To help find solutions to the planet’s climate crisis, MIT Associate Professor Daniel Suess is looking to Earth’s ancient past.
Early in the evolution of life, cells gained the ability to perform reactions such as transferring electrons from one atom to another. These reactions, which help cells to build carbon-containing or nitrogen-containing compounds, rely on specialized enzymes with clusters of metal atoms.
By learning more about how those enzymes work, Suess hopes to eventually devise new ways to perform fundamental chemical reactions that could help capture carbon from the atmosphere or enable the development of alternative fuels.
“We have to find some way of rewiring society so that we are not just relying on vast reserves of reduced carbon, fossil fuels, and burning them using oxygen,” he says. “What we’re doing is we’re looking backward, up to a billion years before oxygen and photosynthesis came along, to see if we can identify the chemical principles that underlie processes that aren’t reliant on burning carbon.”
His work could also shed light on other important cellular reactions such as the conversion of nitrogen gas to ammonia, which is also the key step in the production of synthetic fertilizer.
Exploring chemistry
Suess, who grew up in Spokane, Washington, became interested in math at a young age, but ended up majoring in chemistry and English at Williams College, which he chose based on its appealing selection of courses.
“I was interested in schools that were more focused on the liberal arts model, Williams being one of those. And I just thought they had the right combination of really interesting courses and freedom to take classes that you wanted,” he says. “I went in not expecting to major in chemistry, but then I really enjoyed my chemistry classes and chemistry teachers.”
In his classes, he explored all aspects of chemistry and found them all appealing.
“I liked organic chemistry, because there’s an emphasis on making things. And I liked physical chemistry because there was an attempt to have at least a semiquantitative way of understanding the world. Physical chemistry describes some of the most important developments in science in the 20th century, including quantum mechanics and its application to atoms and molecules,” he says.
After college, Suess came to MIT for graduate school and began working with chemistry professor Jonas Peters, who had recently arrived from Caltech. A couple of years later, Peters ended up moving back to Caltech, and Suess followed, continuing his PhD thesis research on new ways to synthesize inorganic molecules.
His project focused on molecules that consist of a metal such as iron or cobalt bound to a nonmetallic group known as a ligand. Within these molecules, the metal atom typically pulls in electrons from the ligand. However, the molecules Suess worked on were designed so that the metal would give up its own electrons to the ligand. Such molecules can be used to speed up difficult reactions that require breaking very strong bonds, like the nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond in N2.
During a postdoc at the University of California at Davis, Suess switched gears and began working on biomolecules — specifically, metalloproteins. These are protein enzymes that have metals tucked into their active sites, where they help to catalyze reactions.
Suess studied how cells synthesize the metal-containing active sites in these proteins, focusing on an enzyme called iron-iron hydrogenase. This enzyme, found mainly in anaerobic bacteria, including some that live in the human digestive tract, catalyzes reactions involving the transfer of protons and electrons. Specifically, it can combine two protons and two electrons to make H2, or can perform the reverse reaction, breaking H2 into protons and electrons.
“That enzyme is really important because a lot of cellular metabolic processes either generate excess electrons or require excess electrons. If you generate excess electrons, they have to go somewhere, and one solution is to put them on protons to make H2,” Suess says.
Global scale reactions
Since joining the MIT faculty in 2017, Suess has continued his investigations of metalloproteins and the reactions that they catalyze.
“We’re interested in global-scale chemical reactions, meaning they’re occurring on the microscopic scale but happening on a huge scale,” he says. “They impact the planet and have determined what the molecular composition of the biosphere is and what it’s going to be.”
Photosynthesis, which emerged around 2.4 billion years ago, has had the biggest impact on the atmosphere, filling it with oxygen, but Suess focuses on reactions that cells began using even earlier, when the atmosphere lacked oxygen and cell metabolism could not be driven by respiration.
Many of these ancient reactions, which are still used by cells today, involve a class of metalloproteins called iron-sulfur proteins. These enzymes, which are found in all kingdoms of life, are involved in catalyzing many of the most difficult reactions that occur in cells, such as forming carbon radicals and converting nitrogen to ammonia.
To study the metalloenzymes that catalyze these reactions, Suess’s lab takes two different approaches. In one, they create synthetic versions of the proteins that may contain fewer metal atoms, which allows for greater control over the composition and shape of the protein, making them easier to study.
In another approach, they use the natural version of the protein but substitute one of the metal atoms with an isotope that makes it easier to use spectroscopic techniques to analyze the protein’s structure.
“That allows us to study both the bonding in the resting state of an enzyme, as well as the bonding and structures of reaction intermediates that you can only characterize spectroscopically,” Suess says.
Understanding how enzymes perform these reactions could help researchers find new ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by combining it with other molecules to create larger compounds. Finding alternative ways to convert nitrogen gas to ammonia could also have a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions, as the Haber Bosch process now used to synthesize fertilizer produces requires huge amounts of energy.
“Our primary focus is on understanding the natural world, but I think that as we’re looking at different ways to wire biological catalysts to do efficient reactions that impact society, we need to know how that wiring works. And so that is what we’re trying to figure out,” he says.
At the core of problem-solvingStuart Levine ’97, director of MIT’s BioMicro Center, keeps departmental researchers at the forefront of systems biology.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.
“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 researchers in MIT’s Department of Biology.
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.”
A software platform streamlines emergency response First responders worldwide adopt Lincoln Laboratory's Next-Generation Incident Command System for enhanced situational awareness and coordination during emergencies.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."
Security scheme could protect sensitive data during cloud computationMIT researchers crafted a new approach that could allow anyone to run operations on encrypted data without decrypting it first.A hospital that wants to use a cloud computing service to perform artificial intelligence data analysis on sensitive patient records needs a guarantee those data will remain private during computation. Homomorphic encryption is a special type of security scheme that can provide this assurance.
The technique encrypts data in a way that anyone can perform computations without decrypting the data, preventing others from learning anything about underlying patient records. However, there are only a few ways to achieve homomorphic encryption, and they are so computationally intensive that it is often infeasible to deploy them in the real world.
MIT researchers have developed a new theoretical approach to building homomorphic encryption schemes that is simple and relies on computationally lightweight cryptographic tools. Their technique combines two tools so they become more powerful than either would be on its own. The researchers leverage this to construct a “somewhat homomorphic” encryption scheme — that is, it enables users to perform a limited number of operations on encrypted data without decrypting it, as opposed to fully homomorphic encryption that can allow more complex computations.
This somewhat homomorphic technique can capture many applications, such as private database lookups and private statistical analysis.
While this scheme is still theoretical, and much work remains before it could be used in practice, its simpler mathematical structure could make it efficient enough to protect user data in a wider range of real-world scenarios.
“The dream is that you type your ChatGPT prompt, encrypt it, send the encrypted message to ChatGPT, and then it can produce outputs for you without ever seeing what you are asking it,” says Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, the Douglas Ross Career Development Professor of Software Technology in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a co-author of a paper on this security scheme. “We are a long way from getting there, in part because these schemes are so inefficient. In this work, we wanted to try to build homomorphic encryption schemes that don’t use the standard tools, since different approaches can often lead to more efficient, more practical constructions.”
His co-authors include Alexandra Henzinger, an EECS graduate student; Yael Kalai, an Ellen Swallow Richards (1873) Professor and professor of EECS; and Vinod Vaikuntanathan, the Ford Professor of Engineering and a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research will be presented at the International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques.
Balancing security and flexibility
MIT researchers began theorizing about homomorphic encryption in the 1970s. But designing the mathematical structure needed to securely embed a message in a manner flexible enough to enable computation proved to be enormously challenging. The first homomorphic encryption scheme wasn’t designed until 2009.
“These two requirements are very much in tension. On the one hand, we need security, but on the other hand, we need this flexibility in the homomorphism. We have very few mathematical pathways to get there,” says Henzinger.
Essentially, homomorphic schemes add noise to a message to encrypt it. As algorithms and machine-learning models perform operations on that encrypted message, the noise inevitably grows. If one computes for too long, the noise can eventually overshadow the message.
“If you run a deep neural network on these encrypted data, for instance, by the time you get to the end of the computation, the noise might be a billion times larger than the message and you can’t actually figure out what the message says,” Corrigan-Gibbs explains.
There are two main ways to get around this problem. A user could keep operations to a minimum, but this restricts how the encrypted data can be used. On the other hand, a user could add extra steps to reduce noise, but these techniques require a massive amount of additional computation.
Somewhat homomorphic encryption seeks to meet users somewhere in the middle. They can use the technique to perform secure operations on encrypted data using a specific class of functions that keep the noise from growing out of hand.
These functions, known as bounded polynomials, are designed to prevent excessively complex operations. For instance, the functions allow many additions, but only a few multiplications on encrypted data to avoid generating too much extra noise.
Greater than the sum of their parts
The researchers built their scheme by combining two simple cryptographic tools. They started with a linear homomorphic encryption scheme, which can only perform additions on encrypted data, and added one theoretical assumption to it.
This cryptographic assumption “lifts” the linear scheme into a somewhat homomorphic one that can operate with a broader class of more complex functions.
“On its own, this assumption doesn’t give us much. But when we put them together, we get something much more powerful. Now, we can do additions and some bounded number of multiplications,” Henzinger says.
The process for performing homomorphic encryptions is quite simple. The researchers’ scheme encrypts each piece of data into a matrix in a way that the matrix provably hides the underlying data. Then, to perform additions or multiplications on those encrypted data, one only needs to add or multiply the corresponding matrices.
The researchers used mathematical proofs to show that their theoretical encryption scheme provides guaranteed security when operations are limited to this class of bounded polynomial functions.
Now that they have developed this theoretical approach, one next step will be making it practical for real-world applications. For that, they will need to make the encryption scheme fast enough to run certain types of computations on modern hardware.
“We haven’t spent 10 years trying to optimize this scheme yet, so we don’t know how efficient it could get,” Henzinger says.
In addition, the researchers hope to expand their technique to allow more complex operations, perhaps moving closer to developing a new approach for fully homomorphic encryption.
“The exciting thing for us is that, when we put these two simple things together, something different happened that we didn’t expect. It gives us hope. What else can we do now? If we add something else, maybe we can do something even more exciting,” Corrigan-Gibbs says.
This research was funded, in part, by Apple, Capital One, Facebook, Google, Mozilla, NASDAQ, MIT’s FinTech@CSAIL Initiative, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and a Simons Investigator Award.
David Schmittlein, influential dean who brought MIT Sloan into its own, dies at 69In his 17 years as dean, Schmittlein led the transformation of MIT Sloan into a management school uniquely positioned for the future and “the best version of its distinctive self.”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.
“An AI future that honors dignity for everyone”As artificial intelligence develops, we must ask vital questions about ourselves and our society, Ben Vinson III contends in the 2025 Compton Lecture.Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday.
The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson said, “Technological progress must serve humanity, and not the other way around.”
In the course of his remarks, Vinson offered thoughts about our self-conception as rational beings; the effects of technological revolutions on human tasks, jobs, and society; and the values and ethics we want our lives and our social fabric to reflect.
“Philosophers like Cicero argue that the good life centers on the pursuit of virtue and wisdom,” Vinson said. “Can AI enhance our pursuit of virtue and wisdom? Does it risk automating critical aspects of human reflection? Does a world that increasingly defers to AI for decision-making and artistic creation, and even ethical deliberation, does that reflect a more advanced society? Or does it signal a quiet surrender of human agency?”
Vinson’s talk, titled “AI in an Age After Reason: A Discourse on Fundamental Human Questions,” was delivered to a large audience in MIT’s Samberg Conference Center.
He also suggested that universities can serve as an “intellectual compass” in the development of AI, bringing realism and specificity to the topic and “separating real risks from speculative fears, ensuring that AI is neither demonized nor blindly embraced but developed with wisdom, with ethical oversight, and with societal adaptation.”
The Compton lecture series was introduced in 1957, in honor of Karl Taylor Compton, who served as MIT’s ninth president, from 1930 to 1948, and as chair of the MIT Corporation from 1948 to 1954.
In introductory remarks, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth observed that Compton “helped the Institute transform itself from an outstanding technical school for training hands-on engineers to a truly great global university. A renowned physicist, President Compton brought a new focus on fundamental scientific research, and he made science an equal partner with engineering at MIT.”
Beyond that, Kornbluth added, “through the war, he helped invent a partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities.”
Introducing Vinson, Kornbluth described him as an academic leader who projects a “wonderful sense of energy, positivity, and forward movement.”
Vinson became president of Howard University in September 2023, having previously served as provost and executive vice president of Case Western Reserve University; dean of George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences; and vice dean for centers, interdisciplinary studies, and graduate education at Johns Hopkins University. A historian who has studied the African diaspora in Latin America, Vinson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former president of the American Historical Association.
Using history as a guide, Vinson suggested that AI has potential to substantially influence society and the economy, even if it may not fully deliver all of the advances it is imagined to bring.
“It serves as a Rorschach test for society’s deepest hopes and anxieties,” Vinson said of AI. “Optimists, they see it as a productivity revolution and a leap in human evolution, while pessimists warn of mass surveillance, bias, job displacement, and even existential risk. The reality, as history suggests, will likely fall somewhere in between. AI will likely evolve through a cycle of inflated expectations, disillusionment, and eventual pragmatic inspiration.”
Still, Vinson suggested there were substantial differences between AI and some of our earlier technological leaps — the industrial revolution, the electrical revolution, and the digital revolution, among others.
“Unlike previous technologies that have extended human labor, again, AI targets cognition, creativity, decision-making, and even emotional intelligence,” Vinson said.
In all cases, Vinson said, people should be active about discussing the profound effects technological change can have upon society: “AI is not just about technological progress, it is about power, it is about justice, and the very essence of what it means to be human.”
At a few times, Vinson’s remarks looped back to the subject of education and the impact of AI. Howard, one of the nation’s leading historically Black colleges and universities, has recently achieved an R1 designation as a university with a very high level of research activity. At the same time, it has thriving programs in the humanities and social sciences that depend on individual cognition and inquiry.
But suppose, Vinson remarked, that AI eventually ends up displacing a portion of humanistic scholarship. “Does a world with fewer humanities truly represent human progress?” he asked.
All told, Vinson proposed, as AI advances, we have a responsibility to engage with the advances and potential of the field while keeping everyday human values in mind.
“Let’s guide the world through this transformative age with more wisdom, with foresight, and with an unwavering dedication to the common good,” Vinson said. “This is not just a technological moment. It is a moment that calls for a form of intellectual courage and moral imagination. Together, we can shape an AI future that honors dignity for everyone, and at the same time, advances the ideals of humanity itself.”
3D printing approach strings together dynamic objects for you“Xstrings” method enables users to produce cable-driven objects, automatically assembling bionic robots, sculptures, and dynamic fashion designs.It’s difficult to build devices that replicate the fluid, precise motion of humans, but that might change if we could pull a few (literal) strings.
At least, that’s the idea behind “cable-driven” mechanisms in which running a string through an object generates streamlined movement across an object’s different parts. Take a robotic finger, for example: You could embed a cable through the palm to the fingertip of this object and then pull it to create a curling motion.
While cable-driven mechanisms can create real-time motion to make an object bend, twist, or fold, they can be complicated and time-consuming to assemble by hand. To automate the process, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed an all-in-one 3D printing approach called “Xstrings.” Part design tool, part fabrication method, Xstrings can embed all the pieces together and produce a cable-driven device, saving time when assembling bionic robots, creating art installations, or working on dynamic fashion designs.
In a paper to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2025), the researchers used Xstrings to print a range of colorful and unique objects that included a red walking lizard robot, a purple wall sculpture that can open and close like a peacock’s tail, a white tentacle that curls around items, and a white claw that can ball up into a fist to grab objects.
To fabricate these eye-catching mechanisms, Xstrings allows users to fully customize their designs in a software program, sending them to a multi-material 3D printer to bring that creation to life. You can automatically print all the device’s parts in their desired locations in one step, including the cables running through it and the joints that enable its intended motion.
MIT CSAIL postdoc and lead author Jiaji Li says that Xstrings can save engineers time and energy, reducing 40 percent of total production time compared to doing things manually. “Our innovative method can help anyone design and fabricate cable-driven products with a desktop bi-material 3D printer,” says Li.
A new twist on cable-driven fabrication
To use the Xstrings program, users first input a design with specific dimensions, like a rectangular cube divided into smaller pieces with a hole in the middle of each one. You can then choose which way its parts move by selecting different “primitives:” bending, coiling (like a spring), twisting (like a screw), or compressing — and the angle of these motions.
For even more elaborate creations, users can incorporate multiple primitives to create intriguing combinations of motions. If you wanted to make a toy snake, you could include several twists to create a “series” combo, in which a single cord drives a sequence of motions. To create the robot claw, the team embedded multiple cables into a “parallel” combination, where several strings are embedded, to enable each finger to close up into a fist.
Beyond fine-tuning the way cable-driven mechanisms move, Xstrings also facilitates how cables are integrated into the object. Users can choose exactly how the strings are secured, in terms of where the “anchor” (endpoint), “threaded areas” (or holes within the structure that the cord passes through), and “exposed point” (where you’d pull to operate the device) are located. With a robot finger, for instance, you could choose the anchor to be located at the fingertip, with a cable running through the finger and a pull tag exposed at the other end.
Xstrings also supports diverse joint designs by automatically placing components that are elastic, compliant, or mechanical. This allows the cable to turn as needed as it completes the device’s intended motion.
Driving unique designs across robotics, art, and beyond
Once users have simulated their digital blueprint for a cable-driven item, they can bring it to life via fabrication. Xstrings can send your design to a fused deposition modeling 3D printer, where plastic is melted down into a nozzle before the filaments are poured out to build structures up layer by layer.
Xstrings uses this technique to lay out cables horizontally and build around them. To ensure their method would successfully print cable-driven mechanisms, the researchers carefully tested their materials and printing conditions.
For example, the researchers found that their strings only broke after being pulled up and down by a mechanical device more than 60,000 times. In another test, the team discovered that printing at 260 degrees Celsius with a speed of 10-20 millimeters per second was ideal for producing their many creative items.
“The Xstrings software can bring a variety of ideas to life,” says Li. “It enables you to produce a bionic robot device like a human hand, mimicking our own gripping capabilities. You can also create interactive art pieces, like a cable-driven sculpture with unique geometries, and clothes with adjustable flaps. One day, this technology could enable the rapid, one-step creation of cable-driven robots in outer space, even within highly confined environments such as space stations or extraterrestrial bases.”
The team’s approach offers plenty of flexibility and a noticeable speed boost to fabricating cable-driven objects. It creates objects that are rigid on the outside, but soft and flexible on the inside; in the future, they may look to develop objects that are soft externally but rigid internally, much like humans’ skin and bones. They’re also considering using more resilient cables, and, instead of just printing strings horizontally, embedding ones that are angled or even vertical.
Li wrote the paper with Zhejiang University master’s student Shuyue Feng; Tsinghua University master’s student Yujia Liu; Zhejiang University assistant professor and former MIT Media Lab visiting researcher Guanyun Wang; and three CSAIL members: Maxine Perroni-Scharf, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science; Emily Guan, a visiting researcher; and senior author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and leader of the HCI Engineering Group.
This research was supported, in part, by a postdoctoral research fellowship from Zhejiang University, and the MIT-GIST Program.
Within the human brain, a network of regions has evolved to process language. These regions are consistently activated whenever people listen to their native language or any language in which they are proficient.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Game of Thrones.”
To study how the brain responds to these artificial languages, MIT neuroscientists convened nearly 50 speakers of these languages over a single weekend. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that when participants listened to a constructed language in which they were proficient, the same brain regions lit up as those activated when they processed their native language.
“We find that constructed languages very much recruit the same system as natural languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the study.
The findings help to define some of the key properties of language, the researchers say, and suggest that it’s not necessary for languages to have naturally evolved over a long period of time or to have a large number of speakers.
“It helps us narrow down this question of what a language is, and do it empirically, by testing how our brain responds to stimuli that might or might not be language-like,” says Saima Malik-Moraleda, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Convening the conlang community
Unlike natural languages, which evolve within communities and are shaped over time, constructed languages, or “conlangs,” are typically created by one person who decides what sounds will be used, how to label different concepts, and what the grammatical rules are.
Esperanto, the most widely spoken conlang, was created in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, who intended it to be used as a universal language for international communication. Currently, it is estimated that around 60,000 people worldwide are proficient in Esperanto.
In previous work, Fedorenko and her students have found that computer programming languages, such as Python — another type of invented language — do not activate the brain network that is used to process natural language. Instead, people who read computer code rely on the so-called multiple demand network, a brain system that is often recruited for difficult cognitive tasks.
Fedorenko and others have also investigated how the brain responds to other stimuli that share features with language, including music and nonverbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions.
“We spent a lot of time looking at all these various kinds of stimuli, finding again and again that none of them engage the language-processing mechanisms,” Fedorenko says. “So then the question becomes, what is it that natural languages have that none of those other systems do?”
That led the researchers to wonder if artificial languages like Esperanto would be processed more like programming languages or more like natural languages. Similar to programming languages, constructed languages are created by an individual for a specific purpose, without natural evolution within a community. However, unlike programming languages, both conlangs and natural languages can be used to convey meanings about the state of the external world or the speaker’s internal state.
To explore how the brain processes conlangs, the researchers invited speakers of Esperanto and several other constructed languages to MIT for a weekend conference in November 2022. The other languages included Klingon (from “Star Trek”), Na’vi (from “Avatar”), and two languages from “Game of Thrones” (High Valyrian and Dothraki). For all of these languages, there are texts available for people who want to learn the language, and for Esperanto, Klingon, and High Valyrian, there is even a Duolingo app available.
“It was a really fun event where all the communities came to participate, and over a weekend, we collected all the data,” says Malik-Moraleda, who co-led the data collection effort with former MIT postbac Maya Taliaferro, now a PhD student at New York University.
During that event, which also featured talks from several of the conlang creators, the researchers used fMRI to scan 44 conlang speakers as they listened to sentences from the constructed language in which they were proficient. The creators of these languages — who are co-authors on the paper — helped construct the sentences that were presented to the participants.
While in the scanner, the participants also either listened to or read sentences in their native language, and performed some nonlinguistic tasks for comparison. The researchers found that when people listened to a conlang, the same language regions in the brain were activated as when they listened to their native language.
Common features
The findings help to identify some of the key features that are necessary to recruit the brain’s language processing areas, the researchers say. One of the main characteristics driving language responses seems to be the ability to convey meanings about the interior and exterior world — a trait that is shared by natural and constructed languages, but not programming languages.
“All of the languages, both natural and constructed, express meanings related to inner and outer worlds. They refer to objects in the world, to properties of objects, to events,” Fedorenko says. “Whereas programming languages are much more similar to math. A programming language is a symbolic generative system that allows you to express complex meanings, but it’s a self-contained system: The meanings are highly abstract and mostly relational, and not connected to the real world that we experience.”
Some other characteristics of natural languages, which are not shared by constructed languages, don’t seem to be necessary to generate a response in the language network.
“It doesn’t matter whether the language is created and shaped over time by a community of speakers, because these constructed languages are not,” Malik-Moraleda says. “It doesn’t matter how old they are, because conlangs that are just a decade old engage the same brain regions as natural languages that have been around for many hundreds of years.”
To further refine the features of language that activate the brain’s language network, Fedorenko’s lab is now planning to study how the brain responds to a conlang called Lojban, which was created by the Logical Language Group in the 1990s and was designed to prevent ambiguity of meanings and promote more efficient communication.
The research was funded by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Professorship, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
New platform lets anyone rapidly prototype large, sturdy interactive structuresThe system uses reconfigurable electromechanical building blocks to create structural electronics.Prototyping large structures with integrated electronics, like a chair that can monitor someone’s sitting posture, is typically a laborious and wasteful process.
One might need to fabricate multiple versions of the chair structure via 3D printing and laser cutting, generating a great deal of waste, before assembling the frame, grafting sensors and other fragile electronics onto it, and then wiring it up to create a working device.
If the prototype fails, the maker will likely have no choice but to discard it and go back to the drawing board.
MIT researchers have come up with a better way to iteratively design large and sturdy interactive structures. They developed a rapid development platform that utilizes reconfigurable building blocks with integrated electronics that can be assembled into complex, functional devices. Rather than building electronics into a structure, the electronics become the structure.
These lightweight three-dimensional lattice building blocks, known as voxels, have high strength and stiffness, along with integrated sensing, response, and processing abilities that enable users without mechanical or electrical engineering expertise to rapidly produce interactive electronic devices.
The voxels, which can be assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured almost infinitely into various forms, cost about 50 cents each.
The prototyping platform, called VIK (Voxel Invention Kit), includes a user-friendly design tool that enables end-to-end prototyping, allowing a user to simulate the structure’s response to mechanical loads and iterate on the design as needed.
“This is about democratizing access to functional interactive devices. With VIK, there is no 3D printing or laser cutting required. If you just have the voxel faces, you are able to produce these interactive structures anywhere you want,” says Jack Forman, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences and affiliate of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and the MIT Media Lab, and co-lead author of a paper on VIK.
Forman is joined on the paper by co-lead author and fellow graduate student Miana Smith; graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman; and senior author Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor and director of the CBA. The research will be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Functional building blocks
VIK builds upon years of work in the CBA to develop discrete, cellular building blocks called voxels. One voxel, an aluminum cuboctahedra lattice (which has eight triangular faces and six square faces), is strong enough to support 228 kilograms, or about the weight of an upright piano.
Instead of being 3D printed, milled, or laser cut, voxels are assembled into largescale, strong, durable structures like airplane components or wind turbines that can respond to their environments.
The CBA team merged voxels other work in their lab centered on interconnected electrical components, yielding voxels with structural electronics. Assembling these functional voxels generates structures that can transmit data and power, as well as mechanical forces, without the need for wires.
They used these electromechanical building blocks to develop VIK.
“It was an interesting challenge to think about adapting a lot of our previous work, which has been about hitting hard engineering metrics, into a user-friendly system that makes sense and is fun and easy for people to work with,” Smith says.
For instance, they made the voxel design larger so the lattice structures are easier for human hands to assemble and disassemble. They also added aluminum cross-bracing to the units to improve their strength and stability.
In addition, VIK voxels have a reversible, snap-fit connection so a user can seamlessly assemble them without the need for additional tools, in contrast to some prior voxel designs that used rivets as fasteners.
“We designed the voxel faces to permit only the correct connections. That means that, if you are building with voxels, you are guaranteed to be building the correct wiring harness. Once you finish your device, you can just plug it in and it will work,” says Smith.
Wiring harnesses can add significant cost to functional systems and can often be a source of failure.
An accessible prototyping platform
To help users who have minimal engineering expertise create a wide array of interactive devices, the team developed a user-friendly interface to simulate 3D voxel structures.
The interface includes a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulation model that enables users to draw out a structure and simulate the forces and mechanical loads that will be applied to it. It adds colors to an animation of the user’s device to identify potential points of failure.
“We created what is essentially a ‘Minecraft’ for voxel applications. You don’t need a good sense of civil engineering or truss analysis to verify that the structure you are making is safe. Anyone can build something with VIK and have confidence in it,” Forman says.
Users can also easily integrate off-the-shelf modules, like speakers, sensors, or actuators, into their device. VIK emphasizes flexibility, enabling makers to use the types of microcontrollers they are comfortable with.
“The next evolution of electronics will be in three-dimensional space and the Voxel Invention Kit (VIK) is the stepping stone that will enable users, designers, and innovators a way to visualize and integrate electronics directly into structures,” says Victor Zaderej, manager of advanced electronics packaging technology at Molex, a manufacturer of electronic, electrical, and fiber optic connectivity systems. “Think of the VIK as the merging of a LEGO building kit and an electronics breadboard. When creative engineers and designers begin thinking about potential applications, the opportunities and unique products that will be enabled will be limitless.”
Using the design tool for feedback, a maker can rapidly change the configuration of voxels to adjust a prototype or disassemble the structure to build something new. If the user eventually wishes to discard the device, the aluminum voxels are fully recyclable.
This reconfigurability and recyclability, along with the high strength, high stiffness, light weight, and integrated electronics of the voxels, could make VIK especially well-suited for applications such as theatrical stage design, where stage managers want to support actors safely with customizable set pieces that might only exist for a few days.
And by enabling the rapid-prototyping of large, complex structures, VIK could also have future applications in areas like space fabrication or in the development of smart buildings and intelligent infrastructure for sustainable cities.
But for the researchers, perhaps the most important next step will be to get VIK out into the world to see what users come up with.
“These voxels are now so readily available that someone can use them in their day-to-day life. It will be exciting to see what they can do and create with VIK,” adds Forman.
Women’s indoor track and field wins first NCAA Division III National ChampionshipWith 49 points, MIT bests 61 other teams; senior Alexis Boykin wins shot put and weight throw national titles.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.
A dive into the “almost magical” potential of photonic crystals In MIT’s 2025 Killian Lecture, physicist John Joannopoulos recounts highlights from a career at the vanguard of photonics research and innovation.When you’re challenging a century-old assumption, you’re bound to meet a bit of resistance. That’s exactly what John Joannopoulos and his group at MIT faced in 1998, when they put forth a new theory on how materials can be made to bend light in entirely new ways.
“Because it was such a big difference in what people expected, we wrote down the theory for this, but it was very difficult to get it published,” Joannopoulos told a capacity crowd in MIT’s Huntington Hall on Friday, as he delivered MIT’s James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award Lecture.
Joannopoulos’ theory offered a new take on a type of material known as a one-dimensional photonic crystal. Photonic crystals are made from alternating layers of refractive structures whose arrangement can influence how incoming light is reflected or absorbed.
In 1887, the English physicist John William Strutt, better known as the Lord Rayleigh, established a theory for how light should bend through a similar structure composed of multiple refractive layers. Rayleigh predicted that such a structure could reflect light, but only if that light is coming from a very specific angle. In other words, such a structure could act as a mirror for light shining from a specific direction only.
More than a century later, Joannopoulos and his group found that, in fact, quite the opposite was true. They proved in theoretical terms that, if a one-dimensional photonic crystal were made from layers of materials with certain “refractive indices,” bending light to different degrees, then the crystal as a whole should be able to reflect light coming from any and all directions. Such an arrangement could act as a “perfect mirror.”
The idea was a huge departure from what scientists had long assumed, and as such, when Joannopoulos submitted the research for peer review, it took some time for the journal, and the community, to come around. But he and his students kept at it, ultimately verifying the theory with experiments.
That work led to a high-profile publication, which helped the group focus the idea into a device: Using the principles that they laid out, they effectively fabricated a perfect mirror and folded it into a tube to form a hollow-core fiber. When they shone light through, the inside of the fiber reflected all the light, trapping it entirely in the core as the light pinged through the fiber. In 2000, the team launched a startup to further develop the fiber into a flexible, highly precise and minimally invasive “photonics scalpel,” which has since been used in hundreds of thousands of medical procedures including a surgeries of the brain and spine.
“And get this: We have estimated more than 500,000 procedures across hospitals in the U.S. and abroad,” Joannopoulos proudly stated, to appreciative applause.
Joannopoulos is the recipient of the 2024-2025 James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, and is the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. In response to an audience member who asked what motivated him in the face of initial skepticism, he replied, “You have to persevere if you believe what you have is correct.”
Immeasurable impact
The Killian Award was established in 1971 to honor MIT’s 10th president, James Killian. Each year, a member of the MIT faculty is honored with the award in recognition of their extraordinary professional accomplishments.
Joannopoulos received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974, then immediately joined MIT’s physics faculty. In introducing his lecture, Mary Fuller, professor of literature and chair of the MIT faculty, noted: “If you do the math, you’ll know he just celebrated 50 years at MIT.” Throughout that remarkable tenure, Fuller noted Joannopoulos’ profound impact on generations of MIT students.
“We recognize you as a leader, a visionary scientist, beloved mentor, and a believer in the goodness of people,” Fuller said. “Your legendary impact at MIT and the broader scientific community is immeasurable.”
Bending light
In his lecture, which he titled “Working at the Speed of Light,” Joannopoulos took the audience through the basic concepts underlying photonic crystals, and the ways in which he and others have shown that these materials can bend and twist incoming light in a controlled way.
As he described it, photonic crystals are “artificial materials” that can be designed to influence the properties of photons in a way that’s similar to how physical features in semiconductors affect the flow of electrons. In the case of semiconductors, such materials have a specific “band gap,” or a range of energies in which electrons cannot exist.
In the 1990s, Joannopoulos and others wondered whether the same effects could be realized for optical materials, to intentionally reflect, or keep out, some kinds of light while letting others through. And even more intriguing: Could a single material be designed such that incoming light pinballs away from certain regions in a material in predesigned paths?
“The answer was a resounding yes,” he said.
Joannopoulos described the excitement within the emerging field by quoting an editor from the journal Nature, who wrote at the time: “If only it were possible to make materials in which electromagnetic waves cannot propagate at certain frequencies, all kinds of almost-magical things would be possible.”
Joannopoulos and his group at MIT began in earnest to elucidate the ways in which light interacts with matter and air. The team worked first with two-dimensional photonic crystals made from a horizontal matrix-like pattern of silicon dots surrounded by air. Silicon has a high refractive index, meaning it can greatly bend or reflect light, while air has a much lower index. Joannopoulos predicted that the silicon could be patterned to ping light away, forcing it to travel through the air in predetermined paths.
In multiple works, he and his students showed through theory and experiments that they could design photonic crystals to, for instance, bend incoming light by 90 degrees and force light to circulate only at the edges of a crystal under an applied magnetic field.
“Over the years there have been quite a few examples we’ve discovered of very anomalous, strange behavior of light that cannot exist in normal objects,” he said.
In 1998, after showing that light can be reflected from all directions from a stacked, one-dimensional photonic crystal, he and his students rolled the crystal structure into a fiber, which they tested in a lab. In a video that Joannopoulos played for the audience, a student carefully aimed the end of the long, flexible fiber at a sheet of material made from the same material as the fiber’s casing. As light pumped through the multilayered photonic lining of the fiber and out the other end, the student used the light to slowly etch a smiley face design in the sheet, drawing laughter from the crowd.
As the video demonstrated, although the light was intense enough to melt the material of the fiber’s coating, it was nevertheless entirely contained within the fiber’s core, thanks to the multilayered design of its photonic lining. What’s more, the light was focused enough to make precise patterns when it shone out of the fiber.
“We had originally developed this [optical fiber] as a military device,” Joannopoulos said. “But then the obvious choice to use it for the civilian population was quite clear.”
“Believing in the goodness of people and what they can do”
He and others co-founded Omniguide in 2000, which has since grown into a medical device company that develops and commercializes minimally invasive surgical tools such as the fiber-based “photonics scalpel.” In illustrating the fiber’s impact, Joannopoulos played a news video, highlighting the fiber’s use in performing precise and effective neurosurgery. The optical scalpel has also been used to perform procedures in larynology, head and neck surgery, and gynecology, along with brain and spinal surgeries.
Omniguide is one of several startups that Joannopoulos has helped found, along with Luminus Devices, Inc., WiTricity Corporation, Typhoon HIL, Inc., and Lightelligence. He is author or co-author of over 750 refereed journal articles, four textbooks, and 126 issued U.S. patents. He has earned numerous recognitions and awards, including his election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Killian Award citation states: “Professor Joannopoulos has been a consistent role model not just in what he does, but in how he does it. … Through all these individuals he has impacted — not to mention their academic descendants — Professor Joannopoulos has had a vast influence on the development of science in recent decades.”
At the end of the talk, Yoel Fink, Joannopoulos’ former student and frequent collaborator, who is now professor of materials science, asked Joannopoulos how, particularly in current times, he has been able to “maintain such a positive and optimistic outlook, of humans and human nature.”
“It’s a matter of believing in the goodness of people and what they can do, what they accomplish, and giving an environment where they’re working in, where they feel extermely comfortable,” Joannopoulos offered. “That includes creating a sense of trust between the faculty and the students, which is key. That helps enormously.”
Three economists with MIT ties win BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge AwardProfessor Emeritus Olivier Blanchard PhD ’77, Jordi Galí PhD ’89, and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 are honored for work on macroeconomic analysis and policy.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.
Artificial muscle flexes in multiple directions, offering a path to soft, wiggly robotsMIT engineers developed a way to grow artificial tissues that look and act like their natural counterparts.We move thanks to coordination among many skeletal muscle fibers, all twitching and pulling in sync. While some muscles align in one direction, others form intricate patterns, helping parts of the body move in multiple ways.
In recent years, scientists and engineers have looked to muscles as potential actuators for “biohybrid” robots — machines powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers. Such bio-bots could squirm and wiggle through spaces where traditional machines cannot. For the most part, however, researchers have only been able to fabricate artificial muscle that pulls in one direction, limiting any robot’s range of motion.
Now MIT engineers have developed a method to grow artificial muscle tissue that twitches and flexes in multiple coordinated directions. As a demonstration, they grew an artificial, muscle-powered structure that pulls both concentrically and radially, much like how the iris in the human eye acts to dilate and constrict the pupil.
The researchers fabricated the artificial iris using a new “stamping” approach they developed. First, they 3D-printed a small, handheld stamp patterned with microscopic grooves, each as small as a single cell. Then they pressed the stamp into a soft hydrogel and seeded the resulting grooves with real muscle cells. The cells grew along these grooves within the hydrogel, forming fibers. When the researchers stimulated the fibers, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, following the fibers’ orientation.
“With the iris design, we believe we have demonstrated the first skeletal muscle-powered robot that generates force in more than one direction. That was uniquely enabled by this stamp approach,” says Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The team says the stamp can be printed using tabletop 3D printers and fitted with different patterns of microscopic grooves. The stamp can be used to grow complex patterns of muscle — and potentially other types of biological tissues, such as neurons and heart cells — that look and act like their natural counterparts.
“We want to make tissues that replicate the architectural complexity of real tissues,” Raman says. “To do that, you really need this kind of precision in your fabrication.”
She and her colleagues published their open-access results Friday in the journal Biomaterials Science. Her MIT co-authors include first author Tamara Rossy, Laura Schwendeman, Sonika Kohli, Maheera Bawa, and Pavankumar Umashankar, along with Roi Habba, Oren Tchaicheeyan, and Ayelet Lesman of Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Training space
Raman’s lab at MIT aims to engineer biological materials that mimic the sensing, activity, and responsiveness of real tissues in the body. Broadly, her group seeks to apply these bioengineered materials in areas from medicine to machines. For instance, she is looking to fabricate artificial tissue that can restore function to people with neuromuscular injury. She is also exploring artificial muscles for use in soft robotics, such as muscle-powered swimmers that move through the water with fish-like flexibility.
Raman has previously developed what could be seen as gym platforms and workout routines for lab-grown muscle cells. She and her colleagues designed a hydrogel “mat” that encourages muscle cells to grow and fuse into fibers without peeling away. She also derived a way to “exercise” the cells by genetically engineering them to twitch in response to pulses of light. And, her group has come up with ways to direct muscle cells to grow in long, parallel lines, similar to natural, striated muscles. However, it’s been a challenge, for her group and others, to design artificial muscle tissue that moves in multiple, predictable directions.
“One of the cool things about natural muscle tissues is, they don’t just point in one direction. Take for instance, the circular musculature in our iris and around our trachea. And even within our arms and legs, muscle cells don’t point straight, but at an angle,” Raman notes. “Natural muscle has multiple orientations in the tissue, but we haven’t been able to replicate that in our engineered muscles.”
Muscle blueprint
In thinking of ways to grow multidirectional muscle tissue, the team hit on a surprisingly simple idea: stamps. Inspired in part by the classic Jell-O mold, the team looked to design a stamp, with microscopic patterns that could be imprinted into a hydrogel, similar to the muscle-training mats that the group has previously developed. The patterns of the imprinted mat could then serve as a roadmap along which muscle cells might follow and grow.
“The idea is simple. But how do you make a stamp with features as small as a single cell? And how do you stamp something that’s super soft? This gel is much softer than Jell-O, and it’s something that’s really hard to cast, because it could tear really easily,” Raman says.
The team tried variations on the stamp design and eventually landed on an approach that worked surprisingly well. The researchers fabricated a small, handheld stamp using high-precision printing facilities in MIT.nano, which enabled them to print intricate patterns of grooves, each about as wide as a single muscle cell, onto the bottom of the stamp. Before pressing the stamp into a hydrogel mat, they coated the bottom with a protein that helped the stamp imprint evenly into the gel and peel away without sticking or tearing.
As a demonstration, the researchers printed a stamp with a pattern similar to the microscopic musculature in the human iris. The iris comprises a ring of muscle surrounding the pupil. This ring of muscle is made up of an inner circle of muscle fibers arranged concentrically, following a circular pattern, and an outer circle of fibers that stretch out radially, like the rays of the sun. Together, this complex architecture acts to constrict or dilate the pupil.
Once Raman and her colleagues pressed the iris pattern into a hydrogel mat, they coated the mat with cells that they genetically engineered to respond to light. Within a day, the cells fell into the microscopic grooves and began to fuse into fibers, following the iris-like patterns and eventually growing into a whole muscle, with an architecture and size similar to a real iris.
When the team stimulated the artificial iris with pulses of light, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, similar to the iris in the human eye. Raman notes that the team’s artificial iris is fabricated with skeletal muscle cells, which are involved in voluntary motion, whereas the muscle tissue in the real human iris is made up of smooth muscle cells, which are a type of involuntary muscle tissue. They chose to pattern skeletal muscle cells in an iris-like pattern to demonstrate the ability to fabricate complex, multidirectional muscle tissue.
“In this work, we wanted to show we can use this stamp approach to make a ‘robot’ that can do things that previous muscle-powered robots can’t do,” Raman says. “We chose to work with skeletal muscle cells. But there’s nothing stopping you from doing this with any other cell type.”
She notes that while the team used precision-printing techniques, the stamp design can also be made using conventional tabletop 3D printers. Going forward, she and her colleagues plan to apply the stamping method to other cell types, as well as explore different muscle architectures and ways to activate artificial, multidirectional muscle to do useful work.
“Instead of using rigid actuators that are typical in underwater robots, if we can use soft biological robots, we can navigate and be much more energy-efficient, while also being completely biodegradable and sustainable,” Raman says. “That’s what we hope to build toward.”
This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Evidence that 40Hz gamma stimulation promotes brain health is expandingA decade of studies provide a growing evidence base that increasing the power of the brain’s gamma rhythms could help fight Alzheimer’s, and perhaps other neurological diseases.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.
When did human language emerge?A new analysis suggests our language capacity existed at least 135,000 years ago, with language used widely perhaps 35,000 years after that.It is a deep question, from deep in our history: When did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.
Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old. Estimates of when language originated vary widely, based on different forms of evidence, from fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new analysis took a different approach. They reasoned that since all human languages likely have a common origin — as the researchers strongly think — the key question is how far back in time regional groups began spreading around the world.
“The logic is very simple,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing the results. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate about the geographic divergence of early human populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before.”
The paper, “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago,” appears in Frontiers in Psychology. The co-authors are Miyagawa, who is a professor emeritus of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT; Rob DeSalle, a principal investigator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Institute for Comparative Genomics; Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, a faculty member in linguistics at the University of São Paolo; Remo Nitschke, of the University of Zurich, who worked on the project while at the University of Arizona linguistics department; Mercedes Okumura of the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of São Paulo; and Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History.
The new paper examines 15 genetic studies of different varieties, published over the past 18 years: Three used data about the inherited Y chromosome, three examined mitochondrial DNA, and nine were whole-genome studies.
All told, the data from these studies suggest an initial regional branching of humans about 135,000 years ago. That is, after the emergence of Homo sapiens, groups of people subsequently moved apart geographically, and some resulting genetic variations have developed, over time, among the different regional subpopulations. The amount of genetic variation shown in the studies allows researchers to estimate the point in time at which Homo sapiens was still one regionally undivided group.
Miyagawa says the studies collectively provide increasingly converging evidence about when these geographic splits started taking place. The first survey of this type was performed by other scholars in 2017, but they had fewer existing genetic studies to draw upon. Now, there are much more published data available, which when considered together point to 135,000 years ago as the likely time of the first split.
The new meta-analysis was possible because “quantity-wise we have more studies, and quality-wise, it’s a narrower window [of time],” says Miyagawa, who also holds an appointment at the University of São Paolo.
Like many linguists, Miyagawa believes all human languages are demonstrably related to each other, something he has examined in his own work. For instance, in his 2010 book, “Why Agree? Why Move?” he analyzed previously unexplored similarities between English, Japanese, and some of the Bantu languages. There are more than 7,000 identified human languages around the globe.
Some scholars have proposed that language capacity dates back a couple of million years, based on the physiological characteristics of other primates. But to Miyagawa, the question is not when primates could utter certain sounds; it is when humans had the cognitive ability to develop language as we know it, combining vocabulary and grammar into a system generating an infinite amount of rules-based expression.
“Human language is qualitatively different because there are two things, words and syntax, working together to create this very complex system,” Miyagawa says. “No other animal has a parallel structure in their communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and to communicate them to others.”
This conception of human language origins also holds that humans had the cognitive capacity for language for some period of time before we constructed our first languages.
“Language is both a cognitive system and a communication system,” Miyagawa says. “My guess is prior to 135,000 years ago, it did start out as a private cognitive system, but relatively quickly that turned into a communications system.”
So, how can we know when distinctively human language was first used? The archaeological record is invaluable in this regard. Roughly 100,000 years ago, the evidence shows, there was a widespread appearance of symbolic activity, from meaningful markings on objects to the use of fire to produce ochre, a decorative red color.
Like our complex, highly generative language, these symbolic activities are engaged in by people, and no other creatures. As the paper notes, “behaviors compatible with language and the consistent exercise of symbolic thinking are detectable only in the archaeological record of H. sapiens.”
Among the co-authors, Tattersall has most prominently propounded the view that language served as a kind of ignition for symbolic thinking and other organized activities.
“Language was the trigger for modern human behavior,” Miyagawa says. “Somehow it stimulated human thinking and helped create these kinds of behaviors. If we are right, people were learning from each other [due to language] and encouraging innovations of the types we saw 100,000 years ago.”
To be sure, as the authors acknowledge in the paper, other scholars believe there was a more incremental and broad-based development of new activities around 100,000 years ago, involving materials, tools, and social coordination, with language playing a role in this, but not necessarily being the central force.
For his part, Miyagawa recognizes that there is considerable room for further progress in this area of research, but thinks efforts like the current paper are at least steps toward filling out a more detailed picture of language’s emergence.
“Our approach is very empirically based, grounded in the latest genetic understanding of early homo sapiens,” Miyagawa says. “I think we are on a good research arc, and I hope this will encourage people to look more at human language and evolution.”
This research was, in part, supported by the São Paolo Excellence Chair awarded to Miyagawa by the São Paolo Research Foundation.
A collaboration across continents to solve a plastics problemMIT students travel to the Amazon, working with locals to address the plastics sustainability crisis.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.”
High-performance computing, with much less codeThe Exo 2 programming language enables reusable scheduling libraries external to compilers.Many companies invest heavily in hiring talent to create the high-performance library code that underpins modern artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA, for instance, developed some of the most advanced high-performance computing (HPC) libraries, creating a competitive moat that has proven difficult for others to breach.
But what if a couple of students, within a few months, could compete with state-of-the-art HPC libraries with a few hundred lines of code, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands?
That’s what researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown with a new programming language called Exo 2.
Exo 2 belongs to a new category of programming languages that MIT Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley calls “user-schedulable languages” (USLs). Instead of hoping that an opaque compiler will auto-generate the fastest possible code, USLs put programmers in the driver's seat, allowing them to write “schedules” that explicitly control how the compiler generates code. This enables performance engineers to transform simple programs that specify what they want to compute into complex programs that do the same thing as the original specification, but much, much faster.
One of the limitations of existing USLs (like the original Exo) is their relatively fixed set of scheduling operations, which makes it difficult to reuse scheduling code across different “kernels” (the individual components in a high-performance library).
In contrast, Exo 2 enables users to define new scheduling operations externally to the compiler, facilitating the creation of reusable scheduling libraries. Lead author Yuka Ikarashi, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL affiliate, says that Exo 2 can reduce total schedule code by a factor of 100 and deliver performance competitive with state-of-the-art implementations on multiple different platforms, including Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) that power many machine learning applications. This makes it an attractive option for engineers in HPC focused on optimizing kernels across different operations, data types, and target architectures.
“It’s a bottom-up approach to automation, rather than doing an ML/AI search over high-performance code,” says Ikarashi. “What that means is that performance engineers and hardware implementers can write their own scheduling library, which is a set of optimization techniques to apply on their hardware to reach the peak performance.”
One major advantage of Exo 2 is that it reduces the amount of coding effort needed at any one time by reusing the scheduling code across applications and hardware targets. The researchers implemented a scheduling library with roughly 2,000 lines of code in Exo 2, encapsulating reusable optimizations that are linear-algebra specific and target-specific (AVX512, AVX2, Neon, and Gemmini hardware accelerators). This library consolidates scheduling efforts across more than 80 high-performance kernels with up to a dozen lines of code each, delivering performance comparable to, or better than, MKL, OpenBLAS, BLIS, and Halide.
Exo 2 includes a novel mechanism called “Cursors” that provides what they call a “stable reference” for pointing at the object code throughout the scheduling process. Ikarashi says that a stable reference is essential for users to encapsulate schedules within a library function, as it renders the scheduling code independent of object-code transformations.
“We believe that USLs should be designed to be user-extensible, rather than having a fixed set of operations,” says Ikarashi. “In this way, a language can grow to support large projects through the implementation of libraries that accommodate diverse optimization requirements and application domains.”
Exo 2’s design allows performance engineers to focus on high-level optimization strategies while ensuring that the underlying object code remains functionally equivalent through the use of safe primitives. In the future, the team hopes to expand Exo 2’s support for different types of hardware accelerators, like GPUs. Several ongoing projects aim to improve the compiler analysis itself, in terms of correctness, compilation time, and expressivity.
Ikarashi and Ragan-Kelley co-authored the paper with graduate students Kevin Qian and Samir Droubi, Alex Reinking of Adobe, and former CSAIL postdoc Gilbert Bernstein, now a professor at the University of Washington. This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. National Science Foundation, while the first author was also supported by Masason, Funai, and Quad Fellowships.
MIT engineers turn skin cells directly into neurons for cell therapyA new, highly efficient process for performing this conversion could make it easier to develop therapies for spinal cord injuries or diseases like ALS.Converting one type of cell to another — for example, a skin cell to a neuron — can be done through a process that requires the skin cell to be induced into a “pluripotent” stem cell, then differentiated into a neuron. Researchers at MIT have now devised a simplified process that bypasses the stem cell stage, converting a skin cell directly into a neuron.
Working with mouse cells, the researchers developed a conversion method that is highly efficient and can produce more than 10 neurons from a single skin cell. If replicated in human cells, this approach could enable the generation of large quantities of motor neurons, which could potentially be used to treat patients with spinal cord injuries or diseases that impair mobility.
“We were able to get to yields where we could ask questions about whether these cells can be viable candidates for the cell replacement therapies, which we hope they could be. That’s where these types of reprogramming technologies can take us,” says Katie Galloway, the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering.
As a first step toward developing these cells as a therapy, the researchers showed that they could generate motor neurons and engraft them into the brains of mice, where they integrated with host tissue.
Galloway is the senior author of two papers describing the new method, which appear today in Cell Systems. MIT graduate student Nathan Wang is the lead author of both papers.
From skin to neurons
Nearly 20 years ago, scientists in Japan showed that by delivering four transcription factors to skin cells, they could coax them to become induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Similar to embryonic stem cells, iPSCs can be differentiated into many other cell types. This technique works well, but it takes several weeks, and many of the cells don’t end up fully transitioning to mature cell types.
“Oftentimes, one of the challenges in reprogramming is that cells can get stuck in intermediate states,” Galloway says. “So, we’re using direct conversion, where instead of going through an iPSC intermediate, we’re going directly from a somatic cell to a motor neuron.”
Galloway’s research group and others have demonstrated this type of direct conversion before, but with very low yields — fewer than 1 percent. In Galloway’s previous work, she used a combination of six transcription factors plus two other proteins that stimulate cell proliferation. Each of those eight genes was delivered using a separate viral vector, making it difficult to ensure that each was expressed at the correct level in each cell.
In the first of the new Cell Systems papers, Galloway and her students reported a way to streamline the process so that skin cells can be converted to motor neurons using just three transcription factors, plus the two genes that drive cells into a highly proliferative state.
Using mouse cells, the researchers started with the original six transcription factors and experimented with dropping them out, one at a time, until they reached a combination of three — NGN2, ISL1, and LHX3 — that could successfully complete the conversion to neurons.
Once the number of genes was down to three, the researchers could use a single modified virus to deliver all three of them, allowing them to ensure that each cell expresses each gene at the correct levels.
Using a separate virus, the researchers also delivered genes encoding p53DD and a mutated version of HRAS. These genes drive the skin cells to divide many times before they start converting to neurons, allowing for a much higher yield of neurons, about 1,100 percent.
“If you were to express the transcription factors at really high levels in nonproliferative cells, the reprogramming rates would be really low, but hyperproliferative cells are more receptive. It’s like they’ve been potentiated for conversion, and then they become much more receptive to the levels of the transcription factors,” Galloway says.
The researchers also developed a slightly different combination of transcription factors that allowed them to perform the same direct conversion using human cells, but with a lower efficiency rate — between 10 and 30 percent, the researchers estimate. This process takes about five weeks, which is slightly faster than converting the cells to iPSCs first and then turning them into neurons.
Implanting cells
Once the researchers identified the optimal combination of genes to deliver, they began working on the best ways to deliver them, which was the focus of the second Cell Systems paper.
They tried out three different delivery viruses and found that a retrovirus achieved the most efficient rate of conversion. Reducing the density of cells grown in the dish also helped to improve the overall yield of motor neurons. This optimized process, which takes about two weeks in mouse cells, achieved a yield of more than 1,000 percent.
Working with colleagues at Boston University, the researchers then tested whether these motor neurons could be successfully engrafted into mice. They delivered the cells to a part of the brain known as the striatum, which is involved in motor control and other functions.
After two weeks, the researchers found that many of the neurons had survived and seemed to be forming connections with other brain cells. When grown in a dish, these cells showed measurable electrical activity and calcium signaling, suggesting the ability to communicate with other neurons. The researchers now hope to explore the possibility of implanting these neurons into the spinal cord.
The MIT team also hopes to increase the efficiency of this process for human cell conversion, which could allow for the generation of large quantities of neurons that could be used to treat spinal cord injuries or diseases that affect motor control, such as ALS. Clinical trials using neurons derived from iPSCs to treat ALS are now underway, but expanding the number of cells available for such treatments could make it easier to test and develop them for more widespread use in humans, Galloway says.
The research was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Five ways to succeed in sports analyticsThe 19th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference spotlighted a thriving industry. Here are a handful of ideas for getting ahead in it.Sports analytics is fueled by fans, and funded by teams. The 19th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC), held last Friday and Saturday, showed more clearly than ever how both groups can join forces.
After all, for decades, the industry’s main energy source has been fans weary of bad strategies: too much bunting in baseball, too much punting in football, and more. The most enduring analytics icon, Bill James, was a teacher and night watchman until his annual “Baseball Abstract” books began to upend a century of conventional wisdom, in the 1980s. After that, sports analytics became a profession.
Meanwhile, franchise valuations keep rising, women’s sports are booming, and U.S. college sports are professionalizing. All of it should create more analytics jobs, as “Moneyball” author Michael Lewis noted during a Friday panel.
“This whole analytics movement is a byproduct of the decisions becoming really expensive decisions,” Lewis said. “It didn’t matter if you got it wrong if you were paying someone $50,000 a year. But if you’re going to pay them $50 million, you better get it right. So, all of a sudden, someone who can give you a little bit more of an edge in that decision-making has more value.”
Would you like to be a valued sports analytics professional? Here are five ideas, gleaned from MIT’s industry-leading event, about how to gain traction in the field.
1. You can jump into this industry.
Bill James, as it happens, was the first speaker on the opening Friday-morning panel at SSAC, held at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. His theme: the value of everyone’s work, since today’s amateurs become tomorrow’s professionals.
“Time will reveal that the people doing really important work here are not the people sitting on the stages, but the people in the audience,” James said.
This year, that audience had 2,500 attendees, from 44 U.S. states, 42 countries, and over 220 academic institutions, along with dozens of panels, a research paper competition, and thousands of hallway conversations among networking attendees. SSAC was co-founded in 2007 by Daryl Morey SM ’00, president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers, and Jessica Gelman, CEO of KAGR, the Kraft Analytics Group. The first three conferences were held in MIT classrooms.
But even now, sports analytics remains largely a grassroots thing. Why? Because fans can observe sports intensively, without being bound to its conventions, then study it quantitatively.
“The driving thing for a lot of people is they want to take this [analytical] way of thinking and apply it to sports,” soccer journalist Ryan O’Hanlon of ESPN said to MIT News, in one of those hallway conversations.
O’Hanlon’s 2022 book, “Net Gains,” chronicles the work of several people who held non-sports jobs, made useful advances in soccer analytics, then jumped into the industry. Soon, the sport may have more landing spots, between the growth of Major League Soccer in the U.S. and women’s soccer everywhere. Also, in O’Hanlon’s estimation, only three of the 20 clubs in England’s Premier League are deeply invested in analytics: Brentford, Brighton, and (league-leading) Liverpool. That could change.
In any case, most of the people who leap from fandom to professional status are willing to examine issues that others take for granted.
“I think it’s not being afraid to question the way everyone is doing things,” O’Hanlon added. “Whether that’s how a game is played, how we acquire players, how we think about anything. Pretty much anyone who gets to a high level and has impact [in analytics] has asked those questions and found a way to answer some.”
2. Make friends with the video team.
Suppose you love a sport, start analyzing it, produce good work that gets some attention, and — jackpot! — get hired by a pro team to do analytics.
Well, as former NBA player Shane Battier pointed out during a basketball panel at SSAC, you still won’t spend any time talking to players about your beloved data. That just isn’t how professional teams work, not even stat-savvy ones.
But there is good news: Analysts can still reach coaches and athletes through skilled use of video clips. Most European soccer managers ignore data, but will pay attention to the team’s video analysts. Basketball coaches love video. In American football, film study is essential. And technology has made it easier than ever to link data to video clips.
So analysts should become buddies with the video group. Importantly, analytics professionals now grasp this better than ever, something evident at SSAC across sports.
“Video in football [soccer] is the best way to communicate and get on the same page,” said Sarah Rudd, co-founder and CTO of src | ftbl, and a former analyst for Arsenal, at Friday’s panel on soccer analytics.
3. Seek opportunities in women’s sports analytics.
Have we mentioned that women’s sports is booming? The WNBA is expanding, the size of the U.S. transfer market in women’s soccer has doubled for three straight years, and you can now find women’s college volleyball in a basic cable package.
That growth is starting to fund greater data collection, in the WNBA and elsewhere, a frequent conversation topic at SSAC.
As Jennifer Rizzotti, president of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, noted of her own playing days in the 1990s: “We didn’t have statistics, we didn’t have [opponents’] tendencies that were being explained to us. So, when I think of what players have access to now and how far we’ve come, it’s really impressive.” And yet, she added, the amount of data in men’s basketball remains well ahead of the women’s game: “It gives you an awareness of how far we have to go.”
Some women’s sports still lack the cash needed for basic analytics infrastructure. One Friday panelist, LPGA golfer Stacy Lewis, a 13-time winner on tour, noted that the popular ball-tracking analytics system used in men’s golf costs $1 million per week, beyond budget for the women’s game.
And at a Saturday panel, Gelman said that full data parity between men’s and women’s sports was not imminent. “Sadly, I think we’re years away because we just need more investment into it,” she said.
But there is movement. At one Saturday talk, data developer Charlotte Eisenberg detailed how the website Sports Reference — a key resource of free public data —has been adding play-by-play data for WNBA games. That can help for evaluating individual players, particularly over long time periods, and has long been available for NBA games.
In short, as women’s sports grow, their analytics opportunities will, too.
4. Don’t be daunted by someone’s blurry “eye test.”
A subtle trip-wire in sports analytics, even at SSAC, is the idea that analytics should match the so-called “eye test,” or seemingly intuitive sports observations.
Here’s the problem: There is no one “eye test” in any sport, because people’s intuitions differ. For some basketball coaches, an unselfish role player stands out. To others, a flashy off-the-dribble shooter passes the eye test, even without a high shooting percentage. That tension would exist even if statistics did not.
Enter analytics, which confirms the high value of efficient shooting (as well as old-school virtues like defense, rebounding, and avoiding turnovers). But in a twist, the definition of a good shot in basketball has famously changed. In 1979-80, the NBA introduced the three-point line; in 1985, teams were taking 3.1 three-pointers per game; now in 2024-25, teams are averaging 37.5 three-pointers per game, with great efficiency. What happened?
“People didn’t use [the three-point shot] well at the beginning,” Morey said on a Saturday panel, quipping that “they were too dumb to know that three is greater than two.”
Granted, players weren’t used to shooting threes in 1980. But it also took a long time to change intuitions in the sport. Today, analytics shows that a contested three-pointer is a higher-value shot that an open 18-foot two-pointer. That might still run counter to someone’s “eye test.”
Incidentally, always following analytically informed coaching might also lead to a more standardized, less interesting game, as Morey and basketball legend Sue Bird suggested at the same panel.
“There’s a little bit of instinct that is now removed from the game,” Bird said. Shooting threes makes sense, she concurred, but “You’re only focused on the three-point line, and it takes away all the other things.”
5. Think about absolute truths, but solve for current tactics.
Bill James set the bar high for sports analytics: His breakthrough equation, “runs created,” described how baseball works with almost Newtonian simplicity. Team runs are the product of on-base percentage and slugging percentage, divided by plate appearances. This applies to individual players, too.
But it’s almost impossible to replicate that kind of fundamental formula in other sports.
“I think in soccer there’s still a ton to learn about how the game works,” O’Hanlon told MIT News. Should a team patiently build possession, play long balls, or press up high? And how do we value players with wildly varying roles?
That sometimes leads to situations where, O’Hanlon notes, “No one really knows the right questions that the data should be asking, because no one really knows the right way to play soccer.”
Happily, the search for underlying truths can also produce some tactical insights. Consider one of the three finalists in the conference’s research paper competition, “A Machine Learning Approach to Player Value and Decision Making in Professional Ultimate Frisbee,” by Braden Eberhard, Jacob Miller, and Nathan Sandholtz.
In it, the authors examine playing patterns in ultimate, seeing if teams score more by using a longer string of higher-percentage short-range passes, or by trying longer, high-risk throws. They found that players tend to try higher-percentage passes, although there is some variation, including among star players. That suggests tactical flexibility matters. If the defense is trying to take away short passes, throw long sometimes.
It is a classic sports issue: The right way to play often depends on how your opponent is playing. In the search for ultimate truths, analysts can reveal the usefulness of short-term tactics. That helps team win, which helps analytics types stay employed. But none of this would come to light if analysts weren’t digging into the sports they love, searching for answers and trying to let the world know what they find.
“There is nothing happening here that will change your life if you don’t follow through on it,” James said. “But there are many things happening here that will change your life if you do.”
Making airfield assessments automatic, remote, and safeU.S. Air Force engineer and PhD student Randall Pietersen is using AI and next-generation imaging technology to detect pavement damage and unexploded munitions.In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for threats like unexploded munitions.
The work is standard for all Air Force engineers before they deploy, but it held special significance for Pietersen, who has spent the last five years developing faster, safer approaches for assessing airfields as a master’s student and now a PhD candidate and MathWorks Fellow at MIT. For Pietersen, the time-intensive, painstaking, and potentially dangerous work underscored the potential for his research to enable remote airfield assessments.
“That experience was really eye-opening,” Pietersen says. “We’ve been told for almost a decade that a new, drone-based system is in the works, but it is still limited by an inability to identify unexploded ordnances; from the air, they look too much like rocks or debris. Even ultra-high-resolution cameras just don’t perform well enough. Rapid and remote airfield assessment is not the standard practice yet. We’re still only prepared to do this on foot, and that’s where my research comes in.”
Pietersen’s goal is to create drone-based automated systems for assessing airfield damage and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down a number of research paths, from deep learning to small uncrewed aerial systems to “hyperspectral” imaging, which captures passive electromagnetic radiation across a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Hyperspectral imaging is getting cheaper, faster, and more durable, which could make Pietersen’s research increasingly useful in a range of applications including agriculture, emergency response, mining, and building assessments.
Finding computer science and community
Growing up in a suburb of Sacramento, California, Pietersen gravitated toward math and physics in school. But he was also a cross country athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he wanted a way to put his interests together.
“I liked the multifaceted challenge the Air Force Academy presented,” Pietersen says. “My family doesn’t have a history of serving, but the recruiters talked about the holistic education, where academics were one part, but so was athletic fitness and leadership. That well-rounded approach to the college experience appealed to me.”
Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad at the Air Force Academy, where he first began learning how to conduct academic research. This required him to learn a little bit of computer programming.
“In my senior year, the Air Force research labs had some pavement-related projects that fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” Pietersen recalls. “While my domain knowledge helped define the initial problems, it was very clear that developing the right solutions would require a deeper understanding of computer vision and remote sensing.”
The projects, which dealt with airfield pavement assessments and threat detection, also led Pietersen to start using hyperspectral imaging and machine learning, which he built on when he came to MIT to pursue his master’s and PhD in 2020.
“MIT was a clear choice for my research because the school has such a strong history of research partnerships and multidisciplinary thinking that helps you solve these unconventional problems,” Pietersen says. “There’s no better place in the world than MIT for cutting-edge work like this.”
By the time Pietersen got to MIT, he’d also embraced extreme sports like ultra-marathons, skydiving, and rock climbing. Some of that stemmed from his participation in infantry skills competitions as an undergrad. The multiday competitions are military-focused races in which teams from around the world traverse mountains and perform graded activities like tactical combat casualty care, orienteering, and marksmanship.
“The crowd I ran with in college was really into that stuff, so it was sort of a natural consequence of relationship-building,” Pietersen says. “These events would run you around for 48 or 72 hours, sometimes with some sleep mixed in, and you get to compete with your buddies and have a good time.”
Since coming to MIT with his wife and two children, Pietersen has embraced the local running community and even worked as an indoor skydiving instructor in New Hampshire, though he admits the East Coast winters have been tough for him and his family to adjust to.
Pietersen went remote between 2022 to 2024, but he wasn’t doing his research from the comfort of a home office. The training that showed him the reality of airfield assessments took place in Florida, and then he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He happened to write one of his PhD journal publications from a tent in the desert.
Now back at MIT and nearing the completion of his doctorate this spring, Pietersen is thankful for all the people who have supported him in throughout his journey.
“It has been fun exploring all sorts of different engineering disciplines, trying to figure things out with the help of all the mentors at MIT and the resources available to work on these really niche problems,” Pietersen says.
Research with a purpose
In the summer of 2020, Pietersen did an internship with the HALO Trust, a humanitarian organization working to clear landmines and other explosives from areas impacted by war. The experience demonstrated another powerful application for his work at MIT.
“We have post-conflict regions around the world where kids are trying to play and there are landmines and unexploded ordnances in their backyards,” Pietersen says. “Ukraine is a good example of this in the news today. There are always remnants of war left behind. Right now, people have to go into these potentially dangerous areas and clear them, but new remote-sensing techniques could speed that process up and make it far safer.”
Although Pietersen’s master’s work primarily revolved around assessing normal wear and tear of pavement structures, his PhD has focused on ways to detect unexploded ordnances and more severe damage.
“If the runway is attacked, there would be bombs and craters all over it,” Pietersen says. “This makes for a challenging environment to assess. Different types of sensors extract different kinds of information and each has its pros and cons. There is still a lot of work to be done on both the hardware and software side of things, but so far, hyperspectral data appears to be a promising discriminator for deep learning object detectors.”
After graduation, Pietersen will be stationed in Guam, where Air Force engineers regularly perform the same airfield assessment simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes someday soon, those assessments will be done not by humans in protective gear, but by drones.
“Right now, we rely on visible lines of site,” Pietersen says. “If we can move to spectral imaging and deep-learning solutions, we can finally conduct remote assessments that make everyone safer.”
2025 MacVicar Faculty Fellows named MIT professors Paloma Duong, Frank Schilbach, and Justin Steil are honored for exceptional undergraduate teaching.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.
QS World University Rankings rates MIT No. 1 in 11 subjects for 2025The Institute also ranks second in seven subject areas.QS World University Rankings has placed MIT in the No. 1 spot in 11 subject areas for 2025, the organization announced today.
The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.
MIT also placed second in seven subject areas: Accounting and Finance; Architecture/Built Environment; Biological Sciences; Business and Management Studies; Chemistry; Earth and Marine Sciences; and Economics and Econometrics.
For 2024, universities were evaluated in 55 specific subjects and five broader subject areas. MIT was ranked No. 1 in the broader subject area of Engineering and Technology and No. 2 in Natural Sciences.
Quacquarelli Symonds Limited subject rankings, published annually, are designed to help prospective students find the leading schools in their field of interest. Rankings are based on research quality and accomplishments, academic reputation, and graduate employment.
MIT has been ranked as the No. 1 university in the world by QS World University Rankings for 13 straight years.
How do we foster trust in science in an increasingly polarized world? A group including scientists, journalists, policymakers and more gathered at MIT on March 10 to discuss how to bridge the gap between scientific expertise and understanding.
The conference, titled “Building Trust in Science for a More Informed Future,” was organized by the MIT Press and the nonprofit Aspen Institute’s Science and Society Program. It featured talks about the power of storytelling, the role of social media and generative artificial intelligence in our information landscape, and why discussions about certain science topics can become so emotionally heated.
A common theme was the importance of empathy between science communicators and the public.
“The idea that disagreement is often seen as disrespect is insightful,” said MIT’s Ford Professor of Political Science Lily Tsai. “One way to communicate respect is genuine curiosity along with the willingness to change one’s mind. We’re often focused on the facts and evidence and saying, ‘Don’t you understand the facts?’ But the ideal conversation is more like, ‘You value ‘x.’ Tell me why you value ‘x’ and let’s see if we can connect on how the science and research helps you to fulfill those values, even if I don’t agree with them.’”
Many participants discussed the threat of misinformation, a problem exacerbated by the emergence of social media and generative AI. But it’s not all bad news for the scientific community. MIT Provost Cindy Barnhart opened the event by citing surveys showing a high level of trust broadly in scientists across the globe. Still, she also pointed to a U.S. survey showing communication was seen as an area of relative weakness for scientists.
Barnhart noted MIT’s long commitment to science communication and commended communication efforts affiliated with MIT including MIT Press, MIT Technology Review, and MIT News.
“We’re working hard to communicate the value of science to society as we fight to build public support for the scientific research, discovery, and evidence that is needed in our society,” Barnhart said. “At MIT, an essential way we do that is by shining a bright light on the groundbreaking work of our faculty, research, scientists, staff, postdocs, and students.”
Another theme was the importance of storytelling in science communication, and participants including the two keynote speakers offered plenty of their own stories. Francis Collins, who directed the National Institutes of Health between 2009 and 2021, and Sudanese climate journalist Lina Yassin delivered a joint keynote address moderated by MIT Vice President for Communications Alfred Ironside.
Recalling his time leading the NIH through the Covid-19 pandemic, Collins said the Covid-19 vaccine development was a major success, but the scientific community failed to explain to the public the way science evolves based on new evidence.
“We missed a chance to use the pandemic as a teachable moment,” Collins said. “In March of 2020, we were just starting to learn about the virus and how it spread, but we had to make recommendations to the public, which would often change a month or two later. So people began to doubt the information they were getting was reliable because it kept changing. If you’re in a circumstance where you’re communicating scientific evidence, start by saying, ‘This is a work in progress.’”
Collins said the government should have had a better plan for communicating information to the public when the pandemic started.
“Our health system was badly broken at the time because it had been underinvested in for far too long, so community-based education wasn’t really possible,” Collins said, noting his agency should have done more to empower physicians who were trusted voices in rural communities. “Far too much of our communication was top down.”
In her keynote address, Yassin shared her experience trying to get people in her home country to evacuate ahead of natural disasters. She said many people initially ignored her advice, citing their faith in God’s plan for them. But when she reframed her messaging to incorporate the teachings of Islam, a religion most of the country practices, she said people were much more receptive.
That was another recurring lesson participants shared: Science discussions don’t occur in a vacuum. Any conversation that ignores a person’s existing values and experiences will be less effective.
“Personal experience, as well as personal faith and belief, are critically important filters that we encounter every time we talk to people about science,” Ironside said.
Want to climb the leadership ladder? Try debate training Experiments find debate training boosts careers by enhancing assertiveness and communications techniques.For those looking to climb the corporate ladder in the U.S., here’s an idea you might not have considered: debate training.
According to a new research paper, people who learn the basics of debate are more likely to advance to leadership roles in U.S. organizations, compared to those who do not receive this training. One key reason is that being equipped with debate skills makes people more assertive in the workplace.
“Debate training can promote leadership emergence and advancement by fostering individuals’ assertiveness, which is a key, valued leadership characteristic in U.S. organizations,” says MIT Associate Professor Jackson Lu, one of the scholars who conducted the study.
The research is based on two experiments and provides empirical insights into leadership development, a subject more often discussed anecdotally than studied systematically.
“Leadership development is a multi-billion-dollar industry, where people spend a lot of money trying to help individuals emerge as leaders,” Lu says. “But the public doesn’t actually know what would be effective, because there hasn’t been a lot of causal evidence. That’s exactly what we provide.”
The paper, “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness,” was published Monday in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The authors are Lu, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Michelle X. Zhao, an undergraduate student at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis; Hui Liao, a professor and assistant dean at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business; and Lu Doris Zhang, a doctoral student at MIT Sloan.
Assertiveness in the attention economy
The researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 471 employees in a Fortune 100 firm were randomly assigned to receive either nine weeks of debate training or no training. Examined 18 months later, those receiving debate training were more likely to have advanced to leadership roles, by about 12 percentage points. This effect was statistically explained by increased assertiveness among those with debate training.
The second experiment, conducted with 975 university participants, further tested the causal effects of debate training in a controlled setting. Participants were randomly assigned to receive debate training, an alternative non-debate training, or no training. Consistent with the first experiment, participants receiving the debate training were more likely to emerge as leaders in subsequent group activities, an effect statistically explained by their increased assertiveness.
“The inclusion of a non-debate training condition allowed us to causally claim that debate training, rather than just any training, improved assertiveness and increased leadership emergence,” Zhang says.
To some people, increasing assertiveness might not seem like an ideal recipe for success in an organizational setting, as it might seem likely to increase tensions or decrease cooperation. But as the authors note, the American Psychological Association conceptualizes assertiveness as “an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly, while maintaining respect for others.”
Lu adds: “Assertiveness is conceptually different from aggressiveness. To speak up in meetings or classrooms, people don’t need to be aggressive jerks. You can ask questions politely, yet still effectively express opinons. Of course, that’s different from not saying anything at all.”
Moreover, in the contemporary world where we all must compete for attention, refined communication skills may be more important than ever.
“Whether it is cutting filler or mastering pacing, knowing how to assert our opinions helps us sound more leader-like,” Zhang says.
How firms identify leaders
The research also finds that debate training benefits people across demographics: Its impact was not significantly different for men or women, for those born in the U.S. or outside it, or for different ethnic groups.
However, the findings raise still other questions about how firms identify leaders. As the results show, individuals might have incentive to seek debate training and other general workplace skills. But how much responsibility do firms have to understand and recognize the many kinds of skills, beyond assertiveness, that employees may have?
“We emphasize that the onus of breaking leadership barriers should not fall on individuals themelves,” Lu says. “Organizations should also recognize and appreciate different communication and leadership styles in the workplace.”
Lu also notes that ongoing work is needed to understand if those firms are properly valuing the attributes of their own leaders.
“There is an important distinction between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness,” Lu says. “Our paper looks at leadership emergence. It’s possible that people who are better listeners, who are more cooperative, and humbler, should also be selected for leadership positions because they are more effective leaders.”
This research was partly funded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Making solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factoriesCharge Robotics, founded by MIT alumni, has created a system that automatically assembles and installs completed sections of large solar farms.As the price of solar panels has plummeted in recent decades, installation costs have taken up a greater share of the technology’s overall price tag. The long installation process for solar farms is also emerging as a key bottleneck in the deployment of solar energy.
Now the startup Charge Robotics is developing solar installation factories to speed up the process of building large-scale solar farms. The company’s factories are shipped to the site of utility solar projects, where equipment including tracks, mounting brackets, and panels are fed into the system and automatically assembled. A robotic vehicle autonomously puts the finished product — which amounts to a completed section of solar farm — in its final place.
“We think of this as the Henry Ford moment for solar,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who founded Charge Robotics with fellow MIT alumnus Max Justicz ’17. “We’re going from a very bespoke, hands on, manual installation process to something much more streamlined and set up for mass manufacturing. There are all kinds of benefits that come along with that, including consistency, quality, speed, cost, and safety.”
Last year, solar energy accounted for 81 percent of new electric capacity in the U.S., and Hunter and Justicz see their factories as necessary for continued acceleration in the industry.
The founders say they were met with skepticism when they first unveiled their plans. But in the beginning of last year, they deployed a prototype system that successfully built a solar farm with SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the U.S. Now, Charge has raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments later this year.
From surgical robots to solar robots
While majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT, Hunter found plenty of excuses to build things. One such excuse was Course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), where he and his classmates built a smart watch for communication in remote areas.
After graduation, Hunter worked for the MIT alumni-founded startups Shaper Tools and Vicarious Surgical. Vicarious Surgical is a medical robotics company that has raised more than $450 million to date. Hunter was the second employee and worked there for five years.
“A lot of really hands on, project-based classes at MIT translated directly into my first roles coming out of school and set me up to be very independent and run large engineering projects,” Hunter says, “Course 2.009, in particular, was a big launch point for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical got in touch with me through the 2.009 network.”
As early as 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who majored in mechanical engineering and computer science, had discussed starting a company together. But they had to decide where to apply their broad engineering and product skillsets.
“Both of us care a lot about climate change. We see climate change as the biggest problem impacting the greatest number of people on the planet,” Hunter says. “Our mentality was if we can build anything, we might as well build something that really matters.”
In the process of cold calling hundreds of people in the energy industry, the founders decided solar was the future of energy production because its price was decreasing so quickly.
“It’s becoming cheaper faster than any other form of energy production in human history,” Hunter says.
When the founders began visiting construction sites for the large, utility-scale solar farms that make up the bulk of energy generation, it wasn’t hard to find the bottlenecks. The first site they traveled to was in the Mojave Desert in California. Hunter describes it as a massive dust bowl where thousands of workers spent months repeating tasks like moving material and assembling the same parts, over and over again.
“The site had something like 2 million panels on it, and every single one was assembled and fastened the same way by hand,” Hunter says. “Max and I thought it was insane. There’s no way that can scale to transform the energy grid in a short window of time.”
Hunter says he heard from each of the largest solar companies in the U.S. that their biggest limitation for scaling was labor shortages. The problem was slowing growth and killing projects.
Hunter and Justicz founded Charge Robotics in 2021 to break through that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility solar parts and assemble them by hand in their backyards.
“From there, we came up with this portable assembly line that we could ship out to construction sites and then feed in the entire solar system, including the steel tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners, and the solar panels,” Hunter explains. “The assembly line robotically assembles all those pieces to produce completed solar bays, which are chunks of a solar farm.”
Each bay represents a 40-foot piece of the solar farm and weighs about 800 pounds. A robotic vehicle brings it to its final location in the field. Hunter says Charge’s system automates all mechanical installation except for the process of pile driving the first metal stakes into the ground.
Charge’s assembly lines also have machine-vision systems that scan each part to ensure quality, and the systems work with the most common solar parts and panel sizes.
From pilot to product
When the founders started pitching their plans to investors and construction companies, people didn’t believe it was possible.
“The initial feedback was basically, ‘This will never work,’” Hunter says. “But as soon as we took our first system out into the field and people saw it operating, they got much more excited and started believing it was real.”
Since that first deployment, Charge’s team has been making its system faster and easier to operate. The company plans to set up its factories at project sites and run them in partnership with solar construction companies. The factories could even run alongside human workers.
“With our system, people are operating robotic equipment remotely rather than putting in the screws themselves,” Hunter explains. “We can essentially deliver the assembled solar to customers. Their only responsibility is to deliver the materials and parts on big pallets that we feed into our system.”
Hunter says multiple factories could be deployed at the same site and could also operate 24/7 to dramatically speed up projects.
“We are hitting the limits of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,” Hunter says. “We can build much bigger sites much faster with the same number of people by just shipping out more of our factories. It’s a fundamentally new way of scaling solar energy.”
Compassionate leadership Professors Emery Brown and Hamsa Balakrishnan are honored as “Committed to Caring” for their guidance of graduate students.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.
Study: Climate change will reduce the number of satellites that can safely orbit in space Increasing greenhouse gas emissions will reduce the atmosphere’s ability to burn up old space junk, MIT scientists report.MIT aerospace engineers have found that greenhouse gas emissions are changing the environment of near-Earth space in ways that, over time, will reduce the number of satellites that can sustainably operate there.
In a study appearing today in Nature Sustainability, the researchers report that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can cause the upper atmosphere to shrink. An atmospheric layer of special interest is the thermosphere, where the International Space Station and most satellites orbit today. When the thermosphere contracts, the decreasing density reduces atmospheric drag — a force that pulls old satellites and other debris down to altitudes where they will encounter air molecules and burn up.
Less drag therefore means extended lifetimes for space junk, which will litter sought-after regions for decades and increase the potential for collisions in orbit.
The team carried out simulations of how carbon emissions affect the upper atmosphere and orbital dynamics, in order to estimate the “satellite carrying capacity” of low Earth orbit. These simulations predict that by the year 2100, the carrying capacity of the most popular regions could be reduced by 50-66 percent due to the effects of greenhouse gases.
“Our behavior with greenhouse gases here on Earth over the past 100 years is having an effect on how we operate satellites over the next 100 years,” says study author Richard Linares, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro).
“The upper atmosphere is in a fragile state as climate change disrupts the status quo,” adds lead author William Parker, a graduate student in AeroAstro. “At the same time, there’s been a massive increase in the number of satellites launched, especially for delivering broadband internet from space. If we don’t manage this activity carefully and work to reduce our emissions, space could become too crowded, leading to more collisions and debris.”
The study includes co-author Matthew Brown of the University of Birmingham.
Sky fall
The thermosphere naturally contracts and expands every 11 years in response to the sun’s regular activity cycle. When the sun’s activity is low, the Earth receives less radiation, and its outermost atmosphere temporarily cools and contracts before expanding again during solar maximum.
In the 1990s, scientists wondered what response the thermosphere might have to greenhouse gases. Their preliminary modeling showed that, while the gases trap heat in the lower atmosphere, where we experience global warming and weather, the same gases radiate heat at much higher altitudes, effectively cooling the thermosphere. With this cooling, the researchers predicted that the thermosphere should shrink, reducing atmospheric density at high altitudes.
In the last decade, scientists have been able to measure changes in drag on satellites, which has provided some evidence that the thermosphere is contracting in response to something more than the sun’s natural, 11-year cycle.
“The sky is quite literally falling — just at a rate that’s on the scale of decades,” Parker says. “And we can see this by how the drag on our satellites is changing.”
The MIT team wondered how that response will affect the number of satellites that can safely operate in Earth’s orbit. Today, there are over 10,000 satellites drifting through low Earth orbit, which describes the region of space up to 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers), from Earth’s surface. These satellites deliver essential services, including internet, communications, navigation, weather forecasting, and banking. The satellite population has ballooned in recent years, requiring operators to perform regular collision-avoidance maneuvers to keep safe. Any collisions that do occur can generate debris that remains in orbit for decades or centuries, increasing the chance for follow-on collisions with satellites, both old and new.
“More satellites have been launched in the last five years than in the preceding 60 years combined,” Parker says. “One of key things we’re trying to understand is whether the path we’re on today is sustainable.”
Crowded shells
In their new study, the researchers simulated different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios over the next century to investigate impacts on atmospheric density and drag. For each “shell,” or altitude range of interest, they then modeled the orbital dynamics and the risk of satellite collisions based on the number of objects within the shell. They used this approach to identify each shell’s “carrying capacity” — a term that is typically used in studies of ecology to describe the number of individuals that an ecosystem can support.
“We’re taking that carrying capacity idea and translating it to this space sustainability problem, to understand how many satellites low Earth orbit can sustain,” Parker explains.
The team compared several scenarios: one in which greenhouse gas concentrations remain at their level from the year 2000 and others where emissions change according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). They found that scenarios with continuing increases in emissions would lead to a significantly reduced carrying capacity throughout low Earth orbit.
In particular, the team estimates that by the end of this century, the number of satellites safely accommodated within the altitudes of 200 and 1,000 kilometers could be reduced by 50 to 66 percent compared with a scenario in which emissions remain at year-2000 levels. If satellite capacity is exceeded, even in a local region, the researchers predict that the region will experience a “runaway instability,” or a cascade of collisions that would create so much debris that satellites could no longer safely operate there.
Their predictions forecast out to the year 2100, but the team says that certain shells in the atmosphere today are already crowding up with satellites, particularly from recent “megaconstellations” such as SpaceX’s Starlink, which comprises fleets of thousands of small internet satellites.
“The megaconstellation is a new trend, and we’re showing that because of climate change, we’re going to have a reduced capacity in orbit,” Linares says. “And in local regions, we’re close to approaching this capacity value today.”
“We rely on the atmosphere to clean up our debris. If the atmosphere is changing, then the debris environment will change too,” Parker adds. “We show the long-term outlook on orbital debris is critically dependent on curbing our greenhouse gas emissions.”
This research is supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council.
Study: Tuberculosis relies on protective genes during airborne transmissionThe findings provide new drug targets for stopping the infection’s spread.Tuberculosis lives and thrives in the lungs. When the bacteria that cause the disease are coughed into the air, they are thrust into a comparatively hostile environment, with drastic changes to their surrounding pH and chemistry. How these bacteria survive their airborne journey is key to their persistence, but very little is known about how they protect themselves as they waft from one host to the next.
Now MIT researchers and their collaborators have discovered a family of genes that becomes essential for survival specifically when the pathogen is exposed to the air, likely protecting the bacterium during its flight.
Many of these genes were previously considered to be nonessential, as they didn’t seem to have any effect on the bacteria’s role in causing disease when injected into a host. The new work suggests that these genes are indeed essential, though for transmission rather than proliferation.
“There is a blind spot that we have toward airborne transmission, in terms of how a pathogen can survive these sudden changes as it circulates in the air,” says Lydia Bourouiba, who is the head of the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering, and a core faculty member in the Instiute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. “Now we have a sense, through these genes, of what tools tuberculosis uses to protect itself.”
The team’s results, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide new targets for tuberculosis therapies that simultaneously treat infection and prevent transmission.
“If a drug were to target the product of these same genes, it could effectively treat an individual, and even before that person is cured, it could keep the infection from spreading to others,” says Carl Nathan, chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and R.A. Rees Pritchett Professor of Microbiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Nathan and Bourouiba are co-senior authors of the study, which includes MIT co-authors and mentees of Bourouiba in the Fluids and Health Network: co-lead author postdoc Xiaoyi Hu, postdoc Eric Shen, and student mentees Robin Jahn and Luc Geurts. The study also includes collaborators from Weill Cornell Medicine, the University of California at San Diego, Rockefeller University, Hackensack Meridian Health, and the University of Washington.
Pathogen’s perspective
Tuberculosis is a respiratory disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a bacterium that most commonly affects the lungs and is transmitted through droplets that an infected individual expels into the air, often through coughing or sneezing. Tuberculosis is the single leading cause of death from infection, except during the major global pandemics caused by viruses.
“In the last 100 years, we have had the 1918 influenza, the 1981 HIV AIDS epidemic, and the 2019 SARS Cov2 pandemic,” Nathan notes. “Each of those viruses has killed an enormous number of people. And as they have settled down, we are left with a ‘permanent pandemic’ of tuberculosis.”
Much of the research on tuberculosis centers on its pathophysiology — the mechanisms by which the bacteria take over and infect a host — as well as ways to diagnose and treat the disease. For their new study, Nathan and Bourouiba focused on transmission of tuberculosis, from the perspective of the bacterium itself, to investigate what defenses it might rely on to help it survive its airborne transmission.
“This is one of the first attempts to look at tuberculosis from the airborne perspective, in terms of what is happening to the organism, at the level of being protected from these sudden changes and very harsh biophysical conditions,” Bourouiba says.
Critical defense
At MIT, Bourouiba studies the physics of fluids and the ways in which droplet dynamics can spread particles and pathogens. She teamed up with Nathan, who studies tuberculosis, and the genes that the bacteria rely on throughout their life cycle.
To get a handle on how tuberculosis can survive in the air, the team aimed to mimic the conditions that the bacterium experiences during transmission. The researchers first looked to develop a fluid that is similar in viscosity and droplet sizes to what a patient would cough or sneeze out into the air. Bourouiba notes that much of the experimental work that has been done on tuberculosis in the past has been based on a liquid solution that scientists use to grow the bacteria. But the team found that this liquid has a chemical composition that is very different from the fluid that tuberculosis patients actually cough and sneeze into the air.
Additionally, Bourouiba notes that fluid commonly sampled from tuberculosis patients is based on sputum that a patient spits out, for instance for a diagnostic test. “The fluid is thick and gooey and it’s what most of the tuberculosis world considers to represent what is happening in the body,” she says. “But it’s extraordinarily inefficient in spreading to others because it’s too sticky to break into inhalable droplets.”
Through Bourouiba’s work with fluid and droplet physics, the team determined the more realistic viscosity and likely size distribution of tuberculosis-carrying microdroplets that would be transmitted through the air. The team also characterized the droplet compositions, based on analyses of patient samples of infected lung tissues. They then created a more realistic fluid, with a composition, viscosity, surface tension and droplet size that is similar to what would be released into the air from exhalations.
Then, the researchers deposited different fluid mixtures onto plates in tiny individual droplets and measured in detail how they evaporate and what internal structure they leave behind. They observed that the new fluid tended to shield the bacteria at the center of the droplet as the droplet evaporated, compared to conventional fluids where bacteria tended to be more exposed to the air. The more realistic fluid was also capable of retaining more water.
Additionally, the team infused each droplet with bacteria containing genes with various knockdowns, to see whether the absence of certain genes would affect the bacteria’s survival as the droplets evaporated.
In this way, the team assessed the activity of over 4,000 tuberculosis genes and discovered a family of several hundred genes that seemed to become important specifically as the bacteria adapted to airborne conditions. Many of these genes are involved in repairing damage to oxidized proteins, such as proteins that have been exposed to air. Other activated genes have to do with destroying damaged proteins that are beyond repair.
“What we turned up was a candidate list that’s very long,” Nathan says. “There are hundreds of genes, some more prominently implicated than others, that may be critically involved in helping tuberculosis survive its transmission phase.”
The team acknowledges the experiments are not a complete analog of the bacteria’s biophysical transmission. In reality, tuberculosis is carried in droplets that fly through the air, evaporating as they go. In order to carry out their genetic analyses, the team had to work with droplets sitting on a plate. Under these constraints, they mimicked the droplet transmission as best they could, by setting the plates in an extremely dry chamber to accelerate the droplets’ evaporation, analogous to what they would experience in flight.
Going forward, the researchers have started experimenting with platforms that allow them to study the droplets in flight, in a range of conditions. They plan to focus on the new family of genes in even more realistic experiments, to confirm whether the genes do indeed shield Mycobacterium tuberculosis as it is transmitted through the air, potentially opening the way to weakening its airborne defenses.
“The idea of waiting to find someone with tuberculosis, then treating and curing them, is a totally inefficient way to stop the pandemic,” Nathan says. “Most people who exhale tuberculosis do not yet have a diagnosis. So we have to interrupt its transmission. And how do you do that, if you don’t know anything about the process itself? We have some ideas now.”
This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the Abby and Howard P. Milstein Program in Chemical Biology and Translational Medicine, and the Potts Memorial Foundation, the National Science Foundation Center for Analysis and Prediction of Pandemic Expansion (APPEX), Inditex, NASA Translational Research Institute for Space Health , and Analog Devices, Inc.
Robotic helper making mistakes? Just nudge it in the right directionNew research could allow a person to correct a robot’s actions in real-time, using the kind of feedback they’d give another human.Imagine that a robot is helping you clean the dishes. You ask it to grab a soapy bowl out of the sink, but its gripper slightly misses the mark.
Using a new framework developed by MIT and NVIDIA researchers, you could correct that robot’s behavior with simple interactions. The method would allow you to point to the bowl or trace a trajectory to it on a screen, or simply give the robot’s arm a nudge in the right direction.
Unlike other methods for correcting robot behavior, this technique does not require users to collect new data and retrain the machine-learning model that powers the robot’s brain. It enables a robot to use intuitive, real-time human feedback to choose a feasible action sequence that gets as close as possible to satisfying the user’s intent.
When the researchers tested their framework, its success rate was 21 percent higher than an alternative method that did not leverage human interventions.
In the long run, this framework could enable a user to more easily guide a factory-trained robot to perform a wide variety of household tasks even though the robot has never seen their home or the objects in it.
“We can’t expect laypeople to perform data collection and fine-tune a neural network model. The consumer will expect the robot to work right out of the box, and if it doesn’t, they would want an intuitive mechanism to customize it. That is the challenge we tackled in this work,” says Felix Yanwei Wang, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this method.
His co-authors include Lirui Wang PhD ’24 and Yilun Du PhD ’24; senior author Julie Shah, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the director of the Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); as well as Balakumar Sundaralingam, Xuning Yang, Yu-Wei Chao, Claudia Perez-D’Arpino PhD ’19, and Dieter Fox of NVIDIA. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Robots and Automation.
Mitigating misalignment
Recently, researchers have begun using pre-trained generative AI models to learn a “policy,” or a set of rules, that a robot follows to complete an action. Generative models can solve multiple complex tasks.
During training, the model only sees feasible robot motions, so it learns to generate valid trajectories for the robot to follow.
While these trajectories are valid, that doesn’t mean they always align with a user’s intent in the real world. The robot might have been trained to grab boxes off a shelf without knocking them over, but it could fail to reach the box on top of someone’s bookshelf if the shelf is oriented differently than those it saw in training.
To overcome these failures, engineers typically collect data demonstrating the new task and re-train the generative model, a costly and time-consuming process that requires machine-learning expertise.
Instead, the MIT researchers wanted to allow users to steer the robot’s behavior during deployment when it makes a mistake.
But if a human interacts with the robot to correct its behavior, that could inadvertently cause the generative model to choose an invalid action. It might reach the box the user wants, but knock books off the shelf in the process.
“We want to allow the user to interact with the robot without introducing those kinds of mistakes, so we get a behavior that is much more aligned with user intent during deployment, but that is also valid and feasible,” Wang says.
Their framework accomplishes this by providing the user with three intuitive ways to correct the robot’s behavior, each of which offers certain advantages.
First, the user can point to the object they want the robot to manipulate in an interface that shows its camera view. Second, they can trace a trajectory in that interface, allowing them to specify how they want the robot to reach the object. Third, they can physically move the robot’s arm in the direction they want it to follow.
“When you are mapping a 2D image of the environment to actions in a 3D space, some information is lost. Physically nudging the robot is the most direct way to specifying user intent without losing any of the information,” says Wang.
Sampling for success
To ensure these interactions don’t cause the robot to choose an invalid action, such as colliding with other objects, the researchers use a specific sampling procedure. This technique lets the model choose an action from the set of valid actions that most closely aligns with the user’s goal.
“Rather than just imposing the user’s will, we give the robot an idea of what the user intends but let the sampling procedure oscillate around its own set of learned behaviors,” Wang explains.
This sampling method enabled the researchers’ framework to outperform the other methods they compared it to during simulations and experiments with a real robot arm in a toy kitchen.
While their method might not always complete the task right away, it offers users the advantage of being able to immediately correct the robot if they see it doing something wrong, rather than waiting for it to finish and then giving it new instructions.
Moreover, after a user nudges the robot a few times until it picks up the correct bowl, it could log that corrective action and incorporate it into its behavior through future training. Then, the next day, the robot could pick up the correct bowl without needing a nudge.
“But the key to that continuous improvement is having a way for the user to interact with the robot, which is what we have shown here,” Wang says.
In the future, the researchers want to boost the speed of the sampling procedure while maintaining or improving its performance. They also want to experiment with robot policy generation in novel environments.
SMART researchers pioneer nanosensor for real-time iron detection in plantsThe innovation enables nondestructive iron tracking within plant tissues, helping to optimize plant nutrient management, reduce fertilizer waste, and improve crop health.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.
3 Questions: Visualizing research in the age of AIFelice Frankel discusses the implications of generative AI when communicating science visually.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
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.”
Knitted microtissue can accelerate healingLincoln Laboratory and MIT researchers are creating new types of bioabsorbable fabrics that mimic the unique way soft tissues stretch while nurturing growing cells.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."
Study: The ozone hole is healing, thanks to global reduction of CFCsNew results show with high statistical confidence that ozone recovery is going strong.A new MIT-led study confirms that the Antarctic ozone layer is healing, as a direct result of global efforts to reduce ozone-depleting substances.
Scientists including the MIT team have observed signs of ozone recovery in the past. But the new study is the first to show, with high statistical confidence, that this recovery is due primarily to the reduction of ozone-depleting substances, versus other influences such as natural weather variability or increased greenhouse gas emissions to the stratosphere.
“There’s been a lot of qualitative evidence showing that the Antarctic ozone hole is getting better. This is really the first study that has quantified confidence in the recovery of the ozone hole,” says study author Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry. “The conclusion is, with 95 percent confidence, it is recovering. Which is awesome. And it shows we can actually solve environmental problems.”
The new study appears today in the journal Nature. Graduate student Peidong Wang from the Solomon group in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) is the lead author. His co-authors include Solomon and EAPS Research Scientist Kane Stone, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.
Roots of ozone recovery
Within the Earth’s stratosphere, ozone is a naturally occurring gas that acts as a sort of sunscreen, protecting the planet from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. In 1985, scientists discovered a “hole” in the ozone layer over Antarctica that opened up during the austral spring, between September and December. This seasonal ozone depletion was suddenly allowing UV rays to filter down to the surface, leading to skin cancer and other adverse health effects.
In 1986, Solomon, who was then working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), led expeditions to the Antarctic, where she and her colleagues gathered evidence that quickly confirmed the ozone hole’s cause: chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs — chemicals that were then used in refrigeration, air conditioning, insulation, and aerosol propellants. When CFCs drift up into the stratosphere, they can break down ozone under certain seasonal conditions.
The following year, those relevations led to the drafting of the Montreal Protocol — an international treaty that aimed to phase out the production of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances, in hopes of healing the ozone hole.
In 2016, Solomon led a study reporting key signs of ozone recovery. The ozone hole seemed to be shrinking with each year, especially in September, the time of year when it opens up. Still, these observations were qualitative. The study showed large uncertainties regarding how much of this recovery was due to concerted efforts to reduce ozone-depleting substances, or if the shrinking ozone hole was a result of other “forcings,” such as year-to-year weather variability from El Niño, La Niña, and the polar vortex.
“While detecting a statistically significant increase in ozone is relatively straightforward, attributing these changes to specific forcings is more challenging,” says Wang.
Anthropogenic healing
In their new study, the MIT team took a quantitative approach to identify the cause of Antarctic ozone recovery. The researchers borrowed a method from the climate change community, known as “fingerprinting,” which was pioneered by Klaus Hasselmann, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 for the technique. In the context of climate, fingerprinting refers to a method that isolates the influence of specific climate factors, apart from natural, meteorological noise. Hasselmann applied fingerprinting to identify, confirm, and quantify the anthropogenic fingerprint of climate change.
Solomon and Wang looked to apply the fingerprinting method to identify another anthropogenic signal: the effect of human reductions in ozone-depleting substances on the recovery of the ozone hole.
“The atmosphere has really chaotic variability within it,” Solomon says. “What we’re trying to detect is the emerging signal of ozone recovery against that kind of variability, which also occurs in the stratosphere.”
The researchers started with simulations of the Earth’s atmosphere and generated multiple “parallel worlds,” or simulations of the same global atmosphere, under different starting conditions. For instance, they ran simulations under conditions that assumed no increase in greenhouse gases or ozone-depleting substances. Under these conditions, any changes in ozone should be the result of natural weather variability. They also ran simulations with only increasing greenhouse gases, as well as only decreasing ozone-depleting substances.
They compared these simulations to observe how ozone in the Antarctic stratosphere changed, both with season, and across different altitudes, in response to different starting conditions. From these simulations, they mapped out the times and altitudes where ozone recovered from month to month, over several decades, and identified a key “fingerprint,” or pattern, of ozone recovery that was specifically due to conditions of declining ozone-depleting substances.
The team then looked for this fingerprint in actual satellite observations of the Antarctic ozone hole from 2005 to the present day. They found that, over time, the fingerprint that they identified in simulations became clearer and clearer in observations. In 2018, the fingerprint was at its strongest, and the team could say with 95 percent confidence that ozone recovery was due mainly to reductions in ozone-depleting substances.
“After 15 years of observational records, we see this signal to noise with 95 percent confidence, suggesting there’s only a very small chance that the observed pattern similarity can be explained by variability noise,” Wang says. “This gives us confidence in the fingerprint. It also gives us confidence that we can solve environmental problems. What we can learn from ozone studies is how different countries can swiftly follow these treaties to decrease emissions.”
If the trend continues, and the fingerprint of ozone recovery grows stronger, Solomon anticipates that soon there will be a year, here and there, when the ozone layer stays entirely intact. And eventually, the ozone hole should stay shut for good.
“By something like 2035, we might see a year when there’s no ozone hole depletion at all in the Antarctic. And that will be very exciting for me,” she says. “And some of you will see the ozone hole go away completely in your lifetimes. And people did that.”
This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
Why rationality can push people in different directionsPhilosopher Kevin Dorst’s work examines how we apply rational thought to everyday life.It’s not a stretch to suggest that when we disagree with other people, we often regard them as being irrational. Kevin Dorst PhD ’19 has developed a body of research with surprising things to say about that.
Dorst, an associate professor of philosophy at MIT, studies rationality: how we apply it, or think we do, and how that bears out in society. The goal is to help us think clearly and perhaps with fresh eyes about something we may take for granted.
Throughout his work, Dorst specializes in exploring the nuances of rationality. To take just one instance, consider how ambiguity can interact with rationality. Suppose there are two studies about the effect of a new housing subdivision on local traffic patterns: One shows there will be a substantial increase in traffic, and one shows a minor effect. Even if both studies are sound in their methods and data, neither may have a totally airtight case. People who regard themselves as rationally assessing the numbers will likely disagree about which is most valid, and — though this may not be entirely rational — may use their prior beliefs to poke holes in the study that does not represent their prior beliefs.
Among other things, this process also calls into question the widespread “Bayesian” conception that people’s views shift and come into alignment as they’re presented with new evidence. It may be that instead, people apply rationality while their views diverge, not converge.
This is also the kind of phenomenon Dorst explores in the paper “Rational Polarization,” published in The Philosophical Review in 2023; currently Dorst is working on a book about how people can take rational approaches but still wind up with different conclusions about the world. Dorst combines careful argumentation, mathematically structured descriptions of thinking, and even experimental evidence about cognition and people’s views, an increasing trend in philosophy.
“There’s something freeing about how methodologically open philosophy is,” says Dorst, a good-humored and genial conversationalist. “A question can be philosophical if it’s important and we don’t yet have settled methods for answering it, because in philosophy it’s always okay to ask what methods we should be using. It’s one of the exciting things about philosophy.”
For his research and teaching, Dorst was awarded tenure at MIT last year.
Show me your work
Dorst grew up in Missouri, not exactly expecting to become a philosopher, but he started following in the academic trail of his older brother, who had become interested in philosophy.
“We didn’t know what philosophy was growing up, but once my brother started getting interested, there was a little bootstrapping, egging each other on, and having someone to talk to,” Dorst says.
As an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, Dorst majored in philosophy and political science. By graduation, he had become sold on studying philosophy full-time, and was accepted into MIT’s program as a doctoral student.
At the Institute, he started specializing in the problems he now studies full-time, about how we know things and how much we are thinking rationally, while working with Roger White as his primary adviser, along with faculty members Robert Stalnaker and Kieran Setiya of MIT and Branden Fitelson of Northeastern University.
After earning his PhD, Dorst spent a year as a fellow at Oxford University’s Magdalen College, then joined faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. He returned to MIT, this time on the faculty, in 2022. Now settled in the MIT philosophy faculty, Dorst tries to continue the department’s tradition of engaged teaching with his students.
“They wrestle like everyone does with the conceptual and philosophical questions, but the speed with which you can get through technical things in a course is astounding,” Dorst says of MIT undergraduates.
New methods, time-honored issues
At present Dorst, who has published widely in philosophy journals, is grinding through the process of writing a book manuscript about the complexity of rationality. Chapter subjects include hindsight bias, confirmation bias, overconfidence, and polarization.
In the process, Dorst is also developing and conducting more experiments than ever before, to look at the way people process information and regard themselves as being rational.
“There’s this whole movement of experimental philosophy, using experimental data, being sensitive to cognitive science and being interested in connecting questions we have to it,” Dorst says.
In his case, he adds, “The big picture is trying to connect the theoretical work on rationality with the more empirical work about what leads to polarization,” he says. The salience of the work, meanwhile, applies to a wide range of subjects: “People have been polarized forever over everything.”
As he explains all of this, Dorst looks up at the whiteboard in his office, where an extensive set of equations represents the output of some experiments and his ongoing effort to comprehend the results, as part of the book project. When he finishes, he hopes to have work broadly useful in philosophy, cognitive science, and other fields.
“We might use some different models in philosophy,” he says, “but let’s all try to figure out how people process information and regard arguments.”
Letterlocking: A new look at a centuries-old practiceA first history of the document security technology, co-authored by MIT Libraries’ Jana Dambrogio, provides new tools for interdisciplinary research.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.’”
Markus Buehler receives 2025 Washington Award Materials scientist is honored for his academic leadership and innovative research that bridge engineering and nature.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.
A personalized heart implant wins MIT Sloan health care prizeSpheric Bio’s implants are designed to grow in a channel of the heart to better fit the patient’s anatomy and prevent strokes.An MIT startup’s personalized heart implants, designed to help prevent strokes, won this year’s MIT Sloan Healthcare Innovation Prize (SHIP) on Thursday.
Spheric Bio’s implants grow inside the body once injected, to fit within the patient’s unique anatomy. This could improve stroke prevention because existing implants are one-size-fits-all devices that can fail to fully block the most at-risk regions, leading to leakages and other complications.
“Our mission is to transform stroke prevention by building personalized medical devices directly inside patients’ hearts,” said Connor Verheyen PhD ’23, a postdoc in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), who made the winning pitch.
Verheyen’s co-founders are MIT Associate Professor Ellen Roche and HST postdoc Markus Horvath PhD ’22.
Spheric Bio was one of seven teams that pitched their solution at the event, which was held in the MIT Media Lab and kicked off the MIT Sloan Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference.
Spheric took home the event’s $25,000 first-place prize. The second-place prize went to nurtur, another MIT alumnus-founded startup, that has developed an artificial intelligence-powered platform designed to detect and prevent postpartum depression. Last summer, nurtur participated in the delta v startup accelerator program organized by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.
The audience choice award was given to Merunova, which is using AI and MRI diagnostics to improve the diagnosis and treatment of spinal cord disorders. Merunova was co-founded by Dheera Ananthakrishnan, a former spine surgeon who completed an executive MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2023.
Personalized stroke prevention
Spheric Bio’s first implants aim to solve the problem of atrial fibrillation, a condition that causes areas of the heart to beat irregularly and rapidly, leading to a dramatic increase in stroke risk. The problem begins when blood pools and clots in the heart. Those clots then move to the brain and cause a stroke.
“This is a problem I’ve witnessed firsthand in my family,” says Verheyen. “It’s so common that millions of families around the world have had to experience a loved one go through a stroke as well.”
Patients with atrial fibrillation today can either go on blood thinners, in many cases for years or even life, or undergo a procedure in which surgeons insert a device into the heart to close off an area known as the left atrial appendage, where about 90 percent of such originate.
The implants on the market today for that procedure are typically prefabricated metal devices that don’t account for the wide variations seen in patient heart anatomy. Verheyen says up to half of the devices fail to seal the appendage. They can also lead to complications and complex care pathways designed to manage those shortcomings.
“There’s a fundamental mismatch between the devices available and what human patients actually look like,” says Verheyen. “Humans are infinitely variable in shape and size, and these tissues in particular are really soft, complex, delicate tissues. It leaves you with a pretty profound incompatibility.”
Spheric Bio’s implants are designed to conform to a patient’s anatomy like water filling a glass. The implant is made of biomaterials developed over years of research at MIT. They are delivered through a catheter and then expand and self-heal to custom fit the patient.
“This gives us complete closure of the appendage for every patient, every time,” said Verheyen, who has successfully tested the device in animals. “It also allows us to reduce device-related complications and simplifies deployment for operators.”
Verheyen conducted his PhD work on medical imaging and medical physics in Roche’s lab. Roche is also the associate head of Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
Innovations for impact
The 23rd annual pitch competition offered anyone interested in health care innovation a look at the promising new solutions being developed at universities. The event is open to all early-stage health care startups with at least one student or recent graduate co-founder.
The event was the result of a months-long process in which more than 100 applicants were whittled down over the course of three rounds by a group of 20 judges.
The final competition also kicked off the MIT Sloan Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference, which took place Feb. 27 and 28. This year’s conference was titled From Innovation to Impact: The Changing Face of Healthcare, and featured keynotes with health care industry veterans including Chris Boerner, the CEO of Bristole Myers Squibb, and James Davis, the CEO of Quest Diagnostics.
The competition’s keynote was delivered by Iterative Health CEO Jonathan Ng, who was a finalist in the competition in 2017. Ng expressed admiration for this year’s contestants.
“It’s inspiring to look around and see people who want to change the world,” said Ng, whose company is using cameras and AI to improve colorectal cancer screening. “There’s a lot of easier industries to work in, but MIT is such a good place to find your tribe: to find people who want to make the same sort of impact on the world as you.”
Five years, five triumphs in Putnam Math CompetitionUndergrads sweep Putnam Fellows for fifth year in a row and continue Elizabeth Lowell Putnam winning streak.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 named director of J-WAFSThe mechanical engineering professor will lead MIT’s only program specifically focused on water and food for human need.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.”
Collaborating to advance research and innovation on essential chips for AIAgreement between MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and GlobalFoundries aims to deliver power efficiencies for data centers and ultra-low power consumption for intelligent devices at the edge.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.
Will neutrons compromise the operation of superconducting magnets in a fusion plant?Tests suggest these powerful magnets will not suffer immediate loss of performance during irradiation.High-temperature superconducting magnets made from REBCO, an acronym for rare earth barium copper oxide, make it possible to create an intense magnetic field that can confine the extremely hot plasma needed for fusion reactions, which combine two hydrogen atoms to form an atom of helium, releasing a neutron in the process.
But some early tests suggested that neutron irradiation inside a fusion power plant might instantaneously suppress the superconducting magnets’ ability to carry current without resistance (called critical current), potentially causing a reduction in the fusion power output.
Now, a series of experiments has clearly demonstrated that this instantaneous effect of neutron bombardment, known as the “beam on effect,” should not be an issue during reactor operation, thus clearing the path for projects such as the ARC fusion system being developed by MIT spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
The findings were reported in the journal Superconducting Science and Technology, in a paper by MIT graduate student Alexis Devitre and professors Michael Short, Dennis Whyte, and Zachary Hartwig, along with six others.
“Nobody really knew if it would be a concern,” Short explains. He recalls looking at these early findings: “Our group thought, man, somebody should really look into this. But now, luckily, the result of the paper is: It’s conclusively not a concern.”
The possible issue first arose during some initial tests of the REBCO tapes planned for use in the ARC system. “I can remember the night when we first tried the experiment,” Devitre recalls. “We were all down in the accelerator lab, in the basement. It was a big shocker because suddenly the measurement we were looking at, the critical current, just went down by 30 percent” when it was measured under radiation conditions (approximating those of the fusion system), as opposed to when it was only measured after irradiation.
Before that, researchers had irradiated the REBCO tapes and then tested them afterward, Short says. “We had the idea to measure while irradiating, the way it would be when the reactor’s really on,” he says. “And then we observed this giant difference, and we thought, oh, this is a big deal. It’s a margin you’d want to know about if you’re designing a reactor.”
After a series of carefully calibrated tests, it turned out the drop in critical current was not caused by the irradiation at all, but was just an effect of temperature changes brought on by the proton beam used for the irradiation experiments. This is something that would not be a factor in an actual fusion plant, Short says.
“We repeated experiments ‘oh so many times’ and collected about a thousand data points,” Devitre says. They then went through a detailed statistical analysis to show that the effects were exactly the same, under conditions where the material was just heated as when it was both heated and irradiated.
This excluded the possibility that the instantaneous suppression of the critical current had anything to do with the “beam on effect,” at least within the sensitivity of their tests. “Our experiments are quite sensitive,” Short says. “We can never say there’s no effect, but we can say that there’s no important effect.”
To carry out these tests required building a special facility for the purpose. Only a few such facilities exist in the world. “They’re all custom builds, and without this, we wouldn’t have been able to find out the answer,” he says.
The finding that this specific issue is not a concern for the design of fusion plants “illustrates the power of negative results. If you can conclusively prove that something doesn’t happen, you can stop scientists from wasting their time hunting for something that doesn’t exist.” And in this case, Short says, “You can tell the fusion companies: ‘You might have thought this effect would be real, but we’ve proven that it’s not, and you can ignore it in your designs.’ So that’s one more risk retired.”
That could be a relief to not only Commonwealth Fusion Systems but also several other companies that are also pursuing fusion plant designs, Devitre says. “There’s a bunch. And it’s not just fusion companies,” he adds. There remains the important issue of longer-term degradation of the REBCO that would occur over years or decades, which the group is presently investigating. Others are pursuing the use of these magnets for satellite thrusters and particle accelerators to study subatomic physics, where the effect could also have been a concern. For all these uses, “this is now one less thing to be concerned about,” Devitre says.
The research team also included David Fischer, Kevin Woller, Maxwell Rae, Lauryn Kortman, and Zoe Fisher at MIT, and N. Riva at Proxima Fusion in Germany. This research was supported by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative.
An ancient RNA-guided system could simplify delivery of gene editing therapiesThe programmable proteins are compact, modular, and can be directed to modify DNA in human cells.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.
Sometimes, when competitors collaborate, everybody winsEngineers developed a planning tool that can help independent entities decide when they should invest in joint projects.One large metropolis might have several different train systems, from local intercity lines to commuter trains to longer regional lines.
When designing a system of train tracks, stations, and schedules in this network, should rail operators assume each entity operates independently, seeking only to maximize its own revenue? Or that they fully cooperate all the time with a joint plan, putting their own interest aside?
In the real world, neither assumption is very realistic.
Researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich have developed a new planning tool that mixes competition and cooperation to help operators in a complex, multiregional network strategically determine when and how they should work together.
Their framework is unusual because it incorporates co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms that identify which joint infrastructure projects a stakeholder should invest in with other operators to maximize collective benefits. The tool can help mobility stakeholders, such as governments, transport agencies, and firms, determine the right time to collaborate, how much they should invest in cooperative projects, how the profits should be distributed, and what would happen if they withdrew from the negotiations.
“It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you want to invest in your opponent so that, at some point, this investment will come back to you. Thanks to game theory, one can formalize this intuition to give rise to an interesting class of problems,” says Gioele Zardini, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and senior author of a paper on this planning framework.
Numerical analysis shows that, by investing a portion of their budget into some shared infrastructure projects, independent operators can earn more revenue than if they operated completely noncooperatively.
In the example of the rail operators, the researchers demonstrate that co-investment also benefits users by improving regional train service. This win-win situation encourages more people to take the train, boosting revenues for operators and reducing emissions from automobiles, says Mingjia He, a graduate student at ETH Zurich and lead author.
“The key point here is that transport network design is not a zero-sum game. One operator’s gain doesn’t have to mean the others’ loss. By shifting the perception from isolated, self-optimization to strategic interaction, cooperation can create greater value for everyone involved,” she says.
Beyond transportation, this planning framework could help companies in a crowded industry or governments of neighboring countries test co-investment strategies.
He and Zardini are joined on the paper by ETH Zurich researchers Andrea Censi and Emilio Frazzoli. The research will be presented at the 2025 American Control Conference (ACC), and the paper has been selected as a Student Best Paper Award finalist.
Mixing cooperation and competition
Building transportation infrastructure in a multiregional network typically requires a huge investment of time and resources. Major infrastructure projects have an outsized impact that can stretch far beyond one region or operator.
Each region has its own priorities and decision-makers, such as local transportation authorities, which often results in the failure of coordination.
“If local systems are designed separately, regional travel may be more difficult, making the whole system less efficient. But if self-interested stakeholders don’t benefit from coordination, they are less likely to support the plan,” He says.
To find the best mix of cooperation and competition, the researchers used game theory to build a framework that enables operators to align interests and improve regional cooperation in a way that benefits all.
For instance, last year the Swiss government agreed to invest 50 million euros to electrify and expand part of a regional rail network in Germany, with the goal of creating a faster rail connection between three Swiss cities.
The researchers’ planning framework could help independent entities, from regional governments to rail operators, identify when and how to undertake such collaborations.
The first step involves simulating the outcomes if operators don’t collaborate. Then, using the co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms, the decision-maker can explore cooperative approaches.
To identify a fair way to split revenues from shared projects, the researchers design a payoff-sharing mechanism based on a game theory concept known as the Nash bargaining solution. This technique will determine how much benefit operators would receive in different cooperative scenarios, taking into account the benefits they would achieve with no collaboration.
The benefits of co-investment
Once they had designed the planning framework, the researchers tested it on a simulated transportation network with multiple competing rail operators. They assessed various co-investment ratios across multiple years to identify the best decisions for operators.
In the end, they found that a semicooperative approach leads to the highest returns for all stakeholders. For instance, in one scenario, by co-investing 50 percent of their total budgets into shared infrastructure projects, all operators maximized their returns.
In another scenario, they show that by investing just 3.3 percent of their total budget in the first year of a multiyear cooperative project, operators can boost outcomes by 30 percent across three metrics: revenue, reduced costs for customers, and lower emissions.
“This proves that a small, up-front investment can lead to significant long-term benefits,” He says.
When they applied their framework to more realistic multiregional networks where all regions weren’t the same size, this semicooperative approach achieved even better results.
However, their analyses indicate that returns don’t increase in a linear way — sometimes increasing the co-investment ratio does not increase the benefit for operators.
Success is a multifaceted issue that depends on how much is invested by all operators, which projects are chosen, when investment happens, and how the budget is distributed over time, He explains.
“These strategic decisions are complex, which is why simulations and optimization are necessary to find the best cooperation and negotiation strategies. Our framework can help operators make smarter investment choices and guide them through the negotiation process,” she says.
The framework could also be applied to other complex network design problems, such as in communications or energy distribution.
In the future, the researchers want to build a user-friendly interface that will allow a stakeholder to easily explore different collaborative options. They also want to consider more complex scenarios, such as the role policy plays in shared infrastructure decisions or the robust cooperative strategies that handle risks and uncertainty.
This work was supported, in part, by the ETH Zurich Mobility Initiative and the ETH Zurich Foundation.
Fiber computer allows apparel to run apps and “understand” the wearerMIT researchers developed a fiber computer and networked several of them into a garment that learns to identify physical activities.What if the clothes you wear could care for your health?
MIT researchers have developed an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber, which could monitor health conditions and physical activity, alerting the wearer to potential health risks in real-time. Clothing containing the fiber computer was comfortable and machine washable, and the fibers were nearly imperceptible to the wearer, the researchers report.
Unlike on-body monitoring systems known as “wearables,” which are located at a single point like the chest, wrist, or finger, fabrics and apparel have an advantage of being in contact with large areas of the body close to vital organs. As such, they present a unique opportunity to measure and understand human physiology and health.
The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.
The researchers added four fiber computers to a top and a pair of leggings, with the fibers running along each limb. In their experiments, each independently programmable fiber computer operated a machine-learning model that was trained to autonomously recognize exercises performed by the wearer, resulting in an average accuracy of about 70 percent.
Surprisingly, once the researchers allowed the individual fiber computers to communicate among themselves, their collective accuracy increased to nearly 95 percent.
“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most — if not all — of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” says Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), and senior author of a paper on the research, which appears today in Nature.
The use of the fiber computer to understand health conditions and help prevent injury will soon undergo a significant real-world test as well. U.S. Army and Navy service members will be conducting a monthlong winter research mission to the Arctic, covering 1,000 kilometers in average temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Dozens of base layer merino mesh shirts with fiber computers will be providing real-time information on the health and activity of the individuals participating on this mission, called Musk Ox II.
“In the not-too-distant future, fiber computers will allow us to run apps and get valuable health care and safety services from simple everyday apparel. We are excited to see glimpses of this future in the upcoming Arctic mission through our partners in the U.S. Army, Navy, and DARPA. Helping to keep our service members safe in the harshest environments is a honor and privilege,” Fink says.
He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Nikhil Gupta, an MIT materials science and engineering graduate student; Henry Cheung MEng ’23; and Syamantak Payra ’22, currently a graduate student at Stanford University; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Professor of Physics at MIT and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies; as well as others at MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University.
Fiber focus
The fiber computer builds on more than a decade of work in the Fibers@MIT lab at the RLE and was supported primarily by ISN. In previous papers, the researchers demonstrated methods for incorporating semiconductor devices, optical diodes, memory units, elastic electrical contacts, and sensors into fibers that could be formed into fabrics and garments.
“But we hit a wall in terms of the complexity of the devices we could incorporate into the fiber because of how we were making it. We had to rethink the whole process. At the same time, we wanted to make it elastic and flexible so it would match the properties of traditional fabrics,” says Gupta.
One of the challenges that researchers surmounted is the geometric mismatch between a cylindrical fiber and a planar chip. Connecting wires to small, conductive areas, known as pads, on the outside of each planar microdevice proved to be difficult and prone to failure because complex microdevices have many pads, making it increasingly difficult to find room to attach each wire reliably.
In this new design, the researchers map the 2D pad alignment of each microdevice to a 3D layout using a flexible circuit board called an interposer, which they wrapped into a cylinder. They call this the “maki” design. Then, they attach four separate wires to the sides of the “maki” roll and connected all the components together.
“This advance was crucial for us in terms of being able to incorporate higher functionality computing elements, like the microcontroller and Bluetooth sensor, into the fiber,” says Gupta.
This versatile folding technique could be used with a variety of microelectronic devices, enabling them to incorporate additional functionality.
In addition, the researchers fabricated the new fiber computer using a type of thermoplastic elastomer that is several times more flexible than the thermoplastics they used previously. This material enabled them to form a machine-washable, elastic fiber that can stretch more than 60 percent without failure.
They fabricate the fiber computer using a thermal draw process that the Fibers@MIT group pioneered in the early 2000s. The process involves creating a macroscopic version of the fiber computer, called a preform, that contains each connected microdevice.
This preform is hung in a furnace, melted, and pulled down to form a fiber, which also contains embedded lithium-ion batteries so it can power itself.
“A former group member, Juliette Marion, figured out how to create elastic conductors, so even when you stretch the fiber, the conductors don’t break. We can maintain functionality while stretching it, which is crucial for processes like knitting, but also for clothes in general,” Gupta says.
Bring out the vote
Once the fiber computer is fabricated, the researchers use a braiding technique to cover the fiber with traditional yarns, such as polyester, merino wool, nylon, and even silk.
In addition to gathering data on the human body using sensors, each fiber computer incorporates LEDs and light sensors that enable multiple fibers in one garment to communicate, creating a textile network that can perform computation.
Each fiber computer also includes a Bluetooth communication system to send data wirelessly to a device like a smartphone, which can be read by a user.
The researchers leveraged these communication systems to create a textile network by sewing four fiber computers into a garment, one in each sleeve. Each fiber ran an independent neural network that was trained to identify exercises like squats, planks, arm circles, and lunges.
“What we found is that the ability of a fiber computer to identify human activity was only about 70 percent accurate when located on a single limb, the arms or legs. However, when we allowed the fibers sitting on all four limbs to ‘vote,’ they collectively reached nearly 95 percent accuracy, demonstrating the importance of residing on multiple body areas and forming a network between autonomous fiber computers that does not need wires and interconnects,” Fink says.
Moving forward, the researchers want to use the interposer technique to incorporate additional microdevices.
Arctic insights
In February, a multinational team equipped with computing fabrics will travel for 30 days and 1,000 kilometers in the Arctic. The fabrics will help keep the team safe, and set the stage for future physiological “digital twinning” models.
“As a leader with more than a decade of Arctic operational experience, one of my main concerns is how to keep my team safe from debilitating cold weather injuries — a primary threat to operators in the extreme cold,” says U.S. Army Major Mathew Hefner, the commander of Musk Ox II. “Conventional systems just don’t provide me with a complete picture. We will be wearing the base layer computing fabrics on us 24/7 to help us better understand the body’s response to extreme cold and ultimately predict and prevent injury.”
Karl Friedl, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine senior research scientist of performance physiology, noted that the MIT programmable computing fabric technology may become a “gamechanger for everyday lives.”
“Imagine near-term fiber computers in fabrics and apparel that sense and respond to the environment and to the physiological status of the individual, increasing comfort and performance, providing real-time health monitoring and providing protection against external threats. Soldiers will be the early adopters and beneficiaries of this new technology, integrated with AI systems using predictive physiological models and mission-relevant tools to enhance survivability in austere environments,” Friedl says.
“The convergence of classical fibers and fabrics with computation and machine learning has only begun. We are exploring this exciting future not only through research and field testing, but importantly in an MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering course ‘Computing Fabrics,’ taught with Professor Anais Missakian from the Rhode Island School of Design,” adds Fink.
This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology (ISN), the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation Fellowship for New Americans, the Stanford-Knight Hennessy Scholars Program, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.
A protein from tiny tardigrades may help cancer patients tolerate radiation therapyWhen scientists stimulated cells to produce a protein that helps “water bears” survive extreme environments, the tissue showed much less DNA damage after radiation treatment.About 60 percent of all cancer patients in the United States receive radiation therapy as part of their treatment. However, this radiation can have severe side effects that often end up being too difficult for patients to tolerate.
Drawing inspiration from a tiny organism that can withstand huge amounts of radiation, researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Iowa have developed a new strategy that may protect patients from this kind of damage. Their approach makes use of a protein from tardigrades, often also called “water bears,” which are usually less than a millimeter in length.
When the researchers injected messenger RNA encoding this protein into mice, they found that it generated enough protein to protect cells’ DNA from radiation-induced damage. If developed for use in humans, this approach could benefit many cancer patients, the researchers say.
“Radiation can be very helpful for many tumors, but we also recognize that the side effects can be limiting. There’s an unmet need with respect to helping patients mitigate the risk of damaging adjacent tissue,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Traverso and James Byrne, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Iowa, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The paper’s lead authors are Ameya Kirtane, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and Jianling Bi, a research scientist at the University of Iowa.
Extreme survival
Radiation is often used to treat cancers of the head and neck, where it can damage the mouth or throat, making it very painful to eat or drink. It is also commonly used for gastrointestinal cancers, which can lead to rectal bleeding. Many patients end up delaying treatments or stopping them altogether.
“This affects a huge number of patients, and it can manifest as something as simple as mouth sores, which can limit a person’s ability to eat because it’s so painful, to requiring hospitalization because people are suffering so terribly from the pain, weight loss, or bleeding. It can be pretty dangerous, and it’s something that we really wanted to try and address,” Byrne says.
Currently, there are very few ways to prevent radiation damage in cancer patients. There are a handful of drugs that can be given to try to reduce the damage, and for prostate cancer patients, a hydrogel can be used to create a physical barrier between the prostate and the rectum during radiation treatment.
For several years, Traverso and Byrne have been working on developing new ways to prevent radiation damage. In the new study, they were inspired by the extraordinary survival ability of tardigrades. Found all over the world, usually in aquatic environments, these organisms are well known for their resilience to extreme conditions. Scientists have even sent them into space, where they were shown to survive extreme dehydration and cosmic radiation.
One key component of tardigrades’ defense systems is a unique damage suppressor protein called Dsup, which binds to DNA and helps protect it from radiation-induced damage. This protein plays a major role in tardigrades’ ability to survive radiation doses 2,000 to 3,000 times higher than what a human being can tolerate.
When brainstorming ideas for novel ways to protect cancer patients from radiation, the researchers wondered if they might be able to deliver messenger RNA encoding Dsup to patient tissues before radiation treatment. This mRNA would trigger cells to transiently express the protein, protecting DNA during the treatment. After a few hours, the mRNA and protein would disappear.
For this to work, the researchers needed a way to deliver mRNA that would generate large amounts of protein in the target tissues. They screened libraries of delivery particles containing both polymer and lipid components, which have been used separately to achieve efficient mRNA delivery. From these screens, they identified one polymer-lipid particle that was best-suited for delivery to the colon, and another that was optimized to deliver mRNA to mouth tissue.
“We thought that perhaps by combining these two systems — polymers and lipids — we may be able to get the best of both worlds and get highly potent RNA delivery. And that’s essentially what we saw,” Kirtane says. “One of the strengths of our approach is that we are using a messenger RNA, which just temporarily expresses the protein, so it’s considered far safer than something like DNA, which may be incorporated into the cells’ genome.”
Protection from radiation
After showing that these particles could successfully deliver mRNA to cells grown in the lab, the researchers tested whether this approach could effectively protect tissue from radiation in a mouse model.
They injected the particles into either the cheek or the rectum several hours before giving a dose of radiation similar to what cancer patients would receive. In these mice, the researchers saw a 50 percent reduction in the amount of double-stranded DNA breaks caused by radiation.
“This study shows great promise and is a really novel idea leveraging natural mechanisms of protection again DNA damage for the purpose of protecting healthy cells during radiation treatments for cancer,” says Ben Ho Park, director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.
The researchers also showed that the protective effect of the Dsup protein did not spread beyond the injection site, which is important because they don’t want to protect the tumor itself from the effects of radiation. To make this treatment more feasible for potential use in humans, the researchers now plan to work on developing a version of the Dsup protein that would not provoke an immune response, as the original tardigrade protein likely would.
If developed for use in humans, this protein could also potentially be used to protect against DNA damage caused by chemotherapy drugs, the researchers say. Another possible application would be to help prevent radiation damage in astronauts in space.
Other authors of the paper include Netra Rajesh, Chaoyang Tang, Miguel Jimenez, Emily Witt, Megan McGovern, Arielle Cafi, Samual Hatfield, Lauren Rosenstock, Sarah Becker, Nicole Machado, Veena Venkatachalam, Dylan Freitas, Xisha Huang, Alvin Chan, Aaron Lopes, Hyunjoon Kim, Nayoon Kim, Joy Collins, Michelle Howard, Srija Manchkanti, and Theodore Hong.
The research was funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, the U.S. Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Program Early Investigator Award, a Hope Funds for Cancer Research Fellowship, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
Helping the immune system attack tumorsStefani Spranger is working to discover why some cancers don’t respond to immunotherapy, in hopes of making them more vulnerable to it.In addition to patrolling the body for foreign invaders, the immune system also hunts down and destroys cells that have become cancerous or precancerous. However, some cancer cells end up evading this surveillance and growing into tumors.
Once established, tumor cells often send out immunosuppressive signals, which leads T cells to become “exhausted” and unable to attack the tumor. In recent years, some cancer immunotherapy drugs have shown great success in rejuvenating those T cells so they can begin attacking tumors again.
While this approach has proven effective against cancers such as melanoma, it doesn’t work as well for others, including lung and ovarian cancer. MIT Associate Professor Stefani Spranger is trying to figure out how those tumors are able to suppress immune responses, in hopes of finding new ways to galvanize T cells into attacking them.
“We really want to understand why our immune system fails to recognize cancer,” Spranger says. “And I’m most excited about the really hard-to-treat cancers because I think that’s where we can make the biggest leaps.”
Her work has led to a better understanding of the factors that control T-cell responses to tumors, and raised the possibility of improving those responses through vaccination or treatment with immune-stimulating molecules called cytokines.
“We’re working on understanding what exactly the problem is, and then collaborating with engineers to find a good solution,” she says.
Jumpstarting T cells
As a student in Germany, where students often have to choose their college major while still in high school, Spranger envisioned going into the pharmaceutical industry and chose to major in biology. At Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, her course of study began with classical biology subjects such as botany and zoology, and she began to doubt her choice. But, once she began taking courses in cell biology and immunology, her interest was revived and she continued into a biology graduate program at the university.
During a paper discussion class early in her graduate school program, Spranger was assigned to a Science paper on a promising new immunotherapy treatment for melanoma. This strategy involves isolating tumor-infiltrating T-cells during surgery, growing them into large numbers, and then returning them to the patient. For more than 50 percent of those patients, the tumors were completely eliminated.
“To me, that changed the world,” Spranger recalls. “You can take the patient’s own immune system, not really do all that much to it, and then the cancer goes away.”
Spranger completed her PhD studies in a lab that worked on further developing that approach, known as adoptive T-cell transfer therapy. At that point, she still was leaning toward going into pharma, but after finishing her PhD in 2011, her husband, also a biologist, convinced her that they should both apply for postdoc positions in the United States.
They ended up at the University of Chicago, where Spranger worked in a lab that studies how the immune system responds to tumors. There, she discovered that while melanoma is usually very responsive to immunotherapy, there is a small fraction of melanoma patients whose T cells don’t respond to the therapy at all. That got her interested in trying to figure out why the immune system doesn’t always respond to cancer the way that it should, and in finding ways to jumpstart it.
During her postdoc, Spranger also discovered that she enjoyed mentoring students, which she hadn’t done as a graduate student in Germany. That experience drew her away from going into the pharmaceutical industry, in favor of a career in academia.
“I had my first mentoring teaching experience having an undergrad in the lab, and seeing that person grow as a scientist, from barely asking questions to running full experiments and coming up with hypotheses, changed how I approached science and my view of what academia should be for,” she says.
Modeling the immune system
When applying for faculty jobs, Spranger was drawn to MIT by the collaborative environment of MIT and its Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which offered the chance to collaborate with a large community of engineers who work in the field of immunology.
“That community is so vibrant, and it’s amazing to be a part of it,” she says.
Building on the research she had done as a postdoc, Spranger wanted to explore why some tumors respond well to immunotherapy, while others do not. For many of her early studies, she used a mouse model of non-small-cell lung cancer. In human patients, the majority of these tumors do not respond well to immunotherapy.
“We build model systems that resemble each of the different subsets of non-responsive non-small cell lung cancer, and we’re trying to really drill down to the mechanism of why the immune system is not appropriately responding,” she says.
As part of that work, she has investigated why the immune system behaves differently in different types of tissue. While immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors can stimulate a strong T-cell response in the skin, they don’t do nearly as much in the lung. However, Spranger has shown that T cell responses in the lung can be improved when immune molecules called cytokines are also given along with the checkpoint inhibitor.
Those cytokines work, in part, by activating dendritic cells — a class of immune cells that help to initiate immune responses, including activation of T cells.
“Dendritic cells are the conductor for the orchestra of all the T cells, although they’re a very sparse cell population,” Spranger says. “They can communicate which type of danger they sense from stressed cells and then instruct the T cells on what they have to do and where they have to go.”
Spranger’s lab is now beginning to study other types of tumors that don’t respond at all to immunotherapy, including ovarian cancer and glioblastoma. Both the brain and the peritoneal cavity appear to suppress T-cell responses to tumors, and Spranger hopes to figure out how to overcome that immunosuppression.
“We’re specifically focusing on ovarian cancer and glioblastoma, because nothing’s working right now for those cancers,” she says. “We want to understand what we have to do in those sites to induce a really good anti-tumor immune response.”
MIT engineers prepare to send three payloads to the moonData from the devices will help future astronauts navigate the moon’s south polar region and search for frozen water.Three MIT payloads will soon hitch a ride to the moon in a step toward establishing a permanent base on the lunar surface.
In the coming days, weather permitting, MIT engineers and scientists will send three payloads into space, on a course set for the moon’s south polar region. Scientists believe this area, with its permanently shadowed regions, could host hidden reservoirs of frozen water, which could serve to sustain future lunar settlements and fuel missions beyond the moon.
NASA plans to send astronauts to the moon’s south pole in 2027 as part of the Artemis III mission, which will be the first time humans touch down on the lunar surface since the Apollo era and the first time any human sets foot on its polar region. In advance of that journey, the MIT payloads will provide data about the area that can help prepare Artemis astronauts for navigating the frozen terrain.
The payloads include two novel technologies — a small depth-mapping camera and a thumb-sized mini-rover — along with a wafer-thin “record,” etched with the voices of people from around the world speaking in their native languages. All three payloads will be carried by a larger, suitcase-sized rover built by the space contractor Lunar Outpost.
As the main rover drives around the moon’s surface, exploring the polar terrain, the MIT camera, mounted on the front of the rover, will take the first ever 3D images of the lunar landscape captured from the surface of the Moon using time of flight technology. These images will beam back to Earth, where they can be used to train Artemis astronauts in visual simulations of the polar terrain and can be incorporated into advanced spacesuits with synthetic vision helmets.
Meanwhile, the mini-rover, dubbed “AstroAnt,” will wheel around the roof of the main rover and take temperature readings to monitor the larger vehicle’s operation. If it’s successful, AstroAnt could work as part of a team of miniature helper bots, performing essential tasks in future missions, such as clearing dust from solar panels and checking for cracks in lunar habitats and infrastructure.
All three MIT payloads, along with the Lunar Outpost rover, will launch to the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and touch down in the moon’s south polar region in a lander built by space company Intuitive Machines. The mission as a whole, which includes a variety of other payloads in addition to MIT’s, is named IM-2, for Intuitive Machines’ second trip to the moon. IM-2 aims to identify the presence and amount of water-ice on the moon’s south pole, using a combination of instruments, including an ice drill mounted to the lander, and a robotic “hopper” that will bounce along the surface to search for water in hard-to-reach regions.
The lunar landing, which engineers anticipate will be around noon on March 6, will mark the first time MIT has set active technology on the moon’s surface since the Apollo era, when MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, now the independent Draper Laboratory, provided the landmark Apollo Guidance Computer that navigated astronauts to the moon and back.
MIT engineers see their part in the new mission, which they’ve named “To the Moon to Stay,” as the first of many on the way to establishing a permanent presence on the lunar surface.
“Our goal is not just to visit the moon but to build a thriving ecosystem that supports humanity’s expansion into space,” says Dava Newman, Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT, director of the MIT Media Lab, and former NASA deputy administrator.
Institute’s roots
MIT’s part in the lunar mission is led by the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), a research collaborative within the Media Lab that aims to enable a “sci-fi future” of space exploration. The SEI, which was founded in 2016 by media arts and sciences alumna Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20, develops, tests, and deploys futuristic space-grade technologies that are intended to help humans establish sustainable settlements in space.
In the spring of 2021, SEI and MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) offered a course, MAS.839/16.893 (Operating in the Lunar Environment), that tasked teams of students to design payloads that meet certain objectives related to NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon. The class was taught by Ekblaw and AeroAstro’s Jeffrey Hoffman, MIT professor of the practice and former NASA astronaut, who helped students test their payload designs in the field, including in remote regions of Norway that resemble the moon’s barren landscape, and in parabolic flights that mimic the moon’s weak gravity.
Out of that class, Ekblaw and Hoffman chose to further develop two payload designs: a laser-based 3D camera system and the AstroAnt — a tiny, autonomous inspection robot. Both designs grew out of prior work. AstroAnt was originally a side project as part of Ekblaw’s PhD, based on work originally developed by Artem Dementyev in the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group, while the 3D camera was a PhD focus for AeroAstro alumna Cody Paige ’23, who helped develop and test the camera design and implement VR/XR technology with Newman, in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center.
As both designs were fine-tuned, Ekblaw raised funds and established a contract with Lunar Outpost (co-founded by MIT AeroAstro alumnus Forrest Meyen SM ’13, PhD ’17) to pair the payloads with the company’s moon-bound rover. SEI Mission Integrator Sean Auffinger oversaw integration and test efforts, together with Lunar Outpost, to support these payloads for operation in a novel, extreme environment.
“This mission has deep MIT roots,” says Ekblaw, who is the principal investigator for the MIT arm of the IM-2 mission, and a visiting scientist at the Media Lab. “This will be historic in that we’ve never landed technology or a rover in this area of the lunar south pole. It’s a really hard place to land — there are big boulders, and deep dust. So, it’s a bold attempt.”
Systems on
The site of the IM-2 landing is Mons Mouton Plateau — a flat-topped mountain at the moon’s south pole that lies just north of Shackleton Crater, which is a potential landing site for NASA’s Artemis astronauts. After the Intuitive Machines lander touches down, it will effectively open its garage door and let Lunar Outpost’s rover drive out to explore the polar landscape. Once the rover acclimates to its surroundings, it will begin to activate its instruments, including MIT’s 3D camera.
“It will be the first time we’re using this specific imaging technology on the lunar surface,” notes Paige, who is the current SEI director.
The camera, which will be mounted on the front of the main rover, is designed to shine laser light onto a surface and measure the time it takes for the light to bounce back to the camera. This “time-of-flight” is a measurement of distance, which can also be translated into surface topography, such as the depth of individual craters and crevices.
“Because we’re using a laser light, we can look without using sunlight,” Paige explains. “And we don’t know exactly what we’ll find. Some of the things we’re looking for are centimeter-sized holes, in areas that are permanently shadowed or frozen, that might contain water-ice. Those are the kinds of landscapes we’re really excited to see.”
Paige expects that the camera will send images back to Earth in next-day data packets, which will be processed by custom software developed by the team’s lead software engineer, Don Derek Haddad, allowing the camera’s science team to analyze the images as the rover traverses the terrain.
As the camera maps the moon’s surface, AstroAnt — which is smaller and lighter than an airpod case — will deploy from a tiny garage atop the main rover’s roof. The AstroAnt will drive around on magnetic wheels that allow it to stick to the rover’s surface without falling off. To the AstroAnt’s undercarriage, Ekblaw and her team, led by Media Lab graduate student Fangzheng Liu, fixed a thermopile — a small sensor that takes measurements of the main rover’s temperature, which can be used to monitor the vehicle’s thermal performance.
“If we can test this one AstroAnt on the moon, then we imagine having these really capable, roving swarms that can help astronauts do autonomous repair, inspection, diagnostics, and servicing,” Ekblaw says. “In the future, we could put little windshield wipers on them to help clear dust from solar panels, or put a pounding bar on them to induce tiny vibrations to detect defects in a habitat. There’s a lot of potential once we get to swarm scale.”
Eyes on the moon
The third MIT payload that will be affixed to the main rover is dubbed the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space, or HUMANS project. Led by MIT AeroAstro alumna Maya Nasr ’18, SM ’21, PhD ’23, HUMANS is a 2-inch disc made from a silicon wafer engraved with nanometer-scale etchings using technology provided by MIT.nano. The engravings are inspired by The Golden Record, a phonograph record that was sent into space with NASA’s Voyager probes in 1977. The HUMANS record is engraved with recordings of people from around the world, speaking in their native languages about what space exploration and humanity mean to them.
“We are carrying the hopes, dreams, and stories of people from all backgrounds,” Nasr says. “(It’s a) powerful reminder that space is not the privilege of a few, but the shared legacy of all.”
The MIT Media Lab plans to display the March 6 landing on a screen in the building’s atrium for the public to watch in real-time. Researchers from MIT’s Department of Architecture, led by Associate Professor Skylar Tibbits, have also built a lunar mission control room — a circular, architectural space where the engineers will monitor and control the mission’s payloads. If all goes well, the MIT team see the mission as the first step toward putting permanent boots on the surface of the moon, and even beyond.
“Our return to the Moon is not just about advancing technology — it’s about inspiring the next generation of explorers who are alive today and will travel to the moon in their lifetime,” Ekblaw says. “This historic mission for MIT brings students, staff and faculty together from across the Institute on a foundational mission that will support a future sustainable lunar settlement.”
An “All-American” vision of service to othersFormer NFL linebacker Spencer Paysinger keynotes the 51st annual MLK Celebration, with a message focused on building community.Spencer Paysinger has already been many things in his life, including a Super Bowl-winning linebacker, a writer and producer of the hit television series “All-American,” and local-business entrepreneur. But as he explained during his keynote speech at MIT’s 51st annual event celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Paysinger would prefer to think about his journey in additional terms: whether he has been able to serve others along the way.
“As I stand up here today talking about Dr. King’s mission, Dr. King’s dream, why we’re all here today, to me it all leans back into community,” Paysinger said. “I want to be judged by what I have done for others.”
Being able to reach out to others, in good times and bad, was a theme of the annual event, which took place in MIT’s Walker Memorial (Building 50), on Thursday. As Paysinger noted, his own career is marked by being a “team player” and finding reward in shared endeavors.
“For me, I’m at my best when I have people on the right and on the left of me attempting to reach the same dream,” Paysinger said. “We can have different ideologies, we can come from different backgrounds, of race, socioeconomic backgrounds. … At the end of the day it comes back to the mindset we need to have. It’s rooted in community, it’s rooted in togetherness.”
The event featured an array of talks delivered by students, campus leaders, and guests, along with musical interludes, and drew hundreds from the MIT community.
In opening remarks, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth praised Paysinger, saying his “perseverance and tenacity are a fantastic example to us all.”
Kornbluth also spoke about the values, and value, of MIT itself. American universities and colleges, she noted, have long “been a point of national pride and a source of international envy. … They and we have always been valued as centers of excellence creativity, innovation, and an infinitely renewable source of leadership.”
Moving forward, Kornbluth noted, the MIT community will continue to pursue excellence and provide mutual respect for others.
“MIT is in the talent business,” Kornbluth said. “Our success, and living up to our great mission, depends on our ability to attract extraordinarily talented people and to create a community in which everyone earns a place here to do their very best work. … Everyone at MIT is here because they deserve to be here. Every staff member, every faculty member, every postdoc, every student, every one of us. Every one of us is a full member of this community, and every member of our community is valued as a human being, and valued for what they contribute to our mission.”
Paysinger lauded the array of speakers as well as the friendly atmosphere at the event, where attendees sat around luncheon tables, talking and getting to know each other before and after the slate of talks.
“You guys actively and literally in 45 minutes have changed my view of what MIT is,” Paysinger said.
In his NFL career, Paysinger was a linebacker who played with the New York Giants, Miami Dolphins, and Carolina Panthers, from 2011 through 2017, appearing in 94 regular-season games and five playoff games. He saw action in Super Bowl XLVI, when the Giants beat the New England Patriots, 22-17, something he joked about a few times for his Massachusetts audience. Paysinger’s former New York Giants teammate, fellow linebacker Mark Herzlich, was also in attendance on Thursday.
Paysinger grew up in South Central Los Angeles, long perceived from the outside as a place of danger and deprivation. And while he experienced those things, Paysinger said, his home neighborhood also had its “all-American” side, as kids raced bikes down the block and grew to know each other. Paysinger attended Beverly Hills High School, starring as a wide receiver, then signed with the University of Oregon, where he converted to linebacker. Oregon and Paysinger reached college football’s national championship game in his senior season, 2010.
In his talk, Paysinger emphasized the twists and turns of his journey through football, from changing positions on the field to changing teams. He noted that, in sports as in life, moving beyond our comfort zone can help us thrive in the long run.
“I was scared, I wasn’t sure of myself, when my coaches decided to make that change for me,” Paysinger said. However, he added, “I knew that [from] leaning into the uncomfortableness of the moment, the other side could be greater for me.”
The NFL soon beckoned, along with a Super Bowl ring. But Paysinger received a jolt beyond the boundaries of sports in 2015, when his former Giants teammate and close friend Tyler Sash died suddently at age 27. Among other things, Paysinger began thinking about life after football more systematically and began his screenwriting efforts in earnest, even as his football career was still ongoing.
“All-American,” now entering its 7th season on the CW Network, is loosely based on his own background, capturing the dynamics of his experiences as a player and team member. It has become one of the longest-running sports-based shows on television. Paysinger is also an entrepreneur who founded Hilltop Kitchen and Coffee, a chain of eateries in underserved areas around Los Angeles, and has helped develop other local businesses as well.
And while every new venture is a fresh challenge, Paysinger said, we can often accomplish more than we realize: “I’m not coming from a mindset of deciding whether I can or can’t do something, but if I want to or not.”
Sophomore Michael Ewing provided welcoming remarks and introduced Paysinger. He read aloud a quote from King chosen as a central motif of this year’s celebration: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”
For his own part, Ewing said, “When I read these words, I think of a society that aspires to improve its circumstances, address existing issues, and create a more positive and just environment for all.” At MIT, Ewing added, there is “a community where students, professors, and others come together to achieve at the highest levels, united by a shared desire to learn and grow. … The process of collaborating, disagreeing, building with others who are different — this is the key to growth and development.”
The annual MLK Celebration featured further reflections from students, including second-year undergraduate Siddhu Pachipala, a political science and economics double-major. Pachipala began his remarks by recounting a social media exchange he once had with a congressional account, the tenor of which he soon regretted.
“Looking back, I think it was a missed opportunity,” Pachipala said. “Why was my first instinct … to turn it into a battle? … We train ourselves to believe that if we’re not scoring hits, we’re losing, and gestures of decency are traps, that an extended hand must be slapped away. Martin Luther King Jr. took politics to be something more substantial. He had a serious vision of justice, one we’ve gathered today to honor. But he knew that justice had a prerequisite: friendship.”
Elshareef Kabbashi, a graduate student in architecture, offered additional remarks, noting that “Dr. King’s dream was never confined to a single movement, nation, or moment in history,” but rather aimed at creating “human dignity everywhere.”
E. Denise Simmons, mayor of the City of Cambridge, also spoke, and lauded “the entire MIT community for keeping this tradition alive for 51 years.” She added: “It’s Dr. King’s wisdom, his courage, his moral clarity, that helped light the path forward. And I ask each of you to continue to shine that light.”
The luncheon included the presentation of the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Awards Recipients, given this year to Cordelia Price ’78, SM ’80; Pouya Alimagham; Ciarra Ortiz; Sahal Ahmed; William Gibbs; and Maxine Samuels.
On a day full of thoughts about King and his vision, Paysinger underscored the salience of community by highlighting another of his favorite King passages: “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
High-speed videos show what happens when a droplet splashes into a poolFindings may help predict how rain and irrigation systems launch particles and pathogens from watery surfaces, with implications for industry, agriculture, and public health.Rain can freefall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour. If the droplets land in a puddle or pond, they can form a crown-like splash that, with enough force, can dislodge any surface particles and launch them into the air.
Now MIT scientists have taken high-speed videos of droplets splashing into a deep pool, to track how the fluid evolves, above and below the water line, frame by millisecond frame. Their work could help to predict how spashing droplets, such as from rainstorms and irrigation systems, may impact watery surfaces and aerosolize surface particles, such as pollen on puddles or pesticides in agricultural runoff.
The team carried out experiments in which they dispensed water droplets of various sizes and from various heights into a pool of water. Using high-speed imaging, they measured how the liquid pool deformed as the impacting droplet hit the pool’s surface.
Across all their experiments, they observed a common splash evolution: As a droplet hit the pool, it pushed down below the surface to form a “crater,” or cavity. At nearly the same time, a wall of liquid rose above the surface, forming a crown. Interestingly, the team observed that small, secondary droplets were ejected from the crown before the crown reached its maximum height. This entire evolution happens in a fraction of a second.
Scientists have caught snapshots of droplet splashes in the past, such as the famous “Milk Drop Coronet” — a photo of a drop of milk in mid-splash, taken by the late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who invented a photographic technique to capture quickly moving objects.
The new work represents the first time scientists have used such high-speed images to model the entire splash dynamics of a droplet in a deep pool, combining what happens both above and below the surface. The team has used the imaging to gather new data central to build a mathematical model that predicts how a droplet’s shape will morph and merge as it hits a pool’s surface. They plan to use the model as a baseline to explore to what extent a splashing droplet might drag up and launch particles from the water pool.
“Impacts of drops on liquid layers are ubiquitous,” says study author Lydia Bourouiba, a professor in the MIT departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). “Such impacts can produce myriads of secondary droplets that could act as carriers for pathogens, particles, or microbes that are on the surface of impacted pools or contaminated water bodies. This work is key in enabling prediction of droplet size distributions, and potentially also what such drops can carry with them.”
Bourouiba and her mentees have published their results in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. MIT co-authors include former graduate student Raj Dandekar PhD ’22, postdoc (Eric) Naijian Shen, and student mentee Boris Naar.
Above and below
At MIT, Bourouiba heads up the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, part of the Fluids and Health Network, where she and her team explore the fundamental physics of fluids and droplets in a range of environmental, energy, and health contexts, including disease transmission. For their new study, the team looked to better understand how droplets impact a deep pool — a seemingly simple phenomenon that nevertheless has been tricky to precisely capture and characterize.
Bourouiba notes that there have been recent breakthroughs in modeling the evolution of a splashing droplet below a pool’s surface. As a droplet hits a pool of water, it breaks through the surface and drags air down through the pool to create a short-lived crater. Until now, scientists have focused on the evolution of this underwater cavity, mainly for applications in energy harvesting. What happens above the water, and how a droplet’s crown-like shape evolves with the cavity below, remained less understood.
“The descriptions and understanding of what happens below the surface, and above, have remained very much divorced,” says Bourouiba, who believes such an understanding can help to predict how droplets launch and spread chemicals, particles, and microbes into the air.
Splash in 3D
To study the coupled dynamics between a droplet’s cavity and crown, the team set up an experiment to dispense water droplets into a deep pool. For the purposes of their study, the researchers considered a deep pool to be a body of water that is deep enough that a splashing droplet would remain far away from the pool’s bottom. In these terms, they found that a pool with a depth of at least 20 centimeters was sufficient for their experiments.
They varied each droplet’s size, with an average diameter of about 5 millimeters. They also dispensed droplets from various heights, causing the droplets to hit the pool’s surface at different speeds, which on average was about 5 meters per second. The overall dynamics, Bourouiba says, should be similar to what occurs on the surface of a puddle or pond during an average rainstorm.
“This is capturing the speed at which raindrops fall,” she says. “These wouldn’t be very small, misty drops. This would be rainstorm drops for which one needs an umbrella.”
Using high-speed imaging techniques inspired by Edgerton’s pioneering photography, the team captured videos of pool-splashing droplets, at rates of up to 12,500 frames per second. They then applied in-house imaging processing methods to extract key measurements from the image sequences, such as the changing width and depth of the underwater cavity, and the evolving diameter and height of the rising crown. The researchers also captured especially tricky measurements, of the crown’s wall thickness profile and inner flow — the cylinder that rises out of the pool, just before it forms a rim and points that are characteristic of a crown.
“This cylinder-like wall of rising liquid, and how it evolves in time and space, is at the heart of everything,” Bourouiba says. “It’s what connects the fluid from the pool to what will go into the rim and then be ejected into the air through smaller, secondary droplets.”
The researchers worked the image data into a set of “evolution equations,” or a mathematical model that relates the various properties of an impacting droplet, such as the width of its cavity and the thickness and speed profiles of its crown wall, and how these properties change over time, given a droplet’s starting size and impact speed.
“We now have a closed-form mathematical expression that people can use to see how all these quantities of a splashing droplet change over space and time,” says co-author Shen, who plans, with Bourouiba, to apply the new model to the behavior of secondary droplets and understanding how a splash end-up dispersing particles such as pathogens and pesticides. “This opens up the possibility to study all these problems of splash in 3D, with self-contained closed-formed equations, which was not possible before.”
This research was supported, in part, by the Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative; the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; Inditex; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.