanted to know,” says DMSE Professor Jeffrey Grossman, who designed and teaches the class. “Then they’ll use one or more of these pieces of equipment to shed some light on it.”

Grossman traces the origins of the class to his initial vision for the Breakerspace, a laboratory for materials analysis and lounge for MIT undergraduates. Opened in November 2023, the space gives students hands-on experience with materials science and engineering, an interdisciplinary field combining chemistry, physics, and engineering to probe the composition and structure of materials.

“The world is made of stuff, and these are the tools to understand that stuff and bring it to life,” says Grossman. So he envisioned a class that would give students an “exploratory, inspiring nudge.”

“Then the question wasn’t the pedagogy, it was, ‘What’s the hook?’ In materials science, there are a lot of directions you could go, but if you have one that inspires people because they know it and maybe like it already, then that’s exciting.”

Cup of ambition

That hook, of course, was coffee, the second-most-consumed beverage after water. It captured students’ imagination and motivated them to push boundaries.

Orozco brought a fair amount of coffee knowledge to the class. In 2023, he taught in Mexico through the MISTI Global Teaching Labs program, where he toured several coffee farms and acquired a deeper knowledge of the beverage. He learned, for example, that black coffee, contrary to general American opinion, isn’t naturally bitter; bitterness arises from certain compounds that develop during the roasting process.

“If you properly brew it with the right beans, it actually tastes good,” says Orozco, a humanities and engineering major. A year later, in 3.000, he expanded his understanding of making a good brew, particularly through the group project with Jutamulia and other students to fix bad coffee.

The group prepared a control sample of “perfectly brewed” coffee — based on taste, coffee-to-water ratio, and other standards covered in class — alongside coffee that was under-extracted and over-extracted. Under-extracted coffee, made with water that isn’t hot enough or brewed for too short a time, tastes sharp or sour. Over-extracted coffee, brewed with too much coffee or for too long, tastes bitter.

Those coffee samples got additives and were analyzed using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, measuring how coffee absorbed infrared light to identify flavor-related compounds. Jutamulia examined FTIR readings taken from a sample with lime juice to see how the citric acid influenced its chemical profile.

“Can we find any correlation between what we saw and the existing known measurements of citric acid?” asks Jutamulia, who studied computation and cognition at MIT, graduating last May.

Another group dove into coffee storage, questioning why conventional wisdom advises against freezing.

“We just wondered why that’s the case,” says electrical engineering and computer science major Noah Wiley, a coffee enthusiast with his own espresso machine.

The team compared methods like freezing brewed coffee, frozen coffee grounds, and whole beans ground after freezing, evaluating their impact on flavor and chemical composition.

“Then we’re going to see which ones taste good,” says Wiley. The team used a class coffee review sheet to record attributes like acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and overall flavor, pairing the results with FTIR analysis to determine how storage affected taste.

Wiley acknowledged that “good” is subjective. “Sometimes there’s a group consensus. I think people like fuller coffee, not watery,” he says.

Other student projects compared caffeine levels in different coffee types, analyzed the effect of microwaving coffee on its chemical composition and flavor, and investigated the differences between authentic and counterfeit coffee beans.

“We gave the students some papers to look at in case they were interested,” says Justin Lavallee, Breakerspace manager and co-teacher of the class. “But mostly we told them to focus on something they wanted to learn more about.”

Drip, drip, drip

Beyond answering specific questions about coffee, both students and teachers gained deeper insights into the beverage.

“Coffee is a complicated material. There are thousands of molecules in the beans, which change as you roast and extract them,” says Grossman. “The number of ways you can engineer this collection of molecules — it’s profound, ranging from where and how the coffee’s grown to how the cherries are then treated to get the beans to how the beans are roasted and ground to the brewing method you use.”

Dinesen learned firsthand, discovering, for example, that darker roasts have less caffeine than lighter roasts, puncturing a common misconception. “You can vary coffee so much — just with the roast of the bean, the size of the ground,” she says. “It’s so easily manipulatable, if that's a word.”

In addition to learning about the science and chemistry behind coffee, Dinesen and McDonald gained new brewing techniques, like using a pour-over cone. The pair even incorporated coffee making and testing into their study routine, brewing coffee while tackling problem sets for another class.

“I would put my pour-over cone in my backpack with a Ziploc bag full of grounds, and we would go to the Student Center and pull out the cone, a filter, and the coffee grounds,” McDonald says. “And then we would make pour-overs while doing a P-set. We tested different amounts of water, too. It was fun.”

Tony Chen, a materials science and engineering major, reflected on the 3.000’s title — “Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup” — and whether making a perfect cup is possible. “I don’t think there’s one perfect cup because each person has their own preferences. I don't think I’ve gotten to mine yet,” he says.

Enthusiasm for coffee’s complexity and the discovery process was exactly what Grossman hoped to inspire in his students. “The best part for me was also just seeing them developing their own sense of curiosity,” he says.

He recalled a moment early in the class when students, after being given a demo of the optical microscope, saw the surface texture of a magnified coffee bean, the mottled shades of color, and the honeycomb-like pattern of tiny irregular cells.

“They’re like, ‘Wait a second. What if we add hot water to the grounds while it’s under the microscope? Would we see the extraction?’ So, they got hot water and some ground coffee beans, and lo and behold, it looked different. They could see the extraction right there,” Grossman says. “It’s like they have an idea that’s inspired by the learning, and they go and try it. I saw that happen many, many times throughout the semester.”

A recent study from the McGovern Institute for Brain Research shows how interests can modulate language processing in children’s brains and paves the way for personalized brain research.

The paper, which appears in Imaging Neuroscience, was conducted in the lab of MIT professor and McGovern Institute investigator John Gabrieli, and led by senior author Anila D’Mello, a recent McGovern postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Traditional studies give subjects identical stimuli to avoid confounding the results,” says Gabrieli, who is the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “However, our research tailored stimuli to each child’s interest, eliciting stronger — and more consistent — activity patterns in the brain’s language regions across individuals.” 

Funded by the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research in MIT’s Yang Tan Collective, this work unveils a new paradigm that challenges current methods and shows how personalization can be a powerful strategy in neuroscience. The paper’s co-first authors are Halie Olson, a postdoc at the McGovern Institute, and Kristina Johnson PhD '21, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and former doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. “Our research integrates participants’ lived experiences into the study design,” says Johnson. “This approach not only enhances the validity of our findings, but also captures the diversity of individual perspectives, often overlooked in traditional research.”

Taking interest into account

When it comes to language, our interests are like operators behind the switchboard. They guide what we talk about and who we talk to. Research suggests that interests are also potent motivators and can help improve language skills. For instance, children score higher on reading tests when the material covers topics that are interesting to them.

But neuroscience has shied away from using personal interests to study the brain, especially in the realm of language. This is mainly because interests, which vary between people, could throw a wrench into experimental control — a core principle that drives scientists to limit factors that can muddle the results.

Gabrieli, D’Mello, Olson, and Johnson ventured into this unexplored territory. The team wondered if tailoring language stimuli to children’s interests might lead to higher responses in language regions of the brain. “Our study is unique in its approach to control the kind of brain activity our experiments yield, rather than control the stimuli we give subjects,” says D’Mello. “This stands in stark contrast to most neuroimaging studies that control the stimuli but might introduce differences in each subject’s level of interest in the material.”

In their recent study, the authors recruited a cohort of 20 children to investigate how personal interests affected the way the brain processes language. Caregivers described their child’s interests to the researchers, spanning baseball, train lines, “Minecraft,” and musicals. During the study, children listened to audio stories tuned to their unique interests. They were also presented with audio stories about nature (this was not an interest among the children) for comparison. To capture brain activity patterns, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow caused by underlying neural activity.

New insights into the brain

“We found that, when children listened to stories about topics they were really interested in, they showed stronger neural responses in language areas than when they listened to generic stories that weren’t tailored to their interests,” says Olson. “Not only does this tell us how interests affect the brain, but it also shows that personalizing our experimental stimuli can have a profound impact on neuroimaging results.”

The researchers noticed a particularly striking result. “Even though the children listened to completely different stories, their brain activation patterns were more overlapping with their peers when they listened to idiosyncratic stories compared to when they listened to the same generic stories about nature,” says D’Mello. This, she notes, points to how interests can boost both the magnitude and consistency of signals in language regions across subjects without changing how these areas communicate with each other.

Gabrieli noted another finding: “In addition to the stronger engagement of language regions for content of interest, there was also stronger activation in brain regions associated with reward and also with self-reflection.” Personal interests are individually relevant and can be rewarding, potentially driving higher activation in these regions during personalized stories.

These personalized paradigms might be particularly well-suited to studies of the brain in unique or neurodivergent populations. Indeed, the team is already applying these methods to study language in the brains of autistic children.

This study breaks new ground in neuroscience and serves as a prototype for future work that personalizes research to unearth further knowledge of the brain. In doing so, scientists can compile a more complete understanding of the type of information that is processed by specific brain circuits and more fully grasp complex functions such as language. 

Joseph F. DeCarolis, administrator for the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), has one overarching piece of advice for anyone poring over long-term energy projections.

“Whatever you do, don’t start believing the numbers,” DeCarolis said at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Fall Colloquium. “There’s a tendency when you sit in front of the computer and you’re watching the model spit out numbers at you … that you’ll really start to believe those numbers with high precision. Don’t fall for it. Always remain skeptical.”

This event was part of MITEI’s new speaker series, MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition, which connects the MIT community with the energy experts and leaders who are working on scientific, technological, and policy solutions that are urgently needed to accelerate the energy transition.

The point of DeCarolis’s talk, titled “Stay humble and prepare for surprises: Lessons for the energy transition,” was not that energy models are unimportant. On the contrary, DeCarolis said, energy models give stakeholders a framework that allows them to consider present-day decisions in the context of potential future scenarios. However, he repeatedly stressed the importance of accounting for uncertainty, and not treating these projections as “crystal balls.”

“We can use models to help inform decision strategies,” DeCarolis said. “We know there’s a bunch of future uncertainty. We don’t know what's going to happen, but we can incorporate that uncertainty into our model and help come up with a path forward.”

Dialogue, not forecasts

EIA is the statistical and analytic agency within the U.S. Department of Energy, with a mission to collect, analyze, and disseminate independent and impartial energy information to help stakeholders make better-informed decisions. Although EIA analyzes the impacts of energy policies, the agency does not make or advise on policy itself. DeCarolis, who was previously professor and University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University, noted that EIA does not need to seek approval from anyone else in the federal government before publishing its data and reports. “That independence is very important to us, because it means that we can focus on doing our work and providing the best information we possibly can,” he said.

Among the many reports produced by EIA is the agency’s Annual Energy Outlook (AEO), which projects U.S. energy production, consumption, and prices. Every other year, the agency also produces the AEO Retrospective, which shows the relationship between past projections and actual energy indicators.

“The first question you might ask is, ‘Should we use these models to produce a forecast?’” DeCarolis said. “The answer for me to that question is: No, we should not do that. When models are used to produce forecasts, the results are generally pretty dismal.”

DeCarolis pointed to wildly inaccurate past projections about the proliferation of nuclear energy in the United States as an example of the problems inherent in forecasting. However, he noted, there are “still lots of really valuable uses” for energy models. Rather than using them to predict future energy consumption and prices, DeCarolis said, stakeholders should use models to inform their own thinking.

“[Models] can simply be an aid in helping us think and hypothesize about the future of energy,” DeCarolis said. “They can help us create a dialogue among different stakeholders on complex issues. If we’re thinking about something like the energy transition, and we want to start a dialogue, there has to be some basis for that dialogue. If you have a systematic representation of the energy system that you can advance into the future, we can start to have a debate about the model and what it means. We can also identify key sources of uncertainty and knowledge gaps.”

Modeling uncertainty

The key to working with energy models is not to try to eliminate uncertainty, DeCarolis said, but rather to account for it. One way to better understand uncertainty, he noted, is to look at past projections, and consider how they ended up differing from real-world results. DeCarolis pointed to two “surprises” over the past several decades: the exponential growth of shale oil and natural gas production (which had the impact of limiting coal’s share of the energy market and therefore reducing carbon emissions), as well as the rapid rise in wind and solar energy. In both cases, market conditions changed far more quickly than energy modelers anticipated, leading to inaccurate projections.

“For all those reasons, we ended up with [projected] CO₂ [carbon dioxide] emissions that were quite high compared to actual,” DeCarolis said. “We’re a statistical agency, so we’re really looking carefully at the data, but it can take some time to identify the signal through the noise.”

Although EIA does not produce forecasts in the AEO, people have sometimes interpreted the reference case in the agency’s reports as predictions. In an effort to illustrate the unpredictability of future outcomes in the 2023 edition of the AEO, the agency added “cones of uncertainty” to its projection of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, with ranges of outcomes based on the difference between past projections and actual results. One cone captures 50 percent of historical projection errors, while another represents 95 percent of historical errors.

“They capture whatever bias there is in our projections,” DeCarolis said of the uncertainty cones. “It’s being captured because we’re comparing actual [emissions] to projections. The weakness of this, though, is: who’s to say that those historical projection errors apply to the future? We don’t know that, but I still think that there’s something useful to be learned from this exercise.”

The future of energy modeling

Looking ahead, DeCarolis said, there is a “laundry list of things that keep me up at night as a modeler.” These include the impacts of climate change; how those impacts will affect demand for renewable energy; how quickly industry and government will overcome obstacles to building out clean energy infrastructure and supply chains; technological innovation; and increased energy demand from data centers running compute-intensive workloads.

“What about enhanced geothermal? Fusion? Space-based solar power?” DeCarolis asked. “Should those be in the model? What sorts of technology breakthroughs are we missing? And then, of course, there are the unknown unknowns — the things that I can’t conceive of to put on this list, but are probably going to happen.”

In addition to capturing the fullest range of outcomes, DeCarolis said, EIA wants to be flexible, nimble, transparent, and accessible — creating reports that can easily incorporate new model features and produce timely analyses. To that end, the agency has undertaken two new initiatives. First, the 2025 AEO will use a revamped version of the National Energy Modeling System that includes modules for hydrogen production and pricing, carbon management, and hydrocarbon supply. Second, an effort called Project BlueSky is aiming to develop the agency’s next-generation energy system model, which DeCarolis said will be modular and open source.

DeCarolis noted that the energy system is both highly complex and rapidly evolving, and he warned that “mental shortcuts” and the fear of being wrong can lead modelers to ignore possible future developments. “We have to remain humble and intellectually honest about what we know,” DeCarolis said. “That way, we can provide decision-makers with an honest assessment of what we think could happen in the future.” 

Researchers at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) have shown that using decision-making software and dynamic monitoring of weather and energy use can significantly improve resiliency in the face of weather-related outages, and can also help to efficiently integrate renewable energy sources into the grid.

The researchers point out that the system they suggest might have prevented or at least lessened the kind of widespread power outage that Puerto Rico experienced last week by providing analysis to guide rerouting of power through different lines and thus limit the spread of the outage.

The computer platform, which the researchers describe as DyMonDS, for Dynamic Monitoring and Decision Systems, can be used to enhance the existing operating and planning practices used in the electric industry. The platform supports interactive information exchange and decision-making between the grid operators and grid-edge users — all the distributed power sources, storage systems and software that contribute to the grid. It also supports optimization of available resources and controllable grid equipment as system conditions vary. It further lends itself to implementing cooperative decision-making by different utility- and non-utility-owned electric power grid users, including portfolios of mixed resources, users, and storage. Operating and planning the interactions of the end-to-end high-voltage transmission grid with local distribution grids and microgrids represents another major potential use of this platform.

This general approach was illustrated using a set of publicly-available data on both meteorology and details of electricity production and distribution in Puerto Rico. An extended AC Optimal Power Flow software developed by SmartGridz Inc. is used for system-level optimization of controllable equipment. This provides real-time guidance for deciding how much power, and through which transmission lines, should be channeled by adjusting plant dispatch and voltage-related set points, and in extreme cases, where to reduce or cut power in order to maintain physically-implementable service for as many customers as possible. The team found that the use of such a system can help to ensure that the greatest number of critical services maintain power even during a hurricane, and at the same time can lead to a substantial decrease in the need for construction of new power plants thanks to more efficient use of existing resources.

The findings are described in a paper in the journal Foundations and Trends in Electric Energy Systems, by MIT LIDS researchers Marija Ilic and Laurentiu Anton, along with recent alumna Ramapathi Jaddivada.

“Using this software,” Ilic says, they show that “even during bad weather, if you predict equipment failures, and by using that information exchange, you can localize the effect of equipment failures and still serve a lot of customers, 50 percent of customers, when otherwise things would black out.”

Anton says that “the way many grids today are operated is sub-optimal.” As a result, “we showed how much better they could do even under normal conditions, without any failures, by utilizing this software.” The savings resulting from this optimization, under everyday conditions, could be in the tens of percents, they say.

The way utility systems plan currently, Ilic says, “usually the standard is that they have to build enough capacity and operate in real time so that if one large piece of equipment fails, like a large generator or transmission line, you still serve customers in an uninterrupted way. That’s what’s called N-minus-1.” Under this policy, if one major component of the system fails, they should be able to maintain service for at least 30 minutes. That system allows utilities to plan for how much reserve generating capacity they need to have on hand. That’s expensive, Ilic points out, because it means maintaining this reserve capacity all the time, even under normal operating conditions when it’s not needed.

In addition, “right now there are no criteria for what I call N-minus-K,” she says. If bad weather causes five pieces of equipment to fail at once, “there is no software to help utilities decide what to schedule” in terms of keeping the most customers, and the most important services such as hospitals and emergency services, provided with power. They showed that even with 50 percent of the infrastructure out of commission, it would still be possible to keep power flowing to a large proportion of customers.

Their work on analyzing the power situation in Puerto Rico started after the island had been devastated by hurricanes Irma and Maria. Most of the electric generation capacity is in the south, yet the largest loads are in San Juan, in the north, and Mayaguez in the west. When transmission lines get knocked down, a lot of rerouting of power needs to happen quickly.

With the new systems, “the software finds the optimal adjustments for set points,” for example, changing voltages can allow for power to be redirected through less-congested lines, or can be increased to lessen power losses, Anton says.

The software also helps in the long-term planning for the grid. As many fossil-fuel power plants are scheduled to be decommissioned soon in Puerto Rico, as they are in many other places, planning for how to replace that power without having to resort to greenhouse gas-emitting sources is a key to achieving carbon-reduction goals. And by analyzing usage patterns, the software can guide the placement of new renewable power sources where they can most efficiently provide power where and when it’s needed.

As plants are retired or as components are affected by weather, “We wanted to ensure the dispatchability of power when the load changes,” Anton says, “but also when crucial components are lost, to ensure the robustness at each step of the retirement schedule.”

One thing they found was that “if you look at how much generating capacity exists, it’s more than the peak load, even after you retire a few fossil plants,” Ilic says. “But it’s hard to deliver.” Strategic planning of new distribution lines could make a big difference.

Jaddivada, director of innovation at SmartGridz, says that “we evaluated different possible architectures in Puerto Rico, and we showed the ability of this software to ensure uninterrupted electricity service. This is the most important challenge utilities have today. They have to go through a computationally tedious process to make sure the grid functions for any possible outage in the system. And that can be done in a much more efficient way through the software that the company  developed.”

The project was a collaborative effort between the MIT LIDS researchers and others at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, with overall help of SmartGridz software. 

Loren R. Graham, professor emeritus of the history of science who served on the MIT faculty for nearly three decades, died on Dec. 15, 2024, at the age of 91.

Graham received a BS in chemical engineering from Purdue University in 1955, the same year his classmate, acquaintance, and future NASA astronaut and moon walker Neil Armstrong graduated with a BS in aeronautical engineering. Graham went on to earn a PhD in history in 1964 from Columbia University, where he taught from 1965 until 1978. 

In 1978, Graham joined the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) as a professor of the history of science. His specialty during his tenure with the program was in the history of science in Russia and the Soviet Union in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. His work focused on Soviet and Marxist philosophy of science and science politics.

Much of Graham’s career spanned the Cold War. He participated in one of the first academic exchange programs between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1960 to 1961 and marched in the Moscow May Day Parade just weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. In 1965, he received a Fulbright Award to do research in the Soviet Union.

Graham wrote extensively on the influence of social context in science and the study of contemporary science and technology in Russia. He also experimented in writing a nonfiction mystery, “Death in the Lighthouse” (2013), and making documentary films. His publications include “Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union” (1987), “Science and the Soviet Social Order” (1990), “Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History” (1993), “The Ghost of the Executed Engineer” (1993); “A Face in the Rock” (1995); and “What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience?” (1998).

His publication “Science, Philosophy and Science in the Soviet Union” was nominated for the National Book Award in 1987. He received the George Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society in 1996 and the Follo Award of the Michigan Historical Society in 2000 for his contributions to Michigan history.

Many former colleagues recall the impact he had at MIT. In 1988, with fellow faculty member Merritt Roe Smith, professor emeritus of history, he played a leading role in establishing the graduate program in the history and social study of science and technology that is now known as HASTS. This interdisciplinary graduate Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society has become one of the most selective graduate programs at MIT.

“Loren was an intellectual innovator and role model for teaching and advising,” says Sherry Turkle, MIT professor of sociology. “And he was a wonderful colleague. … He experimented. He had fun. He cared about writing and about finding joy in work.”

Graham served on the STS faculty until his retirement in 2006.

Throughout his life, Graham was a member of many foundations and honorary societies, including the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Russian Academy of Natural Science.

He was also a member on several boards of trustees, including George Soros' International Science Foundation, which supported Russian scientists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For many years he served on the board of trustees of the European University at St. Petersburg, remaining an active member on its development board until 2024. After donating thousands of books from his own library to the university, a special collection was established in his name.

In 2012, Graham was awarded a medal by the Russian Academy of Sciences at a ceremony in Moscow for his contributions to the history of science. “His own life as a scholar covered a great deal of important history,” says David Mindell, MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing.

Graham is survived by ​​his wife, Patricia Graham, and daughter, Meg Peterson.

“How do we produce batteries at the cost that is suitable for mass adoption globally, and how do you do this to electrify the planet?” Clare Grey asked an audience of over 450 combined in-person and virtual attendees at the sixth annual Dresselhaus Lecture, organized by MIT.nano on Nov. 18. “The biggest challenge is, how do you make batteries to allow more renewables on the grid.”

These questions emphasized one of Grey’s key messages in her presentation: The future of batteries aligns with global climate efforts. She addressed sustainability issues with lithium mining and stressed the importance of increasing the variety of minerals that can be used in batteries. But the talk primarily focused on advanced imaging techniques to produce insights into the behaviors of materials that will guide the development of new technology. “We need to come up with new chemistries and new materials that are both more sustainable and safer,” she said, as well as think about other issues like secondhand use, which requires batteries to be made to last longer.

Better understanding will produce better batteries

“Batteries have really transformed the way we live,” Grey said. “In order to improve batteries, we need to understand how they work, we need to understand how they operate, and we need to understand how they degrade.”

Grey, a Royal Society Research Professor and the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University, introduced new optical methods for studying batteries while they are operating, visualizing reactions down to the nanoscale. “It is much easier to study an operating device in-situ,” she said. “When you take batteries apart, sometimes there are processes that don’t survive disassembling.”

Grey presented work coming out of her research group that uses in-situ metrologies to better understand different dynamics and transformational phenomena of various materials. For example, in-situ nuclear magnetic resonance can identify issues with wrapping lithium with silicon (it does not form a passivating layer) and demonstrate why anodes cannot be replaced with sodium (it is the wrong size molecule). Grey discussed the value of being able to use in-situ metrology to look at higher energy density materials that are more sustainable such as lithium sulfur or lithium air batteries.

The lecture connected local structure to mechanisms and how materials intercalate. Grey spoke about using interferometric scattering (iSCAT) microscopy, typically used by biologists, to follow how ions are pulled in and out of materials. Sharing iSCAT images of graphite, she gave a shout out to the late Institute Professor and lecture namesake Mildred Dresselhaus when discussing nucleation, the process by which atoms come together to form new structures that is important for considering new, more sustainable materials for batteries.

“Millie, in her solid-state physics class for undergrads, nicely explained what’s going on here,” Grey explained. “There is a dramatic change in the conductivity as you go from diluted state to the dense state. The conductivity goes up. With this information, you can explore nucleation.”

Designing for the future

“How do we design for fast charging?” Grey asked, discussing gradient spectroscopy to visualize different materials. “We need to find a material that operates at a high enough voltage to avoid lithium plating and has high lithium mobility.”

“To return to the theme of graphite and Millie Dresselhaus,” said Grey, “I’ve been trying to really understand what is the nature of the passivating layer that grows on both graphite and lithium metal. Can we enhance this layer?” In the question-and-answer session that followed, Grey spoke about the pros and cons of incorporating nitrogen in the anode.

After the lecture, Grey was joined by Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, for a fireside chat. The conversation touched on political and academic attitudes toward climate change in the United Kingdom, and audience members applauded Grey’s development of imaging methods that allow researchers to look at the temperature dependent response of battery materials.

This was the sixth Dresselhaus Lecture, named in honor of MIT Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, known to many as the "Queen of Carbon Science.” “It’s truly wonderful to be here to celebrate the life and the science of Millie Dresselhaus,” said Grey. “She was a very strong advocate for women in science. I’m honored to be here to give a lecture in honor of her.”

A quiet intensity held the room on edge as the clock ticked down in the final moments of the 2024 MIT Science Bowl Invitational. Montgomery Blair High School clung to a razor-thin lead over Mission San Jose High School — 70 to 60 — with just two minutes remaining.

Mission San Jose faced a pivotal bonus opportunity that could tie the score. The moderator’s steady voice filled the room as he read the question. Mission San Jose’s team of four huddled together, pencils moving quickly across their white scratch paper. Across the stage, Montgomery Blair’s players sat still, their eyes darting between the scoreboard and the opposing team attempting to close the gap.

Mission San Jose team captain Advaith Mopuri called out their final answer.

“Incorrect,” the moderator announced.

Montgomery Blair’s team collectively exhaled, the tension breaking as they sealed their championship victory, but the gravity of those final moments when everything was on the line lingered — a testament to just how close the competition had been. Their showdown in the final round was a fitting culmination of the event, showcasing the mental agility and teamwork honed through months of practice.

“That final round was so tense. It came down to the final question,” says Jonathan Huang, a senior undergraduate at MIT and the co-president of the MIT Science Bowl Club. “It’s rare for it to come down to the very last question, so that was really exciting.”​

A tournament of science and strategy

Now in its sixth year at the high school level, the MIT Science Bowl Invitational welcomed 48 teams from across the country this year for a full day of competition. The buzzer-style tournament challenged students on topics that spanned disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics. The rapid pace and diverse subject matter demanded a combination of deep knowledge, quick reflexes, and strategic teamwork.

Montgomery Blair’s hard-fought victory marked the culmination of months of preparation. “It was so exciting,” says Katherine Wang, Montgomery Blair senior and Science Bowl team member. “I can’t even describe it. You never think anything like that would happen to you.”

The volunteers who make it happen

Behind the scenes, the invitational is powered by a team of more than 120 dedicated volunteers, many of them current MIT students. From moderating matches to coordinating logistics, these volunteers form the backbone of the invitational.

Preparation for the competition starts months in advance. “By the time summer started, we already had to figure out who was going to be the head writers for each subject,” Huang says. “Every week over the summer, volunteers spent their own time to start writing up questions.”

“Every single question you hear today was written by a volunteer,” said Paolo Adajar, an MIT graduate student who served in roles like questions judge this year and is a former president of the MIT Science Bowl Club. Adajar, who competed in the National Science Bowl as a high school student, has been involved in the MIT Invitational since it began in 2019. “There's just something so fun about the games and just watching people be excited to get a question right.”

For many volunteers, the event is a chance to reconnect with a shared community. “It’s so nice to get together with the community every year,” says Emily Liu, a master’s student in computer science at MIT and a veteran volunteer. “And I’m always pleasantly surprised to see how much I remember.”

Looking ahead

For competitors, the invitational offers more than just a chance to win. It’s an opportunity to connect with peers who share their passion for science, to experience the energy of MIT’s campus, and to sharpen skills they’ll carry into future endeavors. 

As the crowd dispersed and the auditorium emptied, the spirit of the competition remained — a testament to the dedication, curiosity, and camaraderie that define the MIT Science Bowl Invitational.

Over two choreographed move-in days in August, more than 600 residents unloaded their boxes and belongings into their new homes in Graduate Junction, located at 269 and 299 Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With smiling ambassadors standing by to assist, residents were welcomed into a new MIT-affiliated housing option that offers the convenience of on-campus licensing terms, pricing, and location, as well as the experienced building development and management of American Campus Communities (ACC).

With the building occupied and residents settled, the staff has turned their attention to creating connections between new community members and celebrating the years of a collaborative effort between faculty, students, and staff to plan and create a building that expands student choice, enhances neighborhood amenities, and meets sustainability goals. 

Gathering recently for a celebratory block party, residents and their families, staff, and project team members convened in the main lounge space of building W87 to mingle and enjoy the new community. Children twirled around while project managers, architects, staff from MIT and ACC, and residents reflected on the partnership-driven work to bring the new building to fruition. With 351 units, including studios, one-, two-, and four-bedroom apartments, the building added a total of 675 new graduate housing beds and marked the final step in exceeding the Institute’s commitment made in 2017 to add 950 new graduate beds.