General news from the MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology University

MIT News
MIT News is dedicated to communicating to the media and the public the news and achievements of the students, faculty, staff and the greater MIT community.
Bryan Bryson: Engineering solutions to the tough problem of tuberculosis

By analyzing how Myobacterium tuberculosis interacts with the immune system, the associate professor hopes to find new vaccine targets to help eliminate the disease.

On his desk, Bryan Bryson ’07, PhD ’13 still has the notes he used for the talk he gave at MIT when he interviewed for a faculty position in biological engineering. On that sheet, he outlined the main question he wanted to address in his lab: How do immune cells kill bacteria?

Since starting his lab in 2018, Bryson has continued to pursue that question, which he sees as critical for finding new ways to target infectious diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries, especially tuberculosis. To make significant progress against TB, researchers need to understand how immune cells respond to the disease, he says.

“Here is a pathogen that has probably killed more people in human history than any other pathogen, so you want to learn how to kill it,” says Bryson, now an associate professor at MIT. “That has really been the core of our scientific mission since I started my lab. How does the immune system see this bacterium and how does the immune system kill the bacterium? If we can unlock that, then we can unlock new therapies and unlock new vaccines.”

The only TB vaccine now available, the BCG vaccine, is a weakened version of a bacterium that causes TB in cows. This vaccine is widely administered in some parts of the world, but it poorly protects adults against pulmonary TB. Although some treatments are available, tuberculosis still kills more than a million people every year.

“To me, making a better TB vaccine comes down to a question of measurement, and so we have really tried to tackle that problem head-on. The mission of my lab is to develop new measurement modalities and concepts that can help us accelerate a better TB vaccine,” says Bryson, who is also a member of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard.

From engineering to immunology

Engineering has deep roots in Bryson’s family: His great-grandfather was an engineer who worked on the Panama Canal, and his grandmother loved to build things and would likely have become an engineer if she had had the educational opportunity, Bryson says.

The oldest of four sons, Bryson was raised primarily by his mother and grandparents, who encouraged his interest in science. When he was three years old, his family moved from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Miami, Florida, where he began tinkering with engineering himself, building robots out of Styrofoam cups and light bulbs. After moving to Houston, Texas, at the beginning of seventh grade, Bryson joined his school’s math team.

As a high school student, Bryson had his heart set on studying biomedical engineering in college. However, MIT, one of his top choices, didn’t have a biomedical engineering program, and biological engineering wasn’t yet offered as an undergraduate major. After he was accepted to MIT, his family urged him to attend and then figure out what he would study.

Throughout his first year, Bryson deliberated over his decision, with electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and aeronautics and astronautics both leading contenders. As he recalls, he thought he might study aero/astro with a minor in biomedical engineering and work on spacesuit design.

However, during an internship the summer after his first year, his mentor gave him a valuable piece of advice: “You should study something that will let you have a lot of options, because you don’t know how the world is going to change.”

When he came back to MIT for his sophomore year, Bryson switched his major to mechanical engineering, with a bioengineering track. He also started looking for undergraduate research positions. A poster in the hallway grabbed his attention, and he ended up with working with the professor whose work was featured: Linda Griffith, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering.

Bryson’s experience in the lab “changed the trajectory of my life,” he says. There, he worked on building microfluidic devices that could be used to grow liver tissue from hepatocytes. He enjoyed the engineering aspects of the project, but he realized that he also wanted to learn more about the cells and why they behaved the way they did. He ended up staying at MIT to earn a PhD in biological engineering, working with Forest White.

In White’s lab, Bryson studied cell signaling processes and how they are altered in diseases such as cancer and diabetes. While doing his PhD research, he also became interested in studying infectious diseases. After earning his degree, he went to work with a professor of immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, Sarah Fortune.

Fortune studies tuberculosis, and in her lab, Bryson began investigating how Mycobacterium tuberculosis interacts with host cells. During that time, Fortune instilled in him a desire to seek solutions to tuberculosis that could be transformative — not just identifying a new antibiotic, for example, but finding a way to dramatically reduce the incidence of the disease. This, he thought, could be done by vaccination, and in order to do that, he needed to understand how immune cells response to the disease. 

“That postdoc really taught me how to think bravely about what you could do if you were not limited by the measurements you could make today,” Bryson says. “What are the problems we really need to solve? There are so many things you could think about with TB, but what’s the thing that’s going to change history?”

Pursuing vaccine targets

Since joining the MIT faculty eight years ago, Bryson and his students have developed new ways to answer the question he posed in his faculty interviews: How does the immune system kill bacteria?

One key step in this process is that immune cells must be able to recognize bacterial proteins that are displayed on the surfaces of infected cells. Mycobacterium tuberculosis produces more than 4,000 proteins, but only a small subset of those end up displayed by infected cells. Those proteins would likely make the best candidates for a new TB vaccine, Bryson says.

Bryson’s lab has developed ways to identify those proteins, and so far, their studies have revealed that many of the TB antigens displayed to the immune system belong to a class of proteins known as type 7 secretion system substrates. Mycobacterium tuberculosis expresses about 100 of these proteins, but which of these 100 are displayed by infected cells varies from person to person, depending on their genetic background.

By studying blood samples from people of different genetic backgrounds, Bryson’s lab has identified the TB proteins displayed by infected cells in about 50 percent of the human population. He is now working on the remaining 50 percent and believes that once those studies are finished, he’ll have a very good idea of which proteins could be used to make a TB vaccine that would work for nearly everyone.

Once those proteins are chosen, his team can work on designing the vaccine and then testing it in animals, with hopes of being ready for clinical trials in about six years.

In spite of the challenges ahead, Bryson remains optimistic about the possibility of success, and credits his mother for instilling a positive attitude in him while he was growing up.

“My mom decided to raise all four of her children by herself, and she made it look so flawless,” Bryson says. “She instilled a sense of ‘you can do what you want to do,’ and a sense of optimism. There are so many ways that you can say that something will fail, but why don’t we look to find the reasons to continue?”

One of the things he loves about MIT is that he has found a similar can-do attitude across the Institute.

“The engineer ethos of MIT is that yes, this is possible, and what we’re trying to find is the way to make this possible,” he says. “I think engineering and infectious disease go really hand-in-hand, because engineers love a problem, and tuberculosis is a really hard problem.”

When not tackling hard problems, Bryson likes to lighten things up with ice cream study breaks at Simmons Hall, where he is an associate head of house. Using an ice cream machine he has had since 2009, Bryson makes gallons of ice cream for dorm residents several times a year. Nontraditional flavors such as passion fruit or jalapeno strawberry have proven especially popular.

“Recently I did flavors of fall, so I did a cinnamon ice cream, I did a pear sorbet,” he says. “Toasted marshmallow was a huge hit, but that really destroyed my kitchen.”

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero wins BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award

MIT physicist shares 400,000-euro award for influential work on “magic-angle” graphene.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, has won the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for “discoveries concerning the ‘magic angle’ that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled.”

He shares the 400,000-euro award with Allan MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin. According to the BBVA Foundation, “the pioneering work of the two physicists has achieved both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a new field where superconductivity, magnetism, and other properties can be obtained by rotating new two-dimensional materials like graphene.” Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure.

Theoretical foundation, experimental validation

In a theoretical model published in 2011, MacDonald predicted that on twisting two graphene layers at a given angle, of around 1 degree, the interaction of electrons would produce new emerging properties.
 
In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero delivered the experimental confirmation of this “magic angle” by rotating two graphene sheets in a way that transformed the material’s behavior, giving rise to new properties like superconductivity.

The physicists’ work “has opened up new frontiers in physics by demonstrating that rotating matter to a given angle allows us to control its behavior, obtaining properties that could have a major industrial impact,” explained award committee member María José García Borge, a research professor at the Institute for the Structure of Matter. “Superconductivity, for example, could bring about far more sustainable electricity transmission, with virtually no energy loss.”

Almost science fiction

MacDonald’s initial discovery had little immediate impact. It was not until some years later, when it was confirmed in the laboratory by Jarillo-Herrero, that its true importance was revealed. 

“The community would never have been so interested in my subject, if there hadn’t been an experimental program that realized that original vision,” observes MacDonald, who refers to his co-laureate’s achievement as “almost science fiction.”

Jarillo-Herrero had been intrigued by the possible effects of placing two graphene sheets on top of each other with a precise rotational alignment, because “it was uncharted territory, beyond the reach of the physics of the past, so was bound to produce some interesting results.”

But the scientist was still unsure of how to make it work in the lab. For years, he had been stacking together layers of the super-thin material, but without being able to specify the angle between them. Finally, he devised a way to do so, making the angle smaller and smaller until he got to the “magic” angle of 1.1 degrees at which the graphene revealed some extraordinary behavior.

“It was a big surprise, because the technique we used, though conceptually straightforward, was hard to pull off in the lab,” says Jarillo-Herrero, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory.

Since 2009, the BBVA has given Frontiers of Knowledge Awards to more than a dozen MIT faculty members. 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. The BBVA Foundation works to support scientific research and cultural creation, disseminate knowledge and culture, and recognize talent and innovation. 

Cancer’s secret safety net

Researchers uncover a hidden mechanism that allows cancer to develop aggressive mutations.

Researchers in Class of 1942 Professor of Chemistry Matthew D. Shoulders’ lab have uncovered a sinister hidden mechanism that can allow cancer cells to survive (and, in some cases, thrive) even when hit with powerful drugs. The secret lies in a cellular “safety net” that gives cancer the freedom to develop aggressive mutations.

This fascinating intersection between molecular biology and evolutionary dynamics, published Jan. 22 on the cover of Molecular Cell, focuses on the most famous anti-cancer gene in the human body, TP53 (tumor protein 53, known as p53), and suggests that cancer cells don’t just mutate by accident — they create a specialized environment that makes dangerous mutations possible. 

The guardian under attack

Tasked with the job of stopping damaged cells from dividing, the p53 protein has been known for decades as the “guardian of the genome” and is the most mutated gene in cancer. Some of the most perilous of these mutations are known as “dominant-negative” variants. Not only do they stop working, but they actually prevent any healthy p53 in the cell from doing its job, essentially disarming the body’s primary defense system.

To function, p53 and most other proteins must fold into specific 3D shapes, much like precise cellular origami. Typically, if a mutation occurs that ruins this shape, the protein becomes a tangled mess, and the cell destroys it.

A specialized network of proteins, called cellular chaperones, help proteins fold into their correct shape, collectively known as the proteostasis network. 

“Many chaperone networks are known to be upregulated in cancer cells, for reasons that are not totally clear,” says Stephanie Halim, a graduate student in the Shoulders Group and co-first author of the study, along with Rebecca Sebastian PhD ’22. “We hypothesized that increasing the activities of these helpful protein folding networks can allow cancer cells to tolerate more mutations than a regular cell.”

The research team investigated a “helper” system in the cell called the proteostasis network. This network involves many proteins known as chaperones that help other proteins fold correctly. A master regulator called Heat Shock Factor 1 (HSF1) controls the composition of the proteostasis network, with HSF1 activity upregulating the network to create supportive protein folding environments in response to stress. In healthy cells, HSF1 stays dormant until heat or toxins appear. In cancer, HSF1 is often permanently in action mode.

To see how this works in real-time, the team created a specialized cancer cell line that let them chemically “turn up” the activity of HSF1 on demand. They then used a cutting-edge technique to express every possible singly mutated version of a p53 protein — testing thousands of different genetic “typos” at once.

The results were clear: When HSF1 was amplified, the cancer cells became much better at handling “bad” mutations. Normally, these specific mutations are so physically disruptive that they would cause the protein to collapse and fail. However, with HSF1 providing extra folding help, these unstable, cancer-driving proteins were able to stay intact and keep the cancer growing.

“These findings show that chaperone networks can reshape the fundamental mutational tolerance of the most mutated gene in cancer, linking proteostasis network activity directly to cancer development,” said Halim. “This work also puts us one step closer to understanding how tinkering with cellular protein folding pathways can help with cancer treatment.”

Unravelling cancer’s safety net

The study revealed that HSF1 activity specifically protects normally disruptive amino acid substitutions located deep inside the protein’s core — the most sensitive areas. Without this extra folding help, these substitutions would likely cause degradation of these proteins. With it, the cancer cell can keep these broken proteins around to help it grow.

This discovery helps explain why cancer is so resilient, and why previous attempts to treat cancer by blocking chaperone proteins (like HSP90, an abundant cellular chaperone) have been so complex. By understanding how cancer “buffers” its own bad mutations, doctors may one day be able to break that safety net, forcing the cancer’s own mutations to become its downfall.

The research was conducted in collaboration with the labs of professors Yu-Shan Lin of Tufts University; Francisco J. Sánchez-Rivera of the MIT Department of Biology; William C. Hahn, institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor of medicine in the Department of Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School; and Marc L. Mendillo of Northwestern University.

Richard Hynes, a pioneer in the biology of cellular adhesion, dies at 81

Professor, mentor, and leader at MIT for more than 50 years shaped fundamental understandings of cell adhesion, the extracellular matrix, and molecular mechanisms of metastasis.

MIT Professor Emeritus Richard O. Hynes PhD ’71, a cancer biologist whose discoveries reshaped modern understandings of how cells interact with each other and their environment, passed away on Jan. 6. He was 81.

Hynes is best known for his discovery of integrins, a family of cell-surface receptors essential to cell–cell and cell–matrix adhesion. He played a critical role in establishing the field of cell adhesion biology, and his continuing research revealed mechanisms central to embryonic development, tissue integrity, and diseases including cancer, fibrosis, thrombosis, and immune disorders.

Hynes was the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, Emeritus, an emeritus professor of biology, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. During his more than 50 years on the faculty at MIT, he was deeply respected for his academic leadership at the Institute and internationally, as well as his intellectual rigor and contributions as an educator and mentor.

“Richard had an enormous impact in his career. He was a visionary leader of the MIT Cancer Center, what is now the Koch Institute, during a time when the progress in understanding cancer was just starting to be translated into new therapies,” reflects Matthew Vander Heiden, director of the Koch Institute and the Lester Wolfe (1919) Professor of Molecular Biology. “The research from his laboratory launched an entirely new field by defining the molecules that mediate interactions between cells and between cells and their environment. This laid the groundwork for better understanding the immune system and metastasis.”

Pond skipper

Born in Kenya, Hynes grew up during the 1950s in Liverpool, in the United Kingdom. While he sometimes recounted stories of being schoolmates with two of the Beatles, and in the same Boy Scouts troop as Paul McCartney, his academic interests were quite different, and he specialized in the sciences at a young age. Both of his parents were scientists: His father was a freshwater ecologist, and his mother a physics teacher. Hynes and all three of his siblings followed their parents into scientific fields.

"We talked science at home, and if we asked questions, we got questions back, not answers. So that conditioned me into being a scientist, for sure," Hynes said of his youth.

He described his time as an undergraduate and master’s student at Cambridge University during the 1960s as “just fantastic,” noting that it was shortly after two 1962 Nobel Prizes were awarded to Cambridge researchers — one to Francis Crick and James Watson for the structure of DNA, the other to John Kendrew and Max Perutz for the structures of proteins — and Cambridge was “the place to be” to study biology.

Newly married, Hynes and his wife traded Cambridge, U.K. for Cambridge, Massachusetts, so that he could conduct doctoral work at MIT under the direction of Paul Gross. He tried (and by his own assessment, failed) to differentiate maternal messages among the three germ layers of sea urchin embryos. However, he did make early successful attempts to isolate the globular protein tubulin, a building block for essential cellular structures, from sea urchins.

Inspired by a course he had taken with Watson in the United States, Hynes began work during his postdoc at the Institute of Cancer Research in the U.K. on the early steps of oncogenic transformation and the role of cell migration and adhesion; it was here that he made his earliest discovery and characterizations of the fibronectin protein.

Recruited back to MIT by Salvador Luria, founding director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research, whom he had met during a summer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, Hynes returned to the Institute in 1975 as a founding faculty member of the center and an assistant professor in the Department of Biology.

Big questions about tiny cells

To his own research, Hynes brought the same spirit of inquiry that had characterized his upbringing, asking fundamental questions: How do cells interact with each other? How do they stick together to form tissues?

His research focused on proteins that allow cells to adhere to each other and to the extracellular matrix — a mesh-like network that surrounds cells, providing structural support, as well as biochemical and mechanical cues from the local microenvironment. These proteins include integrins, a type of cell surface receptor, and fibronectins, a family of extracellular adhesive proteins. Integrins are the major adhesion receptors connecting the extracellular matrix to the intracellular cytoskeleton, or main architectural support within the cell.

Hynes began his career as a developmental biologist, studying how cells move to the correct locations during embryonic development. During this stage of development, proper modulation of cell adhesion is critical for cells to move to the correct locations in the embryo.

Hynes’ work also revealed that dysregulation of cell-to-matrix contact plays an important role in cancer cells’ ability to detach from a tumor and spread to other parts of the body, key steps in metastasis.

As a postdoc, Hynes had begun studying the differences in the surface landscapes of healthy cells and tumor cells. It was this work that led to the discovery of fibronectin, which is often lost when cells become cancerous.

He and others found that fibronectin is an important part of the extracellular matrix. When fibronectin is lost, cancer cells can more easily free themselves from their original location and metastasize to other sites in the body. By studying how fibronectin normally interacts with cells, Hynes and others discovered a family of cell surface receptors known as integrins, which function as important physical links with the extracellular matrix. In humans, 24 integrin proteins have been identified. These proteins help give tissues their structure, enable blood to clot, and are essential for embryonic development.

“Richard’s discoveries, along with others’, of cell surface integrins led to the development of a number of life-altering treatments. Among these are treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis,” notes longtime colleague Phillip Sharp, MIT Institute professor emeritus.

As research technologies advanced, including proteomic and extracellular matrix isolation methods developed directly in Hynes’ laboratory, he and his group were able to uncover increasingly detailed information about specific cell adhesion proteins, the biological mechanisms by which they operate, and the roles they play in normal biology and disease.

In cancer, their work helped to uncover how cell adhesion (and the loss thereof) and the extracellular matrix contribute not only to fundamental early steps in the metastatic process, but also tumor progression, therapeutic response, and patient prognosis. This included studies that mapped matrix protein signatures associated with cancer and non-cancer cells and tissues, followed by investigations into how differentially expressed matrix proteins can promote or suppress cancer progression. 

Hynes and his colleagues also demonstrated how extracellular matrix composition can influence immunotherapy, such as the importance of a family of cell adhesion proteins called selectins for recruiting natural killer cells to tumors. Further, Hynes revealed links between fibronectin, integrins, and other matrix proteins with tumor angiogenesis, or blood vessel development, and also showed how interaction with platelets can stimulate tumor cells to remodel the extracellular matrix to support invasion and metastasis. In pursuing these insights into the oncogenic mechanisms of matrix proteins, Hynes and members of his laboratory have identified useful diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers, as well as therapeutic targets.

Along the way, Hynes shaped not only the research field, but also the careers of generations of trainees.

“There was much to emulate in Richard’s gentle, patient, and generous approach to mentorship. He centered the goals and interests of his trainees, fostered an inclusive and intellectually rigorous environment, and cared deeply about the well-being of his lab members. Richard was a role model for integrity in both personal and professional interactions and set high expectations for intellectual excellence,” recalls Noor Jailkhani, a former Hynes Lab postdoc.

Jailkhani is CEO and co-founder, with Hynes, of Matrisome Bio, a biotech company developing first-in-class targeted therapies for cancer and fibrosis by leveraging the extracellular matrix. “The impact of his long and distinguished scientific career was magnified through the generations of trainees he mentored, whose influence spans academia and the biotechnology industry worldwide. I believe that his dedication to mentorship stands among his most far-reaching and enduring contributions,” she says.

A guiding light

Widely sought for his guidance, Hynes served in a number of key roles at MIT and in the broader scientific community. As head of MIT’s Department of Biology from 1989 to 1991, then a decade as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research, his leadership has helped shape the Institute’s programs in both areas.

“Words can’t capture what a fabulous human being Richard was. I left every interaction with him with new insights and the warm glow that comes from a good conversation,” says Amy Keating, the Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor, professor of biology and biological engineering, and head of the Department of Biology. “Richard was happy to share stories, perspectives, and advice, always with a twinkle in his eye that conveyed his infinite interest in and delight with science, scientists, and life itself. The calm support that he offered me, during my years as department head, meant a lot and helped me do my job with confidence.”

Hynes served as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research from 1991 until 2001, positioning the center’s distinguished cancer biology program for expansion into its current, interdisciplinary research model as MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “He recruited and strongly supported Tyler Jacks to the faculty, who subsequently became director and headed efforts to establish the Koch Institute,” recalls Sharp.

Jacks, a David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology and founding director of the Koch Institute, remembers Hynes as a thoughtful, caring, and highly effective leader in the Center for Cancer Research, or CCR, and in the Department of Biology. “I was fortunate to be able to lean on him when I took over as CCR director. He encouraged me to drop in — unannounced — with questions and concerns, which I did regularly. I learned a great deal from Richard, at every level,” he says.

Hynes’ leadership and recognition extended well beyond MIT to national and international contexts, helping to shape policy and strengthen connections between MIT researchers and the wider field. He served as a scientific governor of the Wellcome Trust, a global health research and advocacy foundation based in the United Kingdom, and co-chaired U.S. National Academy committees establishing guidelines for stem cell and genome editing research.

“Richard was an esteemed scientist, a stimulating colleague, a beloved mentor, a role model, and to me a partner in many endeavors both within and beyond MIT,” notes H. Robert Horvitz, a David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology. He was a wonderful human being, and a good friend. I am sad beyond words at his passing.”

Awarded Howard Hughes medical investigator status in 1988, Hynes’ research and leadership have since been recognized with a number of other notable honors. Most recently, he received the 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, which he shared with Erkki Ruoslahti of Sanford Burnham Prebys and Timothy Springer of Harvard University, for his discovery of integrins and pioneering work in cell adhesion.

His other awards include the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Distinguished Investigator Award from the International Society for Matrix Biology, the Robert and Claire Pasarow Medical Research Award, the E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology, the David Rall Medal from the National Academy of Medicine and the Paget-Ewing Award from the Metastasis Research Society. Hynes was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the Royal Society of London, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Easily recognized by a commanding stature that belied his soft-spoken nature, Hynes was known around MIT’s campus not only for his acuity, integrity, and wise counsel, but also for his community spirit and service. From serving food at community socials to moderating events and meetings or recognizing the success of colleagues and trainees, his willingness to help spanned roles of every size.

“Richard was a phenomenal friend and colleague. He approached complex problems with a thoughtfulness and clarity that few can achieve,” notes Vander Heiden. “He was also so generous in his willingness to provide help and advice, and did so with a genuine kindness that was appreciated by everyone.”

Hynes is survived by his wife Fleur, their sons Hugh and Colin and their partners, and four grandchildren.

Biology-based brain model matches animals in learning, enables new discovery

New “biomimetic” model of brain circuits and function at multiple scales produced naturalistic dynamics and learning, and even identified curious behavior by some neurons.



Akorfa Dagadu named 2027 Schwarzman Scholar

The MIT senior will spend the 2026-27 year at Tsinghua University in Beijing, studying global affairs.

MIT undergraduate Akorfa Dagadu has been named a Schwarzman Scholar and will join the program’s Class of 2026-27 scholars from 40 countries and 83 universities. This year’s 150 Schwarzman Scholars were selected for their leadership potential from a pool of over 5,800 applicants, the highest number in the Schwarzman Scholarship’s 11-year history.

Schwarzman Scholars pursue a one-year, fully funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China. The graduate curriculum focuses on the pillars of leadership, global affairs, and China, with additional opportunities for cultural immersion, experiential learning, and professional development. The program aims to build a global network of leaders with a well-rounded understanding of China’s evolving role in the world.

Hailing from Ghana, Dagadu is a senior majoring in chemical-biological engineering. At MIT, she researches how enzyme-polymer systems can be designed to break down plastics at end-of-life, work that has been recognized internationally through publications and awards, including the CellPress Rising Scientist Award.

Dagadu is the founder of Ishara, a venture transforming recycling in Ghana by connecting informal waste pickers to transparent, efficient systems with potential to scale across growth markets. She aspires to establish a materials innovation hub in Africa to address the end-of-life of materials, from plastics to e-waste.

MIT’s Schwarzman Scholar applicants receive guidance and mentorship from the distinguished fellowships team in MIT Career Advising and Professional Development, as well as the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. Students and alumni interested in learning more should contact Kimberly Benard, associate dean and director of distinguished fellowships and academic excellence.

Featured video: How tiny satellites help us track hurricanes and other weather events

Mini microwave sounders developed at Lincoln Laboratory, demonstrated on a NASA mission, and now transferred to industry, are expanding storm-forecasting capabilities.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has transformed weather intelligence by miniaturizing microwave sounders, instruments that measure Earth's atmospheric temperature, moisture, and water vapor. These instruments are 1/100th the size of traditional sounders aboard multibillion-dollar satellites, enabling them to fit on shoebox-sized CubeSats. 

When deployed in a constellation, the CubeSats can observe rapidly intensifying storms near-hourly — providing fresh data to forecasting professionals during critical windows of storm development that have largely been undetectable by past remote-sensing technology.

Developed at Lincoln Laboratory, the mini microwave sounders were first demonstrated on NASA's TROPICS mission, which measured temperature and humidity soundings as well as precipitation. TROPICS concluded in 2025 with over 11 billion observations, providing scientists with key insights into tropical cyclone evolution. 

Now the technology has been licensed by the commercial firm Tomorrow.io, allowing for the enhancement of global weather coverage for customers in aviation, logistics, agriculture, and emergency management. Tomorrow.io provides clients with hyperlocal forecasts around the globe and is set to launch their own constellation of satellites based on the TROPICS program. Says John Springman, Tomorrow.io's head of space and sensing: “Our overall goal is to fundamentally improve weather forecasts, and that'll improve our downstream products like our weather intelligence.”

Video by Tim Briggs/Lincoln Laboratory | 13 minutes, 58 seconds

Professor of the practice Robert Liebeck, leading expert on aircraft design, dies at 87

A giant in aviation, Liebeck had taught at MIT since 2000 and was a pioneer in the famed Blended-Wing Body experimental aircraft.

Robert Liebeck, a professor of the practice in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and one of the world’s leading experts on aircraft design, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics, died on Jan. 12 at age 87.

“Bob was a mentor and dear friend to so many faculty, alumni, and researchers at AeroAstro over the course of 25 years,” says Julie Shah, department head and the H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “He’ll be deeply missed by all who were fortunate enough to know him.”

Liebeck’s long and distinguished career in aerospace engineering included a number of foundational contributions to aerodynamics and aircraft design, beginning with his graduate research into high-lift airfoils. His novel designs came to be known as “Liebeck airfoils” and are used primarily for high-altitude reconnaissance airplanes; Liebeck airfoils have also been adapted for use in Formula One racing cars, racing sailboats, and even a flying replica of a giant pterosaur.

He was perhaps best known for his groundbreaking work on blended wing body (BWB) aircraft. He oversaw the BWB project at Boeing during his celebrated five-decade tenure at the company, working closely with NASA on the X-48 experimental aircraft. After retiring as senior technical fellow at Boeing in 2020, Liebeck remained active in BWB research. He served as technical advisor at BWB startup JetZero, which is aiming to build a more fuel-efficient aircraft for both military and commercial use and has set a target date of 2027 for its demonstration flight. 

Liebeck was appointed a professor of the practice at MIT in 2000, and taught classes on aircraft design and aerodynamics. 

“Bob contributed to the department both in aircraft capstones and also in advising students and mentoring faculty, including myself,” says John Hansman, the T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “In addition to aviation, Bob was very significant in car racing and developed the downforce wing and flap system which has become standard on F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR cars.”

He was a major contributor to the Silent Aircraft Project, a collaboration between MIT and Cambridge University led by Dame Ann Dowling. Liebeck also worked closely with Professor Woody Hoburg ’08 and his research group, advising on students’ research into efficient methods for designing aerospace vehicles. Before Hoburg was accepted into the NASA astronaut corps in 2017, the group produced an open-source Python package, GPkit, for geometric programming, which was used to design a five-day endurance unmanned aerial vehicle for the U.S. Air Force.

“Bob was universally respected in aviation and he was a good friend to the department,” remembers Professor Ed Greitzer.

Liebeck was an AIAA honorary fellow and Boeing senior technical fellow, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Royal Aeronautical Society, and Academy of Model Aeronautics. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Medal and ASME Spirit of St. Louis Medal, among many other awards, and was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame.

An avid runner and motorcyclist, Liebeck is remembered by friends and colleagues for his adventurous nature and generosity of spirit. Throughout a career punctuated by honors and achievements, Liebeck found his greatest satisfaction in teaching. In addition to his role at MIT, he was an adjunct faculty member at University of California at Irving and served as faculty member for that university’s Design/Build/Fly and Human-Powered Airplane teams.

“It is the one job where I feel I have done some good — even after a bad lecture,” he told AeroAstro Magazine in 2007. “I have decided that I am finally beginning to understand aeronautical engineering, and I want to share that understanding with our youth.”

Electrifying boilers to decarbonize industry

AtmosZero, co-founded by Addison Stark SM ’10, PhD ’14, developed a modular heat pump to electrify the centuries-old steam boiler.

More than 200 years ago, the steam boiler helped spark the Industrial Revolution. Since then, steam has been the lifeblood of industrial activity around the world. Today the production of steam — created by burning gas, oil, or coal to boil water — accounts for a significant percentage of global energy use in manufacturing, powering the creation of paper, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food, and more.

Now, the startup AtmosZero, founded by Addison Stark SM ’10, PhD ’14; Todd Bandhauer; and Ashwin Salvi, is taking a new approach to electrify the centuries-old steam boiler. The company has developed a modular heat pump capable of delivering industrial steam at temperatures up to 150 degrees Celsius to serve as a drop-in replacement for combustion boilers.

The company says its first 1-megawatt steam system is far cheaper to operate than commercially available electric solutions thanks to ultra-efficient compressor technology, which uses 50 percent less electricity than electric resistive boilers. The founders are hoping that’s enough to make decarbonized steam boilers drive the next industrial revolution.

“Steam is the most important working fluid ever,” says Stark, who serves as AtmosZero’s CEO. “Today everything is built around the ubiquitous availability of steam. Cost-effectively electrifying that requires innovation that can scale. In other words, it requires a mass-produced product — not one-off projects.”

Tapping into steam

Stark joined the Technology and Policy Program when he came to MIT in 2007. He ultimately completed a dual master’s degree by adding mechanical engineering to his studies.

“I was interested in the energy transition and in accelerating solutions to enable that,” Stark says. “The transition isn’t happening in a vacuum. You need to align economics, policy, and technology to drive that change.”

Stark stayed at MIT to earn his PhD in mechanical engineering, studying thermochemical biofuels.

After MIT, Stark began working on early-stage energy technologies with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency— Energy (ARPA-E), with a focus on manufacturing efficiency, the energy-water nexus, and electrification.

“Part of that work involved applying my training at MIT to things that hadn’t really been innovated on for 50 years,” Stark says. “I was looking at the heat exchanger. It’s so fundamental. I thought, ‘How might we reimagine it in the context of modern advances in manufacturing technology?’”

The problem is as difficult as it is consequential, touching nearly every corner of the global industrial economy. More than 2.2 gigatons of CO₂ emissions are generated each year to turn water into steam — accounting for more than 5 percent of global energy-related emissions.

In 2020, Stark co-authored an article in the journal Joule with Gregory Thiel SM ’12, PhD ’15 titled, “To decarbonize industry, we must decarbonize heat.” The article examined opportunities for industrial heat decarbonization, and it got Stark excited about the potential impact of a standardized, scalable electric heat pump.

Most electric boiler options today bring huge increases in operating costs. Many also make use of factory waste heat, which requires pricey retrofits. Stark never imagined he’d become an entrepreneur, but he soon realized no one was going to act on his findings for him.

“The only path to seeing this invention brought out into the world was to found and run the company,” Stark says. “It’s something I didn’t anticipate or necessarily want, but here I am.”

Stark partnered with former ARPA-E awardee Todd Bandhauer, who had been inventing new refrigerant compressor technology in his lab at Colorado State University, and former ARPA-E colleague Ashwin Salvi. The team officially founded AtmosZero in 2022.

“The compressor is the engine of the heat pump and defines the efficiency, cost, and performance,” Stark says. “The fundamental challenge of delivering heat is that the higher your heat pump is raising the air temperature, the lower your maximum efficiency. It runs into thermodynamic limitations. By designing for optimum efficiency in the operational windows that matter for the refrigerants we’re using, and for the precision manufacturing of our compressors, we’re able to maximize the individual stages of compression to maximize operational efficiency.”

The system can work with waste heat from air or water, but it doesn’t need waste heat to work. Many other electric boilers rely on waste heat, but Stark thinks that adds too much complexity to installation and operations.

Instead, in AtmosZero’s novel heat pump cycle, heat from ambient-temperature air is used to warm a liquid heat transfer material, which evaporates a refrigerant so it flows into the system’s series of compressors and heat exchangers, reaching high enough temperatures to boil water while recovering heat from the refrigerant once it reaches lower temperatures. The system can be ramped up and down to seamlessly fit into existing industrial processes.

“We can work just like a combustion boiler,” Stark says. “At the end of the day, customers don’t want to change how their manufacturing facilities operate in order to electrify. You can’t change or increase complexity on-site.”

That approach means the boiler can be deployed in a range of industrial contexts without unique project costs or other changes.

“What we really offer is flexibility and something that can drop in with ease and minimize total capital costs,” Stark says.

From 1 to 1,000

AtmosZero already has a pilot 650 kilowatt system operating at a customer facility near its headquarters in Loveland, Colorado. The company is currently focused on demonstrating year-round durability and reliability of the system as they work to build out their backlog of orders and prepare to scale. 

Stark says once the system is brought to a customer’s facility, it can be installed in an afternoon and deployed in a matter of days, with zero downtime.

AtmosZero is aiming to deliver a handful of units to customers over the next year or two, with plans to deploy hundreds of units a year after that. The company is currently targeting manufacturing plants using under 10 megawatts of thermal energy at peak demand, which represents most U.S. manufacturing facilities.

Stark is proud to be part of a growing group of MIT-affiliated decarbonization startups, some of which are targeting specific verticals, like Boston Metal for steel and Sublime Systems for cement. But he says beyond the most common materials, the industry gets very fragmented, with one of the only common threads being the use of steam.

“If we look across industrial segments, we see the ubiquity of steam,” Stark says. “It’s a tremendously ripe opportunity to have impact at scale. Steam cannot be removed from industry. So much of every industrial process that we’ve designed over the last 160 years has been around the availability of steam. So, we need to focus on ways to deliver low-emissions steam rather than removing it from the equation.”

Why it’s critical to move beyond overly aggregated machine-learning metrics

New research detects hidden evidence of mistaken correlations — and provides a method to improve accuracy.

MIT researchers have identified significant examples of machine-learning model failure when those models are applied to data other than what they were trained on, raising questions about the need to test whenever a model is deployed in a new setting.

“We demonstrate that even when you train models on large amounts of data, and choose the best average model, in a new setting this ‘best model’ could be the worst model for 6-75 percent of the new data,” says Marzyeh Ghassemi, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.

In a paper that was presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025) conference in December, the researchers point out that models trained to effectively diagnose illness in chest X-rays at one hospital, for example, may be considered effective in a different hospital, on average. The researchers’ performance assessment, however, revealed that some of the best-performing models at the first hospital were the worst-performing on up to 75 percent of patients at the second hospital, even though when all patients are aggregated in the second hospital, high average performance hides this failure.

Their findings demonstrate that although spurious correlations — a simple example of which is when a machine-learning system, not having “seen” many cows pictured at the beach, classifies a photo of a beach-going cow as an orca simply because of its background — are thought to be mitigated by just improving model performance on observed data, they actually still occur and remain a risk to a model’s trustworthiness in new settings. In many instances — including areas examined by the researchers such as chest X-rays, cancer histopathology images, and hate speech detection — such spurious correlations are much harder to detect.

In the case of a medical diagnosis model trained on chest X-rays, for example, the model may have learned to correlate a specific and irrelevant marking on one hospital’s X-rays with a certain pathology. At another hospital where the marking is not used, that pathology could be missed.

Previous research by Ghassemi’s group has shown that models can spuriously correlate such factors as age, gender, and race with medical findings. If, for instance, a model has been trained on more older people’s chest X-rays that have pneumonia and hasn’t “seen” as many X-rays belonging to younger people, it might predict that only older patients have pneumonia.

“We want models to learn how to look at the anatomical features of the patient and then make a decision based on that,” says Olawale Salaudeen, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, “but really anything that’s in the data that’s correlated with a decision can be used by the model. And those correlations might not actually be robust with changes in the environment, making the model predictions unreliable sources of decision-making.”

Spurious correlations contribute to the risks of biased decision-making. In the NeurIPS conference paper, the researchers showed that, for example, chest X-ray models that improved overall diagnosis performance actually performed worse on patients with pleural conditions or enlarged cardiomediastinum, meaning enlargement of the heart or central chest cavity.

Other authors of the paper included PhD students Haoran Zhang and Kumail Alhamoud, EECS Assistant Professor Sara Beery, and Ghassemi.

While previous work has generally accepted that models ordered best-to-worst by performance will preserve that order when applied in new settings, called accuracy-on-the-line, the researchers were able to demonstrate examples of when the best-performing models in one setting were the worst-performing in another.

Salaudeen devised an algorithm called OODSelect to find examples where accuracy-on-the-line was broken. Basically, he trained thousands of models using in-distribution data, meaning the data were from the first setting, and calculated their accuracy. Then he applied the models to the data from the second setting. When those with the highest accuracy on the first-setting data were wrong when applied to a large percentage of examples in the second setting, this identified the problem subsets, or sub-populations. Salaudeen also emphasizes the dangers of aggregate statistics for evaluation, which can obscure more granular and consequential information about model performance.

In the course of their work, the researchers separated out the “most miscalculated examples” so as not to conflate spurious correlations within a dataset with situations that are simply difficult to classify.

The NeurIPS paper releases the researchers’ code and some identified subsets for future work.

Once a hospital, or any organization employing machine learning, identifies subsets on which a model is performing poorly, that information can be used to improve the model for its particular task and setting. The researchers recommend that future work adopt OODSelect in order to highlight targets for evaluation and design approaches to improving performance more consistently.

“We hope the released code and OODSelect subsets become a steppingstone,” the researchers write, “toward benchmarks and models that confront the adverse effects of spurious correlations.”

To flexibly organize thought, the brain makes use of space

MIT researchers tested their theory of spatial computing, which holds that the brain recruits and controls ad hoc groups of neurons for cognitive tasks by applying brain waves to patches of the cortex.



A new way to “paint with light” to create radiant, color-changing items

“MorphoChrome,” developed at MIT, pairs software with a handheld device to make everyday objects iridescent.

Gemstones like precious opal are beautiful to look at and deceivingly complex. As you look at such gems from different angles, you’ll see a variety of tints glisten, causing you to question what color the rock actually is. It’s iridescent thanks to something called structural color — microscopic structures that reflect light to produce radiant hues.

Structural color can be found across different organisms in nature, such as on the tails of peacocks and the wings of certain butterflies. Scientists and artists have been working to replicate this quality, but outside of the lab, it’s still very hard to recreate, causing a barrier to on-demand, customizable fabrication. Instead, companies and individual designers alike have resorted to adding existing color-changing objects like feathers and gems to things like personal items, clothes, and artwork.

Now MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have replicated nature’s brilliance with a new optical system called “MorphoChrome.” MorphoChrome allows users to design and program iridescence onto everyday objects (like a glove, for example), augmenting them with the structurally colored multi-color glimmer reminiscent of many gemstones. You select particular colors from a color wheel in the team’s software program and use their handheld device to “paint” with multi-color light onto holographic film. Then, you apply that painted sheet to 3D-printed objects or flexible substrates such as fashion items, sporting goods, and other personal accessories, using their unique epoxy resin transfer process.

“We wanted to tap into the innate intelligence of nature,” says MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL researcher Paris Myers SM ’25, who is a lead author on a recent paper presenting MorphoChrome. “In the past, you couldn’t easily synthesize structural color yourself, but using pigments or dyes gave you full creative expression. With our system, you have full creative agency over this new material space, predictably programming iridescent designs in real-time.”

MorphoChrome showed it could add a luminous touch to things like a necklace charm of a butterfly. What started as a static, black accessory became a shiny pendant with green, orange, and blue glimmers, thanks to the system’s programmable color process. MorphoChrome also turned golfing gloves into beginner-friendly training equipment that shine green when you hold a golf club at the correct angle, and even helped one user adorn their fingernails with a gemstone-like look.

These multi-color displays are the result of a handheld fabrication process where MorphoChrome acts as a “brush" to paint with red-green-blue (RGB) laser light, while a holographic photopolymer film (used for things like passports and debit cards) is the canvas. Users first connect the system’s handheld device to a computer via a USB-C port, then open the software program. They can then click “send color” to rapidly transmit different hues from their laptop or home computer to the MorphoChrome hardware tool.

This handheld device transforms the colors on a screen into a controllable, multi-color RGB laser light output that instantly exposes the film, a sort of canvas where users can explore different combinations of hues. About the size of a glue bottle, MorphoChrome’s optical machine houses red, green, and blue lasers, which are activated at various intensities depending on the color chosen. These lights are reflected off mirrors toward an optical prism, where the colors mix and are promptly released as a single combined beam of light. 

After designing the film, one can fabricate diverse structurally colored objects by first coating a chosen object with a thin layer of epoxy resin. Next, the holographic film (litiholographics) — composed of a photopolymer layer and a protective plastic backing — is bonded to the object through a 20-second ultraviolet cure, essentially using a handheld UV light to transfer the colored design onto the surface. Finally, users peel off the film’s protective plastic sheet, revealing a color-changing, structurally-colored object that looks like a jewel. 

Do try this at home

MorphoChrome is surprisingly user-friendly, consisting of a straightforward fabrication blueprint and an easy-to-use device that encourages do-it-yourself designers and other makers to explore iridescent designs at home. Instead of spending time searching for hard-to-find artistic materials or chemically synthesizing structural color in the lab, users can focus on expressing various ideas and experimenting with programming different radiant color mixes.

The array of possible colors stems from intriguing fusions. Nagenta, for instance, is created after the system’s blue and red lasers mix. Selecting cyan on the MorphoChrome software’s color wheel will mix the green and blue lights.

Users should note that the time it takes to fully expose the film to each color will vary, based on the researchers’ multi-color findings and the intrinsic properties of holographic photopolymer film. MorphoChrome activates green in 2.5 seconds, whereas red takes about 3 seconds, and blue needs roughly 6 seconds to saturate. The reason for this discrepancy is that each color is a particular wavelength of light, requiring a certain level of light exposure (blue needing more than green or red).

Look at this hologram

MorphoChrome builds upon previous work on stretchable structural color by co-author Benjamin Miller PhD ’24, Professor Mathias Kolle, and Kolle’s Laboratory for Biologically Inspired Photonic Engineering group at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. The CSAIL researchers, who work in the Human-Computer Interaction Engineering Group, say that MorphoChrome also advances their ongoing work on merging computation with unique materials to create dynamic, programmable color interfaces. 

Going forward, their goal is to push the capabilities of holographic structural color as a reprogrammable design and manufacturing space, empowering individuals and industries alike to customize iridescent and diffuse multi-color interfaces. “The polymer sheet we went with here is holographic, which has potential beyond what we’re showing here,” says co-author Yunyi Zhu ’20, MEng ’21, who is an MIT EECS PhD student and CSAIL researcher. “We’re working on adapting our process for creating entire 3D light fields in one film.”

Customizing full light-field holographic messages onto objects would allow users to encode information and 3D images. One could imagine, for example, that a passport could have a sticker that beams out a 3D green check mark. This hologram would signal its authenticity when viewed through a particular device or at a certain angle.

The team is also inspired by how animals use structural color as an adaptive communication channel and camouflage technique. Going forward, they are curious how programmable structural color could be integrated into different types of environments, perhaps as camouflage for soft robotic structures to blend into an environment. For instance, they imagine a robot studying jungle terrain may need to match the appearance of nearby bushes to collect data, with a human reprogramming the machine’s color from afar.

In the meantime, MorphoChrome recreates the majestic structural color found in various ecosystems, connecting a natural phenomenon with our creative processes. MIT researchers will look to improve the system’s color gamut and maximize how luminous mixed colors are. They’re also considering using another material for the device’s casing, since its current 3D-printing housing leaks out some light.

“Being able to easily create and manipulate structural color is a great new tool, and opens up new avenues for discovery and expression,” says Liti Holographics CEO Paul Christie SM ’97, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Simplifying the process to be more easily accessible allows for new applications to be developed in a wider range of areas, from art and jewelry to functional fabric.”

Myers, Zhu, and Miller wrote the paper with senior author Stefanie Mueller, who is an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator. Their research was supported by the National Science Foundation, and presented as a demo paper and poster at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication in November.

Polar weather on Jupiter and Saturn hints at the planets’ interior details

New research may explain the striking differences between the two planets’ polar vortex patterns.

Over the years, passing spacecraft have observed mystifying weather patterns at the poles of Jupiter and Saturn. The two planets host very different types of polar vortices, which are huge atmospheric whirlpools that rotate over a planet’s polar region. On Saturn, a single massive polar vortex appears to cap the north pole in a curiously hexagonal shape, while on Jupiter, a central polar vortex is surrounded by eight smaller vortices, like a pan of swirling cinnamon rolls.

Given that both planets are similar in many ways — they are roughly the same size and made from the same gaseous elements — the stark difference in their polar weather patterns has been a longstanding mystery.

Now, MIT scientists have identified a possible explanation for how the two different systems may have evolved. Their findings could help scientists understand not only the planets’ surface weather patterns, but also what might lie beneath the clouds, deep within their interiors.

In a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team simulates various ways in which well-organized vortex patterns may form out of random stimulations on a gas giant. A gas giant is a large planet that is made mostly of gaseous elements, such as Jupiter and Saturn. Among a wide range of plausible planetary configurations, the team found that, in some cases, the currents coalesced into a single large vortex, similar to Saturn’s pattern, whereas other simulations produced multiple large circulations, akin to Jupiter’s vortices.

After comparing simulations, the team found that vortex patterns, and whether a planet develops one or multiple polar vortices, comes down to one main property: the “softness” of a vortex’s base, which is related to the interior composition. The scientists liken an individual vortex to a whirling cylinder spinning through a planet’s many atmospheric layers. When the base of this swirling cylinder is made of softer, lighter materials, any vortex that evolves can only grow so large. The final pattern can then allow for multiple smaller vortices, similar to those on Jupiter. In contrast, if a vortex’s base is made of harder, denser stuff, it can grow much larger and subsequently engulf other vortices to form one single, massive vortex, akin to the monster cyclone on Saturn.

“Our study shows that, depending on the interior properties and the softness of the bottom of the vortex, this will influence the kind of fluid pattern you observe at the surface,” says study author Wanying Kang, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “I don’t think anyone’s made this connection between the surface fluid pattern and the interior properties of these planets. One possible scenario could be that Saturn has a harder bottom than Jupiter.”

The study’s first author is MIT graduate student Jiaru Shi.

Spinning up

Kang and Shi’s new work was inspired by images of Jupiter and Saturn that have been taken by the Juno and Cassini missions. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been orbiting around Jupiter since 2016, and has captured stunning images of the planet’s north pole and its multiple swirling vortices. From these images, scientists have estimated that each of Jupiter’s vortices is immense, spanning about 3,000 miles across — almost half as wide as the Earth itself.

The Cassini spacecraft, prior to intentionally burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, orbited the ringed planet for 13 years. Its observations of Saturn’s north pole recorded a single, hexagonal-shaped polar vortex, about 18,000 miles wide.

“People have spent a lot of time deciphering the differences between Jupiter and Saturn,” Shi says. “The planets are about the same size and are both made mostly of hydrogen and helium. It’s unclear why their polar vortices are so different.”

Shi and Kang set out to identify a physical mechanism that would explain why one planet might evolve a single vortex, while the other hosts multiple vortices. To do so, they worked with a two-dimensional model of surface fluid dynamics. While a polar vortex is three-dimensional in nature, the team reasoned that they could accurately represent vortex evolution in two dimensions, as the fast rotation of Jupiter and Saturn enforces uniform motion along the rotating axis.

“In a fast-rotating system, fluid motion tends to be uniform along the rotating axis,” Kang explains. “So, we were motivated by this idea that we can reduce a 3D dynamical problem to a 2D problem because the fluid pattern does not change in 3D. This makes the problem hundreds of times faster and cheaper to simulate and study.”

Getting to the bottom

Following this reasoning, the team developed a two-dimensional model of vortex evolution on a gas giant, based on an existing equation that describes how swirling fluid evolves over time.

“This equation has been used in many contexts, including to model midlatitude cyclones on Earth,” Kang says. “We adapted the equation to the polar regions of Jupiter and Saturn.”

The team applied their two-dimensional model to simulate how fluid would evolve over time on a gas giant under different scenarios. In each scenario, the team varied the planet’s size, its rate of rotation, its internal heating, and the softness or hardness of the rotating fluid, among other parameters. They then set a random “noise” condition, in which fluid initially flowed in random patterns across the planet’s surface. Finally, they observed how the fluid evolved over time given the scenario’s specific conditions.

Over multiple different simulations, they observed that some scenarios evolved to form a single large polar vortex, like Saturn, whereas others formed multiple smaller vortices, like Jupiter. After analyzing the combinations of parameters and variables in each scenario and how they related to the final outcome, they landed on a single mechanism to explain whether a single or multiple vortices evolve: As random fluid motions start to coalesce into individual vortices, the size to which a vortex can grow is limited by how soft the bottom of the vortex is. The softer, or lighter the gas is that is rotating at the bottom of a vortex, the smaller the vortex is in the end, allowing for multiple smaller-scale vortices to coexist at a planet’s pole, similar to those on Jupiter.

Conversely, the harder or denser a vortex bottom is, the larger the system can grow, to a size where eventually it can follow the planet’s curvature as a single, planetary-scale vortex, like the one on Saturn.

If this mechanism is indeed what is at play on both gas giants, it would suggest that Jupiter could be made of softer, lighter material, while Saturn may harbor heavier stuff in its interior.

“What we see from the surface, the fluid pattern on Jupiter and Saturn, may tell us something about the interior, like how soft the bottom is,” Shi says. “And that is important because maybe beneath Saturn’s surface, the interior is more metal-enriched and has more condensable material which allows it to provide stronger stratification than Jupiter. ”

"Because Jupiter and Saturn are otherwise so similar, their different polar weather has been a puzzle,” says Yohai Kaspi, a professor of geophysical fluid dynamics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a member of the Juno mission’s science team, who was not involved in the new study. “The work by Shi and Kang reveals a surprising link between these differences and the planets’ deep interior ‘softness’, offering a new way to map the key internal properties that shape their atmospheres."

This research was supported, in part, by a Mathworks Fellowship and endowed funding from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Demystifying college for enlisted veterans and service members

For nearly a decade, the MIT Warrior-Scholar Project STEM boot camp has helped enlisted members of the military prepare for higher education.

“I went into the military right after high school, mostly because I didn’t really see the value of academics,” says Air Force veteran and MIT sophomore Justin Cole.

His perspective on education shifted, however, after he experienced several natural disasters during his nine years of service. As a satellite systems operator in Colorado, Cole volunteered in the aftermath of the 2013 Black Forest fire, the state’s most destructive fire at the time. And in 2018, while he was leading a team in Okinawa conducting signal-monitoring work on communications satellites, two Category 5 typhoons barreled through the area within 26 days.

“I realized, this climate stuff is really a prerequisite to national security objectives in almost every sense, so I knew that school was going to be the thing that would help prepare me to make a difference,” he says. In 2023, after leaving the Air Force to work for climate-focused nonprofits and take engineering courses, Cole participated in an intense, weeklong STEM boot camp at MIT. “It definitely reaffirmed that I wanted to continue down the path of at least getting a bachelor’s, and it also inspired me to apply to MIT,” he says. He transferred in 2024 and is majoring in climate system science and engineering.

“It’s a lot like the MIT experience”

MIT runs the boot camp every summer as part of the nonprofit Warrior-Scholar Project (WSP), which started at Yale University in 2012. WSP offers a range of programming designed to help enlisted veterans and service members transition from the military to higher education. The academic boot camp program, which aims to simulate a week of undergraduate life, is offered at 19 schools nationwide in three areas: business, college readiness, and STEM.

MIT joined WSP in 2017 as one of the first three campuses to offer the STEM boot camp. “It was definitely rigorous,” Cole recalls, “not getting tons of sleep, grinding psets at night with friends … it’s a lot like the MIT experience.” In addition to problem sets, every day at MIT-WSP is packed with faculty lectures on math and physics, recitations, working on research projects, and tours of MIT campus labs. Scholars also attend daily college success workshops on topics such as note taking, time management, and applying to college. The schedule is meticulously mapped out — including travel times — from 0845 to 2200, Sunday through Friday.

Michael McDonald, an associate professor of physics at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and Navy veteran Nelson Olivier MBA ’17 have run the MIT-WSP program since its inception. At the time, WSP wanted to expand its STEM boot camps to other universities, so a Yale astrophysicist colleague recruited McDonald. Meanwhile, Olivier’s former Navy SEAL Team THREE teammate — who happened to be the WSP CEO — convinced Olivier to help launch the program while he was at the MIT Sloan School of Management, along with classmate Bill Kindred MBA ’17.

Now in its 10th year, MIT-WSP has hosted over 120 scholars, 93 percent of whom have gone on to attend schools like Stanford University, Georgetown University, University of Notre Dame, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley. MIT-WSP alumni who have graduated now work at employers such as Meta, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Boeing, and BAE Systems.

Translating helicopter repairs to Newton’s laws

McDonald has a lot of fun teaching WSP scholars every summer. “When I pose a question to my first-year physics class in September, no one wants to meet my eyes or raise their hand for fear of embarrassing themselves,” he says. “But I ask a question to this group of, say, 12 vets, and 12 hands shoot up, they are all answering over each other, and then asking questions to follow up on the question. They are just curious and hungry, and they couldn’t care less about how they come off. … As a professor, it’s like your dream class.”

Every year, McDonald witnesses a predictable transformation among the scholars. They start off eager enough, however “by Tuesday, they are miserable, they’re pretty beaten down. But by the end of the week, they’re like, ‘I could do another week,’” he says.

Their confidence grows as they recognize that, while they may not have taken college courses, their military experience is invaluable. “It’s just a matter of convincing these guys that what they are already doing is what we are looking for. We have guys that say, ‘I don’t know if I can succeed in an engineering program,’ but then in the field, they are repairing helicopters. And I’m like, ‘Oh no, you can do this stuff!’ They just need to understand the background of why that helicopter that they are building works.”

Olivier agrees. “The enlisted veteran has a leg up because they’ve already done this before. They are just translating it from either fixing a radio or messing around with the components of a bomb to understanding Newton’s laws. That’s a thing of beauty, when you see that.”

Fostering a virtuous cycle

While just seeing themselves succeed at MIT-WSP helps instill confidence among scholars, meeting veterans who have made the leap into academia has a multiplier effect. To that end, the WSP organization provides each academic boot camp with alumni, called fellows, to teach college success workshops, provide support, and share their experiences in higher education.

“When I was at boot camp, we had two WSP fellows who were at Columbia, one at Princeton, and one who just got accepted to Harvard,” Cole recalls. “Just seeing people existing at these institutions made me realize, this is a thing that is doable.” The following summer, he became a fellow as well.

Former Marine Corps communications operator Aaron Kahler, who attended MIT-WSP in 2024, particularly recalls meeting a veteran PhD student while the group toured the neuroscience facility. “It was really cool seeing instances of successful vets doing their thing at MIT,” he says. “There were a lot more than we thought.”

Over the years, McDonald has made an effort to recruit more MIT veterans to staff the program. One of them is Andrea Henshall, a retired major in the Air Force and a PhD student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. After joining the Ask Me Anything panel a few years ago, she’s become increasingly involved, presenting lectures, mentoring participants, offering tours of the motion capture lab where she conducts experiments, and informally mentoring scholars.

“It’s so inspiring to hear so many students at the end of the week say, ‘I never considered a place like MIT until the boot camp, or until somebody told me, hey, you can be here, too.’ Or they see examples of enlisted veterans, like Justin, who’ve transitioned to a place like MIT and shown that it’s possible,” says Henshall.

At the conclusion of MIT-WSP, scholars receive a tangible reminder of what’s possible: a challenge coin designed by Olivier and McDonald. “In the military, the challenge coin usually has the emblem of the unit and symbolizes the ethos of the unit,” Olivier explains. On one side of the MIT-WSP coin are Newton’s laws of motion, superimposed over the WSP logo. MIT's “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”) motto appears on the other side, beneath an image of the Great Dome inscribed with the scholar’s name.

“As you go into Killian Court you see all the names of Pasteur, Newton, et cetera, but Building 10 doesn’t have a name on it,” he says. “So we say, ‘earn your space there on these buildings. Do something significant that will impact the human experience.’ And that’s what we think each one of these guys and gals can do.”

Kahler keeps the coin displayed on his desk at MIT, where he’s now a first-year student, for inspiration. “I don’t think I would be here if it weren’t for the Warrior-Scholar Project,” he says.

How collective memory of the Rwandan genocide was preserved

Delia Wendel’s new book illuminates a painful and painstaking effort by citizens to bear witness to atrocities.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda took place over a little more than three months, during which militias representing the Hutu ethnic group conducted a mass murder of members of the Tutsi ethnic group along with some politically moderate members of the Hutu and Twa groups. Soon after, local citizens and aid workers began to document the atrocities that had occurred in the country.

They were establishing evidence of a genocide that many outsiders were slow to acknowledge; other countries and the U.N. did not recognize it until 1998. By preserving scenes of massacre and victims’ remains, this effort allowed foreigners, journalists, and neighbors to witness what had happened. Though the citizens’ work was emotionally and physically challenging, they used these sites of memory to seek justice for victims who had been killed and harmed.

In so doing, these efforts turned memory into officially recognized history. Now, in a new book, MIT scholar Delia Wendel carefully explores this work, shedding new light on the people who created the state’s genocide memorials, and the decisions they made in the process — such as making the remains of the dead available for public viewing. She also examines how the state gained control of the effort and has chosen to represent the past through these memorials.

“I’m seeking to recuperate this forgotten history of the ethics of the work, while also contending with the motivations of state sovereignty that has sustained it,” says Wendel, who is the Class of 1922 Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Studies and International Development in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).

That book, “Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty,” is published by Duke University Press and is freely available through the MIT Libraries. In it, Wendel uncovers new details about the first efforts to preserve the memory of the genocide, analyzes the social and political dynamics, and examines their impact on people and public spaces.

“The shift from memory to history is important because it also requires recognition that is official or more public in nature,” Wendel says. “Survivors, their kin, their relatives, they know their histories. What they’re wishing to happen is a form of repair, or justice, or empowerment, that comes with disclosing those histories. That truth-telling aspect is really important.”

Conversations and memory

Wendel’s book was well over a decade in the making — and emerged from a related set of scholarly inquiries about peace-building activities in the wake of genocide. For this project, about memorializing genocide, Wendel visited over 30 villages in Rwanda over a span of many years, gradually making connections and building dialogues with citizens, in addition to conducting more conventional social science research.

“Speaking with rural residents started to unlock a lot of different types of conversations,” Wendel says of those visits. “A good deal of those conversations had to do with memory, and with relationships to place, neighbors, and authority.” She adds: “These are topics that people are very hesitant to speak about, and rightly so. This has been a book that took a long time to research and build some semblance of trust.”

During her research, Wendel also talked at length with some key figures involved in the process, including Louis Kanamugire, a Rwandan who became the first head of the country’s post-war Genocide Memorial Commission. Kanamugire, who lost his parents in the genocide, felt it was necessary to preserve and display the remains of genocide victims, including at four key sites that later become official state memorials.

This process involved, as Wendel puts it, the “gruesome” work of cleaning and preserving bodies and bones to provide both material evidence of genocide and the grounds for beginning the work of societal repair and individual healing.

Wendel also uncovers, in detail for the first time, the work done by Mario Ibarra, a Chilean aid worker for the U.N. who also investigated atrocities, photographed evidence extensively, conducted preservation work, and contributed to the country’s Genocide Memorial Commission as well. The relationships between global human rights practice and genocide survivors seeking justice, in terms of preserving and documenting evidence, is at the core of the book and, Wendel believes, a previously underappreciated aspect of this topic.

“The story of Rwanda memorialization that has typically been told is one of state control,” Wendel says. “But in the beginning, the government followed independent initiatives by this human rights worker and local residents who really spurred this on.”

In the book, Wendel also examines how Rwanda’s memorialization practices relates to those of other countries, often in the so-called Global South. This phenomenon is something she terms “trauma heritage,” and has followed similar trajectories across countries in Africa and South America, for instance.

“Trauma heritage is the act of making visible the violence that had been actively hidden, and intervening in the dynamics of power,” she says. “Making such public spaces for silenced pain is a way of seeking recognition of those harms, and [seeking] forms of justice and repair.”

The tensions of memorialization

To be clear, Rwanda has been able to construct genocide memorials in the first place because, in the mid-1990s, Tutsi troops regained power in the country by defeating their Hutu adversaries. Subsequently, in a state without unlimited free expression, the government has considerable control over the content and forms of memorialization that take place.

Meanwhile, there have always been differing views about, say, displaying victims’ remains, and to what degree such a practice underlines their humanity or emphasizes the dehumanizing treatment they suffered. Then too, atrocities can produce a wide range of psychological responses among the living, including survivors’ guilt and the sheer difficulty many experience in expressing what they have witnessed. The process of memorialization, in such circumstances, will likely be fraught.

“The book is about the tensions and paradoxes between the ethics of this work and its politics, which have a lot to do with state sovereignty and control,” Wendel says. “It’s rooted in the tension between what’s invisible and what’s visible, between this bid to be seen and to recognize the humanity of the victims and yet represent this dehumanizing violence. These are irresolvable dilemmas that were felt by the people doing this work.”

Or, as Wendel writes in the book, Rwandans and others immersed in similar struggles for justice around the world have had to grapple with the “messy politics of repair, searching for seemingly impossible redress for injustice.”

Other experts have praised Wendel’s book, such as Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a professor at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who studies the psychological effects of mass violence. Gobodo-Madikizela has cited Wendel’s “extraordinary narratives” about the book’s principal figures, observing that they “not only preserve the remains but also reclaim the victims’ humanity. … Wendel shows how their labor becomes a defiant insistence on visibility that transforms the act of cleaning into a form of truth-telling, making injustice materially and spatially undeniable.”

For her part, Wendel hopes the book will engage readers interested in multiple related issues, including Rwandan and African history, the practices and politics of public memory, human rights and peace-building, and the design of public memorials and related spaces, including those built in the aftermath of traumatic historical episodes.

“Rwanda’s genocide heritage remains an important endeavor in memory justice, even if its politics need to be contended with at the same time,” Wendel says. 

Helping companies with physical operations around the world run more intelligently

Founded by two MIT alumni, Samsara’s platform gives companies a central hub to learn from their workers, equipment, and other infrastructure.

Running large companies in construction, logistics, energy, and manufacturing requires careful coordination between millions of people, devices, and systems. For more than a decade, Samsara has helped those companies connect their assets to get work done more intelligently.

Founded by John Bicket SM ’05 and Sanjit Biswas SM ’05, Samsara’s platform gives companies with physical operations a central hub to track and learn from workers, equipment, and other infrastructure. Layered on top of that platform are real-time analytics and notifications designed to prevent accidents, reduce risks, save fuel, and more.

Tens of thousands of customers have used Samsara’s platform to improve their operations since its founding in 2015. Home Depot, for instance, used Samsara’s artificial intelligence-equipped dashcams to reduce their total auto liability claims by 65 percent in one year. Maxim Crane Works saved more than $13 million in maintenance costs using Samsara’s equipment and vehicle diagnostic data in 2024. Mohawk Industries, the world’s largest flooring manufacturer, improved their route efficiency and saved $7.75 million annually.

“It’s all about real-world impact,” says Biswas, Samsara’s CEO. “These organizations have complex operations and are functioning at a massive scale. Workers are driving millions of miles and consuming tons of fuel. If you can understand what’s happening and run analysis in the cloud, you can find big efficiency improvements. In terms of safety, these workers are putting their lives at risk every day to keep this infrastructure running. You can literally save lives if you can reduce risk.”

Finding big problems

Biswas and Bicket started PhD programs at MIT in 2002, both conducting research around networking in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). They eventually applied their studies to build a wireless network called MIT RoofNet.

Upon graduating with master’s degrees, Biswas and Bicket decided to commercialize the technologies they worked on, founding the company Meraki in 2006.

“How do you get big Wi-Fi networks out in the world?” Biswas asks. “With MIT RoofNet, we covered Cambridge in Wi-Fi. We wanted to enable other people to build big Wi-Fi networks and make Wi-Fi go mainstream for larger campuses and offices.”

Over the next six years, Meraki’s technology was used to create millions of Wi-Fi networks around the world. In 2012, Meraki was acquired by Cisco. Biswas and Bicket left Cisco in 2015, unsure of what they’d work on next.

“The way we found ourselves to Samsara was through the same curiosity we had as graduate students,” Biswas says. “This time it dealt more with the planet’s infrastructure. We were thinking about how utilities work, and how construction happens at the scale of cities and states. It drew us into operations, which is the infrastructure backbone of the planet.”

As the founders learned about industries like logistics, utilities, and construction, they realized they could use their technical background to improve safety and efficiency.

“All these industries have a lot in common,” Biswas says. “They have a lot of field workers — often thousands of them — they have a lot of assets like trucks and equipment, and they’re trying to orchestrate it all. The throughline was the importance of data.”

When they founded Samsara 10 years ago, many people were still collecting field data with pen and paper.

“Because of our technical background, we knew that if you could collect the data and run sophisticated algorithms like AI over it, you could get a ton of insights and improve the way those operations run,” Biswas says.

Biswas says extracting insights from data is easy. Making field-ready products and getting them into the hands of frontline workers took longer.

Samsara started by tapping into existing sensors in buildings, cars, and other assets. They also built their own, including AI-equipped cameras and GPS trackers that can monitor driving behavior. That formed the foundation of Samsara’s Connected Operations Platform. On top of that, Samsara Intelligence processes data in the cloud and provides insights like ways to calculate the best routes for commercial vehicles, be more proactive with maintenance, and reduce fuel consumption.

Samsara’s platform can be used to detect if a commercial vehicle or snowplow driver is on their phone and send an audio message nudging them to stay safe and focused. The platform can also deliver training and coaching.

“That’s the kind of thing that reduces risk, because workers are way less likely to be distracted,” Biswas says. “If you do for millions of workers, you reduce risk at scale.”

The platform also allows managers to query their data in a ChatGPT-style interface, asking questions such as: Who are my safest drivers? Which vehicles need maintenance? And what are my least fuel-efficient trucks?

“Our platform helps recognize frontline workers who are safe and efficient in their job,” Biswas says. “These people are largely unsung heroes. They keep our planet running, but they don’t hear ‘thank you’ very often. Samsara helps companies recognize the safest workers on the field and give them recognition and rewards. So, it’s about modernizing equipment but also improving the experience of millions of people that help run this vital infrastructure.”

Continuing to grow

Today Samsara processes 20 trillion data points a year and monitors 90 billion miles of driving. The company employs about 4,000 people across North America and Europe.

“It still feels early for us,” Biswas says. “We’ve been around for 10 years and gotten some scale, but we needed to build this platform to be able to build more products and have more impact. If you step back, operations is 40 percent of the world’s GDP, so we see a lot of opportunities to do more with this data. For instance, weather is part of Samsara Intelligence, and weather is 20 to 25 percent of the risk, and so we’re training AI models to reduce risk from the weather. And on the sustainability side, the more data we have, the more we can help optimize for things like fuel consumption or transitioning to electric vehicles. Maintenance is another fascinating data problem.”

The founders have also maintained a connection with MIT — and not just because the City of Boston’s Department of Public Works and the MBTA are customers. Last year, the Biswas Family Foundation announced funding for a four-year postdoctoral fellowship program at MIT for early-stage researchers working to improve health care.

Biswas says Samsara’s journey has been incredibly rewarding and notes the company is well-positioned to leverage advances in AI to further its impact going forward.

“It’s been a lot of fun and also a lot of hard work,” Biswas says. “What’s exciting is that each decade of the company feels different. It’s almost like a new chapter — or a whole new book. Right now, there’s so many incredible things happening with data and AI. It feels as exciting as it did in the early days of the company. It feels very much like a startup.”

How an online MIT course in supply chain management sparked a new career

MicroMasters coursework led engineer Kevin Power to MIT, where hands-on research in the MIT Supply Chain Management blended program transformed his professional trajectory.

As a college student, Kevin Power never considered working in supply chain management; in fact, he didn’t know it was an option. He earned an undergraduate degree in manufacturing engineering while working full time at an oil refinery, which demanded a rigorous routine of shift work, long days, and evening classes.

After graduation, he found himself searching for new learning opportunities, and stumbled upon the online courses of the MITx MicroMasters Program in Supply Chain Management, an online program of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Starting with Supply Chain Analytics (SC0x), Power was drawn in immediately by how directly applicable the lessons were to real work. 

“So many courses that you do are more theoretical,” he reflects. “Everything I learned, I could apply it directly to my work and see the value in doing it. So as soon as I finished Supply Chain Analytics, I decided, OK, I’ll finish the whole program.” What he didn’t yet know was that he belonged to the very audience the MicroMasters was designed for — lifelong learners. Learners are often working professionals who want deep, flexible training while continuing their careers.

After completing the five-course MicroMasters track and earning his credential, Power uncovered another opportunity: the MIT SCM Blended Master’s Program, which pairs the online credential with a one-semester, on-campus program, resulting in a master of applied science degree in supply chain management.

For Power, the blend of online and in-person learning proved pivotal. He describes his MicroMasters experience as fertile ground for deep, self-paced study. “I’m a very introverted kind of learner, so I prefer to just learn out of a textbook and online,” he says. But, once in the MIT SCM program, he tapped into the soft skills he needs to stand out in the industry. “When I came to campus, it was more about networking and being able to communicate with executives, on top of our academic work,” he says. The immersive environment of combining scholarly rigor with real-world experience among peers across the supply chain industry is at the heart of what the blended program aims to facilitate.

During his time on campus, Power’s research included simulation modeling in port shipping and generative-AI–driven projects focused on supply chain resilience. “I had never done simulation modeling before, and right now it’s huge in the industry,” he says. “If I were trying to apply for a simulation modeling job, I’m sure it would help me greatly having done this.” 

His project, completed with fellow MIT SCM student Yassine Lahlou-Kamal, was one of the winners at the 2025 Annual MIT Global SCALE Network Supply Chain Student Research Expo, in which students showcased their industry-sponsored thesis and capstone projects. This experience pays off in his current work with Elenna Dugundji in her Deep Knowledge Lab for Supply Chain and Logistics.

Beyond academics and research, Power threw himself into the fast-paced world of hackathons, despite having never participated in one before. “I’m very competitive,” Power confesses, “and I feel like I learn something new every time.” His first effort, an internal MIT competition called Hack-Nation’s Global AI Hackathon, earned him a win with an AI sports-betting agent project that fuses model-driven analysis with web scraping. Soon after, he tackled the OpenAI Red Teaming Challenge on Kaggle. Despite joining the competition halfway through the 15-day window, he raced through the final week and was selected as one of the winners. “It gave me a lot of confidence … that the things I’m working on right now are cutting-edge, even in the eyes of OpenAI.”

In terms of his return on investment in the degree, Power says, “I’m getting so much value out of being here. Even from just doing the Kaggle competition, I won more than the cost of my full MIT degree.” Long-term, Power has been impressed that “as far as I know, everybody that was looking for a job in the supply chain program has one.” The data back him up, as every student from the MIT SCM residential program Class of 2025 secured a job within six months of graduation.

Now a current master’s student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program, looking ahead, Power says, “I want to do a startup. A lot of the ideas came from research I’ve done here.” 

Reflecting on the transformation he’s experienced in just 10 months of the program, he calls it “crazy.” “The SCM program really is amazing … I’d recommend it to anyone.”

Fostering MIT’s Japan connection

MISTI Japan managing director Christine Pilcavage supports students and faculty interested in exploring the country’s rich cultural traditions and heritage with a STEM flair.

Born and raised in Japan as part of a military family, Christine Pilcavage knows first-hand about the value of an immersive approach to exploration. 

“Any experience in a different context improves an individual,” says Pilcavage, who has also lived in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Kenya. 

It’s that ethos that Pilcavage brings to her role as managing director of MISTI Japan, which connects MIT students and faculty to Institute collaborators in Japan. In her role, Pilcavage sends students to Japan for internship and research opportunities. She also shares Japanese culture on campus with activities like Ikebana classes during Independent Activities Period and a Japanese Film Festival.

MIT’s connection to Japan dates back before 1874, when its first Japanese student graduated. Later, 1911 saw the foundation of the MIT Association of Japan, Japan’s first MIT trans-Pacific alumni club. That organization later evolved into the MIT Club of Japan. 

MISTI Japan predates the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI)’s creation. The MIT-Japan Program was established in 1981 to prepare MIT students to be better scientists and engineers who understand and work effectively with Japan. The program sought to foster a deeper U.S.-Japan collaboration in science and technology amidst Japan's growing economic and technological power. MIT-Japan began sending students to Japan in 1983. 

Students in the MIT-Japan Program complete a three-to-12-month internship at their host institution, and the immersive experiences are invaluable. “Japan is so different from the Western world,” Pilcavage notes. “For example, in Japanese, verbs end sentences, so it’s important to develop patience and listen carefully when communicating.”

Pilcavage believes there is tremendous value in creating and supporting a program like MISTI at MIT. Traveling to areas outside the Institute and the United States can expose students to diverse cultures, aid the exploration of challenges, help them discover solutions, improve language learning, and foster communication. 

“We want our students to think and create,” she says. “They need to see beyond the MIT bubble and think carefully about how to solve difficult problems and help others.”

Japan, Pilcavage continues, is monocultural in ways the United States isn’t. While English is spoken in larger cities, it’s harder to find it spoken in rural areas. “MIT students teach STEM topics to rural Japanese kids in Japanese,” Pilcavage says, citing a program that’s been teaching STEAM workshops in the tsunami-affected area in Northern Japan since 2017. “Learning to code switch means they improve their language skills while also learning important cultural nuances, like body language.”

Pilcavage emphasizes the importance of “learning differently” for MIT students and the Japanese people with whom they interact. “I wanted our students to engage with the local population,” she says, encouraging them to develop what she calls “cultural resilience.”

Journey to MIT

Pilcavage — whose educational background includes master’s degrees in international affairs and public health, and undergraduate study in economics and psychology — has also worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Japanese government, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the World Health Organization on global health and educational issues in Africa and Asia. 

Pilcavage first came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking for hands-on experience in public health and community outcomes in a role with Management Sciences for Health, co-founded by MIT Sloan School of Management alumnus Ron O’Connor SM ’71. There, she investigated reproductive and women’s health and supported a Japanese nonprofit affiliated with the organization.

She has since developed strong ties to Cambridge and MIT. “I was married in the MIT Chapel to an MIT alum, and our reception was held in Walker Memorial,” she says. “I was a migratory bird who landed on a tree, and my husband is the tree that has deep local roots here.” 

In keeping with her ethos of overcoming roadblocks to success, Pilcavage encourages students to challenge themselves. “I’ve tried to model that behavior throughout my career,” she says.

Following her arrival at MIT In 2013, Pilcavage worked with the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE), an MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning project established in 2012 to develop new methods for product evaluation in global development. Formerly funded by USAID, Pilcavage administered the $10 million research program, which sought to learn which low-cost interventions worked best by evaluating products designed for people living in lower-income communities. 

“It’s important to learn how to manage real-world challenges and deal with them effectively,” she argues. “Creating a collaborative environment in which people can discover solutions is how things get done.”

A career of service

Pilcavage has been recognized for her outstanding contributions to encouraging positive relations between America and Japan. She received the Foreign Minister's Commendation from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the John E. Thayer III Award from the Japan Society of Boston.

“I’m honored to join a community of people who have dedicated their lives to strengthening ties between the U.S. and Japan,” Pilcavage says when asked about the awards. “It’s exciting and humbling to be recognized for doing something I love.” 

“Chris is a determined, empathetic leader who inspires our students and is committed to advancing both MIT’s mission and U.S.-Japan relations,” says Richard Samuels, the Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, and founder and faculty director of MISTI Japan. “I can think of no one more deserving of these awards.”

Pilcavage is excited about new MISTI Japan initiatives that are in development or already underway. “We’re launching our first global classroom with [MIT historian] Hiromu Nagahara and [lecturer in Japanese] Takako Aikawa,” she notes. “Students will visit cities like Kyoto and Hiroshima, and explore Japanese history and culture up close.”

Additionally, Pilcavage is developing social impact workshops and consistently questioning how to improve MIT Japan’s work and its impact. She’s always looking for new projects and new ways to engage and encourage students. “How can I make the program better?” she asks when considering MISTI Japan and its value to MIT and its students. 

“I tell people I have the best job in the world,” she says. “I get to share my culture with the MIT community and work with the best colleagues who are nurturing and supportive. I believe I’ve found my home here.”

Efficient cooling method could enable chip-based trapped-ion quantum computers

New technique could improve the scalability of trapped-ion quantum computers, an essential step toward making them practically useful.

Quantum computers could rapidly solve complex problems that would take the most powerful classical supercomputers decades to unravel. But they’ll need to be large and stable enough to efficiently perform operations. To meet this challenge, researchers at MIT and elsewhere are developing trapped-ion quantum computers based on ultra-compact photonic chips. These chip-based systems offer a scalable alternative to existing trapped-ion quantum computers, which rely on bulky optical equipment.

The ions in these quantum computers must be cooled to extremely cold temperatures to minimize vibrations and prevent errors. So far, such trapped-ion systems based on photonic chips have been limited to inefficient and slow cooling methods.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and MIT Lincoln Laboratory has implemented a much faster and more energy-efficient method for cooling trapped ions using photonic chips. Their approach achieved cooling to about 10 times below the limit of standard laser cooling.

Key to this technique is a photonic chip that incorporates precisely designed antennas to manipulate beams of tightly focused, intersecting light.

The researchers’ initial demonstration takes a key step toward scalable chip-based architectures that could someday enable quantum computing systems with greater efficiency and stability.

“We were able to design polarization-diverse integrated-photonics devices, utilize them to develop a variety of novel integrated-photonics-based systems, and apply them to show very efficient ion cooling. However, this is just the beginning of what we can do using these devices. By introducing polarization diversity to integrated-photonics-based trapped-ion systems, this work opens the door to a variety of advanced operations for trapped ions that weren’t previously attainable, even beyond efficient ion cooling — all research directions we are excited to explore in the future,” says Jelena Notaros, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and senior author of a paper on this architecture.

She is joined on the paper by lead authors Sabrina Corsetti, an EECS graduate student; Ethan Clements, a former postdoc who is now a staff scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Felix Knollmann, a graduate student in the Department of Physics; John Chiaverini, senior member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory and a principal investigator in MIT’s Center for Quantum Engineering; as well as others at Lincoln Laboratory and MIT. The research appears today in two joint publications in Light: Science and Applications and Physical Review Letters.

Seeking scalability

While there are many types of quantum systems, this research is focused on trapped-ion quantum computing. In this application, a charged particle called an ion is formed by peeling an electron from an atom, and then trapped using radio-frequency signals and manipulated using optical signals.

Researchers use lasers to encode information in the trapped ion by changing its state. In this way, the ion can be used as a quantum bit, or qubit. Qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer.

To prevent collisions between ions and gas molecules in the air, the ions are held in vacuum, often created with a device known as a cryostat. Traditionally, bulky lasers sit outside the cryostat and shoot different light beams through the cryostat’s windows toward the chip. These systems require a room full of optical components to address just a few dozen ions, making it difficult to scale to the large numbers of ions needed for advanced quantum computing. Slight vibrations outside the cryostat can also disrupt the light beams, ultimately reducing the accuracy of the quantum computer.

To get around these challenges, MIT researchers have been developing integrated-photonics-based systems. In this case, the light is emitted from the same chip that traps the ion. This improves scalability by eliminating the need for external optical components.

“Now, we can envision having thousands of sites on a single chip that all interface up to many ions, all working together in a scalable way,” Knollmann says.

But integrated-photonics-based demonstrations to date have achieved limited cooling efficiencies.

Keeping their cool

To enable fast and accurate quantum operations, researchers use optical fields to reduce the kinetic energy of the trapped ion. This causes the ion to cool to nearly absolute zero, an effective temperature even colder than cryostats can achieve.

But common methods have a higher cooling floor, so the ion still has a lot of vibrational energy after the cooling process completes. This would make it hard to use the qubits for high-quality computations.

The MIT researchers utilized a more complex approach, known as polarization-gradient cooling, which involves the precise interaction of two beams of light.

Each light beam has a different polarization, which means the field in each beam is oscillating in a different direction (up and down, side to side, etc.). Where these beams intersect, they form a rotating vortex of light that can force the ion to stop vibrating even more efficiently.

Although this approach had been shown previously using bulk optics, it hadn’t been shown before using integrated photonics.

To enable this more complex interaction, the researchers designed a chip with two nanoscale antennas, which emit beams of light out of the chip to manipulate the ion above it.

These antennas are connected by waveguides that route light to the antennas. The waveguides are designed to stabilize the optical routing, which improves the stability of the vortex pattern generated by the beams.

“When we emit light from integrated antennas, it behaves differently than with bulk optics. The beams, and generated light patterns, become extremely stable. Having these stable patterns allows us to explore ion behaviors with significantly more control,” Clements says.

The researchers also designed the antennas to maximize the amount of light that reaches the ion. Each antenna has tiny curved notches that scatter light upward, spaced just right to direct light toward the ion.

“We built upon many years of development at Lincoln Laboratory to design these gratings to emit diverse polarizations of light,” Corsetti says.

They experimented with several architectures, characterizing each to better understand how it emitted light.

With their final design in place, the researchers demonstrated ion cooling that was nearly 10 times below the limit of standard laser cooling, referred to as the Doppler limit. Their chip was able to reach this limit in about 100 microseconds, several times faster than other techniques.

“The demonstration of enhanced performance using optics integrated in the ion-trap chip lays the foundation for further integration that can allow new approaches for quantum-state manipulation, and that could improve the prospects for practical quantum-information processing,” adds Chiaverini. “Key to achieving this advance was the cross-Institute collaboration between the MIT campus and Lincoln groups, a model that we can build on as we take these next steps.”

In the future, the team plans to conduct characterization experiments on different chip architectures and demonstrate polarization-gradient cooling with multiple ions. In addition, they hope to explore other applications that could benefit from the stable light beams they can generate with this architecture.

Other authors who contributed to this research are Ashton Hattori (MIT), Zhaoyi Li (MIT), Milica Notaros (MIT), Reuel Swint (Lincoln Laboratory), Tal Sneh (MIT), Patrick Callahan (Lincoln Laboratory), May Kim (Lincoln Laboratory), Aaron Leu (MIT), Gavin West (MIT), Dave Kharas (Lincoln Laboratory), Thomas Mahony (Lincoln Laboratory), Colin Bruzewicz (Lincoln Laboratory), Cheryl Sorace-Agaskar (Lincoln Laboratory), Robert McConnell (Lincoln Laboratory), and Isaac Chuang (MIT).

This work is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the MIT Center for Quantum Engineering, the U.S. Department of Defense, an MIT Rolf G. Locher Endowed Fellowship, and an MIT Frederick and Barbara Cronin Fellowship.

At MIT, a continued commitment to understanding intelligence

With support from the Siegel Family Endowment, the newly renamed MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence investigates how brains produce intelligence and how it can be replicated to solve problems.

The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a research unit in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, brings together researchers from across MIT who combine their diverse expertise to understand intelligence through tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers engage in collaborative efforts spanning science, engineering, the humanities, and more. 

SQI seeks to comprehend how brains produce intelligence and how it can be replicated in artificial systems to address real-world problems that exceed the capabilities of current artificial intelligence technologies.

“In SQI, we are studying intelligence scientifically and generically, in the hope that by studying neuroscience and behavior in humans and animals, and also studying what we can build as intelligent engineering artifacts, we'll be able to understand the fundamental underlying principles of intelligence,” says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, SQI director of research and the Panasonic Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“We in SQI believe that understanding human intelligence is one of the greatest open questions in science — right up there with the origin of the universe and our place in it, and the origin of life. The question of human intelligence has two parts: how it works, and where it comes from. If we understand those, we will see payoffs well beyond our current imaginings," says Jim DiCarlo, SQI director and the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Exploring the great mysteries of the mind

The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence was recently renamed in recognition of a major gift from the Siegel Family Endowment that is enabling further growth in SQI’s research and activities.

SQI’s efforts are organized around missions — long-term, collaborative projects rooted in foundational questions about intelligence and supported by platforms — systems, and software that enable new research and create benchmarking and testing interfaces. 

“Ours is the only unit at MIT dedicated to building a scientific understanding of intelligence while working with researchers across the entire Institute,” DiCarlo says. “There has been remarkable progress in AI over the past decade, but I believe the next decade will bring even greater advances in our understanding of human intelligence — advances that will reshape what we call AI. By supporting us, David Siegel, the Siegel Family Endowment, and our other donors are demonstrating their confidence in our approach."

A legacy of interdisciplinary support

In 2011, David Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91 founded the Siegel Family Endowment (SFE) to support organizations working at the intersections of learning, workforce, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations addressing society’s most critical challenges while supporting innovative civic and community leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers, and others driving this work forward. Siegel is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. While in graduate school at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, he worked on robotics in the group of Tomás Lozano-Pérez — currently the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence — focusing on sensing and grasping. Later, he co-founded Two Sigma with the belief that innovative technology, AI, and data science could help uncover value in the world’s data. Today, Two Sigma drives transformation across the financial services industry in investment management, venture capital, private equity, and real estate.

Siegel explains, “The human brain may very well be the most complex physical system in the universe, yet most people haven't shown much interest in how it works. People take the mind for granted, yet wonder so much about other scientific mysteries, such as the origin of the universe. My fascination with the brain and its intersection with artificial intelligence stems from this. I don’t care whether there are commercial applications for this quest; instead, we should pursue research like that done at the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence to advance our understanding of ourselves. As we uncover more about human intelligence, I am hopeful that we will lay the groundwork not only for advancing artificial intelligence but also for extending our own thinking.”

As a long-time champion of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a National Science Foundation-funded collaborative interdisciplinary research thrust, and one of the first donors to the MIT Quest for Intelligence, David Siegel helped lay the foundation for the research underway today. In early 2024, he founded Open Athena, a nonprofit that bridges the gap between academic research and the cutting edge of AI. Open Athena equips universities with elite AI and data engineering talent to accelerate breakthrough discoveries at scale. Siegel serves on the MIT Corporation Executive Committee, is vice-chair of the Scratch Foundation, and is a member of the Cornell Tech Council. He also sits on the boards of Re:Build Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST, and Carnegie Hall.

A Catalyst for Global Collaboration

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says, “Of all the donors and supporters whose generosity fueled the Quest for Intelligence, no one has been more important from the beginning than David Siegel. Without his longstanding commitment to CBMM and his support for the Quest, this community might never have formed. There’s every reason to think that David’s recent gift, which renames the Quest for Intelligence and also supports the Schwarzman College of Computing, will be even more powerful in shaping the future of this initiative and of the field itself.” She continues, “Fueled by generous donors — particularly David Siegel’s transformative gift — SQI is poised to take on an even more important role.”

SQI scientists and engineers are presenting their work broadly, publishing papers, and developing new tools and technologies that are used in research institutions worldwide, as they engage with colleagues in disciplines across the Institute and in universities and institutions around the globe. DiCarlo explains, “We're part of the Schwarzman College of Computing, at the nexus between the people interested in biology and various forms of intelligence and the people interested in AI. We're working with partners at other universities, in nonprofits, and in industry — we can't do it alone.”

“Fundamentally, we're not an AI effort. We're a human intelligence effort using the tools of engineering,” DiCarlo says. “That gives us, among other things, very useful insights for human learning and health, but also very useful tools for AI — including AI that will just work a lot better in a human world.” 

The entire SQI community of faculty, students, and staff is excited to face new challenges in the efforts to understand the fundamentals of intelligence.

New missions and next horizons

SQI research is broadening: Mission principal investigators are integrating their efforts across areas of interest, increasing their impact on the field. In the coming months, the organization plans to launch a new Social Intelligence Mission.

"We need to focus on problems that mirror natural and artificial intelligence — making sure that we are evaluating new models on tasks that mirror what humans and other natural intelligence can do,” says Nick Roy, SQI director of systems engineering and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. He predicts that SQI’s future research will rely on asking the right questions: “[While] we are good at picking tasks that test our computational models, and we're extremely good at picking tasks that kind of align with what our models can already do, we need to get better at choosing tasks and benchmarks that also elicit something about natural intelligence,” he says.

On November 24, 2025, faculty, staff, students, and supporters gathered at an event titled “The Next Horizon: Quest’s Future” to celebrate SQI’s next chapter. The event consisted of an afternoon of research updates, a panel discussion, and a poster session on new and evolving research, and was attended by David Siegel, representatives from the Siegel Family Endowment, and various members of the MIT Corporation. Recordings of the presentations from the event are available on SQI’s YouTube channel.

Generative AI tool helps 3D print personal items that sustain daily use

“MechStyle” allows users to personalize 3D models, while ensuring they’re physically viable after fabrication, producing unique personal items and assistive technology.

Generative artificial intelligence models have left such an indelible impact on digital content creation that it’s getting harder to recall what the internet was like before it. You can call on these AI tools for clever projects such as videos and photos — but their flair for the creative hasn’t quite crossed over into the physical world just yet.

So why haven’t we seen generative AI-enabled personalized objects, such as phone cases and pots, in places like homes, offices, and stores yet? According to MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers, a key issue is the mechanical integrity of the 3D model.

While AI can help generate personalized 3D models that you can fabricate, those systems don’t often consider the physical properties of the 3D model. MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL engineer Faraz Faruqi has explored this trade-off, creating generative AI-based systems that can make aesthetic changes to designs while preserving functionality, and another that modifies structures with the desired tactile properties users want to feel.

Making it real 

Together with researchers at Google, Stability AI, and Northeastern University, Faruqi has now found a way to make real-world objects with AI, creating items that are both durable and exhibit the user’s intended appearance and texture. With the AI-powered “MechStyle” system, users simply upload a 3D model or select a preset asset of things like vases and hooks, and prompt the tool using images or text to create a personalized version. A generative AI model then modifies the 3D geometry, while MechStyle simulates how those changes will impact particular parts, ensuring vulnerable areas remain structurally sound. When you’re happy with this AI-enhanced blueprint, you can 3D print it and use it in the real world.

You could select a model of, say, a wall hook, and the material you’ll be printing it with (for example, plastics like polylactic acid). Then, you can prompt the system to create a personalized version, with directions like, “generate a cactus-like hook.” The AI model will work in tandem with the simulation module and generate a 3D model resembling a cactus while also having the structural properties of a hook. This green, ridged accessory can then be used to hang up mugs, coats, and backpacks. Such creations are possible thanks, in part, to a stylization process, where the system changes a model’s geometry based on its understanding of the text prompt, and working with the feedback received from the simulation module.

According to CSAIL researchers, 3D stylization used to come with unintended consequences. Their formative study revealed that only about 26 percent of 3D models remained structurally viable after they were modified, meaning that the AI system didn’t understand the physics of the models it was modifying.

“We want to use AI to create models that you can actually fabricate and use in the real world,” says Faruqi, who is a lead author on a paper presenting the project. “So MechStyle actually simulates how GenAI-based changes will impact a structure. Our system allows you to personalize the tactile experience for your item, incorporating your personal style into it while ensuring the object can sustain everyday use.”

This computational thoroughness could eventually help users personalize their belongings, creating a unique pair of glasses with speckled blue and beige dots resembling fish scales, for example. It also produced a pillbox with a rocky texture that’s checkered with pink and aqua spots. The system’s potential extends to crafting unique home and office decor, like a lampshade resembling red magma. It can even design assistive technology fit to users’ specifications, such as finger splints to aid with dexterous injuries and utensil grips to aid with motor impairments.

In the future, MechStyle could also be useful in creating prototypes for accessories and other handheld products you might sell in a toy shop, hardware store, or craft boutique. The goal, CSAIL researchers say, is for both expert and novice designers to spend more time brainstorming and testing out different 3D designs, instead of assembling and customizing items by hand.

Staying strong

To ensure MechStyle’s creations could withstand daily use, the researchers augmented their generative AI technology with a type of physics simulation called a finite element analysis (FEA). You can imagine a 3D model of an item, such as a pair of glasses, with a sort of heat map indicating which regions are structurally viable under a realistic amount of weight, and which ones aren’t. As AI refines this model, the physics simulations highlight which parts of the model are getting weaker and prevent further changes.

Faruqi adds that running these simulations every time a change is made drastically slows down the AI process, so MechStyle is designed to know when and where to do additional structural analyses. “MechStyle’s adaptive scheduling strategy keeps track of what changes are happening in specific points in the model. When the genAI system makes tweaks that endanger certain regions of the model, our approach simulates the physics of the design again. MechStyle will make subsequent modifications to make sure the model doesn’t break after fabrication.”

Combining the FEA process with adaptive scheduling allowed MechStyle to generate objects that were as high as 100 percent structurally viable. Testing out 30 different 3D models with styles resembling things like bricks, stones, and cacti, the team found that the most efficient way to create structurally viable objects was to dynamically identify weak regions and tweak the generative AI process to mitigate its effect. In these scenarios, the researchers found that they could either stop stylization completely when a particular stress threshold was reached, or gradually make smaller refinements to prevent at-risk areas from approaching that mark.

The system also offers two different modes: a freestyle feature that allows AI to quickly visualize different styles on your 3D model, and a MechStyle one that carefully analyzes the structural impacts of your tweaks. You can explore different ideas, then try the MechStyle mode to see how those artistic flourishes will affect the durability of particular regions of the model.

CSAIL researchers add that while their model can ensure your model remains structurally sound before being 3D printed, it’s not yet able to improve 3D models that weren’t viable to begin with. If you upload such a file to MechStyle, you’ll receive an error message, but Faruqi and his colleagues intend to improve the durability of those faulty models in the future.

What’s more, the team hopes to use generative AI to create 3D models for users, instead of stylizing presets and user-uploaded designs. This would make the system even more user-friendly, so that those who are less familiar with 3D models, or can’t find their design online, can simply generate it from scratch. Let’s say you wanted to fabricate a unique type of bowl, and that 3D model wasn’t available in a repository; AI could create it for you instead.

“While style-transfer for 2D images works incredibly well, not many works have explored how this transfer to 3D,” says Google Research Scientist Fabian Manhardt, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “Essentially, 3D is a much more difficult task, as training data is scarce and changing the object’s geometry can harm its structure, rendering it unusable in the real world. MechStyle helps solve this problem, allowing for 3D stylization without breaking the object’s structural integrity via simulation. This gives people the power to be creative and better express themselves through products that are tailored towards them.”

Farqui wrote the paper with senior author Stefanie Mueller, who is an MIT associate professor and CSAIL principal investigator, and two other CSAIL colleagues: researcher Leandra Tejedor SM ’24, and postdoc Jiaji Li. Their co-authors are Amira Abdel-Rahman PhD ’25, now an assistant professor at Cornell University, and Martin Nisser SM ’19, PhD ’24; Google researcher Vrushank Phadnis; Stability AI Vice President of Research Varun Jampani; MIT Professor and Center for Bits and Atoms Director Neil Gershenfeld; and Northeastern University Assistant Professor Megan Hofmann.

Their work was supported by the MIT-Google Program for Computing Innovation. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Computational Fabrication in November.

Feeding innovation to solve complex urban problems

Cross-border collaborations are seen as a key to success for the MIT Leventhal Center’s Mexico City Initiative.

The Mexico City Initiative at MIT, led by the Institute’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU), has conceived and modeled an impressive array of solutions for challenges facing urban areas in Mexico and beyond. Faculty and students have designed the repurposing of a vintage roller coaster as a public meeting space, modeled strategies to decarbonize a municipal neighborhood, and proposed plans to convert nearly 990 acres of what was once Latin America’s largest landfill into a model of ecological restoration and clean energy production. The initiative has also spawned a sustainable construction startup that’s contributing to local economies in both Mexico and the United States.

When asked what’s most impactful about their work, however, those leading and collaborating with the LCAU’s Mexico City Initiative point to something else: the cross-border human connections they say are essential to continuing the ideation, development, and implementation of projects designed for Mexico City, but likely to be scalable and beneficial in urban centers around the world.

“To really create change in cities, we need to build relationships, friendships, and new networks. And through building them together, we can go so much further,” says Sarah Williams, director of the LCAU, which leads the initiative in collaboration with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Mexico City government, and the engineering firm Mota-Engil Mexico.

“I think one of the big things we’re proud of is there have been a lot of personal connections created between MIT and UNAM, and I think research collaboration will result from these connections,” says Onésimo Flores PhD ’13, director general of Mota-Engil Mexico’s transportation mobility division. “I think what we have contributed to building is deepening collaboration.”   

UNAM associate professor of architecture Elena Tudela agrees, noting that “beyond the projects themselves, we have developed a genuine friendship that I hope will continue long after this specific collaboration ends.”

“What I personally value most from these years of collaboration on Mexico City’s energy transition is the set of relationships we have built — with researchers, professors and especially the team at the LCAU,” says Tudela, an initiative collaborator. “For local students, the impact has been even more profound. It built bonds that transcend the workshop’s objectives, contributing to a deeper understanding of design as a collaborative, multidisciplinary practice.”

Williams credits Flores with helping to obtain Mota-Engil’s crucial financial support for the LCAU’s Mexico City Initiative. An MIT alumnus who earned his PhD in urban studies and planning in 2013 with Mota-Engil scholarship aid, Flores says the company’s support is meant to accomplish three goals: connect Mexican researchers with MIT, get Mexican students involved in MIT programs, and stimulate interest in projects relevant to cities like Mexico City among MIT faculty.   

“If you can find urban solutions for a city as complex as Mexico City, you can probably figure it out for any city in the world, particularly in the Global South,” he says.

Over the past three years, faculty and students from MIT and UNAM have worked on projects centered on energy transition. Project teams, collaborators, interested local officials, business leaders, and others gathered for a recent symposium showcasing the progress made on the Mexico City Initiative’s projects so far.

Held in Mexico City last fall and featuring presentations by several MIT faculty, the “Energy Transitions” symposium was hosted by the LCAU, UNAM, and Mota-Engil Mexico. Its purpose “was to make sure the research effort that was done together was presented to the public and private sectors — groups that might be able to take the research to the next level,” says Williams, an MIT associate professor of technology and urban planning.

“The lecture series was exciting because we saw an interest in extending all the projects. I also think the conversations and ideas that were had in the room spark the kind of civic debate needed to transform our cities,” Williams says.

Established in 2013, the LCAU’s work cuts across diverse research fields to create innovation in cities.

“There’s not one field that can transform our future cities — innovation happens when we cross disciplines,” says Williams, who became LCAU director four years ago and has since focused the center’s mission on building and maintaining long-term relationships with cities through “City Initiatives.”

Other City Initiatives have included collaborations in Boston, as well as Sydney, Australia; Beirut, Lebanon; Bogota, Colombia; and Pristina, Kosovo. Mexico City was among the first initiatives and is the LCAU’s longest-standing program. Activities have included several classes held between MIT and Mexico City, a public exhibition, a hackathon with MITdesignX, and numerous joint research projects.

Williams describes it as “a fantastic relationship,” which began with development of a strategic plan for a Mexico City Innovation Lab, leading to a decision to focus the initiative on themes playing out over the course of about two years. The current theme is Energy Intersections, which looks at the role design plays in transitioning to cleaner energy infrastructure. 

“This came from the group seeing that Mexico wanted to be a player in the global manufacturing marketplace and one of the barriers was how heavily polluted their energy infrastructure was,” Willliams says.

“The LCAU was founded for this idea that the work and research that we do about cities should be experimental, but also framed within contemporary policies and politics,” she says, adding that the team had considered other possible themes — from water and emergency planning to housing — but “as we started to think about energy, it just became so clearly important.”

Attracting about 70 attendees from Mexico City’s academic, government, and private sectors, the symposium was convened to enable MIT and UNAM researchers to share findings and discuss paths forward for several projects. Featured projects included:

• Redesigning Vallejo-I — aimed at transforming Mexico City’s Vallejo Industrial Zone into a revitalized hub for industry, transportation and housing;
• Decarbonize and Revitalize: Urban Regeneration for Mexico City’s Neighborhoods — which envisions ways for energy, equity, and design to regenerate Mexico City neighborhoods, using the Daniel Garza neighborhood as a model; and
• Bordo Poniente: Territories of Industrial and Ecological Metabolism — which presents strategies for reinventing what was once the world’s third-largest solid waste landfill (Bordo Poniente).

Leading the Bordo Poniente panel was project leader Eran Ben-Joseph, professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at MIT. Developed with UNAM and Mota-Engil partners, the project involved 12 MIT School of Architecture and Planning graduate students working across disciplines to address four integrated objectives: converting waste into public value, advancing energy transition (through methane/leachate capture), promoting equity and environmental justice for neighboring communities, and generating actionable policy recommendations, Ben-Joseph says.

“This collaborative effort exemplifies how international courses can combine rigorous fieldwork, interdisciplinary expertise, and community engagement to reimagine a toxic site as a model of urban regeneration and ecological repair,” he says, adding that the project “reflects MIT’s commitments to climate action, urban innovation, and applied systems thinking.” With over 100,000 landfills worldwide, he says, “a replicable ‘Bordo Model’ positions MIT as a global leader in transformation of waste landscapes into energy, ecological, and civic assets.”

In a similar vein, the Vallejo project reimagines urban industrial blocks as engines of clean energy generation, water resilience, and sustainable mobility. Led by MIT Department of Architecture Lecturer Roi Salgueiro Barrio and moderated by UNAM associate professor of architecture and project collaborator Daniel Daou, the symposium’s Redesigning Vallejo panel discussed how the project establishes an actionable framework for energy and industrial transition that can inspire and guide the revival of other industrial areas.

Finally, MIT professor of architecture and urbanism and project leader Rafi Segal presented the team’s Daniel Garza neighborhood case study, which highlighted two replicable urban planning and community clean energy project designs resulting from work by MIT and UNAM researchers.

“The most impactful aspect of ‘Decarbonize and Revitalize’ is its ability to merge energy transition with urban regeneration at the neighborhood scale. The project does not fit neatly into a single disciplinary category; it operates at the intersection of energy, design, and social infrastructure,” says Daniela Martinez Chapa, a former MIT student and an architect and urban designer who served as research assistant on the MIT team. “The project exemplifies MIT’s commitment to collaborative, context-specific innovation,” she adds.

Like others involved with the Mexico City Initiative, UNAM’s Tudela pointed out how working across disciplines, institutions, and borders has benefited both UNAM and MIT.

“MIT brings cutting-edge tools and methodologies in fields such as energy and urban data science, while UNAM contributes deep local expertise, strong social perspectives, and long-standing engagement with communities,” Tudela says. “This combination has produced highly creative, context-sensitive outcomes.”

As for next steps, Williams is hopeful that conversations started at this fall’s symposium might push the team’s research into the local limelight, helping them go from research and strategies to on-the-ground reality. She pointed to the success of an earlier LCAU Mexico City project as an example of what can happen when the right ideas and stakeholders coalesce.

For the 2022 Mextropoli Architecture and City Festival in Mexico City, an MIT team presented “Sueños con Fiber/Timber, Earth/Concrete.”

“As part of that project, we took a decommissioned roller coaster and reused it as a public forum space. And so that was talking about reuse of wood and making sure that building materials are reused in unique ways,” Williams says.

Adjacent to the repurposed roller coaster, Caitlin Mueller, an associate professor in MIT’s departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering, built a structure made of 3D printed bricks that capture the traditional style of Mexican construction, but with a fraction of the carbon footprint. Mueller has since taken the Sueños project further, co-founding a design and technology company (Forma Systems) focused on expanding access to high-quality, low-carbon affordable housing and building systems by reimagining widely available materials such as concrete and earth.

“Caitlin’s project with the bricks is just such a good example of what the Cities Initiative can do. We seeded collaborative research, and now there’s a startup based off the idea, and they are continuing to do the work,” Williams says. “I think that’s the idea — we help to fund research that combines deep local knowledge and MIT’s innovation environment to help inspire new ideas and technologies for cities.

“I would hope these new projects just presented in Mexico would have a similar trajectory,” she says. “The future is open.”

Michael Moody: Impacting MIT through leadership in auditing

The Institute auditor has guided the Audit Division through a transformative period while strengthening collaborations across MIT.

Michael J. Moody, who has served as Institute auditor since 2014, will retire from MIT in October, following a career in internal and external audit spanning 40 years.

Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor announced the news today in a letter to MIT’s Academic Council.

“I have greatly appreciated Mike’s rigorous and collaborative approach to auditing and advising on the Institute’s policies and processes,” Shor wrote. “He has helped MIT accomplish far-reaching ambitions while adhering to best practices in administering programs and services.”

As Institute auditor, Moody oversees a division that conducts financial, operational, compliance, and technology reviews across MIT. He leads a team of internal auditors that serve as trusted advisors to administrative leadership and members of the MIT Corporation, assessing processes and making recommendations to control risks, improve processes, and enhance decision-making.

The MIT Audit Division maintains a dual reporting structure to ensure its independence. Moody and his team work for the MIT Corporation Risk and Audit Committee but receive administrative support from the MIT Office of the Executive Vice President and Treasurer.

“Mike is highly principled and rigorous with detail, earning our committee’s trust,” says Pat Callahan, chair of the Risk and Audit Committee. “The committee runs like clockwork because of Mike’s dedication and skill.”

Moody has guided the Audit Division through a transformative period, spearheading several impactful initiatives throughout his tenure. He advanced the approval of the first-ever Audit Division Charter to codify the unit’s independence and objectivity and to articulate its mandates for accountability and oversight, and he implemented a new process to distribute audit reports to all senior administrative officers as a best practice. He also initiated the Institute’s inaugural external quality assurance review, for which MIT received the highest rating. Moody has continued the practice of externally auditing the division.

Having a particular interest in leveraging analytics and data to improve workflows and inform assessments, Moody added a data analyst to his team in 2016. The team also sponsors the cross-Institute Data Analysts and Data Scientists (DADS) group, which seeks to foster collaboration while advancing analytics and data practices at an Institute level.

More recently, Moody helped establish the MIT AI Cohort to advance artificial intelligence solutions across the Institute while minimizing associated risks. The group, launched in November 2025, includes representatives from MIT Sloan School of Management, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the School of Engineering, MIT Libraries, the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Division of Graduate and Undergraduate Education, and MIT Health, among others.

A key aspect of Moody's work — and one that has been especially meaningful to him — is helping the MIT community understand the Audit Division's mission and role in furthering the Institute’s positive impact. To facilitate this, he instilled in his team a set of core values that emphasizes professionalism, objectivity, pragmatism, openness, and willingness to listen, and has presented it as a model for peer institutions. He has in this vein focused on building relationships with the community to identify the right opportunities for improvement in MIT’s operations and ensure that the Audit Division’s feedback is constructively delivered and received.

“Mike has been an invaluable partner,” says Suzy Nelson, MIT vice chancellor for student life. “Over the years, his collaborative and knowledgeable approach has helped us improve so many areas — from student organization event management to our business practices to enhancing our student support services. Mike has listened carefully to students’ needs and offered guidance aligned with the goals of the program and student safety.”

Before joining MIT, Moody served in audit and compliance roles at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the state of Illinois. At the public accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand (now Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP), he managed and performed information technology audits and served as a financial and technology consultant for clients in a variety of industries. Moody has also held numerous volunteer and elected leadership positions in international, national, and local professional audit associations. He holds certified internal auditor and certified information systems auditor designations, along with a certification in risk management assurance.

“In reflecting on my time here, I’m most proud of assembling a team that has made positive changes to how MIT operates,” says Moody. “It’s been very rewarding having leaders, staff, and researchers reach out for advice and assistance. It's a testament to the strong relationships we've built across the Institute.”

Shor and Callahan will soon formally launch a search for Institute auditor, and expect to identify Moody’s successor during the fall 2026 semester.

Chemists determine the structure of the fuzzy coat that surrounds Tau proteins

Learning more about this structure could help scientists find ways to block Tau from forming tangles in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the clumping of proteins called Tau, which form tangled fibrils in the brain. The more severe the clumping, the more advanced the disease is.

The Tau protein, which has also been linked to many other neurodegenerative diseases, is unstructured in its normal state, but in the pathological state it consists of a well-ordered rigid core surrounded by floppy segments. These disordered segments form a “fuzzy coat” that helps determine how Tau interacts with other molecules.

MIT chemists have now shown, for the first time, they can use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to decipher the structure of this fuzzy coat. They hope their findings will aid efforts to develop drugs that interfere with Tau buildup in the brain.

“If you want to disaggregate these Tau fibrils with small-molecule drugs, then these drugs have to penetrate this fuzzy coat,” says Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and the senior author of the new study. “That would be an important future endeavor.”

MIT graduate student Jia Yi Zhang is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Former MIT postdoc Aurelio Dregni is also an author of the paper.

Analyzing the fuzzy coat

In a healthy brain, Tau proteins help to stabilize microtubules, which give cells their structure. However, when Tau proteins become misfolded or otherwise altered, they form clumps that contribute to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia.

Determining the structure of the Tau tangles has been difficult because so much of the protein — about 80 percent — is found in the fuzzy coat, which tends to be highly disordered.

This fuzzy coat surrounds a rigid inner core that is made from folded protein strands known as beta sheets. Hong and her colleagues have previously analyzed the structure of the core in a particular Tau fibril using NMR, which can reveal the structures of molecules by measuring the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei within the molecules.

Until now, most researchers had overlooked Tau’s fuzzy coat and focused on the rigid core of the fibrils because those disordered segments change their structures so often that standard structure characterization techniques such as cryoelectron microscopy and X-ray crystallography can’t capture them.

However, in the new study, the researchers developed NMR techniques that allowed them to study the entire Tau protein. In one experiment, they were able to magnetize protons within the most rigid amino acids, then measure how long it took for the magnetization to be transferred to the mobile amino acids. This allowed them to track the magnetization as it traveled from rigid regions to floppy segments, and vice versa.

Using this approach, the researchers could estimate the proximity between the rigid and mobile segments. They complemented this experiment by measuring the different degrees of movement of the amino acids in the fuzzy coat.

“We have now developed an NMR-based technology to examine the fuzzy coat of a full-length Tau fibril, allowing us to capture both the dynamic regions and the rigid core,” Hong says.

Protein dynamics

For this particular fibril, the researchers showed that the overall structure of the Tau protein, which contains about 10 different domains, somewhat resembles a burrito, with several layers of the fuzzy coat wrapped around the rigid core.

Based on their measurements of protein dynamics, the researchers found that these segments fell into three categories. The rigid core of the fibril was surrounded by protein regions with intermediate mobility, whereas the most dynamic segments were found in the outermost layer.

The most dynamic segments of the fuzzy coat are rich in the amino acid proline. In the protein sequence, these prolines are near the amino acids that form the rigid core, and were previously thought to be partially immobilized. Instead, they are highly mobile, indicating that these positively charged proline-rich regions are repelled by the positive charges of the amino acids that form the rigid core.

This structural model gives insight into how Tau proteins form tangles in the brain, Hong says. Similar to how prions trigger healthy proteins to misfold in the brain, it is believed that misfolded Tau proteins latch onto normal Tau proteins and act as a template that induces them to adopt the abnormal structure.

In principle, these normal Tau proteins could add to the ends of existing short filaments or pile onto the sides. The fact that the fuzzy coat wraps around the rigid core indicates that normal Tau proteins more likely add onto the ends of the filaments to generate longer fibrils.

The researchers now plan to explore whether they can stimulate normal Tau proteins to assemble into the type of fibrils seen in Alzheimer’s disease, using misfolded Tau proteins from Alzheimer’s patients as a template.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The “delicious joy” of creating and recreating music

Leslie Tilley combines deep experience as a musician with cultural and formal analysis, to see how people refashion music anew.

As a graduate student, Leslie Tilley spent years studying and practicing the music of Bali, Indonesia, including a traditional technique in which two Balinese drummers play intricately interlocking rhythms while simultaneously improvising. It was beautiful and compelling music, which Tilley heard an unexpected insight about one day.

“The higher drum is the bus driver, and the lower drum is the person who puts the bags on the top of the bus,” a Balinese musician told Tilley.

Today, Tilley is an MIT faculty member who works as both an ethnomusicologist, studying music in its cultural settings, and a music theorist, analyzing its formal principles. The tools of music theory have long been applied to, say, Bach, and rather less often to Balinese drumming. But one of Tilley’s interests is building music theory across boundaries. As she recognized, the drummer’s bus driver analogy is a piece of theory. 

“That doesn’t feel like the music theory I had learned, but that is 100 percent music theory,” Tilley said. “What is the relationship between the drummers? The higher drum has to stick to a smaller subset of rhythms so that the lower drum has more freedom to improvise around. Putting it that way is just a different music-theoretical language.”

Tilley’s anecdote touches on many aspects of her career: Her work ranges widely, while linking theory, practice, and learning. Her studies in Bali became the basis for an award-winning book, which uses Balinese music as a case study for a more generalized framework about collective improvisation, one that can apply to any type of music.

Currently, Tilley is engaged in another major project, supported by a multiyear, $500,000 Mellon Foundation grant, to develop a reimagined music theory curriculum. That project aims to produce an alternative four-semester open access music theory curriculum with a broader scope than many existing course materials, to be accompanied by a new audio-visual textbook. The effort includes a major conference later this year that Tilley is organizing, and is designed as a collaborative project; she will work with other scholars on the curriculum and textbook, with 2028 as a completion date.

If that weren’t enough, Tilley is also working on a new book about the phenomenon of cover songs in modern pop music, from the 1950s onward. Here too, Tilley is combining careful cultural analysis of select popular artists and their work, along with a formal examination of the musical choices they have made while developing cover versions of songs.

All told, understanding how music works within a culture, while understanding the inner workings of music, can deliver us new insights — about music, performers, and audiences.

“What I am focused on fundamentally is how musicians take a musical thing and make something new out of it,” Tilley says. “And then how listeners react to that thing. What is happening here musically? And can that explain the human reaction to it, which is messy and subjective?”

Across all these projects, Tilley has been a consistently innovative scholar who reshapes existing genres of work. For her research and teaching, Tilley has received tenure and is now an associate professor in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Program.

The joy of collective improv

Both of Tilley’s parents were musicians, but “they never had any intention for their kids to go into music,” says Tilley, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Growing up, she studied piano, violin, and French horn for years; played in a symphony orchestra, brass band, and concert bands; sang in choirs; and performed in musicals. Ultimately she realized she could make a career out of music as well. 

“In 12th grade I suddenly realized, music is what I do. Music is who I am. Music is what I love,” Tilley says. Back then, she pictured herself being an opera singer. Subsequently, as she recalls, “Somewhere along the way, I steered myself into music scholarship.”

Tilley received her bachelor of music degree from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, and then conducted her graduate studies in music at the University of British Columbia, where she earned an MA and PhD. It was in graduate school that Tilley began studying the music of Bali — on campus and during extended periods of field research.

Studying Balinese music was “mildly accidental,” Tilley says, calling it “a little bit of happy happenstance. Encountering these musical traditions exploded the way I thought about music and ways of understanding the interactions of musicians.”

In her research, Tilley looked intensively at two distinct improvised Balinese musical practices: the four-person melodic gong technique “reyong norot” and the two-person drumming practice “kendang arja.” Both are featured in her 2019 book, “Making It Up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond.” Published by the University of Chicago Press, it won the 2022 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory.

Grounded in empirical evidence, the book proposes a novel, universal framework for understanding the components of collective improvisation. That includes both the more strictly musical aspects of improvisation — how much flexibility musicians give themselves to improvise, for instance — as well as the forms of interaction musicians have with their co-performers.

“My book is about collective improvisation and what it means,” Tilley says. “What is the give and take of that process, and how can we analyze that? There are lots of scholars who have discussed collective improvisation as it exists in jazz. The delicious joy of collective improvisation is something anybody who improvises in a musical group will talk about. My book looks at examples, especially the case studies I have from Bali, and then creates bigger analytical frameworks, so there can finally be an umbrella way of looking at this phenomenon across music cultures and practices.”

Despite her years of immersing herself in the music, and playing it, Tilley says, “I am a beginner in comparison to the drummers I studied with, who have been playing forever and played with other masters their whole lives, and were generous enough to allow me to learn from them.” Still, she thinks the experience of playing music while studying it is indispensable.

“Ethnomusicology is a field that takes a bit from other fields,” Tilley notes. “The idea of participant observation, we borrow that from anthropology, and the idea of close musical analysis is from musicology or music theory. It’s an in-between way of thinking about music where I get to both participate and observe. But also I’m a music analysis nerd: What’s happening in the notes? Looking at music note-by-note, but from a place of physical embodiment, provides a better understanding than if I had just looked at the notes.”

Expanding instruction

At present, Tilley is devoting significant effort to her music-theory curriculum work, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation as a three-year effort. The upcoming summer conference she is organizing, also supported by the Mellon Foundation, will be a key part of the project, allowing a wide range of scholars to air perspectives about reimagining music theory studies in the 21st century.

Substantively, the idea is to broaden the scope of music theory instruction. Often, Tilley says, “music theory is learning how to understand the musical structures that are essentially between Bach and early Beethoven, that kind of narrow range of a couple hundred years, really amazing musical systems with a very deep, written-down music theory. But that accepted canon leaves out so many other kinds of music and ways of knowing.” Instead, she adds, “If we were not beholden to any assumptions about what we should have in a music program, what skills would we want our students to walk away from four semesters of music theory with?”

About the conference, Tilley quips: “Sitting in a room and nerding out with a bunch of people who care deeply about a thing you care about, which in my case is music, music theory, and pedagogy, is possibly the coolest thing you can do with your time. Hopefully something wonderful comes out of it.”

As Tilley views it, her current book project on pop music cover songs stems from some of the same issues that have long animated her thinking: How do artists fashion their work out of existing knowledge?

“The project on cover songs is similar to the project on collective improvisation in Bali,” Tilley says, in the sense that when it comes to improvisation, “I have a bank of things I know, in my head and in my body about this musical practice, and within that context I can create something that is new and mine, based on something that exists already.”

She adds: “Cover songs to me are the same, but different. The same in that it’s a musical transformation, but different because a pop song doesn’t just have lyrics, melody, and chords, but the vocal quality, the arrangement, the brand of the performer, and so much more. What we think about in popular music isn’t just the song, it’s the person singing it, the social and political contexts, and the listener’s personal relationships to all those things, and they’re so wrapped up together we almost can’t disentangle them.”

As with her earlier work, Tilley is not just examining individual pieces of music, but building a larger analytical model in the process — one that factors in the formal musical changes artists make as well as the cultural components of the phenomenon, to understand why cover songs can produce strong and varying reactions among listeners.

In the process, Tilley has been presenting conference papers and invited talks on the topic for a number of years now. One case that interests Tilley is the singer-songwriter Tori Amos, whose many cover versions transform the viewpoint, music, and meaning of songs by artists from Eminem to Nirvana, and more. There may also be some Taylor Swift content in the next book, although with thousands and thousands of songs to choose from in the pop-rock era, there could be something for everyone — fitting Tilley’s ethos of studying music broadly, across time and space as it is created, recreated, and recreated again.

“This is why music is infinitely cool,” Tilley says. “It’s so malleable, and so open to interpretation.” 

A protein found in the GI tract can neutralize many bacteria

The protein, known as intelectin-2, also helps to strengthen the mucus barrier lining the digestive tract.

The mucosal surfaces that line the body are embedded with defensive molecules that help keep microbes from causing inflammation and infections. Among these molecules are lectins — proteins that recognize microbes and other cells by binding to sugars found on cell surfaces.

One of these lectins, MIT researchers have found, has broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity against bacteria found in the GI tract. This lectin, known as intelectin-2, binds to sugar molecules found on bacterial membranes, trapping the bacteria and hindering their growth. Additionally, it can crosslink molecules that make up mucus, helping to strengthen the mucus barrier.

“What’s remarkable is that intelectin-2 operates in two complementary ways. It helps stabilize the mucus layer, and if that barrier is compromised, it can directly neutralize or restrain bacteria that begin to escape,” says Laura Kiessling, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study.

This kind of broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity could make intelectin-2 useful as a potential therapeutic, the researchers say. It could also be harnessed to help strengthen the mucus barrier in patients with disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease.

Amanda Dugan, a former MIT research scientist, and Deepsing Syangtan PhD ’24 are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.

A multifunctional protein

Current evidence suggests that the human genome encodes more than 200 lectins — carbohydrate-binding proteins that play a variety of roles in the immune system and in communication between cells. Kiessling’s lab, which has been exploring lectin-carbohydrate interactions, recently became interested in a family of lectins called intelectins. In humans, this family includes two lectins, intelectin-1 and intelectin-2.

Those two proteins have very similar structures, but intelectin-1 is distinctive in that it only binds to carbohydrates found in bacteria and other microbes. About 10 years ago, Kiessling and her colleagues were able to discover intelectin-1’s structure, but its functions are still not fully understood.

At that time, scientists hypothesized that intelectin-2 might play a role in immune defense, but there hadn’t been many studies to support that idea. Dugan, then a postdoc in Kiessling’s lab, set out to learn more about intelectin-2.

In humans, intelectin-2 is produced at steady levels by Paneth cells in the small intestine, but in mice, its expression from mucus-producing Goblet cells appears to be triggered by inflammation and certain types of parasitic infection.

In the new study, the researchers found that both human and mouse intelectin-2 bind to a sugar molecule called galactose. This sugar is commonly found in molecules called mucins that make up mucus. When intelectin-2 binds to these mucins, it helps to strengthen the mucus barrier, the researchers found.

Galactose is also found in carbohydrates displayed on the surfaces of some bacterial cells. The researchers showed that intelectin-2 can bind to microbes that display these sugars, including many pathogens that cause GI infections.

The researchers also found that over time, these trapped microbes eventually disintegrate, suggesting that the protein is able to kill them by disrupting their cell membranes. This antimicrobial activity appears to affect a wide range of bacteria, including some that are resistant to traditional antibiotics.

These dual functions help to protect the lining of the GI tract from infection, the researchers believe.

“Intelectin-2 first reinforces the mucus barrier itself, and then if that barrier is breached, it can control the bacteria and restrict their growth,” Kiessling says.

Fighting off infection

In patients with inflammatory bowel disease, intelectin-2 levels can become abnormally high or low. Low levels could contribute to degradation of the mucus barrier, while high levels could kill off too many beneficial bacteria that normally live in the gut. Finding ways to restore the correct levels of intelectin-2 could be beneficial for those patients, the researchers say.

“Our findings show just how critical it is to stabilize the mucus barrier. Looking ahead, we can imagine exploiting lectin properties to design proteins that actively reinforce that protective layer,” Kiessling says.

Because intelectin-2 can neutralize or eliminate pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which are often difficult to treat with antibiotics, it could potentially be adapted as an antimicrobial agent.

“Harnessing human lectins as tools to combat antimicrobial resistance opens up a fundamentally new strategy that draws on our own innate immune defenses,” Kiessling says. “Taking advantage of proteins that the body already uses to protect itself against pathogens is compelling and a direction that we are pursuing.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health Glycoscience Common Fund, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the National Science Foundation.

Other authors who contributed to the study include Charles Bevins, a professor of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine; Ramnik Xavier, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and Katharina Ribbeck, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT.

Understanding ammonia energy’s tradeoffs around the world

MIT Energy Initiative researchers calculated the economic and environmental impact of future ammonia energy production and trade pathways.

Many people are optimistic about ammonia’s potential as an energy source and carrier of hydrogen, and though large-scale adoption would require major changes to the way it is currently manufactured, ammonia does have a number of advantages. For one thing, ammonia is energy-dense and carbon-free. It is also already produced at scale and shipped around the world, primarily for use in fertilizer.

Though current manufacturing processes give ammonia an enormous carbon footprint, cleaner ways to make ammonia do exist. A better understanding of how to guide the ammonia fuel industry’s continued development could improve carbon emissions, energy costs, and regional energy balances.

In a new paper, MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) researchers created the largest combined dataset showing the economic and environmental impact of global ammonia supply chains under different scenarios. They examined potential ammonia flows across 63 countries and considered a variety of country-specific economic parameters as well as low- and no-carbon ammonia production technologies. The results should help researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders calculate the cost and lifecycle emissions of different ammonia production technologies and trade routes.

“This is the most comprehensive work on the global ammonia landscape,” says senior author Guiyan Zang, a research scientist at MITEI. “We developed many of these frameworks at MIT to be able to make better cost-benefit analyses. Hydrogen and ammonia are the only two types of fuel with no carbon at scale. If we want to use fuel to generate power and heat, but not release carbon, hydrogen and ammonia are the only options, and ammonia is easier to transport and lower-cost.”

The study provides the clearest view yet of the tradeoffs associated with various ammonia production technologies. The researchers found, for instance, that a full transition to ammonia produced using conventional processes paired with carbon capture could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 71 percent for a 23.2 percent cost increase. A transition to electrolyzed ammonia produced using renewable energy could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.7 percent for a 46 percent cost increase.

“Before this, there were no harmonized datasets quantifying the impacts of this transition,” says lead author Woojae Shin, a postdoc at MITEI. “Everyone is talking about ammonia as a super important hydrogen carrier in the future, and also ammonia can be directly used in power generation or fertilizer and other industrial uses. But we needed this dataset. It’s filling a major knowledge gap.”

The paper appears in Energy and Environmental Science. Former MITEI postdocs Haoxiang Lai and Gasim Ibrahim are also co-authors.

Filling a data gap

Today ammonia is mainly produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which in 2020 was responsible for about 1.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Although current ammonia production is energy-intensive and polluting (referred to as gray ammonia), ammonia can also be produced sustainably using renewable sources (green ammonia) or with natural gas and carbon sequestration (blue ammonia).

As ammonia has increasingly attracted interest as a carbon-free energy source and a medium for hydrogen transport, it’s become more important to quantify the costs and life-cycle emissions associated with various ammonia production technologies, as well as ammonia storage and shipping routes. But existing studies were too narrowly focused.

“The previous studies and datasets were fragmented,” Shin says. “They focused on specific regions or single technologies, like gray ammonia only, or blue ammonia only. They would also only cover the cost or the greenhouse emissions of ammonia in isolation. Finally, they use different scopes and methodologies. It meant you couldn’t make global comparisons or draw definitive conclusions.”

To build their database, the MIT researchers combined data from dozens of studies analyzing specific technologies, regions, economic parameters, and trade flows. They also used frameworks they previously developed to calculate the total cost of ammonia production in each country and estimated lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain, factoring in storage and shipping between different regions.

Emissions calculations included activities related to feedstock extraction, production, transport, and import processing. Major cost factors included each country’s renewable and grid electricity prices, natural gas prices, and location. Other factors like interest rates and equity premiums were also included.

The researchers used their calculations to find ammonia costs and life cycle emissions across six ammonia production technologies. In the context of the U.S. average, they found the lowest production cost came from using a popular form of the Haber Bosch process known as natural gas steam methane reforming (SMR) without carbon capture and storage (gray ammonia), at 48 cents per kilogram of ammonia. Unfortunately, that economic advantage came with the highest greenhouse gas emissions, at 2.46 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of ammonia. In contrast, SMR with carbon capture and storage achieves an approximately 61 percent reduction in emissions while incurring a 29 percent increase in production costs.

Another method for producing ammonia that uses natural gas as a feedstock called auto-thermal reforming (ATR) with air combustion, when combined with carbon capture and storage, exhibited a 10 percent higher cost than conventional SMR while generating emissions of 0.75 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of ammonia, representing a more cost-effective decarbonization option than SMR with carbon capture and storage.

Among production pathways including carbon capture (blue ammonia), a variation of ATR that uses oxygen combustion and carbon capture had the lowest emissions, with a production cost of about 57 cents per kilogram of ammonia. Producing ammonia with electricity generally had higher production costs than blue ammonia pathways. When nuclear energy is powering ammonia production, as opposed to the grid, greenhouse gas emissions are near zero at 0.03 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per kilogram of ammonia produced.

Across the 63 countries studied, major cost and emissions differences were driven by energy costs, sources of energy for the grid, and financing environments. China emerged as an optimal future supplier of green ammonia to many countries, while the Middle East also offered competitive low-carbon ammonia production pathways. Generally, blue ammonia pathways are most attractive for countries with low-cost natural gas resources, and ammonia made using grid electricity proved more expensive and more carbon-intensive than conventionally produced ammonia.

From data to policy

Low-carbon ammonia use is projected to grow dramatically by 2050, with that ammonia procured via global trade. Japan and Korea, for example, have included ammonia in their national energy strategies and conducted trials using ammonia to generate power. They even offer economic credits for verified CO2 reductions from clean ammonia projects.

“Ammonia researchers, producers, as well as government officials require this data to understand the impact of different technologies and global supply corridors,” Shin says.

The authors also believe industry stakeholders and other researchers will get a lot of value from their database, which allows users to explore the impact of changing specific parameters.

“We collaborate with companies, and they need to know the full costs and lifecycle emissions associated with different options,” Zang says. “Governments can also use this to compare options and set future policies. Any country producing ammonia needs to know which countries they can deliver to economically.”

The research was supported by the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center.

This new tool could tell us how consciousness works

Researchers propose a roadmap for using transcranial focused ultrasound, a noninvasive way to stimulate the brain and see how it functions.

Consciousness is famously a “hard problem” of science: We don’t precisely know how the physical matter in our brains translates into thoughts, sensations, and feelings. But an emerging research tool called transcranial focused ultrasound may enable researchers to learn more about the phenomenon.

The technology has entered use in recent years, but it isn’t yet fully integrated into research. Now, two MIT researchers are planning experiments with it, and have published a new paper they term a “roadmap” for using the tool to study consciousness.

“Transcranial focused ultrasound will let you stimulate different parts of the brain in healthy subjects, in ways you just couldn’t before,” says Daniel Freeman, an MIT researcher and co-author of a new paper on the subject. “This is a tool that’s not just useful for medicine or even basic science, but could also help address the hard problem of consciousness. It can probe where in the brain are the neural circuits that generate a sense of pain, a sense of vision, or even something as complex as human thought.”

Transcranial focused ultrasound is noninvasive and reaches deeper into the brain, with greater resolution, than other forms of brain stimulation, such as transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation.

“There are very few reliable ways of manipulating brain activity that are safe but also work,” says Matthias Michel, an MIT philosopher who studies consciousness and co-authored the new work.

The paper, “Transcranial focused ultrasound for identifying the neural substrate of conscious perception,” is published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. The authors are Freeman, a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Brian Odegaard, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida; Seung-Schik Yoo, an associate professor of radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School; and Michel, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Philosophy and Linguistics.

Pinpointing causality

Brain research is especially difficult because of the challenge of studying healthy individuals. Apart from neurosurgery, there are very limited ways to gain knowledge of the deepest structures in the human brain. From the outside of the head, noninvasive approaches like MRIs and other kinds of ultrasounds yield some imaging information, while the electroencephalogram (EEG) shows electrical activity in the brain. Conversely, with transcranial focused ultrasound, acoustic waves are transmitted through the skull, focusing down to a target area of a few millimeters, allowing specific brain structures to be stimulated to study the resulting effect. It could therefore be a productive tool for robust experiments.

“It truly is the first time in history that one can modulate activity deep in the brain, centimeters from the scalp, examining subcortical structures with high spatial resolution,” Freeman says. “There’s a lot of interesting emotional circuits that are deep in the brain, but until now you couldn’t manipulate them outside of the operating room.”

Crucially, the technology may help researchers determine cause-and-effect patterns, precisely because its ultrasound waves modulate brain activity. Many studies of consciousness today may measure brain activity in relation to, say, visual stumuli, since visual processing is among the core components of consciousness. But it’s not necessarily clear if the brain activity being measured represents the generation of consciousness, or a mere consequence of consciousness. By manipulating the brain’s activity, researchers can better grasp which actions help constitute consciousness, or are byproducts of it.

“Transcranial focused ultrasound gives us a solution to that problem,” says Michel.

The “roadmap” laid out in the new paper aims to help distinguish between two main conceptions of consciousness. Broadly, the “cognitivist” conception holds that the neural activity that generates conscious experience must involve higher-level mental processes, such as reasoning or self-reflection. These processes link information from many different parts of the brain into a coherent whole, likely using the frontal cortex of the brain.

By contrast, the “non-cognitivist” idea of consciousness takes the position that conscious experience does not require such cognitive machinery; instead, specific patterns of neural activity give rise directly to particular subjective experiences, without the need for sophisticated interpretive processes. In this view, brain activity responsible for consciousness may be more localized, at the back of the cortex or in subcortical structures at the back of the brain.

To use transcranial focused ultrasound productively, the researchers lay out a series of more specific questions that experiments might address: What is the role of the prefrontal cortex in conscious perception? Is perception generated locally, or are brain-wide networks required? If consciousness arises across distant regions of the brain, how are perceptions from those areas linked into one unified experience? And what is the role of subcortical structures in conscious activity?

By modulating brain activity in experiments involving, say, visual stimuli, researchers could draw closer to answers about the brain areas that are necessary in the production of conscious thought. The same goes for studies of, for instance, pain, another core sensation linked with consciousness. We pull our hand back from a hot stove before the pain hits us. But how is the conscious sensation of pain generated, and where in the brain does that happen?

“It’s a basic science question, how is pain generated in the brain,” Freeman says. “And it’s surprising there is such uncertainty … Pain could stem from cortical areas, or it could be deeper brain structures. I’m interested in therapies, but I’m also curious if subcortical structures may play a bigger role than appreciated. It could be the physical manifestation of pain is subcortical. That’s a hypothesis. But now we have a tool to examine it.”

Experiments ahead

Freeman and Michel are not just abstractly charting a course for others to follow; they are planning forthcoming experiments centered on stimulation of the visual cortex, before moving on to higher-level areas in frontal cortex. While methods of recording brain activity, such as an EEG reveal areas that are visually responsive, these new experiments are aiming to build a more complete, causal picture of the entire process of visual perception and its associated brain activity.

“It’s one thing to say if these neurons reponded electrically. It’s another thing to say if a person saw light,” Freeman says.

Michel, for his part, is also playing an active role in generating further interest in studies of consciousness at MIT. Along with Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Michel is a co-founder of the MIT Consciousness Club, a cross-disciplinary effort to spur further academic study of consciousness, on campus and at other Boston-area institutions.

The MIT Consciousness Club is supported in part by MITHIC, the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, an initiative backed by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The program aims to hold monthly events, while grappling with the cutting edge of consciousness research.

At the moment, Michel believes, the cutting edge very much involves transcranial focused ultrasound.

“It’s a new tool, so we don’t really know to what extent it’s going to work,” Michel says. “But I feel there’s low risk and high reward. Why wouldn’t you take this path?”

The research for the paper was supported by the U.S. Department of the Air Force. 

Fueling research in nuclear thermal propulsion

Master's student Taylor Hampson is modeling the behavior of an unconventional rocket engine that will heat propellant using nuclear energy.

Going to the moon was one thing; going to Mars will be quite another. The distance alone is intimidating. While the moon is 238,855 miles away, the distance to Mars is between 33 million and 249 million miles. The propulsion systems that got us to the moon just won’t work.

Taylor Hampson, a master’s student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is well aware of the problem. It’s one of the many reasons he’s excited about his NASA-sponsored research into nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP).

The technique uses nuclear energy to heat a propellant, like hydrogen, to an extremely high temperature and expel it through a nozzle. The resultant thrust can significantly reduce travel times to Mars, compared to chemical rockets. “You can get double the efficiency, or more, from a nuclear propulsion engine with the same thrust. Besides, being in microgravity is not ideal for astronauts, so you want to get them there faster, which is a strong motivation for using nuclear propulsion over the chemical equivalents,” Hampson says.

Understanding nuclear thermal propulsion

It’s worth taking a quick survey of rocket propulsion techniques to understand where Hampson’s work fits.

There are three broad types of rocket propulsion: chemical, where thrust is achieved by the combustion of rocket propellants; electrical, where electric fields accelerate charged particles to high velocities to achieve thrust; and nuclear, where nuclear energy delivers needed propulsion.

Nuclear propulsion, which is only used in space, not to get to space, further falls into one of two categories: nuclear electric propulsion uses nuclear energy to generate electricity and accelerate the propellant. Nuclear thermal propulsion, which is what Hampson is researching, heats a propellant using nuclear power. A significant advantage of NTP is that it can deliver double the efficiency (or more) of the chemical equivalent for the same thrust. A disadvantage: cost and regulatory hurdles. “Sure, you can get double the efficiency or more from a nuclear propulsion engine, but there hasn’t been a mission case that has needed it enough to justify the higher cost,” Hampson says.

Until now.

With a human mission to Mars becoming a very real possibility — NASA plans on sending astronauts to Mars as early as the 2030s — NTP might soon come under the spotlight.

"It's almost futuristic"

Growing up on Florida’s Space Coast and watching space shuttle launches stoked Hampson’s early interest in science. Loving many other subjects, including history and math, it wasn’t until his senior year that Hampson cast his lot into the engineering category. While space exploration got him hooked on aerospace engineering, Hampson was also intrigued by the possibility of nuclear engineering as a way to a greener future.

Wracked by indecision, he applied to schools in both fields and completed his undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech. It was here that a series of internships in space technology companies like Blue Origin and Stoke Space, and participation in Georgia Tech’s rocket team, cemented Hampson’s love for rocket propulsion.

Looking to pursue graduate studies, MIT seemed like the next logical step. “I think MIT has the best combination of nuclear and aerospace education, and is really strong in the field of testing nuclear fuels,” Hampson says. Facilities in the MIT Reactor enable testing of nuclear fuel under conditions they would see in a nuclear propulsion engine. It helped that Koroush Shirvan, associate professor of NSE and Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies, was working on nuclear thermal propulsion efforts with NASA while focusing most of his efforts on the testing of nuclear fuels.

At MIT, Hampson works under the advisement of Shirvan. Hampson has had the chance to pursue further research in a project he started with an internship at NASA: studies of a nuclear thermal propulsion engine. “Nuclear propulsion is itself advanced, and I’m working on what comes after that. It’s almost futuristic,” he says.

Modeling the effects of nuclear thermal propulsion

While the premise of NTP sounds promising, its execution will likely not be straightforward. For one thing, with NTP, the rocket engine won’t start up and shut down like simple combustion engines. The startup is complex because rapid increase in temperatures can cause material failures. And the engines can take longer to shut down because of heat from nuclear decay. As a result, the components have to continue to be cooled until enough fission products decay away so there isn’t a lot of heat left, Hampson says.

Hampson is modeling the entirety of the rocket engine system — the tank, the pump, and more — to understand how these and many other parameters work together. Evaluating the entire engine is important because different configurations of parts (and even the fuel) can affect performance. To simplify calculations and to have simulations run faster, he’s working with a relatively simple one-dimensional model. Using it, Hampson can follow the effects of variables on parameters like temperature and pressure on each of the components throughout the engine operation.

“The challenge is in coupling the thermodynamic effects with the neutronic effects,” he says.

Ready for more challenges ahead

After years of indecision, delaying practically every academics-related decision to the last minute, Hampson seems to have zeroed in on what he expects to be his life’s work — inspired by the space shuttle launches many years ago — and hopes to pursue doctoral studies after graduation.

Hampson always welcomes a challenge, and it’s what motivates him to run. Training for the Boston Marathon, he fractured his leg, an injury that surfaced when he was running for yet another race, the Beantown Marathon. He’s not bowed by the incident. “I learned that you’re a lot more capable than you think,” Hampson says, “although you have to ask yourself about the cost,” he laughs. (He was in crutches for weeks after).

A thirst for a challenge is also one of the many reasons he chose to research thermal nuclear propulsion. It helps that the research indulges his love for the field. “Relatively speaking, it’s a field in need of much more advancement; there are many more unsolved problems,” he says. 

MIT named to prestigious 2026 honor roll for mental health services

Princeton Review recognizes MIT as one of 30 institutions with a strong commitment to mental health and well-being.

MIT is often recognized as one of the leading institutions of higher learning not only in the United States, but in the world, by several publications, including U.S. News & World Report, QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education, and Forbes.

Now, MIT also has the distinction of being one of just 30 colleges and universities out of hundreds recognized by Princeton Review’s 2026 Mental Health Services Honor Roll for providing exemplary mental health and well-being services to its students. This is the second year in a row that MIT has received this honor.

The honor roll was created to be a resource for enrolled students and prospective students who may seek such services when applying to colleges. The survey asked more than a dozen questions about training for students, faculty, and staff; provisions for making new policies and procedures; peer-to-peer offerings; screenings and referral services available to all students; residence hall mental health resources; and other criteria, such as current online information that is updated and accessible.

Overall, the 2025 survey findings for all participating institutions are noteworthy, with Princeton Review reporting double-digit increases in campus counseling, wellness, and student support programs compared with its 2024 survey results. Earning a place on the honor roll underscores MIT’s commitment to providing exceptional services for graduate and undergraduate students alike.

Karen Singleton, deputy chief health officer and chief of mental health and counseling services at MIT Health, says, “This honor highlights the hard work and collaboration that we do here at MIT to support students in their well-being journey. This is a recognition of how we are doing those things effectively, and a recognition of MIT’s investment in these support services.”

MIT Health hosts 36 clinicians to meet the needs of the community, and it recently added an easy online scheduling system at the request of students.

Many mental health and well-being services are offered through several departments housed in the Division of Student Life (DSL). They often collaborate with MIT Health and partners across the Institute, including in the Division of Graduate and Undergraduate Education, to provide the best services for the best outcomes for MIT students. 

Support resources in DSL are highly utilized and valued by students. For instance, 82 percent of the Class of 2025 had visited Student Support Services (S3) at least once before graduating, and on a regular satisfaction survey, 91 percent of students who visited S3 said they would return if needed.

“Student Support Services supports over 80 percent of all undergraduates by the time they graduate, and over 60 percent each year. Our offices, including ORSEL, GradSupport, S3, SMHC, the CARE Team, and Residential and Community Life work incredibly well together to support our students,” says Kate McCarthy, senior associate dean of support, wellbeing, and belonging.

“The magic in our support system is the deeply collaborative nature of it. There are many different places students can enter the support network, and each of these teams works closely together to ensure students get connected to the help they need. We always say that students shouldn’t think too much about where they turn … if they get to one of us, they get to all of us,” says David Randall, dean of student life.

Division of Student Life Vice Chancellor Suzy Nelson adds, “It is an honor to see MIT included among colleges and universities recognized for excellent mental health services. Promoting student well-being is central to our mission and guides so much of what we do. This recognition reflects the work of many in our community who are dedicated to creating a campus environment where students can thrive academically and personally.”

3 Questions: How AI could optimize the power grid

While the growing energy demands of AI are worrying, some techniques can also help make power grids cleaner and more efficient.

Artificial intelligence has captured headlines recently for its rapidly growing energy demands, and particularly the surging electricity usage of data centers that enable the training and deployment of the latest generative AI models. But it’s not all bad news — some AI tools have the potential to reduce some forms of energy consumption and enable cleaner grids.

One of the most promising applications is using AI to optimize the power grid, which would improve efficiency, increase resilience to extreme weather, and enable the integration of more renewable energy. To learn more, MIT News spoke with Priya Donti, the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), whose work focuses on applying machine learning to optimize the power grid.

Q: Why does the power grid need to be optimized in the first place?

A: We need to maintain an exact balance between the amount of power that is put into the grid and the amount that comes out at every moment in time. But on the demand side, we have some uncertainty. Power companies don’t ask customers to pre-register the amount of energy they are going to use ahead of time, so some estimation and prediction must be done.

Then, on the supply side, there is typically some variation in costs and fuel availability that grid managers need to be responsive to. That has become an even bigger issue because of the integration of energy from time-varying renewable sources, like solar and wind, where uncertainty in the weather can have a major impact on how much power is available. Then, at the same time, depending on how power is flowing in the grid, there is some power lost through resistive heat on the power lines. So, as a grid operator, how do you make sure all that is working all the time? That is where optimization comes in.

Q: How can AI be most useful in power grid optimization?

A: One way AI can be helpful is to use a combination of historical and real-time data to make more precise predictions about how much renewable energy will be available at a certain time. This could lead to a cleaner power grid by allowing us to handle and better utilize these resources.

AI could also help tackle the complex optimization problems that power grid operators must solve to balance supply and demand in a way that also reduces costs. These optimization problems are used to determine which power generators should produce power, how much they should produce, and when they should produce it, as well as when batteries should be charged and discharged, and whether we can leverage flexibility in power loads. These optimization problems are so computationally expensive that operators use approximations so they can solve them in a feasible amount of time. But these approximations are often wrong, and when we integrate more renewable energy into the grid, they are thrown off even farther. AI can help by providing more accurate approximations in a faster manner, which can be deployed in real-time to help grid operators responsively and proactively manage the grid.

AI could also be useful in the planning of next-generation power grids. Planning for power grids requires one to use huge simulation models, so AI can play a big role in running those models more efficiently. The technology can also help with predictive maintenance by detecting where anomalous behavior on the grid is likely to happen, reducing inefficiencies that come from outages. More broadly, AI could also be applied to accelerate experimentation aimed at creating better batteries, which would allow the integration of more energy from renewable sources into the grid.

Q: How should we think about the pros and cons of AI, from an energy sector perspective?

A: One important thing to remember is that AI refers to a heterogeneous set of technologies. There are different types and sizes of models that are used, and different ways that models are used. If you are using a model that is trained on a smaller amount of data with a smaller number of parameters, that is going to consume much less energy than a large, general-purpose model.

In the context of the energy sector, there are a lot of places where, if you use these application-specific AI models for the applications they are intended for, the cost-benefit tradeoff works out in your favor. In these cases, the applications are enabling benefits from a sustainability perspective — like incorporating more renewables into the grid and supporting decarbonization strategies.

Overall, it’s important to think about whether the types of investments we are making into AI are actually matched with the benefits we want from AI. On a societal level, I think the answer to that question right now is “no.” There is a lot of development and expansion of a particular subset of AI technologies, and these are not the technologies that will have the biggest benefits across energy and climate applications. I’m not saying these technologies are useless, but they are incredibly resource-intensive, while also not being responsible for the lion’s share of the benefits that could be felt in the energy sector.

I’m excited to develop AI algorithms that respect the physical constraints of the power grid so that we can credibly deploy them. This is a hard problem to solve. If an LLM says something that is slightly incorrect, as humans, we can usually correct for that in our heads. But if you make the same magnitude of a mistake when you are optimizing a power grid, that can cause a large-scale blackout. We need to build models differently, but this also provides an opportunity to benefit from our knowledge of how the physics of the power grid works.

And more broadly, I think it’s critical that those of us in the technical community put our efforts toward fostering a more democratized system of AI development and deployment, and that it’s done in a way that is aligned with the needs of on-the-ground applications.

2.009 mechanical engineering students embrace “cycles”

Six MIT student teams pitched products during the annual capstone course prototype launch event.

MIT’s senior capstone course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), an iconic class known colloquially on campus as “two double-oh nine,” emulates what engineers experience while working as part of a design team at a product development firm. The annual prototype launch is a colorful and exciting culmination of a semester’s worth of work.

“This fall, 97 students split into six teams entered the rapid-fire cycle of product engineering, looping between ideas, prototypes, failures, fixes, and breakthroughs,” said Josh Wiesman, 2.009 lecturer, in the program’s opening remarks. “They pushed themselves out of their comfort zone and learned to oscillate between creativity and technical rigor. Thermal, fluids, mechanics, materials, instrumentation — everything you can imagine came back around in new and unexpected ways.”

Wiesman’s remarks hinted at this year’s theme, which co-instructor Peko Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering, reminded spectators was announced this year as “Cycles!”

“Engineering doesn’t move in a straight line,” Hosoi elaborated. “It loops, it resets, accelerates, and builds momentum, just like our students.” She continued, “Tonight, we’re celebrating the energy, grit, and creativity that comes from embracing those cycles.”

Starting with ideation, the teams ventured out to talk to people from a variety of walks of life and uncover what Hosoi referred to as “exciting problems worth solving.” From there — with mentors, access to makerspaces, and a budget to turn their ideas into working products — the teams, each represented by a color, spent 13 weeks designing, building, and drafting a business plan for their product.

Spectators packed Kresge Auditorium on Dec. 8, waiving colorful pompoms and cheering on the teams, with thousands more watching online. The six teams demonstrated their prototypes and shared business plans, with breaks between presentations featuring dance and musical performances by MIT Ridonkulous, MIT Ohms, and MIT Live, and short animated films created by the 2.009 team which, this year, incorporated popular movie references.

A recording of the event livestream is available on the 2.009 website, which includes full demonstrations of the product prototypes discussed below, along with audience questions.

Green Team

In the United States, some 350,000 people suffer cardiac arrest each year. Immediate intervention by bystanders can be the difference between life and death. The Green Team presented HeartBridge, an automated CPR device.

“For every minute someone who needs it goes without effective CPR, their chance of survival decreases by roughly 10 percent,” Green Team presenters told the audience. But, they added, CPR is exhausting at the recommended speed and compression depth, with research showing decreases in effectiveness of manual compressions after just three minutes.

HeartBridge is a durable mechanical device that administers steady compressions to a patient and provides textual, visual, and auditory cues to users.

Purple Team

The Purple Team painted the picture of a quintessential fall activity in New England, inviting the audience to imagine “it’s a beautiful Saturday in October, and you decide to go apple picking.” At family-run orchards, thousands of apples fall to the ground each season, creating more than just a mess. Rotting apples invite pests or can spread fungus, decreasing crop yield.

AgriSweep, the Purple Team’s prototype, is a hydraulic powered tractor attachment that collects fallen apples into a produce bin, saving time and labor costs, decreasing the need for sprays, and potentially generating revenue for farmers who sell the windfalls for hard cider, livestock feed, or compost.

Nodding to the video references punctuating the show, the team closed their presentation with a reference to an iconic film with an MIT connection: “How do you like them apples?”

Red Team

Hand embroidery is a popular pastime, but drawing or transferring patterns can be time-consuming or messy. The Red Team aims to solve this problem with their product, Scribbly, a “user-friendly and software-free printer” designed to let hobbyists to create their own designs and make transfers easier.

The machine, which can accommodate a variety of fabrics and embroidery hoop sizes up to 10 inches in diameter, reads design files from a USB, then transfers the image via a pen that can be “erased” with heat if the user wants to change the design.

To demonstrate their product, the team created a transfer pattern of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering logo.

Blue Team

Boating safety was top-of-mind for the Blue Team. Propeller-related injuries are a big concern for recreational boaters. Fixed propeller guards, or prop guards, are the most common solution but have drawbacks, including reducing fuel efficiency and decreasing maneuverability. DORI, the Blue Team prototype, is a deployable prop guard that is stowed above the waterline and can be lowered into place when needed.

Yellow Team

The Yellow Team tackled a problem faced by “pond skating enthusiasts and people who maintain their own backyard rinks,” namely, rough patches, bumps, and uneven ice. Their product, Polar, is a compact device that smooths out backyard surfaces to improve skate-ability.

The system includes a chassis on a welded steel frame with a motorized drivetrain, a cutter to shave the ice surface, and an onboard water distribution system with heating mechanism and drip bar for resurfacing.

Pink Team

The final team of the night, the Pink Team, conquered a challenge rooted in one of the most demanding and real-world contexts: rescue diving. In a drowning emergency, rescue divers have just minutes to save a life. Using a retractable strap, carabiner, and locking mechanism, the Pink Team’s product, HydroHold, attaches directly to a diver’s buoyancy control device and offers a hands-free way to secure a drowning victim during a rescue mission.

The product was developed following consultations with divers from local fire departments, the state police, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “When we took these prototypes to rescue divers, we heard them ask for two things over and over,” the presenters said. “Something simple, and something safe.”

Rather than choosing complexity, Hosoi told the audience, the Pink Team pursued refinement. “They kept testing with users, shaping the interface, and polishing the details until everything felt natural.”

Wiesman added that the product is a reminder that “powerful engineering isn’t about flashy things … sometimes it’s about reducing friction, elevating usability, and building something that just works when it matters.”

Thank you and goodnight

The night ended with a final “thank you” song celebrating the products, the teams, and all the contributors who make the class possible because, as Hosoi said, “It really does take a team to make this class ‘cycle’ forward.” 

The clever AI-generated tribute, which weaves in the names of class participants and instructors, while rhyming “pizza with pepperoni” and “pond-sized Zamboni,” can also be watched in its entirety at the end of the livestream recording, following the product demonstrations. 

Pills that communicate from the stomach could improve medication adherence

MIT engineers designed capsules with biodegradable radio frequency antennas that can reveal when the pill has been swallowed.

In an advance that could help ensure people are taking their medication on schedule, MIT engineers have designed a pill that can report when it has been swallowed.

The new reporting system, which can be incorporated into existing pill capsules, contains a biodegradable radio frequency antenna. After it sends out the signal that the pill has been consumed, most components break down in the stomach while a tiny RF chip passes out of the body through the digestive tract.

This type of system could be useful for monitoring transplant patients who need to take immunosuppressive drugs, or people with infections such as HIV or TB, who need treatment for an extended period of time, the researchers say.

“The goal is to make sure that this helps people receive the therapy they need to help maximize their health,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Traverso is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Nature Communications. Mehmet Girayhan Say, an MIT research scientist, and Sean You, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper.

A pill that communicates

Patients’ failure to take their medicine as prescribed is a major challenge that contributes to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and billions of dollars in health care costs annually.

To make it easier for people to take their medication, Traverso’s lab has worked on delivery capsules that can remain in the digestive tract for days or weeks, releasing doses at predetermined times. However, this approach may not be compatible with all drugs.

“We’ve developed systems that can stay in the body for a long time, and we know that those systems can improve adherence, but we also recognize that for certain medications, we can’t change the pill,” Traverso says. “The question becomes: What else can we do to help the person and help their health care providers ensure that they’re receiving the medication?”

In their new study, the researchers focused on a strategy that would allow doctors to more closely monitor whether patients are taking their medication. Using radio frequency — a type of signal that can be easily detected from outside the body and is safe for humans — they designed a capsule that can communicate after the patient has swallowed it.

There have been previous efforts to develop RF-based signaling devices for medication capsules, but those were all made from components that don’t break down easily in the body and would need to travel through the digestive system.

To minimize the potential risk of any blockage of the GI tract, the MIT team decided to create an RF-based system that would be bioresorbable, meaning that it can be broken down and absorbed by the body. The antenna that sends out the RF signal is made from zinc, and it is embedded into a cellulose particle.

“We chose these materials recognizing their very favorable safety profiles and also environmental compatibility,” Traverso says.

The zinc-cellulose antenna is rolled up and placed inside a capsule along with the drug to be delivered. The outer layer of the capsule is made from gelatin coated with a layer of cellulose and either molybdenum or tungsten, which blocks any RF signal from being emitted.

Once the capsule is swallowed, the coating breaks down, releasing the drug along with the RF antenna. The antenna can then pick up an RF signal sent from an external receiver and, working with a small RF chip, sends back a signal to confirm that the capsule was swallowed. This communication happens within 10 minutes of the pill being swallowed.

The RF chip, which is about 400 by 400 micrometers, is an off-the-shelf chip that is not biodegradable and would need to be excreted through the digestive tract. All of the other components would break down in the stomach within a week.

“The components are designed to break down over days using materials with well-established safety profiles, such as zinc and cellulose, which are already widely used in medicine,” Say says. “Our goal is to avoid long-term accumulation while enabling reliable confirmation that a pill was taken, and longer-term safety will continue to be evaluated as the technology moves toward clinical use.”

Promoting adherence

Tests in an animal model showed that the RF signal was successfully transmitted from inside the stomach and could be read by an external receiver at a distance up to 2 feet away. If developed for use in humans, the researchers envision designing a wearable device that could receive the signal and then transmit it to the patient’s health care team.

The researchers now plan to do further preclinical studies and hope to soon test the system in humans. One patient population that could benefit greatly from this type of monitoring is people who have recently had organ transplants and need to take immunosuppressant drugs to make sure their body doesn’t reject the new organ.

“We want to prioritize medications that, when non-adherence is present, could have a really detrimental effect for the individual,” Traverso says.

Other populations that could benefit include people who have recently had a stent inserted and need to take medication to help prevent blockage of the stent, people with chronic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, and people with neuropsychiatric disorders whose conditions may impair their ability to take their medication.

The research was funded by Novo Nordisk, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Division of Gastroenterology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which notes that the views and conclusions contained in this article are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Government.

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

Fewer layovers, better-connected airports, more firm growth

Research shows direct flights and links to key airports help multinational firms expand globally and decide where to invest.

Waiting in an airport for a connecting flight is often tedious. A new study by MIT researchers shows it’s bad for business, too.

Looking at air travel and multinational firm formation over a 30-year period, the researchers measured how much a strong network of airline connections matters for economic growth. They found that multinational firms are more likely to locate their subsidiaries in cities they can reach with direct flights, and that this trend is particularly pronounced in knowledge industries. The degree to which a city is embedded within a larger network of high-use flights matters notably for business expansion too.

The team examined 142 countries over the period from 1993 through 2023 and concluded that pairs of cities reachable only by flights with one stopover had 20 percent fewer multinational firm subsidiaries than cities with direct flights. If two changes of planes were needed to connect cities, they had 34 percent fewer subsidiaries. That equates to 1.8 percent and 3.0 percent fewer new firms per year, respectively.

“What we found is how much it matters for a city to be embedded within the global air transportation network,” says Ambra Amico, an MIT researcher and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “And we also highlight the importance of this for knowledge-intensive business sectors.”

Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of the paper, adds: “We found a very strong empirical result about the relationship of parent and subsidiary firms, and how much connectivity matters. The important role that connectivity plays to facilitate face-to-face interactions, build trust, and reduce information asymmetry between such firms is crucial.”

The paper, “Air Connectivity Boosts Urban Attractiveness for Global Firms,” is published today in Nature Cities.

The co-authors are Amico, a postdoc at the MIT-Singapore Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); Fabio Duarte, associate director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab; Wen-Chi Liao, a visiting associate professor at the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) and an associate professor at NUS Business School at the National University of Singapore; and Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at CRE and MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

The study analyzes 7.5 million firms in 800 cities with airports, comprising a total of over 400,000 international flight routes. The research focused only on multinational firms, and thus international flights, excluding domestic flights in large countries.

To conduct the analysis and build their new database, the researchers used flight data from the International Civil Aviation Organization as well as firm data from the Orbis database, run by Moody’s, which has company data for over 469 million firms globally. That includes ownership data, allowing the researchers to track relationships between companies. The study included firms located within 37 miles (60 kilometers) of an airport, and accounted for additional factors influencing new-firm location, including city size.

By analyzing industry types, the researchers observed that air connectivity matters relatively more in knowledge industries, such as finance, where face-to-face activity seems to matter more. Alternately, a knowledge-industry firm with auditors periodically showing up to conduct work can lower costs by being more reachable.

“We were fascinated by the heterogenity across industries,” Liao says. “The results are intuitive, but it surprised us that the pattern is so consistent. If the nature of the industy requires face-to-face interaction, air connectivity matters more.” By contrast, for manufacturing, he notes, road infrastructure and ocean shipping will matter relatively more.

To be sure, there are multiple ways to define how connected a city is within the global air transportation network, and the study examines how specific measures relate to firm growth. One measure is what the paper calls “degree centrality,” or how many other places a city is connected to by direct flights. Over a 10-year period, a 10 percent increase in a city’s degree centrality leads to a 4.3 percent increase in the number of subsidiaries located there.

However, another kind of connectedness is even more strongly associated with subsidiary growth. It’s not just how many cities one place is linked to, but in turn, how many direct connections those linked cities themselves have. This turns out to be the strongest predictor of subsidiary growth.

“What matters is not just how many neighbor [directly linked] cities you have,” Duarte says. “It’s important to choose strategically which ones you’re connected to, as well. If you tell me who you are connected to, I tell you how successful your city will be.”

Intriguingly, the relationship between direct flights and multinational firm growth patterns has held up throughout the 30-year study period, despite the rise of teleconferencing, the Covid-19 pandemic, shifts in global growth, and other factors.

“There is consistency across a 30-year period, which is not something to underestimate,” Amico says. “We needed face-to-face interaction 30 years ago, 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, and we need it now, despite all the big changes we have seen.”

Indeed, Zheng adds, “Ironically, I think even with trade and geopolitical frictions, it’s more and more important to have face-to-face interactions to build trust for global trade and business. You still need to reach an actual place and see your business partners, so air connectivity really influences how global business copes with global uncertainties.”

The research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore within the Office of the Prime Minister of Singapore, under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program, and the MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative. 

AI-generated sensors open new paths for early cancer detection

Nanoparticles coated with molecular sensors could be used to develop at-home tests for many types of cancer.

Detecting cancer in the earliest stages could dramatically reduce cancer deaths because cancers are usually easier to treat when caught early. To help achieve that goal, MIT and Microsoft researchers are using artificial intelligence to design molecular sensors for early detection.

The researchers developed an AI model to design peptides (short proteins) that are targeted by enzymes called proteases, which are overactive in cancer cells. Nanoparticles coated with these peptides can act as sensors that give off a signal if cancer-linked proteases are present anywhere in the body.

Depending on which proteases are detected, doctors would be able to diagnose the particular type of cancer that is present. These signals could be detected using a simple urine test that could even be done at home.

“We’re focused on ultra-sensitive detection in diseases like the early stages of cancer, when the tumor burden is small, or early on in recurrence after surgery,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

Bhatia and Ava Amini ’16, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a former graduate student in Bhatia’s lab, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Communications. Carmen Martin-Alonso PhD ’23, a founding scientist at Amplifyer Bio, and Sarah Alamdari, a senior applied scientist at Microsoft Research, are the paper’s lead authors.

Amplifying cancer signals

More than a decade ago, Bhatia’s lab came up with the idea of using protease activity as a marker of early cancer. The human genome encodes about 600 proteases, which are enzymes that can cut through other proteins, including structural proteins such as collagen. They are often overactive in cancer cells, as they help the cells escape their original locations by cutting through proteins of the extracellular matrix, which normally holds cells in place.

The researchers’ idea was to coat nanoparticles with peptides that can be cleaved by a specific protease. These particles could then be ingested or inhaled. As they traveled through the body, if they encountered any cancer-linked proteases, the peptides on the particles would be cleaved.

Those peptides would be secreted in the urine, where they could be detected using a paper strip similar to a pregnancy test strip. Measuring those signals would reveal the overactivity of proteases deep within the body.

“We have been advancing the idea that if you can make a sensor out of these proteases and multiplex them, then you could find signatures of where these proteases were active in diseases. And since the peptide cleavage is an enzymatic process, it can really amplify a signal,” Bhatia says.

The researchers have used this approach to demonstrate diagnostic sensors for lung, ovarian, and colon cancers.

However, in those studies, the researchers used a trial-and-error process to identify peptides that would be cleaved by certain proteases. In most cases, the peptides they identified could be cleaved by more than one protease, which meant that the signals that were read could not be attributed to a specific enzyme.

Nonetheless, using “multiplexed” arrays of many different peptides yielded distinctive sensor signatures that were diagnostic in animal models of many different types of cancer, even if the precise identity of the proteases responsible for the cleavage remained unknown.

In their new study, the researchers moved beyond the traditional trial-and-error process by developing a novel AI system, named CleaveNet, to design peptide sequences that could be cleaved efficiently and specifically by target proteases of interest.

Users can prompt CleaveNet with design criteria, and CleaveNet will generate candidate peptides likely to fit those criteria. In this way, CleaveNet enables users to tune the efficiency and specificity of peptides generated by the model, opening a path to improving the sensors’ diagnostic power.

“If we know that a particular protease is really key to a certain cancer, and we can optimize the sensor to be highly sensitive and specific to that protease, then that gives us a great diagnostic signal,” Amini says. “We can leverage the power of computation to try to specifically optimize for these efficiency and selectivity metrics.”

For a peptide that contains 10 amino acids, there are about 10 trillion possible combinations. Using AI to search that immense space allows for prediction, testing, and identification of useful sequences much faster than humans would be able to find them, while also considerably reducing experimental costs.

Predicting enzyme activity

To create CleaveNet, the researchers developed a protein language model to predict the amino acid sequences of peptides, analogous to how large language models can predict sequences of text. For the training data, they used publicly available data on about 20,000 peptides and their interactions with different proteases from a family known as matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs).

Using these data, the researchers trained one model to generate peptide sequences that are predicted to be cleaved by proteases. These sequences could then be fed into another model that predicted how efficiently each peptide would be cleaved by any protease of interest.

To demonstrate this approach, the researchers focused on a protease called MMP13, which cancer cells use to cut through collagen and help them metastasize from their original locations. Prompting CleaveNet with MMP13 as a target allowed the models to design peptides that could be cut by MMP13 with considerable selectivity and efficiency. This cleavage profile is particularly useful for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

“When we set the model up to generate sequences that would be efficient and selective for MMP13, it actually came up with peptides that had never been observed in training, and yet these novel sequences did turn out to be both efficient and selective,” Martin-Alonso says. “That was very exciting to see.”

This kind of selectivity could help to reduce the number of different peptides needed to diagnose a given type of cancer, to identify novel biomarkers, and to provide insight into specific biological pathways for study and therapeutic testing, the researchers say.

Bhatia’s lab is currently part of an ARPA-H funded project to create reporters for an at-home diagnostic kit that could potentially detect and distinguish between 30 different types of cancer, in early stages of disease, based on measurements of protease activity. These sensors could include detection of not only MMP-mediated cleavage, but other enzymes such as serine proteases and cysteine proteases.

Peptides designed using CleaveNet could also be incorporated into cancer therapeutics such as antibody treatments. Using a specific peptide to attach a therapeutic such as a cytokine or small molecule drug to a targeting antibody could enable the medicine to be released only when the peptides are exposed to proteases in the tumor environment, improving efficacy and reducing side effects.

Beyond direct applications in diagnostics and therapeutics, combining efforts from the ARPA-H work with this modeling framework could enable the creation of a comprehensive “protease activity atlas” that spans multiple protease classes and cancers. Such a resource could further accelerate research in early cancer detection, protease biology, and AI models for peptide design.

The research was funded by La Caixa Foundation, the Ludwig Center at MIT, and the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine.

Sean Luk: Addressing the urgent need for better immunotherapy

The MIT senior helps design proteins that spur the immune system to fight cancer and other diseases.

In elementary school, Sean Luk loved donning an oversized lab coat and helping her mom pipette chemicals at Johns Hopkins University. A few years later, she started a science blog and became fascinated by immunoengineering, which is now her concentration as a biological engineering major at MIT.

Her grandparents’ battles with cancer made Luk, now a senior, realize how urgently patients need advancements in immunotherapy, which leverages a patient’s immune system to fight tumors or pathogens.

“The idea of creating something that is actually able to improve human health is what really drives me now. You want to fight that sense of helplessness when you see a loved one suffering through this disease, and it just further motivates me to be excellent at what I do,” Luk says.

A varsity athlete and entrepreneur as well as a researcher, Luk thrives when bringing people together for a common cause.

Working with immunotherapies

Luk was introduced to immunotherapies in high school after she listened to a seminar about using components of the immune system, such as antibodies and cytokines, to improve graft tolerance.

“The complexity of the immune system really fascinated me, and it is incredible that we can build antibodies in a very logical way to address disease,” Luk says.

She worked in several Johns Hopkins labs as a high school student in Maryland, and a professor there connected her to MIT Professor Dane Wittrup. Luk has worked in the Wittrup lab throughout her time at MIT. One of her main projects involves developing ultra-stable cyclic peptide drugs to help treat autoimmune diseases, which could potentially be taken orally instead of injected.

Luk has been a co-author on two published articles and has become increasingly interested in the intersection between computational and experimental protein design. Currently, she is working on engineering an interferon gamma construct that preferentially targets myeloid cells in the tumor microenvironment.

“We're trying to target and reprogram the immunosuppressive myeloid cells surrounding the cancer cells, so that they can license T cells to attack cancer cells and kickstart the cancer immunity cycle,” she explains.

Communication for all

Through her work in high school with Best Buddies, an organization that aims to promote one-on-one friendships between students with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities, Luk became passionate about empowering people with special needs. At MIT, she started a project focusing on children with Down syndrome, with support from the Sandbox Innovation Fund.

“Through talking to a lot of parents and caretakers, the biggest issue that people with Down syndrome face is communication. And when you think about it, communication is crucial to everything that we do,” Luk says, “We want to communicate our thoughts. We want to be able to interact with our peers. And if people are unable to do that, it’s isolating, it’s frustrating.”

Her solution was to co-found EasyComm, an online game platform that helps children with Down syndrome work on verbal communication.

“We thought it would be a great way to improve their verbal communication skills while having fun and incentivize that kind of learning through gamification,” Luk says. She and her co-founder recently filed a provisional patent and plan to make the platform available to a wider audience.

A global perspective

Luk grew up in Hong Kong before moving to Maryland in the fifth grade. She’s always been athletic; in Hong Kong, she was a competitive jump roper. At just 9 years old, she won bronze in the Asian Jump Rope Championships among children 14 years old and younger. At 7 years old, she started playing soccer on her brother’s team, despite being the only girl. She says the sport was considered “manly” in Hong Kong, and girls were discouraged from joining, but her coaches and family were supportive.

Moving to the U.S. meant that her time in competitive jump roping was cut short, and Luk focused more on soccer. Her team in the U.S. felt far more intense than boys soccer in Hong Kong, but the Luk family was in it together, Luk says. She credits her success to the combination of her hard-working nature she learned from Hong Kong, and the innovation and experiences she was exposed to in the U.S.

“We had a really close bond within the family,” Luk says, “Figuring out taxes for my dad and our family, like driving and houses and all that stuff, it was totally new. But I think we really took it in stride, just adjusting as we went.”

Luk continued soccer throughout high school and eventually committed to play on the MIT team. She likes that the team allows players to prioritize academics while still being competitive. Last season, she was elected captain.

“It’s really a pleasure to be captain, and it’s challenging, but it’s also very rewarding when you see the team be cohesive. When you see the team out there winning games through grit,” Luk says.

During her first year at MIT, Luk got back in touch with her old soccer coach from Hong Kong, who then worked on the national team. After sending over some tape, she was offered a spot on the U-20 national team, and played in the U20 Asian Football Championship Qualifiers.

“It was so, so cool to be able to represent Hong Kong because I played soccer all my life but it just carries a different weight to it when you’re wearing your country’s jersey,” Luk says.

Besides her cross-cultural background, Luk is also proud of her international experiences playing soccer, staying with host families and doing lab work in Copenhagen, Denmark; Stuttgart, Germany; and Ancona, Italy. She speaks English, Cantonese, and Mandarin fluently.

“Aside from the textbook academic knowledge, I feel like a global perspective is so important when you’re trying to collaborate with other people from different walks of life,” Luk says, “When you’re just thinking about science or the impact that you can have in general, it’s important to realize you don’t have all the answers and to learn from the world outside your little bubble.”

New research may help scientists predict when a humid heat wave will break

As these events become more common at midlatitudes, a phenomenon called an atmospheric inversion will determine how long they last.

A long stretch of humid heat followed by intense thunderstorms is a weather pattern historically seen mostly in and around the tropics. But climate change is making humid heat waves and extreme storms more common in traditionally temperate midlatitude regions such as the midwestern U.S., which has seen episodes of unusually high heat and humidity in recent summers.

Now, MIT scientists have identified a key condition in the atmosphere that determines how hot and humid a midlatitude region can get, and how intense related storms can become. The results may help climate scientists gauge a region’s risk for humid heat waves and extreme storms as the world continues to warm.

In a study appearing this week in the journal Science Advances, the MIT team reports that a region’s maximum humid heat and storm intensity are limited by the strength of an “atmospheric inversion”— a weather condition in which a layer of warm air settles over cooler air.

Inversions are known to act as an atmospheric blanket that traps pollutants at ground level. Now, the MIT researchers have found atmospheric inversions also trap and build up heat and moisture at the surface, particularly in midlatitude regions. The more persistent an inversion, the more heat and humidity a region can accumulate at the surface, which can lead to more oppressive, longer-lasting humid heat waves.

And, when an inversion eventually weakens, the accumulated heat energy is released as convection, which can whip up the hot and humid air into intense thunderstorms and heavy rainfall.

The team says this effect is especially relevant for midlatitude regions, where atmospheric inversions are common. In the U.S., regions to the east of the Rocky Mountains often experience inversions of this kind, with relatively warm air aloft sitting over cooler air near the surface.

As climate change further warms the atmosphere in general, the team suspects that inversions may become more persistent and harder to break. This could mean more frequent humid heat waves and more intense storms for places that are not accustomed to such extreme weather.

“Our analysis shows that the eastern and midwestern regions of U.S. and the eastern Asian regions may be new hotspots for humid heat in the future climate,” says study author Funing Li, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

“As the climate warms, theoretically the atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture,” adds co-author and EAPS Assistant Professor Talia Tamarin-Brodsky. “Which is why new regions in the midlatitudes could experience moist heat waves that will cause stress that they weren’t used to before.”

Air energetics

The atmosphere’s layers generally get colder with altitude. In these typical conditions, when a heat wave comes through a region, it warms the air at ground level. Since warm air is lighter than cold air, it will eventually rise, like a hot air balloon, prompting colder air to sink. This rise and fall of air sets off convection, like bubbles in boiling water. When warm air hits colder altitudes, it condenses into droplets that rain out, typically as a thunderstorm, that can often relieve a heat wave.

For their new study, Li and Tamarin-Brodsky wondered: What would it take to get air at the surface to convect and ultimately end a heat wave? Put another way: What sets the limit to how hot a region can get before air begins to convect to eventually rain?

The team treated the question as a problem of energy. Heat is energy that can be thought of in two forms: the energy that comes from dry heat (i.e., temperature), and the energy that comes from latent, or moist, heat. The scientists reasoned that, for a given portion or “parcel” of air, there is some amount of moisture that, when condensed, contributes to that air parcel’s total energy. Depending on how much energy an air parcel has, it could start to convect, rise up, and eventually rain out.

“Imagine putting a balloon around a parcel of air and asking, will it stay in the same place, will it go up, or will it sink?” Tamarin-Brodsky says. “It’s not just about warm air that’s lifting. You also have to think about the moisture that’s there. So we consider the energetics of an air parcel while taking into account the moisture in that air. Then we can find the maximum ‘moist energy’ that can accumulate near the surface before the air becomes unstable and convects.”

Heat barrier

As they worked through their analysis, the researchers found that the maximum amount of moist energy, or the highest level of heat and humidity that the air can hold, is set by the presence and strength of an atmospheric inversion. In cases where atmospheric layers are inverted (when a layer of warm or light air settles over colder or heavier, ground-level air), the air has to accumulate more heat and moisture in order for an air parcel to build up enough energy to lift up and break through the inversion layer. The more persistent the inversion is, the hotter and more humid air must get before it can rise up and convect.

Their analysis suggests that an atmospheric inversion can increase a region’s capacity to hold heat and humidity. How high this heat and humidity can get depends on how stable the inversion is. If a blanket of warm air parks over a region without moving, it allows more humid heat to build up, versus if the blanket is quickly removed. When the air eventually convects, the accumulated heat and moisture will generate stronger, more intense storms.

“This increasing inversion has two effects: more severe humid heat waves, and less frequent but more extreme convective storms,” Tamarin-Brodsky says.

Inversions in the atmosphere form in various ways. At night, the surface that warmed during the day cools by radiating heat to space, making the air in contact with it cooler and denser than the air above. This creates a shallow layer in which temperature increases with height, called a nocturnal inversion. Inversions can also form when a shallow layer of cool marine air moves inland from the ocean and slides beneath warmer air over the land, leaving cool air near the surface and warmer air above. In some cases, persistent inversions can form when air heated over sun-warmed mountains is carried over colder low-lying regions, so that a warm layer aloft caps cooler air near the ground.

“The Great Plains and the Midwest have had many inversions historically due to the Rocky Mountains,” Li says. “The mountains act as an efficient elevated heat source, and westerly winds carry this relatively warm air downstream into the central and midwestern U.S., where it can help create a persistent temperature inversion that caps colder air near the surface.”

“In a future climate for the Midwest, they may experience both more severe thunderstorms and more extreme humid heat waves,” Tamarin-Brodsky says. “Our theory gives an understanding of the limit for humid heat and severe convection for these communities that will be future heat wave and thunderstorm hotspots.”

This research is part of the MIT Climate Grand Challenge on Weather and Climate Extremes. Support was provided by Schmidt Sciences.

One pull of a string is all it takes to deploy these complex structures

A new method could enable users to design portable medical devices, like a splint, that can be rapidly converted from flat panels to a 3D object without any tools.

MIT researchers have developed a new method for designing 3D structures that can be transformed from a flat configuration into their curved, fully formed shape with only a single pull of a string.

This technique could enable the rapid deployment of a temporary field hospital at the site of a disaster such as a devastating tsunami — a situation where quick medical action is essential to save lives.

The researchers’ approach converts a user-specified 3D structure into a flat shape composed of interconnected tiles. The algorithm uses a two-step method to find the path with minimal friction for a string that can be tightened to smoothly actuate the structure.

The actuation mechanism is easily reversible, and if the string is released, the structure quickly returns to its flat configuration. This could enable complex, 3D structures to be stored and transported more efficiently and with less cost.

In addition, the designs generated by their system are agnostic to the fabrication method, so complete structures can be produced using 3D printing, CNC milling, molding, or other techniques.

This method could enable the creation of transportable medical devices, foldable robots that can flatten to enter hard-to-reach spaces, or even modular space habitats that can be actuated by robots working on the surface of Mars.

“The simplicity of the whole actuation mechanism is a real benefit of our approach. The user just needs to provide their intended design, and then our method optimizes it in such a way that it holds the shape after just one pull on the string, so the structure can be deployed very easily. I hope people will be able to use this method to create a wide variety of different, deployable structures,” says Akib Zaman, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this new method.

He is joined on the paper by MIT graduate student Jacqueline Aslarus; postdoc Jiaji Li; Associate Professor Stefanie Mueller, leader of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Engineering Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and senior author Mina Konaković Luković, an assistant professor and leader of the Algorithmic Design Group in CSAIL. The research was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia.

From ancient art to an algorithm

Creating deployable structures from flat pieces simplifies on-site assembly and could be especially useful in constructing emergency shelters after natural disasters. On a smaller scale, items like foldable bike helmets could improve the safety of riders who would otherwise be unable to carry a bulky helmet.

But converting flat, deployable objects into their 3D shape often requires specialized equipment or multiple steps, and the actuation mechanism is typically difficult to reverse.

“Because of these challenges, deployable structures tend to be manually designed and quite simple, geometrically. But if we can create more complex geometries, while simplifying the actuation mechanism, we could enhance the capabilities of these deployables,” Zaman says.

To do this, the researchers created a method that automatically converts a user’s 3D design into a flat structure comprised of tiles, connected by rotating hinges at the corners, which can be fully actuated by pulling a single string one time.

Their method breaks a user design into a grid of quadrilateral tiles inspired by kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of paper cutting. With kirigami, by cutting a material in certain ways, they can encode it with unique properties. In this case, they use kirigami to create an auxetic mechanism, which is a structure that gets thicker when stretched and thinner when compressed.

After encoding the 3D geometry into a flat set of auxetic tiles, the algorithm computes the minimum number of points that the tightening string must lift to fully deploy the 3D structure. Then, it finds the shortest path that connects those lift points, while including all areas of the object’s boundary that must be connected to guide the structure into its 3D configuration. It does these calculations in such a way that the optimal string path minimizes friction, enabling the structure to be smoothly actuated with just one pull.

“Our method makes it easy for the user. All they have to do is input their design, and our algorithm automatically takes care of the rest. Then all the user needs to do is to fabricate the tiles exactly the way it has been computed by the algorithm,” Zaman says.

For instance, one could fabricate a structure using a multi-material 3D printer that prints the hinges of the tiles with a flexible material and the other surfaces with a hard material.

A scale independent method

One of the biggest challenges the researchers faced was figuring out how the string route and the friction within the string channel can be effectively modeled as close to physical reality.

“While playing with a few fabricated models, we observed that closing boundary tiles is a must to enable a successful deployment and the string must be routed through them. Later, we proved this observation mathematically. Then, we looked back at an age-old physics equation and used it to formulate the optimization problem for friction minimization,” he says.

They built their automatic algorithm into an interactive user interface that allows one to design and optimize configurations to generate manufacturable objects.

The researchers used their method to design several objects of different sizes, from personalized medical items including a splint and a posture corrector to an igloo-like portable structure. They also fabricated a deployable, human-scale chair they designed using their method.

This method is scale independent, so it could be used to create tiny deployable objects that are injected and actuated inside the body, or architectural structures, like the frame of a building, that are deployed and actuated on-site using cranes.

In the future, the researchers want to further explore the design of tiny structures, while also tackling the engineering challenges involved in creating architectural installations, such as determining the ideal cable thickness and the necessary strength of the hinges. In addition, they want to create a self-deploying mechanism, so the structures do not need to be actuated by a human or robot.

This research is funded, in part, by an MIT Research Support Committee Award.

MIT in the media: 2025 in review

MIT community members made headlines with key research advances and their efforts to tackle pressing challenges.

“At MIT, innovation ranges from awe-inspiring technology to down-to-Earth creativity,” noted Chronicle, during a campus visit this year for an episode of the program. In 2025, MIT researchers made headlines across print publications, podcasts, and video platforms for key scientific advances, from breakthroughs in quantum and artificial intelligence to new efforts aimed at improving pediatric health care and cancer diagnosis.

MIT faculty, researchers, students, alumni and staff helped demystify new technologies, highlighted the practical hands-on learning the Institute is known for, and shared what inspires their research with viewers, readers and listeners around the world. Below is a sampling of news moments to revisit.

Let’s take a closer look at MIT: It’s alarming to see such a complex, important institution subject to the whims of today’s politics
Washington Post columnist George F. Will reflects on MIT and his view of “the damage that can be done to America’s meritocracy by policies motivated by hostility toward institutions vital to it.” Will notes that MIT has an “astonishing economic multiplier effect: MIT graduates have founded companies that have generated almost $1.9 trillion in annual revenue (a sum almost equal to Russia’s GDP) and 4.6 million jobs.”
Full story via The Washington Post

At MIT, groundbreaking ideas blend science and breast cancer detection innovation
Chronicle visited MIT this spring to learn more about how the Institute “nurtures groundbreaking efforts, reminding us that creativity and science thrive together, inspiring future advancements in engineering, medicine, and beyond.”
Full story via Chronicle

New MIT provost looks to build more bridges with CEOs
Provost Anantha Chandrakasan shares his energy and enthusiasm for MIT, and his goals for the Institute.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Five things New England researchers helped develop with federal funding
Professors John Guttag and David Mindell discuss MIT’s long history of developing foundational technologies — including the internet and the first widely used electronic navigation system — with the support of federal funding.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Bostonians of the Year 2025: First responders, university presidents, and others who exemplified courage
President Sally Kornbluth is honored by The Boston Globe as one of the Bostonians of the Year, a list that spotlights individuals across the region who, in choosing the difficult path, “showed us what strength looks like.” Kornbluth was recognized for her work being of the “most prominent voices rallying to protect academic freedom.”
Full story via The Boston Globe

Practical education and workforce preparation

College students flock to a new major: AI
MIT’s new Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making major is aimed at teaching students to “develop AI systems and study how technologies like robots interact with humans and the environment.”
Full story via New York Times

50 colleges with the best ROI
MIT has been named among the top colleges in the country for return on investment. MIT “is need-blind and full-need for undergraduate students. Six out of 10 students receive financial aid, and almost 88% of the Class of 2025 graduated debt-free.”
Full story via Boston 25

Desirée Plata: Chemist, oceanographer, engineer, entrepreneur
Professor Desirée Plata explains that she is most proud of her work as an educator. “The faculty of the world are training the next generation of researchers,” says Plata. “We need a trained workforce. We need patient chemists who want to solve important problems.”
Full story via Chemical & Engineering News

Taking a quantum leap

MIT launches quantum initiative to tackle challenges in science, health care, national security
MIT is “taking a quantum leap with the launch of the new MIT Quantum Initiative (QMIT). “There isn't a more important technological field right now than quantum with its enormous potential for impact on both fundamental research and practical problems,” said President Sally Kornbluth.
Full story via State House News Service

Peter Shor on how quantum tech can help climate
Professor Peter Shor helps disentangle quantum technologies.
Full story via The Quantum Kid

MIT researchers develop device to enable direct communication between multiple quantum processors
MIT researchers made a key advance in the creation of a practical quantum computer.
Full story via Military & Aerospace Electronics

Fortifying national security and aiding disaster response

Nano-material breakthrough could revolutionize night vision
MIT researchers developed “a new way to make large ultrathin infrared sensors that don’t need cryogenic cooling and could radically change night vision for the military.”
Full story via Defense One

MIT researchers develop robot designed to help first-responders in disaster situations
Researchers at MIT engineered SPROUT (Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit), a robot aimed at assisting first-responders.
Full story via WHDH

MIT scientists make “smart” clothes that warn you when you’re sick
As part of an effort to help keep service members safe, MIT scientists created a programmable fiber that can be stitched into clothing to help monitor the wearer’s health.
Full story via FOX 28

MIT Lincoln Lab develops ocean-mapping technology
MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers are developing “automated electric vessels to map the ocean floor and improve search and rescue missions.”
Full story via Chronicle

Transformative tech

This MIT scientist is rewiring robots to keep the humanity in tech
Professor Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, discusses her work revolutionizing the field of robotics by bringing “empathy into engineering and proving that responsibility is as radical and as commercially attractive as unguarded innovation.”
Full story via Forbes

Watch this tiny robot somersault through the air like an insect
Professor Kevin Chen designed a tiny, insect-sized aerial microrobot.
Full story via Science

It's actually really hard to make a robot, guys
Professor Pulkit Agrawal delves into his work engineering a simulator that can be used to train robots.
Full story via NPR

Shape-shifting fabrics and programmable materials redefine design at MIT
Associate Professor Skylar Tibbits is embedding intelligence into the materials around us, while Professor Caitlin Mueller and Sandy Curth PhD ’25 are digging into eco-friendly construction.
Full story via Chronicle

Building a healthier future

MIT launches pediatric research hub to address access gaps
The Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub is addressing “underinvestment in pediatric healthcare innovations.”
Full story via Boston Business Journal

Bionic knee helps amputees walk naturally again
Professor Hugh Herr developed a prosthetic that could increase mobility for above-the-knee amputees. “The bionic knee developed by MIT doesn’t just restore function, it redefines it.”
Full story via Fox News

MIT drug hunters are using AI to design completely new antibiotics
Professor James Collins is using AI to develop new compounds to combat antibiotic resistance.
Full story via Fast Company

Innovative once-weekly capsule helps quell schizophrenia symptoms
A new pill from the lab of Associate Professor Giovanni Traverso “can greatly simplify the drug schedule faced by schizophrenia patients.”
Full story via Newsmax

Renewing American manufacturing

US manufacturing is in “pretty bad shape.” MIT hopes to change that.
MIT launched the Initiative for New Manufacturing to help “build the tools and talent to shape a more productive and sustainable future for manufacturing.”
Full story via Manufacturing Dive

Giving US manufacturing a boost
Ben Armstrong of the MIT Industrial Performance Center discusses how to reinvigorate manufacturing in America.
Full story via Marketplace

New England companies are sparking an industrial revolution. Here’s how to harness it.
Professor David Mindell spotlights how “a new wave of industrial companies, many in New England, are leveraging new technologies to create jobs and empower workers.”
Full story via The Boston Globe 

Improving aging

My day as an 80-year-old. What an age-simulation suit taught me.
To get a better sense of the experience of aging, Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Dockser Marcus donned the MIT AgeLab’s age-simulation suit and embarked on multiple activities.
Full story via The Wall Street Journal

New mobile robot helps seniors walk safely and prevent falls
A mobile robot created by MIT engineers is designed to help prevent falls. “It's easy to see how something like this could make a big difference for seniors wanting to stay independent.”
Full story via Fox News

The senior population is booming. Caregiving is struggling to keep up
Professor Jonathan Gruber discusses the labor shortages impacting senior care.
Full story via CNBC

Upping our energy resilience

New MIT collaboration with GE Vernova aims to accelerate energy transition
“A great amount of innovation happens in academia. We have a longer view into the future,” says Provost Anantha Chandrakasan of the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance.
Full story via The Boston Globe

The environmental impacts of generative AI
Noman Bashir, a fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium, explores the environmental impacts of generative AI.
Full story via Fox 13

Is the clean energy economy doomed?
Professor Christopher Knittel discusses how the U.S. can be in the best position for global energy dominance.
Full story via Marketplace

Advancing American workers

WTH can we do to prevent a second China shock? Professor David Autor explains
Professor David Autor shares his research examining the long-term impact of China entering the World Trade Organization, how the U.S. can protect vital industries from unfair trade practices, and the potential impacts of AI on workers.
Full story via American Enterprise Institute

The fight over robots threatening American jobs
Professor Daron Acemoglu highlights the economic and societal implications of integrating automation in the workforce, advocating for policies aimed at assisting workers.
Full story via Financial Times

Moving toward automation
Research Scientist Eva Ponce of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics notes that robotics and AI technologies are “replacing some jobs — particularly more manual tasks including heavy lifting — but have also offered new opportunities within warehouse operations.”
Full story via Financial Times

Planetary defense and out-of-this world exploration

MIT researchers create new asteroid detection methods to help protect Earth
Associate Professor Julien de Wit and Research Scientist Artem Burdanov discuss their work developing a new method to track asteroids that could impact Earth.
Full story via WBZ Radio

What happens to the bodies of NASA astronauts returning to Earth?
Professor Dava Newman speaks about how long-duration stays in space can affect the human body.
Full story via News Nation

Lunar lander Athena is packed and ready to explore the moon. Here’s what on board
MIT engineers sent three payloads into space on a course set for the moon’s south polar region.
Full story via USA Today

Scanning the heavens at the Vatican Observatory
Br. Guy Consolmagno '74, SM '75, director of the Vatican Observatory, and graduate student Isabella Macias share their experiences studying astronomy and planetary formation at the Vatican Observatory. “The Vatican has such a deep, rich history of working with astronomers,” says Macias. “It shows that science is not only for global superpowers around the world, but it's for students, it's for humanity.”
Full story via CBS News Sunday Morning

The story of real-life rocket scientists
Professor Kerri Cahoy takes viewers on an out-of-this-world journey into how a college internship inspired her research on space and satellites.
Full story via Bloomberg Television 

On the air 

While digital currency initiatives expand, we ask: What’s the future of cash?
Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, examines the future of cash as the use of digital currencies expands.
Full story via USA Today

The high stakes of the AI economy
Professor Asu Ozdaglar, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, explores AI’s opportunities and risks — and whether it can be regulated without stifling progress.
Full story via Is Business Broken? 

The LIGO Lab is pushing the boundaries of gravitational-wave research
Associate Professor Matt Evans explores the future of gravitational wave research and how Cosmic Explorer, the next-generation gravitational wave observatory, will help unearth secrets of the early universe.
Full story via Scientific American

Space junk: The impact of global warming on satellites
Graduate student Will Parker discusses his research examining the impact of climate change on satellites.
Full story via USA Today

Endometriosis is common. Why is getting diagnosed so hard?
Professor Linda Griffith shares her work studying endometriosis and her efforts to improve healthcare for women.
Full story via Science Friday

There’s nothing small about this nanoscale research
Professor Vladimir Bulović takes listeners on a tour of MIT.nano, MIT’s “clean laboratory facility that is critical to nanoscale research, from microelectronics to medical nanotechnology.”
Full story via Scientific American

Marrying science and athletics

The MIT scientist behind the “torpedo bats” that are blowing up baseball
Aaron Leanhardt PhD ’03 went from an MIT graduate student who was part of a research team that “cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history” to inventor of the torpedo baseball bat, “perhaps the most significant development in bat technology in decades.”
Full story via The Wall Street Journal

Engineering athletes redefine routine
After suffering a concussion during her sophomore year, Emiko Pope ’25 was inspired to explore the effectiveness of concussion headbands.
Full story via American Society of Mechanical Engineers

“I missed talking math with people”: why John Urschel left the NFL for MIT
Assistant Professor John Urschel shares his decision to call an audible and leave his NFL career to focus on his love for math at MIT.
Full story via The Guardian

Making a statement, MIT’s football team dons extra head padding for safety
It’s a piece of equipment that may become more widely used as research continues into its effectiveness — including from at least one of the players on the current team.
Full story via GBH Morning Edition

Agricultural efficiency

New MIT breakthrough could save farmers billions on pesticides
MIT engineers developed a system that helps pesticides adhere more effectively to plant leaves, allowing farmers to use fewer chemicals.
Full story via Michigan Farm News

Bug-sized robots could help pollination on future farms
Insect-sized robots crafted by MIT researchers could one day be used to help with farming practices like artificial pollination.
Full story via Reuters

See how MIT researchers harvest water from the air
An ultrasonic device created by MIT engineers can extract clean drinking water from atmospheric moisture.
Full story via CNN

Appreciating art

Meet the engineer using deep learning to restore Renaissance art
Graduate student Alex Kachkine talks about his work applying AI to develop a restoration method for damaged artwork.
Full story via Nature

MIT’s Linde Music Building opens with a free festival
“The extent of art-making on the MIT campus is equal to that of a major city,” says Institute Professor Marcus Thompson. “It’s a miracle that it’s all right here, by people in science and technology who are absorbed in creating a new world and who also value the past, present and future of music and the arts.”
Full story via Cambridge Day

“Remembering the Future” on display at the MIT Museum
The “Remembering the Future” exhibit at the MIT Museum features a sculptural installation that uses “climate data from the last ice age to the present, as well as projected future environments, to create a geometric design.”
Full story via The New York Times 

MIT community in 2025: A year in review

Top stories highlighted the Institute’s leading positions in world and national rankings; new collaboratives tackling manufacturing, generative AI, and quantum; how one professor influenced hundreds of thousands of students around the world; and more.

In 2025, MIT maintained its standard of community and research excellence amidst a shift in national priorities regarding the federal funding of higher education. Notably, QS ranked MIT No. 1 in the world for the 14th straight year, while U.S. News ranked MIT No. 2 in the nation for the 5th straight year.

This year, President Sally Kornbluth also added to the Institute’s slate of community-wide strategic initiatives, with new collaborative efforts focused on manufacturing, generative artificial intelligence, and quantum science and engineering. In addition, MIT opened several new buildings and spaces, hosted a campuswide art festival, and continued its tradition of bringing the latest in science and technology to the local community and to the world. Here are some of the top stories from around MIT over the past 12 months.

MIT collaboratives

President Kornbluth announced three new Institute-wide collaborative efforts designed to foster and support alliances that will take on global problems. The Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) will work toward bolstering industry and creating jobs by driving innovation across vital manufacturing sectors. The MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC), a group of industry leaders and MIT researchers, aims to harness the power of generative artificial intelligence for the good of society. And the MIT Quantum Initiative (QMIT) will leverage quantum breakthroughs to drive the future of scientific and technological progress.

These missions join three announced last year — the Climate Project at MIT, the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), and the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS).

Sharing the wonders of science and technology

This year saw the launch of MIT Learn, a dynamic AI-enabled website that hosts nearly 13,000 non-degree learning opportunities, making it easier for learners around the world to discover the courses and resources available on MIT’s various learning platforms.

The Institute also hosted the Cambridge Science Carnival, a hands-on event managed by the MIT Museum that drew approximately 20,000 attendees and featured more than 140 activities, demonstrations, and installations tied to the topics of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM).

Commencement

At Commencement, Hank Green urged MIT’s newest graduates to focus their work on the “everyday solvable problems of normal people,” even if it is not always the easiest or most obvious course of action. Green is a popular content creator and YouTuber whose work often focuses on science and STEAM issues, and who co-created the educational media company Complexly.

President Kornbluth challenged graduates to be “ambassadors” for the open-minded inquiry and collaborative work that marks everyday life at MIT.

Top accolades

In January, the White House bestowed national medals of science and technology — the country’s highest awards for scientists and engineers — on four MIT professors and an additional alumnus. Moderna, with deep MIT roots, was also recognized.

As in past years, MIT faculty, staff, and alumni were honored with election to the various national academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors.

Faculty member Carlo Ratti served as curator of the Venice Biennale’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition.

Members of MIT Video Productions won a New England Emmy Award for their short film on the art and science of hand-forged knives with master bladesmith Bob Kramer.

And at MIT, Dimitris Bertsimas, vice provost for open learning and a professor of operations research, won this year’s Killian Award, the Institute’s highest faculty honor.

New and refreshed spaces

In the heart of campus, the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building became fully operational to start off the year. In celebration, the Institute hosted Artfinity, a vibrant multiweek exploration of art and ideas, with more than 80 free performing and visual arts events including a film festival, interactive augmented-reality art installations, a simulated lunar landing, and concerts by both student groups and internationally renowned musicians.

Over the summer, the “Outfinite” — the open space connecting Hockfield Court with Massachusetts Avenue — was officially named the L. Rafael Reif Innovation Corridor in honor of President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s 17th president.

And in October, the Undergraduate Advising Center’s bright new home opened in Building 11 along the Infinite Corridor, bringing a welcoming and functional destination for MIT undergraduate students within the Institute’s Main Group.

Student honors and awards

MIT undergraduates earned an impressive number of prestigious awards in 2025. Exceptional students were honored with Rhodes, Gates Cambridge, and Schwarzman scholarships, among others.

A number of MIT student-athletes also helped to secure their team’s first NCAA national championship in Institute history: Women’s track and field won both the indoor national championship and outdoor national championship, while women’s swimming and diving won the national title as well.

Also for the fifth year in a row, MIT students earned all five top spots at the Putnam Mathematical Competition.

Leadership transitions

Several senior administrative leaders took on new roles in 2025. Anantha Chandrakasan was named provost; Paula Hammond was named dean of the School of Engineering; Richard Locke was named dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management; Gaspare LoDuca was named vice president for information systems and technology and CIO; Evelyn Wang was named vice president for energy and climate; and David Darmofal was named vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education.

Additional new leadership transitions include: Ana Bakshi was named executive director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship; Fikile Brushett was named director of the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice; Laurent Demanet was named co-director of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering; Rohit Karnik was named director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab; Usha Lee McFarling was named director of the Knight Science Journalism Program; C. Cem Tasan was named director of the Materials Research Laboratory; and Jessika Trancik was named director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center.

Remembering those we lost

Among MIT community members who died this year were David Baltimore, Juanita Battle, Harvey Kent Bowen, Stanley Fischer, Frederick Greene, Lee Grodzins, John Joannopoulos, Keith Johnson, Daniel Kleppner, Earle Lomon, Nuno Loureiro, Victor K. McElheny, David Schmittlein, Anthony Sinskey, Peter Temin, Barry Vercoe, Rainer Weiss, Alan Whitney, and Ioannis Yannas.

In case you missed it…

Additional top stories from around the Institute in 2025 include a description of the environmental and sustainability implications of generative AI tech and applications; the story of how an MIT professor introduced hundreds of thousands of students to neuroscience with his classic textbook; a look at how MIT entrepreneurs are using AI; a roundup of new books by MIT faculty and staff; the selection of an MIT alumnus as a NASA astronaut candidate; the signing of an MIT student-athlete by the Los Angles Dodgers; and behind the scenes with MIT students who cracked a longstanding egg dilemma. 

MIT’s top research stories of 2025

Concrete batteries, AI-developed antibiotics, the ozone’s recovery, and a more natural bionic knee were some of the most popular topics on MIT News.

In 2025, MIT’s research community had another prolific year filled with exciting scientific and technological advances. To celebrate the achievements of the past 12 months, MIT News highlights some of our most-read stories from this year.

• More powerful concrete “batteries”: MIT researchers combined cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black, and electrolytes to create electron-conducting carbon concrete. The researchers say the material could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy.
   
• Confirming the famous double-slit experiment: Physicists performed an idealized version of one of the most famous experiments in quantum physics, demonstrating with atomic-level precision the dual nature of light. The experiment confirmed that light exists as both a particle and a wave, though that duality cannot be simultaneously observed.
   
• Periodic table of machine learning: Researchers created a table that reveals connections among more than 20 classical machine-learning algorithms. The table stems from the idea that all algorithms learn a specific kind of relationship between data points. The framework could help scientists fuse different methods to improve existing AI models or come up with new ones.
   
• Photographing “free range” atoms: Physicists captured the first images of individual atoms freely interacting in space. The experiment used single-atom microscopy and ultracold quantum gases to reveal correlations between the particles that had been predicted but never before observed.
   
• Pulling drinking water from air: Engineers developed a window-sized device that acts as an atmospheric water harvester to produce fresh water anywhere. The origami-inspired device uses a hydrogel material that swells to absorb water — it even works in Death Valley, California.
   
• Generative AI versus drug-resistant bacteria: With help from artificial intelligence, researchers designed novel antibiotics that can combat two drug-resistant infections. First, a generative AI algorithm designed more than 35 million compounds. Then, the researchers screened them for antimicrobial properties, discovering drug candidates that are structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics.
   
• Tracking the ozone recovery: A study confirms the Antarctic ozone layer is healing as a direct result of global efforts to reduce ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons — chemicals that were used in refrigeration, air conditioning, insulation, and aerosol propellants.
   
• First evidence of “proto Earth”: Scientists discovered extremely rare remnants of an early version of our planet that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, before a colossal collision irreversibly altered its composition and produced the Earth as we know today. The findings will help scientists piece together the primordial starting ingredients that forged early Earth and the rest of the solar system.
   
• Restoring movement with a bionic knee: Researchers developed a bionic knee that can help people with above-the-knee amputations walk faster, climb stairs, and avoid obstacles. In a small study, users navigated more easily and said the limb felt more like a part of their body compared to traditional prostheses.
   
• How people walk in crowds: Mathematicians studied the flow of human crowds and developed a first-of-its-kind way to predict when pedestrian paths will transition from orderly to entangled. The findings could help inform the design of public spaces and promote safe and efficient thoroughfares.

3 Questions: How to launch a successful climate and energy venture

A new book by experts at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship offers 24 steps to success.

In 2013, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Managing Director Bill Aulet published “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup,” which has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been used to teach entrepreneurship at universities around the world. One MIT course where it’s used is 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), where instructors have tweaked the framework over the years. In a new book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures,” they codify those changes and provide a new blueprint for entrepreneurs working in the climate and energy spaces.

MIT News spoke with lead author and Trust Center Entrepreneur-in-Residence Ben Soltoff, who wrote the book with Aulet, Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes, Senior Lecturer Francis O’Sullivan, and Lecturer Libby Wayman. Soltoff explains why climate and energy entrepreneurship is so challenging and talks about some of the new steps in the book.

Q: What are climate and energy ventures?

A: It’s a broad umbrella. These ventures aren’t all in a specific industry or structured in the same way. They could be software, they could be hardware, or they could be deep tech coming out of labs. This book is also written for people working in government, large corporations, or nonprofits. Each of those folks can benefit from the entrepreneurial framework in this book. We very intentionally refer to them as climate and energy ventures in the book, not just climate and energy startups.

One common theme is meeting the challenge of providing enough energy for current and future needs without exacerbating, or even while reducing, the impact we have on our planet. Generally, climate and energy ventures are less likely to be only software. Many of the solutions we need are around molecules, not bits. A lot of it is breakthrough technology and science from research labs. You could be making a useful fuel, removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or delivering something in a novel way. Your venture might produce a chemical or molecule that’s already being provided and is a commodity. It needs to be not only more sustainable, but better for your customers — either cheaper, more reliable, or more securely delivered. Ultimately, all of these ventures have to provide value. They also often involve physical infrastructure that you have to scale up — not just 10 times or 100 times, but 1,000 times or more — from original lab demonstrations.

Q: How should climate and energy entrepreneurs be thinking about navigating financing and working with the government?

A: One of the major themes of the book is the importance of figuring out if policy is in your favor and constantly applying a policy lens to what you’re building. Finance is another major theme. In climate and energy, these things are fundamental, and we need to consider them from the beginning. We talk about different “valleys of death” — the idea that going from one stage to the next stage requires this jump in time and resources that presents a big challenge. That also relates to the jump in scale of the technology, from a lab scale to something you can produce and sell in a quantity and at a cost the market is interested in. All of that requires financing.

At an early stage, a lot of these ventures are funded through grants and research funding. Later, they start getting early-stage capital — often venture capital. Eventually, as folks are scaling, they move to debt and project financing. Companies need to be very intentional about the type of financing they’re going to pursue and at what stage. We have an entire step on creating a long-term capital plan. Entrepreneurs need to be very clear about the story they’re going to tell investors at different stages. Otherwise, they can paint themselves into a corner and fail to build a company for the next stage of capital they need.

In terms of policy, entrepreneurs should use the policy environment as a filter for selecting a market. We have a story in the book about a startup that switched from working in sub-Saharan Africa to the U.S. after the Inflation Reduction Act passed. As those incentives began disappearing, they still had the option to return to their original market. It’s not ideal for them, but they are still able to build profitable projects. You shouldn’t build a company based on the incentives alone, but you should understand which way the wind is blowing and take advantage of policy when it’s in your favor. That said, policy can always change.

Q: How should climate and energy entrepreneurs select the right market “stepping stones”?

A: Each of the “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” books talks about the importance of selecting customers and listening to your customers. When thinking about their beachhead market, or where to initially focus, climate and energy entrepreneurs need to look for the easiest near-term opportunity to plug in their technology. Subsequent market selection is also driven by technology. Instead of just picking a beachhead market and figuring everything else out later, there often needs to be an intentional choice of what we call market stepping stones. You start by focusing on an initial market in the early days — land and expand — but there needs to be a long-term strategy, so you don’t go down a dead end. These ventures don’t have a lot of flexibility as they build out potentially expensive technologies. Being intentional means having a pathway planned from the beachhead market up to the big prize that makes the entire enterprise worthwhile. The prize means having a big impact but also targeting a big market opportunity.

We have an example in the book of a company that can turn CO₂ into useful products. They knew the big prize was turning it into fuel, most likely aviation fuel, but they couldn’t produce at the right volume or cost early on, so they looked at other applications. They started with making vodka from CO₂ because it was low-volume and high-margin. Then the pandemic happened, so they made hand sanitizer. Then they made perfume, which had the highest margins of all. By that point, they were ready to start moving into the fuel market. The stepping stones are about figuring out who is willing to buy the simple version of your technology or product and pay a premium. Initially, looking at that company, you might say, “They’re not going to save the planet by selling vodka.” But it was a critical stepping stone to get to the big prize. Long-term thinking is essential for ventures in this space.

Study: High-fat diets make liver cells more likely to become cancerous

New research suggests liver cells exposed to too much fat revert to an immature state that is more susceptible to cancer-causing mutations.

One of the biggest risk factors for developing liver cancer is a high-fat diet. A new study from MIT reveals how a fatty diet rewires liver cells and makes them more prone to becoming cancerous.

The researchers found that in response to a high-fat diet, mature hepatocytes in the liver revert to an immature, stem-cell-like state. This helps them to survive the stressful conditions created by the high-fat diet, but in the long term, it makes them more likely to become cancerous.

“If cells are forced to deal with a stressor, such as a high-fat diet, over and over again, they will do things that will help them survive, but at the risk of increased susceptibility to tumorigenesis,” says Alex K. Shalek, director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The researchers also identified several transcription factors that appear to control this reversion, which they believe could make good targets for drugs to help prevent tumor development in high-risk patients.

Shalek; Ömer Yilmaz, an MIT associate professor of biology and a member of the Koch Institute; and Wolfram Goessling, co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Cell. MIT graduate student Constantine Tzouanas, former MIT postdoc Jessica Shay, and Massachusetts General Brigham postdoc Marc Sherman are the co-first authors of the paper.

Cell reversion

A high-fat diet can lead to inflammation and buildup of fat in the liver, a condition known as steatotic liver disease. This disease, which can also be caused by a wide variety of long-term metabolic stresses such as high alcohol consumption, may lead to liver cirrhosis, liver failure, and eventually cancer.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to figure out just what happens in cells of the liver when exposed to a high-fat diet — in particular, which genes get turned on or off as the liver responds to this long-term stress.

To do that, the researchers fed mice a high-fat diet and performed single-cell RNA-sequencing of their liver cells at key timepoints as liver disease progressed. This allowed them to monitor gene expression changes that occurred as the mice advanced through liver inflammation, to tissue scarring and eventually cancer.

In the early stages of this progression, the researchers found that the high-fat diet prompted hepatocytes, the most abundant cell type in the liver, to turn on genes that help them survive the stressful environment. These include genes that make them more resistant to apoptosis and more likely to proliferate.

At the same time, those cells began to turn off some of the genes that are critical for normal hepatocyte function, including metabolic enzymes and secreted proteins.

“This really looks like a trade-off, prioritizing what’s good for the individual cell to stay alive in a stressful environment, at the expense of what the collective tissue should be doing,” Tzouanas says.

Some of these changes happened right away, while others, including a decline in metabolic enzyme production, shifted more gradually over a longer period. Nearly all of the mice on a high-fat diet ended up developing liver cancer by the end of the study.

When cells are in a more immature state, it appears that they are more likely to become cancerous if a mutation occurs later on, the researchers say.

“These cells have already turned on the same genes that they’re going to need to become cancerous. They’ve already shifted away from the mature identity that would otherwise drag down their ability to proliferate,” Tzouanas says. “Once a cell picks up the wrong mutation, then it’s really off to the races and they’ve already gotten a head start on some of those hallmarks of cancer.”

The researchers also identified several genes that appear to orchestrate the changes that revert hepatocytes to an immature state. While this study was going on, a drug targeting one of these genes (thyroid hormone receptor) was approved to treat a severe form of steatotic liver disease called MASH fibrosis. And, a drug activating an enzyme that they identified (HMGCS2) is now in clinical trials to treat steatotic liver disease.

Another possible target that the new study revealed is a transcription factor called SOX4, which is normally only active during fetal development and in a small number of adult tissues (but not the liver).

Cancer progression

After the researchers identified these changes in mice, they sought to discover if something similar might be happening in human patients with liver disease. To do that, they analyzed data from liver tissue samples removed from patients at different stages of the disease. They also looked at tissue from people who had liver disease but had not yet developed cancer.

Those studies revealed a similar pattern to what the researchers had seen in mice: The expression of genes needed for normal liver function decreased over time, while genes associated with immature states went up. Additionally, the researchers found that they could accurately predict patients’ survival outcomes based on an analysis of their gene expression patterns.

“Patients who had higher expression of these pro-cell-survival genes that are turned on with high-fat diet survived for less time after tumors developed,” Tzouanas says. “And if a patient has lower expression of genes that support the functions that the liver normally performs, they also survive for less time.”

While the mice in this study developed cancer within a year or so, the researchers estimate that in humans, the process likely extends over a longer span, possibly around 20 years. That will vary between individuals depending on their diet and other risk factors such as alcohol consumption or viral infections, which can also promote liver cells’ reversion to an immature state.

The researchers now plan to investigate whether any of the changes that occur in response to a high-fat diet can be reversed by going back to a normal diet, or by taking weight-loss drugs such as GLP-1 agonists. They also hope to study whether any of the transcription factors they identified could make good targets for drugs that could help prevent diseased liver tissue from becoming cancerous.

“We now have all these new molecular targets and a better understanding of what is underlying the biology, which could give us new angles to improve outcomes for patients,” Shalek says.

The research was funded, in part, by a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative through Fondation MIT.

Study: More eyes on the skies will help planes reduce climate-warming contrails

Images from geostationary satellites alone aren’t enough to help planes avoid contrail-prone regions, MIT researchers report.

Aviation’s climate impact is partly due to contrails — condensation that a plane streaks across the sky when it flies through icy and humid layers of the atmosphere. Contrails trap heat that radiates from the planet’s surface, and while the magnitude of this impact is uncertain, several studies suggest contrails may be responsible for about half of aviation’s climate impact.

Pilots could conceivably reduce their planes’ climate impact by avoiding contrail-prone regions, similarly to making altitude adjustments to avoid turbulence. But to do so requires knowing where in the sky contrails are likely to form.

To make these predictions, scientists are studying images of contrails that have formed in the past. Images taken by geostationary satellites are one of the main tools scientists use to develop contrail identification and avoidance systems. 

But a new study shows there are limits to what geostationary satellites can see. MIT engineers analyzed contrail images taken with geostationary satellites, and compared them with images of the same areas taken by low-Earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites. LEO satellites orbit the Earth at lower altitudes and therefore can capture more detail. However, since LEO satellites only snap an image as they fly by, they capture images of the same area far less frequently than geostationary (GEO) satellites, which continuously image the same region of the Earth every few minutes.

The researchers found that geostationary satellites miss about 80 percent of the contrails that appear in LEO imagery. Geostationary satellites mainly see larger contrails that have had time to grow and spread across the atmosphere. The many more contrails that LEO satellites can pick up are often shorter and thinner. These finer threads likely formed immediately from a plane’s engines and are still too small or otherwise not distinct enough for geostationary satellites to discern.

The study highlights the need for a multiobservational approach in developing contrail identification and avoidance systems. The researchers emphasize that both GEO and LEO satellite images have their strengths and limitations. Observations from both sources, as well as images taken from the ground, could provide a more complete picture of contrails and how they evolve.

“With more ‘eyes’ on the sky, we could start to see what a contrail’s life looks like,” says Prakash Prashanth, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “Then you can understand what are its radiative properties over its entire life, and when and why a contrail is climatically important.”

The new study appears today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Marlene Euchenhofer, a graduate student in AeroAstro; Sydney Parke, an undergraduate student; Ian Waitz, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT’s vice president of research; and Sebastian Eastham of Imperial College London.

Imaging backbone

Contrails form when the exhaust from planes meets icy, humid air, and the particles from the exhaust act as seeds on which water vapor collects and freezes into ice crystals. As a plane moves forward, it leaves a trail of condensation in its wake that starts as a thin thread that can grow and spread over large distances, lasting for several hours before dissipating.

When it persists, a contrail acts similar to an ice cloud and, as such, can have two competing effects: one in which the contrail is a sort of heat shield, reflecting some incoming radiation from the sun. On the other hand, a contrail can also act as a blanket, absorbing and reflecting back some of the heat from the surface. During the daytime, when the sun is shining, contrails can have both heat shielding and trapping effects. At night, the cloud-like threads have only a trapping, warming effect. On balance, studies have shown that contrails as a whole contribute to warming the planet.

There are multiple efforts underway to develop and test aircraft contrail-avoidance systems to reduce aviation’s climate-warming impact. And scientists are using images of contrails from space to help inform those systems.

“Geostationary satellite images are the workhorse of observations for detecting contrails,” says Euchenhofer. “Because they are at 36,000 kilometers above the surface, they can cover a wide area, and they look at the same point day and night so you can get new images of the same location every five minutes.”

But what they bring in rate and coverage, geostationary satellites lack in clarity. The images they take are about one-fifth the resolution of those taken by LEO satellites. This wouldn’t be a surprise to most scientists. But Euchenhofer wondered how different the geostationary and LEO contrail pictures would look, and what opportunities there might be to improve the picture if both sources could be combined.

“We still think geostationary satellites are the backbone of observation-based avoidance because of the spatial coverage and the high frequency at which we get an image,” she says. “We think that the data could be enhanced if we include observations from LEO and other data sources like ground-based cameras.”

Catching the trail

In their new study, the researchers analyzed contrail images from two satellite imagers: the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard a geostationary satellite that is typically used to observe contrails and the higher-resolution Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), an instrument onboard several LEO satellites.

For each month from December 2023 to November 2024, the team picked out an image of the contiguous United States taken by VIIRS during its flyby. They found corresponding images of the same location, taken at about the same time of day by the geostationary ABI. The images were taken in the infrared spectrum and represented in false color, which enabled the researchers to more easily identify contrails that formed during both the day and night. The researchers then worked by eye, zooming in on each image to identify, outline, and label each contrail they could see.

When they compared the images, they found that GEO images missed about 80 percent of the contrails observed in the LEO images. They also assessed the length and width of contrails in each image and found that GEO images mostly captured larger and longer contrails, while LEO images could also discern shorter, smaller contrails.

“We found 80 percent of the contrails we could see with LEO satellites, we couldn’t see with GEO imagers,” says Prashanth, who is the executive officer of MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment. “That does not mean that 80 percent of the climate impact wasn’t captured. Because the contrails we see with GEO imagers are the bigger ones that likely have a bigger climate effect.”

Still, the study highlights an opportunity.

“We want to make sure this message gets across: Geostationary imagers are extremely powerful in terms of the spatial extent they cover and the number of images we can get,” Euchenhofer says. “But solely relying on one instrument, especially when policymaking comes into play, is probably too incomplete a picture to inform science and also airlines regarding contrail avoidance. We really need to fill this gap with other sensors.”

The team says other sensors could include networks of cameras on the ground that under ideal conditions can spot contrails as planes form them in real time. These smaller, “younger” contrails are typically missed by geostationary satellites. Once scientists have these ground-based data, they can match the contrail to the plane and use the plane’s flight data to identify the exact altitude at which the contrail appears. They could then track the contrail as it grows and spreads through the atmosphere, using geostationary images. Eventually, with enough data, scientists could develop an accurate forecasting model, in real time, to predict whether a plane is heading toward a region where contrails might form and persist, and how it could change its altitude to avoid the region.

“People see contrail avoidance as a near-term and cheap opportunity to attack one of the hardest-to-abate sectors in transportation,” Prashanth says. “We don’t have a lot of easy solutions in aviation to reduce our climate impact. But it is premature to do so until we have better tools to determine where in the atmosphere contrails will form, to understand their relative impacts and to verify avoidance outcomes. We have to do this in a careful and rigorous manner, and this is where a lot of these pieces come in.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Office of Environment and Energy.

Anything-goes “anyons” may be at the root of surprising quantum experiments

MIT physicists say these quasiparticles may explain how superconductivity and magnetism can coexist in certain materials.

In the past year, two separate experiments in two different materials captured the same confounding scenario: the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism. Scientists had assumed that these two quantum states are mutually exclusive; the presence of one should inherently destroy the other.

Now, theoretical physicists at MIT have an explanation for how this Jekyll-and-Hyde duality could emerge. In a paper appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team proposes that under certain conditions, a magnetic material’s electrons could splinter into fractions of themselves to form quasiparticles known as “anyons.” In certain fractions, the quasiparticles should flow together without friction, similar to how regular electrons can pair up to flow in conventional superconductors.

If the team’s scenario is correct, it would introduce an entirely new form of superconductivity — one that persists in the presence of magnetism and involves a supercurrent of exotic anyons rather than everyday electrons.

“Many more experiments are needed before one can declare victory,” says study lead author Senthil Todadri, the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics at MIT. “But this theory is very promising and shows that there can be new ways in which the phenomenon of superconductivity can arise.”

What’s more, if the idea of superconducting anyons can be confirmed and controlled in other materials, it could provide a new way to design stable qubits — atomic-scale “bits” that interact quantum mechanically to process information and carry out complex computations far more efficiently than conventional computer bits.

“These theoretical ideas, if they pan out, could make this dream one tiny step within reach,” Todadri says.

The study’s co-author is MIT physics graduate student Zhengyan Darius Shi.

“Anything goes”

Superconductivity and magnetism are macroscopic states that arise from the behavior of electrons. A material is a magnet when electrons in its atomic structure have roughly the same spin, or orbital motion, creating a collective pull in the form of a magnetic field within the material as a whole. A material is a superconductor when electrons passing through, in the form of voltage, can couple up in “Cooper pairs.” In this teamed-up state, electrons can glide through a material without friction, rather than randomly knocking against its atomic latticework.

For decades, it was thought that superconductivity and magnetism should not co-exist; superconductivity is a delicate state, and any magnetic field can easily sever the bonds between Cooper pairs. But earlier this year, two separate experiments proved otherwise. In the first experiment, MIT’s Long Ju and his colleagues discovered superconductivity and magnetism in rhombohedral graphene — a synthesized material made from four or five graphene layers.

“It was electrifying,” says Todadri, who recalls hearing Ju present the results at a conference. “It set the place alive. And it introduced more questions as to how this could be possible.”

Shortly after, a second team reported similar dual states in the semiconducting crystal molybdenium ditelluride (MoTe₂). Interestingly, the conditions in which MoTe₂ becomes superconductive happen to be the same conditions in which the material exhibits an exotic “fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect,” or FQAH — a phenomenon in which any electron passing through the material should split into fractions of itself. These fractional quasiparticles are known as “anyons.”

Anyons are entirely different from the two main types of particles that make up the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons are the extroverted particle type, as they prefer to be together and travel in packs. The photon is the classic example of a boson. In contrast, fermions prefer to keep to themselves, and repel each other if they are too near. Electrons, protons, and neutrons are examples of fermions. Together, bosons and fermions are the two major kingdoms of particles that make up matter in the three-dimensional universe.

Anyons, in contrast, exist only in two-dimensional space. This third type of particle was first predicted in the 1980s, and its name was coined by MIT’s Frank Wilczek, who meant it as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea that, in terms of the particle’s behavior, “anything goes.”

A few years after anyons were first predicted, physicists such as Robert Laughlin PhD ’79, Wilczek, and others also theorized that, in the presence of magnetism, the quasiparticles should be able to superconduct.

“People knew that magnetism was usually needed to get anyons to superconduct, and they looked for magnetism in many superconducting materials,” Todadri says. “But superconductivity and magnetism typically do not occur together. So then they discarded the idea.”

But with the recent discovery that the two states can, in fact, peacefully coexist in certain materials, and in MoTe₂ in particular, Todadri wondered: Could the old theory, and superconducting anyons, be at play?

Moving past frustration

Todadri and Shi set out to answer that question theoretically, building on their own recent work. In their new study, the team worked out the conditions under which superconducting anyons could emerge in a two-dimensional material. To do so, they applied equations of quantum field theory, which describes how interactions at the quantum scale, such as the level of individual anyons, can give rise to macroscopic quantum states, such as superconductivity. The exercise was not an intuitive one, since anyons are known to stubbornly resist moving, let alone superconducting, together.

“When you have anyons in the system, what happens is each anyon may try to move, but it’s frustrated by the presence of other anyons,” Todadri explains. “This frustration happens even if the anyons are extremely far away from each other. And that’s a purely quantum mechanical effect.”

Even so, the team looked for conditions in which anyons might break out of this frustration and move as one macroscopic fluid. Anyons are formed when electrons splinter into fractions of themselves under certain conditions in two-dimensional, single-atom-thin materials, such as MoTe2. Scientists had previously observed that MoTe2 exhibits the FQAH, in which electrons fractionalize, without the help of an external magnetic field.

Todadri and Shi took MoTe2 as a starting point for their theoretical work. They modeled the conditions in which the FQAH phenomenon emerged in MoTe2, and then looked to see how electrons would splinter, and what types of anyons would be produced, as they theoretically increased the number of electrons in the material.

They noted that, depending on the material’s electron density, two types of anyons can form: anyons with either 1/3 or 2/3 the charge of an electron. They then applied equations of quantum field theory to work out how either of the two anyon types would interact, and found that when the anyons are mostly of the 1/3 flavor, they are predictably frustrated, and their movement leads to ordinary metallic conduction. But when anyons are mostly of the 2/3 flavor, this particular fraction encourages the normally stodgy anyons to instead move collectively to form a superconductor, similar to how electrons can pair up and flow in conventional superconductors.

“These anyons break out of their frustration and can move without friction,” Todadri says. “The amazing thing is, this is an entirely different mechanism by which a superconductor can form, but in a way that can be described as Cooper pairs in any other system.”

Their work revealed that superconducting anyons can emerge at certain electron densities. What’s more, they found that when superconducting anyons first emerge, they do so in a totally new pattern of swirling supercurrents that spontaneously appear in random locations throughout the material. This behavior is distinct from conventional superconductors and is an exotic state that experimentalists can look for as a way to confirm the team’s theory. If their theory is correct, it would introduce a new form of superconductivity, through the quantum interactions of anyons.

“If our anyon-based explanation is what is happening in MoTe₂, it opens the door to the study of a new kind of quantum matter which may be called ‘anyonic quantum matter,’” Todadri says. “This will be a new chapter in quantum physics.”

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

Statement on Professor Nuno Loureiro

"We are grateful to all who played a part in identifying and tracking down the suspect in the killing of Prof. Loureiro. Our community continues to mourn and remember Nuno — an incredible scientist, colleague, mentor, and friend. Our thoughts are also with the Brown University community, which suffered so much loss this week.

As the authorities work to answer remaining questions, our continuing position is to refer to the law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Attorney of Massachusetts for information.

For now, our focus is on our community, on Nuno’s family, and all those who knew him.”

---

Remembering Nuno

• Letter to the MIT community from President Kornbluth (Dec 19)
• MIT News Obituary (Dec. 16)
• Letter to the MIT community (Dec. 16)

---

“Wait, we have the tech skills to build that”

From robotics to apps like “NerdXing,” senior Julianna Schneider is building technologies to solve problems in her community.

Students can take many possible routes through MIT’s curriculum, which can zigag through different departments, linking classes and disciplines in unexpected ways. With so many options, charting an academic path can be overwhelming, but a new tool called NerdXing is here to help.

The brainchild of senior Julianna Schneider and other students in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG), NerdXing lets students search for a class and see all the other classes students have gone on to take in the past, including options that are off the beaten track.

“I hope that NerdXing will democratize course knowledge for everyone,” Schneider says. “I hope that for anyone who's a freshman and maybe hasn't picked their major yet, that they can go to NerdXing and start with a class that they would maybe never consider — and then discover that, ‘Oh wait, this is perfect for this really particular thing I want to study.’”

As a student double-majoring in artificial intelligence and decision-making and in mathematics, and doing research in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Schneider knows the benefits of interdisciplinary studies. It’s a part of the reason why she joined the UAG, which advises the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s leadership as it advances education and research at the intersections between computing, engineering, the arts, and more.

Through all of her activities, Schneider seeks to make people’s lives better through technology.

“This process of finding a problem in my community and then finding the right technology to solve that — that sort of approach and that framework is what guides all the things I do,” Schneider says. “And even in robotics, the things that I care about are guided by the sort of skills that I think we need to develop to be able to have meaningful applications.”

From Albania to MIT

Before she ever touched a robot or wrote code, Schneider was an accomplished young classical pianist in Albania. When she discovered her passion for robotics at age 13, she applied some of the skills she had learned while playing piano.

“I think on some fundamental level, when I was a pianist, I thought constantly about my motor dynamics as a human being, and how I execute really complex skills but do it over and over again at the top of my ability,” Schneider says. “When it came to robotics, I was building these robotic arms that also had to operate at the top of their ability every time and do really complex tasks. It felt kind of similar to me, like a fun crossover.”

Schneider joined her high school’s robotics team as a middle schooler, and she was so immediately enamored that she ended up taking over most of the coding and building of the team’s robot. She went on to win 14 regional and national awards across the three teams she led throughout middle and high school. It was clear to her that she’d found her calling.

NerdXing wasn’t Schneider’s first experience building new technology. At just 16, she built an app meant to connect English-speaking volunteers from her international school in Tirana, Albania, to local charities that only posted jobs in Albanian. By last year, the platform, called VoluntYOU, had 18 ambassadors across four continents. It has enabled volunteers to give out more than 2,000 burritos in Reno, Nevada; register hundreds of signatures to support women’s rights legislation in Albania; and help with administering Covid-19 vaccines to more than 1,200 individuals a day in Italy.

Schneider says her experience at an international school encouraged her to recognize problems and solutions all around her.

“When I enter a new community and I can immediately be like, ‘Oh wait, if we had this tool, that would be so cool and that would help all these people,’ I think that’s just a derivative of having grown up in a place where you hear about everyone’s super different life experiences,” she says.

Schneider describes NerdXing as a continuation of many of the skills she picked up while building VoluntYOU.

“They were both motivated by seeing a challenge where I thought, ‘Wait, we have the tech skills to build that. This is something that I can envision the solution to.’ And then I wanted to actually go and make that a reality,” Schneider says.

Robotics with a positive impact

At MIT, Schneider started working in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory of Professor Sangbae Kim, where she has now participated in three research projects, one of which she’s co-authoring a paper on. She’s part of a team that tests how robots, including the famous back-flipping mini cheetah, move, in order to see how they could complement humans in high-stakes scenarios.

Most of her work has revolved around crafting controllers, including one hybrid-learning and model-based controller that is well-suited to robots with limited onboard computing capacity. It would allow the robot to be used in regions with less access to technology.

“It’s not just doing technology for technology's sake, but because it will bridge out into the world and make a positive difference. I think legged robotics have some of the best potential to actually be a robotic partner to human beings in the scenarios that are most high-stakes,” Schneider says.

Schneider hopes to further robotic capabilities so she can find applications that will service communities around the world. One of her goals is to help create tools that allow a surgeon to operate on a patient a long distance away. 

To take a break from academics, Schneider has channeled her love of the arts into MIT’s vibrant social dancing scene. This year, she’s especially excited about country line dancing events where the music comes on and students have to guess the choreography.

“I think it's a really fun way to make friends and to connect with the community,” she says.

A “scientific sandbox” lets researchers explore the evolution of vision systems

The AI-powered tool could inform the design of better sensors and cameras for robots or autonomous vehicles.

Why did humans evolve the eyes we have today?

While scientists can’t go back in time to study the environmental pressures that shaped the evolution of the diverse vision systems that exist in nature, a new computational framework developed by MIT researchers allows them to explore this evolution in artificial intelligence agents.

The framework they developed, in which embodied AI agents evolve eyes and learn to see over many generations, is like a “scientific sandbox” that allows researchers to recreate different evolutionary trees. The user does this by changing the structure of the world and the tasks AI agents complete, such as finding food or telling objects apart.

This allows them to study why one animal may have evolved simple, light-sensitive patches as eyes, while another has complex, camera-type eyes.

The researchers’ experiments with this framework showcase how tasks drove eye evolution in the agents. For instance, they found that navigation tasks often led to the evolution of compound eyes with many individual units, like the eyes of insects and crustaceans.

On the other hand, if agents focused on object discrimination, they were more likely to evolve camera-type eyes with irises and retinas.

This framework could enable scientists to probe “what-if” questions about vision systems that are difficult to study experimentally. It could also guide the design of novel sensors and cameras for robots, drones, and wearable devices that balance performance with real-world constraints like energy efficiency and manufacturability.

“While we can never go back and figure out every detail of how evolution took place, in this work we’ve created an environment where we can, in a sense, recreate evolution and probe the environment in all these different ways. This method of doing science opens to the door to a lot of possibilities,” says Kushagra Tiwary, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and co-lead author of a paper on this research.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead author and fellow graduate student Aaron Young; graduate student Tzofi Klinghoffer; former postdoc Akshat Dave, who is now an assistant professor at Stony Brook University; Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator in the McGovern Institute, and co-director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines; co-senior authors Brian Cheung, a postdoc in the  Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and an incoming assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco; and Ramesh Raskar, associate professor of media arts and sciences and leader of the Camera Culture Group at MIT; as well as others at Rice University and Lund University. The research appears today in Science Advances.

Building a scientific sandbox

The paper began as a conversation among the researchers about discovering new vision systems that could be useful in different fields, like robotics. To test their “what-if” questions, the researchers decided to use AI to explore the many evolutionary possibilities.

“What-if questions inspired me when I was growing up to study science. With AI, we have a unique opportunity to create these embodied agents that allow us to ask the kinds of questions that would usually be impossible to answer,” Tiwary says.

To build this evolutionary sandbox, the researchers took all the elements of a camera, like the sensors, lenses, apertures, and processors, and converted them into parameters that an embodied AI agent could learn.

They used those building blocks as the starting point for an algorithmic learning mechanism an agent would use as it evolved eyes over time.

“We couldn’t simulate the entire universe atom-by-atom. It was challenging to determine which ingredients we needed, which ingredients we didn’t need, and how to allocate resources over those different elements,” Cheung says.

In their framework, this evolutionary algorithm can choose which elements to evolve based on the constraints of the environment and the task of the agent.

Each environment has a single task, such as navigation, food identification, or prey tracking, designed to mimic real visual tasks animals must overcome to survive. The agents start with a single photoreceptor that looks out at the world and an associated neural network model that processes visual information.

Then, over each agent’s lifetime, it is trained using reinforcement learning, a trial-and-error technique where the agent is rewarded for accomplishing the goal of its task. The environment also incorporates constraints, like a certain number of pixels for an agent’s visual sensors.

“These constraints drive the design process, the same way we have physical constraints in our world, like the physics of light, that have driven the design of our own eyes,” Tiwary says.

Over many generations, agents evolve different elements of vision systems that maximize rewards.

Their framework uses a genetic encoding mechanism to computationally mimic evolution, where individual genes mutate to control an agent’s development.

For instance, morphological genes capture how the agent views the environment and control eye placement; optical genes determine how the eye interacts with light and dictate the number of photoreceptors; and neural genes control the learning capacity of the agents.

Testing hypotheses

When the researchers set up experiments in this framework, they found that tasks had a major influence on the vision systems the agents evolved.

For instance, agents that were focused on navigation tasks developed eyes designed to maximize spatial awareness through low-resolution sensing, while agents tasked with detecting objects developed eyes focused more on frontal acuity, rather than peripheral vision.

Another experiment indicated that a bigger brain isn’t always better when it comes to processing visual information. Only so much visual information can go into the system at a time, based on physical constraints like the number of photoreceptors in the eyes.

“At some point a bigger brain doesn’t help the agents at all, and in nature that would be a waste of resources,” Cheung says.

In the future, the researchers want to use this simulator to explore the best vision systems for specific applications, which could help scientists develop task-specific sensors and cameras. They also want to integrate LLMs into their framework to make it easier for users to ask “what-if” questions and study additional possibilities.

“There’s a real benefit that comes from asking questions in a more imaginative way. I hope this inspires others to create larger frameworks, where instead of focusing on narrow questions that cover a specific area, they are looking to answer questions with a much wider scope,” Cheung says.

This work was supported, in part, by the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Mathematics for the Discovery of Algorithms and Architectures (DIAL) program.

New study suggests a way to rejuvenate the immune system

Stimulating the liver to produce some of the signals of the thymus can reverse age-related declines in T-cell populations and enhance response to vaccination.

As people age, their immune system function declines. T cell populations become smaller and can’t react to pathogens as quickly, making people more susceptible to a variety of infections.

To try to overcome that decline, researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute have found a way to temporarily program cells in the liver to improve T-cell function. This reprogramming can compensate for the age-related decline of the thymus, where T cell maturation normally occurs.

Using mRNA to deliver three key factors that usually promote T-cell survival, the researchers were able to rejuvenate the immune systems of mice. Aged mice that received the treatment showed much larger and more diverse T cell populations in response to vaccination, and they also responded better to cancer immunotherapy treatments.

If developed for use in patients, this type of treatment could help people lead healthier lives as they age, the researchers say.

“If we can restore something essential like the immune system, hopefully we can help people stay free of disease for a longer span of their life,” says Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, who has joint appointments in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering.

Zhang, who is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, a core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT, is the senior author of the new study. Former MIT postdoc Mirco Friedrich is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature.

A temporary factory

The thymus, a small organ located in front of the heart, plays a critical role in T-cell development. Within the thymus, immature T cells go through a checkpoint process that ensures a diverse repertoire of T cells. The thymus also secretes cytokines and growth factors that help T cells to survive.

However, starting in early adulthood, the thymus begins to shrink. This process, known as thymic involution, leads to a decline in the production of new T cells. By the age of approximately 75, the thymus is greatly reduced.

“As we get older, the immune system begins to decline. We wanted to think about how can we maintain this kind of immune protection for a longer period of time, and that's what led us to think about what we can do to boost immunity,” Friedrich says.

Previous work on rejuvenating the immune system has focused on delivering T cell growth factors into the bloodstream, but that can have harmful side effects. Researchers are also exploring the possibility of using transplanted stem cells to help regrow functional tissue in the thymus.

The MIT team took a different approach: They wanted to see if they could create a temporary “factory” in the body that would generate the T-cell-stimulating signals that are normally produced by the thymus.

“Our approach is more of a synthetic approach,” Zhang says. “We're engineering the body to mimic thymic factor secretion.”

For their factory location, they settled on the liver, for several reasons. First, the liver has a high capacity for producing proteins, even in old age. Also, it’s easier to deliver mRNA to the liver than to most other organs of the body. The liver was also an appealing target because all of the body’s circulating blood has to flow through it, including T cells.

To create their factory, the researchers identified three immune cues that are important for T-cell maturation. They encoded these three factors into mRNA sequences that could be delivered by lipid nanoparticles. When injected into the bloodstream, these particles accumulate in the liver and the mRNA is taken up by hepatocytes, which begin to manufacture the proteins encoded by the mRNA.

The factors that the researchers delivered are DLL1, FLT-3, and IL-7, which help immature progenitor T cells mature into fully differentiated T cells.

Immune rejuvenation

Tests in mice revealed a variety of beneficial effects. First, the researchers injected the mRNA particles into 18-month-old mice, equivalent to humans in their 50s. Because mRNA is short-lived, the researchers gave the mice multiple injections over four weeks to maintain a steady production by the liver.

After this treatment, T cell populations showed significant increases in size and function.

The researchers then tested whether the treatment could enhance the animals’ response to vaccination. They vaccinated the mice with ovalbumin, a protein found in egg whites that is commonly used to study how the immune system responds to a specific antigen. In 18-month-old mice that received the mRNA treatment before vaccination, the researchers found that the population of cytotoxic T-cells specific to ovalbumin doubled, compared to mice of the same age that did not receive the mRNA treatment.

The mRNA treatment can also boost the immune system’s response to cancer immunotherapy, the researchers found. They delivered the mRNA treatment to 18-month-old mice, who were then implanted with tumors and treated with a checkpoint inhibitor drug. This drug, which targets the protein PD-L1, is designed to help take the brakes off the immune system and stimulate T cells to attack tumor cells.

Mice that received the treatment showed much higher survival rates and longer lifespan that those that received the checkpoint inhibitor drug but not the mRNA treatment.

The researchers found that all three factors were necessary to induce this immune enhancement; none could achieve all aspects of it on their own. They now plan to study the treatment in other animal models and to identify additional signaling factors that may further enhance immune system function. They also hope to study how the treatment affects other immune cells, including B cells.

Other authors of the paper include Julie Pham, Jiakun Tian, Hongyu Chen, Jiahao Huang, Niklas Kehl, Sophia Liu, Blake Lash, Fei Chen, Xiao Wang, and Rhiannon Macrae.

The research was funded, in part, by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center, part of the Yang Tan Collective at MIT, Broad Institute Programmable Therapeutics Gift Donors, the Pershing Square Foundation, J. and P. Poitras, and an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship.

MIT goes quantum

Institute to launch new quantum initiative aimed at advancing the most significant practical applications in science, technology, industry and national security.

Everyone is talking about new quantum technologies, but what exactly is quantum and why are scientists, engineers and technologists so excited by the potential for this new field? On Monday, December 8, MIT will launch the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT), an Institute-wide effort to apply quantum breakthroughs to the most consequential challenges in science, technology, industry, and national security. 

The interdisciplinary endeavor, the newest of MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s strategic initiatives, will bring together MIT researchers and domain experts from a range of industries to identify and tackle practical challenges wherever quantum solutions could achieve the greatest impact. In collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, industry leaders and end users from all domains, researchers from across the traditional quantum disciplines will work to identify and advance the most significant practical applications in science, technology, industry and national security.

The QMIT launch event will feature:

• Introductory remarks by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and MIT President Sally Kornbluth;
• MIT quantum luminaries, from Nobel Laureates Moungi Bawendi and Wolfgang Ketterle to Peter Shor, Nergis Mavalvala, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, Paola Cappellaro, Isaac Chuang, Will Oliver, Vladan Vuletić and many others
• Industry leaders including Jay M. Gambetta (Director of Research, IBM), Hartmut Neven (Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI) – and a range of MIT startups
• Eric Lander, Broad Institute founding director emeritus, offering reflections on the early adoption of innovative technology
• A lunchtime poster session highlighting student research in quantum science and engineering

More information on QMIT can be found here and the full agenda can be found here.