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“We can’t ship goods without functioning ports”

PhD student Chelsea Mitchell studies the economic forces that shape shipping ports and their ability to support global supply chains.

In the small coastal town of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, the port is the backbone of the community.

Growing up there, with a father who works as a longshoreman, Chelsea Mitchell witnessed the port’s importance firsthand. From an early age, she understood that the port was essential to the transportation of goods in and out of not only Prince Rupert but all of British Columbia’s North Coast. Disruptions to port operations could have ripple effects reaching from dockworkers’ families to the regional economy and beyond. 

“The port is central to my hometown’s economy,” Mitchell says. “Having family in the industry gave me visibility into the complexity and the volatility of the shipping industry.”

Today, that industry and the forces that shape it are the subject of Michell’s research as a fourth-year PhD student in MIT’s Department of Economics. She studies how ports and shipping companies compete, how goods move through congested terminals, and how disruptions affect global supply chains.

“When I was younger, I never would have imagined I would get to conduct research at MIT,” Mitchell says. “Prince Rupert is largely a blue-collar town, so I had minimal insight into the world of academic research growing up. But in high school I realized I thrived in an academic environment, especially studying math, and hoped one day I could pursue a PhD.”

She left British Columbia to attend the University of Toronto, where she studied math and economics. There, faculty mentors introduced her to economic research and encouraged her to apply to doctoral programs, eventually leading her to the Institute.

“I was lucky to have mentors in college who encouraged me to apply to MIT. The level of support and quality of advising here has consistently amazed me,” Mitchell says.

Her research focus became clearer in 2023, when longshore workers along Canada’s West Coast walked off the job during a labor dispute centered, in part, on automation and its effect on port employment. The strike lasted roughly two weeks and shut down 35 terminals across the province. That experience left a lasting impression on Mitchell.

“These labor disruptions made me acutely aware that ports were a choke point in our supply chains,” Mitchell says. “They seemed understudied relative to how important they are.”

Because of her family’s ties to the industry, Mitchell was able to spend time speaking not only with her father’s co-workers who were involved in the strike but also with people working throughout the shipping industry. 

One of her first major projects examined labor negotiations and competition among American ports. She found that even just the possibility of work disruptions in ports could alter shipping patterns, prompting companies to reroute cargo away from West Coast ports and toward East Coast facilities despite added logistical cost.

Her current work focuses on another major shift in the industry: the growing number of shipping companies that own container terminals.

Traditionally, carriers relied on independent terminal operators to load and unload cargo. Increasingly, however, major shipping lines have begun acquiring terminals themselves. Using detailed vessel-tracking and port-call data, Mitchell studies what happens after those acquisitions occur.

Her findings suggest that ships operated by the acquiring carrier often receive faster service, particularly during periods of congestion when terminal capacity is limited. Competing carriers, meanwhile, face longer wait times and are more likely to divert cargo to other terminals.

“Ports are notoriously capacity constrained, but all carriers need access to them,” Mitchell says. “A central question is what advantages these acquisitions create and whether they affect competition.”

More broadly, Mitchell hopes her work highlights the importance of an industry that has often gone unnoticed by consumers. Approximately 80 percent of global trade moves by sea, making ports essential infrastructure for the modern economy.

“People have become increasingly aware of the shipping industry, but we can’t ship goods without functioning ports,” she says. “We want ports to be reliable and efficient so that supply chains function and goods can remain affordable.”

Mitchell credits her advisors, Nancy Rose and Tobias Salz, with helping her navigate her research, especially through difficult obstacles. More broadly, she says the people she has met at MIT have been the most rewarding part of her experience thus far.

Outside of economics, Mitchell enjoys exercising, skiing, reading, and spending time with friends. She finds that having a work-life balance is essential to her success as a researcher.

“Research is extremely challenging,” Mitchell says. “You invest a lot of time trying to answer questions that you don’t necessarily know are answerable given the data you have. It’s important to have rewarding aspects of your life outside of research that can help keep you motivated.”

Still, whether she is analyzing data in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or returning home to the rugged coastline of northern British Columbia, Mitchell takes a people-first approach to her research.

“I see numbers. I see data. But it’s challenging to tell a story with that data when you don’t have insights from the people who are actually doing the work,” Mitchell says. “Talking to people in the industry has been fundamental to understanding what’s really happening.”

QS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1 university for 2026-27

Ranking at the top for the 15th year in a row, the Institute also places first in 12 subject areas.

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 15th year in a row MIT has received this distinction.

The full 2027 edition of the rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at TopUniversities.com. The QS rankings are based on factors including academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students. 

MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in 12 of the subject areas ranked by QS, as announced in March of this year. 

The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Engineering and Technology; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.

MIT also placed second in seven subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; History of Art; Biological Sciences; Economics and Econometrics; Marketing; Natural Sciences; and Statistics and Operational Research.

Susan Solomon named 2026 Tang Prize laureate

The MIT professor’s groundbreaking work on atmospheric chemistry helped lay steps towards recovery of the ozone layer and demonstrated the lasting impacts of carbon emissions on Earth’s climate.

Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT, has been named the 2026 Tang Prize Laureate in Sustainable Development for “groundbreaking advances and leadership in atmospheric and climate sciences that shaped global policy for Sustainable Development,” according to the Tang Prize Foundation.

The Tang Prize is a biennial international award granted by judges convened by Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s top academic research institution, and recognizes four fields of research: sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology, and rule of law.

“The Tang Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in environmental science, and it’s flooring to anyone to learn that they received it,” says Solomon, who holds joint appointments in the MIT departments of Chemistry and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It’s a tremendous, tremendous honor, and I’ll try to live up to it.”

Solomon began her career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1985, scientists discovered an unexpected “hole” in the ozone layer of the atmosphere above Antarctica. Ozone, a gas made of three oxygen atoms, helps filter out ultraviolet radiation from the sun that would otherwise damage living organisms, with impacts such as increasing rates of skin cancer and cataracts. The following year Solomon, then 30, published a paper proposing a novel chemical mechanism that might explain the mysterious hole. In the same year, she led a team of 16 scientists to take direct measurements of the degradation of the ozone layer, as the only woman in the expedition. Their findings were the first measurements to show that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), compounds used in common items such as aerosols and cooling systems, were indeed destroying ozone in the stratosphere. 

“Maybe it’s just being young and naive, or maybe it’s being open to new ideas, but at that stage in my life I was open to the idea that chemistry might be completely different from what we had thought. I came up with some ideas of how to explain it that turned out to be right, remarkably,” she says.

The following year, a United Nations conference signed the Montreal Protocol, with all nations agreeing to phase out the use of CFCs and resulting in one of the most successful triumphs of international climate policy to date.

“The ozone story is a fantastic one, because it teaches us that we can actually develop international agreements and get all different kinds of countries, developed and developing, to agree to them and to solve problems together,” she says.

From 2002 to 2008, she co-led the production of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, synthesizing climate science knowledge and assessing effects and mitigation approaches to human-caused climate change. It was later recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Solomon then went on to study the impacts of human-made carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions on the Earth’s climate. Her groundbreaking research showed that human emissions of CO₂ were causing impacts on the climate that would be irreversible for 1,000 years, even after emissions stopped. In 2012 she joined the faculty of EAPS, where she has continued her work on studying the ozone layer. Recently, she has found the first quantitative proof that the ozone layer is on track to recover by around 2035.

“Most of the awards I’ve gotten previously have been very focused on the science that I did, but this one embraces the fact that my work has benefit for the planet’s sustainability,” she says. “People recognize that my work did something valuable. That is an incredible, humbling, and remarkable feeling.”

“Susan is a model of an engaged scientist,” says David McGee, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT and EAPS department head. “From uncovering the mechanisms by which human activities affect the ozone layer to using that understanding to guide political action to, most recently, showing that our actions have produced measurable ozone recovery, her work and leadership have deeply impacted the field and the health of our society. Her mentoring and teaching have similarly impacted students and researchers across EAPS and MIT. This award is a wonderful celebration of her remarkable achievements.”

“Susan is a pioneer of atmospheric chemistry,” says Class of 1942 Professor of Chemistry and Department Head Matthew D. Shoulders. “Her groundbreaking research at the intersection of chemistry and environmental science is critically important, and it is wonderful to see her dedication, creativity, and scientific leadership recognized in this way.”

“I have been absolutely blessed by the students and colleagues that I’ve had over the years,” Solomon says, including collaborators Qiang Fu, Rolando Garcia, Douglas Kinnison, Ben Santer, and David Thompson, as well as MIT research scientists Kane Stone and Diane Ivy and former students, including Megan Lickley and Peidong Wang.

Founded in 2012 by the late Samuel Yin, the Tang Prize Foundation is a nongovernmental, nonprofit educational foundation. Nomination and selection of laureates is conducted by the Academia Sinica. Each award cycle, the academy convenes four autonomous selection committees, each consisting of an assembly of international experts, until a consensus on the recipients is reached. Recipients are chosen on the basis of the originality of their work along with their contributions to society, irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, gender, and political affiliation. Recipients in each Tang Prize category receive a total of approximately $1.6 million and a grant of approximately $320,000.

Solomon is the second MIT faculty member to receive the award after Feng Zhang, who won the award in Biopharmaceutical Science in 2016 for his role in developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system.

Expanding and deepening climate reporting through local messengers

A new impact report shows how the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship has brought community-centered climate coverage to nearly 3 million readers and listeners.

Since 2021, the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship has supported local and regional journalists in reporting high-impact news stories that connect climate change with local priorities. 

Now, the MIT Climate Project has published a report on the reach and impact of these fellowships, highlighting how the Institute’s scientific resources can help spark and deepen conversations about climate solutions in every corner of the country.

“Our goal is to offer trusted, grounded knowledge about climate change to everyone who wants to learn, so communities can make informed decisions for themselves about how to respond,” says Aaron Krol, who leads the Climate Change Engagement Program within the Climate Project. “Often, the best way to do that is just to lend support and scientific guidance to the people, like the reporters at local papers and radio stations, who know their audiences’ needs and perspectives best.”

Since the fellowship was founded, 20 journalists have completed the program, publishing 104 stories with a collective audience of nearly 3 million readers and listeners. Among the goals of the fellowship is to ensure that ambitious, long-form or serial climate reporting is not restricted to the large national outlets that can afford to maintain a climate desk. Americans consistently say they trust their local newsrooms more than national ones, and feel local news is an important institution in their cities and towns — making these news sources especially powerful media for introducing new ideas and perspectives on climate change and its solutions. 

MIT journalism fellows have covered the potential for offshore wind energy in Louisiana, flood preparedness in West Virginia, and the energy transition in Utah’s coal country, among many other topics with clear stakes for readers and their communities.

“Local journalists want to engage on climate issues,” says Krol. “Every year, we’re amazed by the quality of the applications we receive. There are so many reporters out there who know this is important, who have been holding onto ideas for stories, and just need that extra support to step outside their usual beats or devote the time and resources to these issues.”

The 20 outlets that have participated in the fellowship showcase the full variety of local news media in the United States today. Some are long-standing institutions in their cities and states, while others are recent startups trying out new, nonprofit models for local journalism in the 21st century. Some publish in print, some are online-only, and some report on the radio. Some have readerships in the hundreds of thousands, and others serve impactful niche audiences.

The most recent cohort of fellows, from 2025, exemplifies this range. At the Chicago Tribune, Karina Atkins reached hundreds of thousands of readers with her series on state and federal policies that have hampered Illinois farmers from diversifying their crops in preparation for a warming climate. Meanwhile, at Lancaster Farming, Carolyn Beans gave dairy farmers in Pennsylvania an in-depth look at the market for climate-smart milk.

“We don’t ask how big your audience is,” Krol says. “We ask who you’re going to reach, and how you’re going to connect climate change to their lives and livelihoods.”

MIT provides the fellows with editorial, scientific, design, and financial support. Fellows get a crash course in climate science from MIT experts, and work hands-on with interactive climate models to get new perspectives on policy and technology solutions. They also get access to a science editor who can supplement the work of the host newsroom with a specialized background in reporting and writing science-focused stories.

“The stories themselves are important, but I’m proudest of the difference our program has made for the careers of the journalists who have come through it,” says Krol. “We’ve had newsrooms dedicate more resources to following up on their climate stories, fellows pivot to energy and environment beats, outlets start using digital tools and data visualizations in new ways. We even had a fellow start her own newsroom to pursue more environmental and solutions reporting for Minnesota. Once these journalists get a chance to dig in on climate, they carry the knowledge and skills with them.”

Read the 2026 Impact Report to learn more about the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellows, and the impacts they made on communities across the country. All 100-plus stories published through the fellowship can be found on the MIT Climate Portal.

Flexible cryogenic cables solve a challenge in quantum system development

A prototype wiring system for dilution refrigerators could advance the realization of practical quantum computers.



MIT Open Learning reaches all the way to the South Pole

John Della Costa uses OpenCourseWare to engage fellow Antarctica “winterovers” in physics content, and to build community.

From the icy expanse of the South Pole, John Della Costa, a researcher on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) project, watches STS.042/8.225 (Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th Century), a free online class from MIT Open Learning’s OpenCourseWare, as part of a weekly “Fysics Fridays” series he started with his team.

MIT Professor David Kaiser, who teaches the course, often receives thoughtful notes from remote learners, but says an email from Della Costa stood out.

“Hearing that John and his team are spending a part of their time with this course was just the best message to receive,” says Kaiser.

The BICEP collaboration uses a series of radio telescopes at the South Pole to study the cosmic microwave background — the oldest light, emitted about 380,000 years after the start of the universe. The team is looking for signs of primordial gravitational waves, which would help to support MIT Professor Alan Guth’s theory of cosmic inflation that explains the rapid early expansion of the universe.

“Inflation is really important in making sense of our observations of our universe,” says Della Costa. “We have yet to discover the evidence for inflation that definitively proves that it did happen, and BICEP’s main role here at the South Pole is to discover gravitational waves from the very early universe.”

Kaiser co-directs a research group on early-universe cosmology with Guth. He says he has colleagues who have worked as Antarctica winter-overs, and can appreciate the immense challenge of this work.

“It’s very exciting to see this important research flourishing,” says Kaiser. “It takes enormous effort and dedication.” 

Bringing Open Learning to the South Pole

Della Costa first discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, as a graduate student at San Diego State University. At the time, the Covid-19 pandemic had altered his schedule and created more downtime to pursue additional independent learning. He was taking a nuclear physics course as part of his graduate program in astrophysics, and wanted to learn much more about the topic. A little bit of online research led to his discovery of class 22.01 (Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation), taught by Professor Michael Short.

“I found the course so interesting, and I’ve been exploring OpenCourseWare ever since then,” says Della Costa.

Preparing to spend an entire year at the South Pole (from November 2025 to December 2026), he realized he would need a productive way to occupy his downtime and stay entertained while isolated from much of the world.

“The station is completely isolated. After a certain point, no planes can fly in because it’s too cold,” says Della Costa. “The station closed on February 14, and it will reopen at the end of October or early November, depending on the weather.”

Because internet access is so limited at the South Pole, he downloaded several courses ahead of time, including: STS.042/8.225, 8.02 (Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism), 8.03 (Physics III: Vibrations and Waves), and Guth’s course, 8.286 (The Early Universe).

Like Della Costa’s discovery of OpenCourseWare, STS.042/8.225 was rooted in the disruptive days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Kaiser had taught the course in its traditional, in-person format many times, until fall 2020, when the courses needed to be taught entirely remotely. He made slides and taught the course via Zoom — for synchronous and asynchronous learning — to approximately 100 students located throughout the world. The materials were initially posted on the course site. The online version was later refined and expanded, launching on OpenCourseWare in August 2022. Unlike many physics offerings, this course includes background readings by physicists, as well as historians, philosophers, and sociologists.

“In this course, we get to talk about some really amazing ideas from modern physics,” says Kaiser. “We start in the middle of the 19th century, still in an era of what we would now call classical physics, and we rapidly go through things like relativity, quantum theory, nuclear physics, and particle physics. We end up with some of my favorite material about cosmology and the Big Bang — the kinds of things that John and his team are actively working on right now from their perch at the South Pole.”

Building community and learning together

Beyond finding ways to stay occupied during downtime from his research, Della Costa realized the importance of engaging the 45-person community at the South Pole. He describes it as a tight-knit group that needs to work together and look out for one another, especially given the extreme isolation, cold, and darkness, which can take a serious toll on mental health during the winter months.

“It’s very important to have community activities here,” says Della Costa, who thought of the idea to launch the “Fysics Fridays” series a couple of months ago. 

The group gathers to watch lectures and documentaries about physics every Friday. The series kicked off with a documentary about atomic bombs, drawing strong interest from the very beginning. 

Della Costa realized that STS.042/8.225 would be an ideal offering for Fysics Fridays.

“I thought this would be a perfect lecture series for us to watch, because it’s fairly introductory,” says Della Costa. “Not everyone here is a physicist, actually. It’s widely accessible, but still meaty, and worth people’s time to watch.”

Team members have been very interested in watching the course, and they’ve also started doing experiments before watching the lectures. Della Costa says that they’ve done the double-slit experiment and plan to also make a cloud chamber to see cosmic rays going through it.

Now that Della Costa and Kaiser are in contact, Kaiser has made plans to provide a special Zoom colloquium for the community at the South Pole.

“This use of the course is especially inspiring,” says Kaiser. “It really speaks to the excellence and far reach of OpenCourseWare and Open Learning.”

Could AI tell you where you left your keys?

A new spatial memory system for robots efficiently captures details about the objects they see while exploring their environment.

An auto factory worker can remember the storage bin where she left a partly assembled component the night before, and quickly return to that spot to pick it up. But robots that may work side-by-side with her would struggle to develop and access this same type of “spatiotemporal” memory.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a long-term memory framework that allows robots to rapidly form and recall a detailed mental model of complicated, large-scale environments.

In the future, this advance could allow the factory worker to send a robotic assistant to fetch the item, simply by asking it to “go and grab the component we started assembling last night.”

This new method combines advanced map representations with rich descriptions of the environment that the robot gathers as it travels over a long period of time. The robot can quickly access this memory to answer complex queries about its environment in plain language.

This memory framework, which answers questions more accurately than state-of-the-art methods, runs fast enough for a mobile robot to use in real-time.

In addition to its potential uses in robotics, this method could have applications in augmented reality systems that aid maintenance workers in anomaly detection or assist commuters in wayfinding.

“If we want robots to work side-by-side with humans and interact better with humans, they must speak the same language. The robot must be able to reason about time and space the same way humans do. That is essentially what our method is doing. It is turning a traditional map into a language-based map that is easier for the robot to think about and access using language,” says Luca Carlone, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and director of the MIT SPARK Laboratory.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Nicolas Gorlo, an MIT graduate student; and Lukas Schmid, a former research scientist at MIT and now professor at the University of Technology Nuremberg in Germany. The research was recently presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Spatiotemporal memory

Memory allows an artificial intelligence system, like a chatbot, to answer complex questions and reason about previous interactions with its user.

“We want to design a new type of memory, a spatiotemporal memory, that enables an AI-powered robot to remember real interactions and sensor observations. Like ChatGPT, but grounded in the real world and capable of answering any question about the environment, like ‘Where did I leave my wallet?’” Carlone says.

To develop such a memory framework, the MIT researchers bridged two lines of work: computer vision and robotic mapping.

Multimodal computer vision models can understand and richly describe the objects in a scene, but they often only process a single annotation at a time. On the other hand, robotic mapping frameworks create 3D maps of an environment, like an entire apartment or university campus, but usually lack detailed descriptions of objects or are computationally expensive.

The method the MIT researchers created, called Describe Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, at Any Moment (DAAAM), takes the best of both approaches.

Using DAAAM, as a robot traverses its environment, it attaches rich descriptions to objects it sees. For instance, the robot may note that a particular building on the MIT campus is called the Stata Center and is designed with a certain type of architecture, or that a bike rack holds five bicycles and the red one has a flat tire. 

It stores this detailed information in a 3D map-based representation that is arranged spatially, so objects will be grouped into separate regions. In this way, the robot can remember that the red bicycle with the flat tire is in the bike rack outside the Stata Center.

But existing techniques that capture such rich descriptions typically take a few seconds to annotate a few objects. This is too slow for real-time performance, since a robot might see hundreds of objects during a few minutes of exploration.

“The faster the robot can form this spatial memory, the more efficient it will be performing actions in the environment,” Carlone adds.

Streamlining the process

To speed things up, DAAAM aggregates nearby objects as it travels and uses an optimization method to select key frames to annotate. These are images with the clearest view of multiple objects, allowing the system to thoroughly describe several items in parallel, speeding up computation tenfold.

As the robot explores the space, it attaches each batch of annotations to multiple objects in a particular location on the 3D map.

“We annotate every object only once, so our framework can run in very large-scale environments in real time. And by clustering objects into regions, it can answer a wide range of queries about objects and locations in the environment,” Gorlo explains.

Once the system builds this spatial memory, it must retrieve information from an enormous database of objects and descriptions in an efficient manner. 

To enable this, the researchers used an LLM that calls on various tools, which can quickly retrieve specific information in a way that reduces hallucinations. This allows DAAAM to answer a user query accurately in only a few seconds. 

For instance, if one asks a robot about a certain sculpture it saw near an MIT campus building, DAAAM can use a semantic search tool to retrieve information based on the word “sculpture” or a different tool to retrieve information based on the location of the building.

When tested and compared with other methods, DAAAM was between 21 percent and 53 percent more accurate, depending on the question type. 

In the future, the researchers want to expand DAAAM so the system can capture significant events that happened in the environment. They are also working to incorporate confidence levels into the system’s responses.

“Ultimately, we want to have robots that can help with any sort of tasks. With this framework, we are trying to create the foundations to enable a generalist agent that can do anything you ask,” Gorlo says.

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research. Carlone is currently on sabbatical as an Amazon Scholar; this article describes work performed at MIT and is not associated with Amazon.

MIT’s Initiative for New Manufacturing builds momentum

In its first year, INM has worked across research, workforce development, and industry engagement to help accelerate new manufacturing technologies and their real-world deployment.

In May, the Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) marked its first anniversary with MIT Manufacturing Week, four days of events that attracted more than 800 registrants including students, faculty, industry leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, and government officials to explore topics ranging from how companies are using AI on factory floors to the role of startups in introducing innovation to new workforce solutions to address the worker shortage.

“INM launched a year ago with the premise that strengthening the industrial base needed a coordinated response, and MIT has a responsibility to lead it,” says Paula T. Hammond, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering and co-chair of INM’s Steering Committee. “The response and participation level has been huge. MIT Manufacturing Week proved that the appetite for change — from students to chief executives — is real and urgent.”

The week opened with a cybersecurity workshop co-led by INM and Google Cloud for the initiative’s industry members. It continued with the MIT MIMO (Machine Intelligence for Manufacturing Operations) symposium focused on deploying artificial intelligence on factory floors, alongside discussions on workforce development, emerging technologies, startups, and industrial transformation. The week closed with a regional research showcase and competition that drew more than 140 graduate students and postdocs from across New England.

Over the past year, INM has also continued its distinguished speaker series featuring manufacturing leaders including Keith Flynn, senior vice president of manufacturing at Anduril; Roland Busch, president and CEO of Siemens; and Venky Alagirisamy, COO of Nike.

Inspiring a new generation of manufacturing startups

A central goal of INM is to help more students see manufacturing as a frontier for scientific discovery, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and societal impact.

To support that effort, INM is launching and leading programs to help move early-stage ideas and new technologies from the lab to real-world development, and to catalyze new manufacturing companies. 

This year, INM partnered with NSF I-Corps New England, which helps researchers turn their startup ideas into companies, to host its first manufacturing research showcase. More than 140 teams from 17 universities across New England applied to participate. Forty finalist teams received mentorship on their ideas and advanced to the final competition, where eight teams shared $50,000 in prize funding.

The top prize in the category “most transformative innovation” went to MIT PhD student Jake Read for “The End of G Code,” a project focused on modular machine control architectures designed to accelerate the development of new manufacturing equipment and processes. Vatsal Patel from MIT and Joshua Grace from Yale University won the top prize in the research excellence category, for “VisFT,” scalable six-axis force-torque sensors.

Project themes presented by participating teams included AI tools for manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing and process control, robotics and autonomous assembly, digital twins and simulation, new materials, additive manufacturing, next-generation shipbuilding, and biomanufacturing. 

“Entrepreneurship is a transformative pathway to take research to market, and to drive faster innovation and scale-up,” says John Hart, INM faculty co-director and head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “At INM’s inaugural research showcase, we had tremendous interest from universities across New England, along with enthusiastic participation from industry, investors, and experienced founders across the ecosystem. We are excited to build on this success and work toward a nationwide program and platform for entrepreneurship and translation in manufacturing.” 

The Cheng Wu Foundation supported the showcase. 

Growing industry membership

During MIT Manufacturing Week, First Solar became INM’s eighth industry member, joining Amgen, Autodesk, GE Vernova, Flex, PTC, Sanofi and Siemens. 

The growth of INM’s consortium reflects a broader recognition that the challenges facing modern manufacturing — from supply chain resilience to workforce development and industrial competitiveness — are too complex for any single sector or company to address alone. 

This reflects renewed interest in manufacturing at a moment when advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, energy systems, and advanced materials are transforming industrial production. INM provides a platform to convene and provide solutions.

INM’s industry consortium model brings industry, researchers, and educators together around shared manufacturing challenges, with a focus on emerging technologies, workforce transformation, and commercialization pathways. Members participate in workshops and working groups on topics including cybersecurity and digital twins, implementing automated systems, AI agents in regulatory environments, and AI and continuous innovation. INM helps them connect with students, meet with startups, and learn from one another.

“Our members see MIT as a partner that can help them both address today’s challenges and think far into the future,” says Rick Locke, dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-chair of INM’s steering committee. “This kind of multi-industry engagement is unusual and powerful.”

A year of rapid progress

When MIT launched INM a year ago, the goal was to create stronger connections between research, industry, workforce development, and entrepreneurship — helping accelerate how new manufacturing technologies move from the laboratory into real-world development.

Since then, the initiative has expanded quickly across research, industry, workforce training, and student engagement. INM issued a call for proposals focused on artificial intelligence and automation, receiving an incredible response from faculty and researchers, and funding eight seed research projects. In June, the initiative plans to publish eight white papers as part of a broader study examining the future of manufacturing. 

During MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2026, INM collaborated with NSF I-Corps to guide 13 early-stage teams through customer discovery as part of the I-Corps Spark program.

Workforce development has also been a major focus. This fall, MIT launched the Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), led by Principal Research Scientist John Liu, to create a new generation of shop floor leaders and drivers of productivity — becoming“‘technologists” — at six sites across New England, including three community colleges. 

“INM has the potential to transform the national manufacturing workforce,” says Liu. “It will require deep engagement between how people learn and lead, and how firms adopt new technologies and transform. We’re just getting started.” 

INM is now exploring a national rollout of TechAMP, along with expansion into areas including biomanufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing.

On campus, INM supported student engagements including an AI and automation lunch series that Professor Faez Ahmed and colleagues organized, and visited factories through its Factory Observatory program that Ben Armstrong and the MIT Industrial Performance Center led. This spring, students also founded MIT’s first manufacturing club, holding its launch event during MIT Manufacturing Week. “We’re thrilled students are taking the lead,” says Sloan associate professor and INM faculty co-director Karen Zheng. “It was really exciting to see a full room of 80-plus students across campus coming together for the kickoff event during the busiest final period of a semester. This speaks to the students’ enthusiasm.” 

An eye toward the long term

While maintaining a deep focus on strengthening domestic manufacturing, INM aims to have a global reach. For example, the initiative is collaborating with NAMTECH, a new education institute in Ahmedabad, India, where students are now taking an adaptation of MIT’s well-known “yo-yo course,” or 2.008 (Design and Manufacturing II), focused on the fundamentals of manufacturing processes.

Next year, INM plans to bring more manufacturing leaders to campus, offer additional programming for emerging entrepreneurs, graduate the first cohort of TechAMP students, bring TechAMP to new states, grow the consortium to include new industries, and deepen research into manufacturing productivity. 

“INM aims to be a catalyst for transforming manufacturing across the nation to drive innovation, economic growth, and new types of jobs,” says Chris Love, faculty co-director of INM. “MIT’s work on the PIE (Production in the Innovation Economy) study in 2013 highlighted the value of proximity between production and innovation. INM seeks to rekindle this relationship in manufacturing across the country.”

The tenured engineers of 2026

Ten faculty members have been granted tenure in five units across MIT’s School of Engineering.

In 2026, MIT granted tenure to 10 faculty members across the School of Engineering. This year’s tenured engineers hold appointments in the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — which reports jointly to the School of Engineering and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing — and Mechanical Engineering, as well as within the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES).

“I’m delighted to congratulate the 10 newest tenured faculty members in the School of Engineering. This major career milestone reflects not only their impact and excellence in research, but their deep commitment to education and mentoring the next generation of engineers. I am so excited to see what new developments, innovations, and technologies will come next from this incredibly accomplished group,” says Paula T. Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, dean of engineering, Institute Professor, and professor of chemical engineering.

This year’s newly tenured engineering faculty include the following:

Jacob Andreas is an associate professor in EECS and is affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His work is in natural language processing, and more broadly in AI. He aims to understand the computational foundations of language learning, and to build intelligent systems that can learn from human guidance.

Zachary Cordero is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the associate director of the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory. His research seeks to enable frontier aviation and space platforms through advanced materials, manufacturing, and structures, with a particular focus on high-temperature systems.

Christina Delimitrou is the KDD Career Development Professor in Communications and Technology and an associate professor in EECS. She is also affiliated with CSAIL. Her research sits at the intersection of computer architecture and computer systems; specifically, she is one of the first systems researchers to apply machine learning techniques to design and management problems in the cloud.

Sili Deng is the Doherty Career Development Professor in Ocean Utilization and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her group develops scientific machine learning and experimental approaches to understand, predict, and engineer chemically reacting systems for sustainable energy, advanced materials manufacturing, and climate-resilient technologies.

David Des Marais is the Amgen Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He leads the Des Marais Lab, whose primary focus of research is to understand the mechanisms of plant-environment interaction, using tools from molecular, quantitative, and population genetics to identify the physiological basis of plant response to environmental cues.

Carmen Guerra-Garcia is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the director of the Aerospace Plasma Group. Her work lies at the intersection of aerospace engineering, low-temperature plasma technologies, and gas discharge physics. It addresses two aviation challenges — reducing emissions, and ensuring safety of next-generation aircraft — through three interconnected thrusts: advancing the fundamental science of electrical discharges in flowing gases and nonuniform media, applying that science to plasma-assisted combustion and chemical conversion, and developing physics-based approaches to lightning protection.

Laura Lewis is the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor in EECS and IMES. Her research aims to develop methods to analyze and interpret multi-modal neuroimaging data in order to enable measurement of previously undetectable aspects of brain function. She has a particular interest in fast fMRI, EEG, and PET, and is applying those methods to study sleep.

Tami Lieberman is the Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and IMES. She leads the Lieberman Lab, which seeks to understand how ecology and evolution shape the personalized communities of the human microbiome, and the role of this personalization on human health.

Kevin O’Brien is an associate professor in EECS and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics.  He leads the Quantum Coherent Electronics Group. His research efforts focus on developing tools, techniques, and devices to enhance the measurement of quantum systems, most notably superconducting quantum computers.

Wim van Rees is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Leonardo Career Development Professor in Engineering. His research advances high-order, high-fidelity numerical methods for efficiently simulating interactions between fluid flows and moving or deforming bodies, with methodologies spanning applications from wake vortex dynamics to bio-inspired propulsion and morphing structures. 

How to create distinguishable states for quantum systems

Researchers establish key insights for reading and writing information for quantum sensing, communication, computing, and control.

Researchers around the world are racing to develop new quantum-based systems for sensing, communication, computing, and control that have the promise of outperforming traditional systems. Creating stable, measurable, distinguishable quantum states, which would be the heart of any such system, is a daunting task.

Quantum states possess unique properties that can be exploited for developing novel information processing systems. Two key properties, stability and distinguishability, are hard to achieve, however. Extracting information from a quantum system depends on the distinguishability of quantum states, an intrinsic property associated with a property known as orthogonality. Nevertheless, no two Gaussian states (a widely studied class of quantum states) are orthogonal, and this yields an unavoidable error when attempting to distinguish them. 

In addition, present quantum devices tend to remain stable only for a fraction of a second, and require complex protocols to distinguish states. Now, researchers at MIT and the University of Ferrara have found a new approach for creating easily distinguishable states that could help to enable the development of these new quantum-based devices.

The new approach is described in a paper published today in the journal Physical Review A, by Moe Z. Win and Peter L. Falb at MIT with Andrea Giani and Andrea Conti at the University of Ferrara. The team found a way of translating between quantum states of light and algebraic varieties (a mathematical structure from abstract algebra), making the analysis more manageable by reducing it to solvable mathematical equations.

“Quantum systems can provide performance that is significantly better than classical counterparts,” Win says, “but this doesn’t come for free.” To develop practical devices for producing and detecting different states, “one needs to carefully engineer the quantum states in which they encode information.” 

Traditional computers typically use different voltages in a solid-state device to encode ones and zeros, while optical systems may use the presence or absence of a pulse of light. In quantum devices, the states might have to do with the spin state of a single atom, or the excitation level of a group of electrons.

Win adds that “we have been studying how to design distinguishable quantum states, which translates directly into improved performance for sensing and communication.” In the jargon of the field, they are improving the orthogonality — that is, the distinguishability — of different states.

The particular kinds of states studied in this theoretical analysis had to do with energy levels of photons, or particles of light. Giani explains that they used an operation called photon variation. This can take two forms: photon addition, in which photons are excited to a higher energy state, or photon subtraction, in which photons are annihilated (i.e., removed from the system). These operations change the quantum state from Gaussian to non-Gaussian states; it’s the non-Gaussian states that seem most useful, the team concluded. 

“The domain of non-Gaussian states is quite big,” Giani says, “but among them, we are looking into non-Gaussian states that are easier to implement with current technologies, because if we want to make the transition to the quantum world, we need to take into account realistic experimental challenges.”

Unlike some kinds of cutting-edge technologies being studied for possible quantum applications, Giani explains, “these kinds of photon-varied states have already been produced in the laboratory, and there is much interest in this kind of operation.”

These types of states are relatively new, Conti says, and so “there was a need for a theoretical characterization for these states,” The theoretical characterization this team derived, based on underlying mathematical properties, makes it possible to design states with higher levels of distinguishability. 

With this work, Win says, “we have a theory that gives us a blueprint to go design these non-Gaussian states, rather than just, ‘try this and that, and let’s hope they’re somewhat distinguishable.’ Our theory tells us exactly how to go about designing orthogonal non-Gaussian states.”

The findings result from the connection between the algebraic equations and the underlying physics, Win says, “That was the important connection between different disciplines — bringing algebraic geometry to the table.” 

“The equations to be solved for determining the orthogonality” of the quantum states “happened to be polynomial equations,” Falb says. “It just happened that there was the appropriate mathematics to solve them.”

Now that the principles have been established through this work, implementation should be relatively straightforward, the researchers say. There already are some optical setups that can be used to implement these kinds of states. 

“In principle,” Giani notes, “you can just put the parameters that you find by solving these equations directly into your physical apparatuses and produce these kinds of states. I don’t think this requires some more-advanced technology.” 

Conti adds that “as soon as this paper is published, we hope that experimentalists can try these methods.”

But that’s just the beginning, Win emphasizes. “We are getting momentum, and it’s very exciting,” he says. “The approach that we are taking here is to ask more general questions than just, ‘here’s a particular setup, how do you tune it to get a performance gain?’ Rather, we’re looking at a class of signal design problems, and then finding keys that really unlock these, so that hopefully the answer will not just be applied to only one particular setup, but something significantly broader.”

Fluorescent nanosensor enables rapid, first-of-its-kind detection of key gut health biomarker

Researchers developed an optical nanosensor to rapidly detect a key gut biomarker, enabling faster, accessible screening.

An international team of researchers has developed a novel fluorescent nanosensor powered by carbon nanotubes that is capable of rapidly detecting an emerging biomarker linked to gut health and disease. 

This important development could eventually lead to faster and more accessible gut-health testing. 

Indole-3-propionic acid (IPA) is a metabolite produced by gut bacteria during the breakdown of dietary tryptophan, an amino acid essential for protein synthesis. It plays an important role in regulating inflammation and oxidative stress, and has been associated with conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), Type 2 diabetes, and liver disease. However, current detection methods rely on traditional mass spectrometry-based analytical techniques, which are costly and time-consuming, making it impractical for routine screening or point-of-care use.

The new platform addresses a longstanding gap in gut metabolite sensing. Using a fluorescence-based approach, the sensor produces a rapid optical readout within minutes, offering a significantly faster and more accessible alternative to conventional analytical techniques. It demonstrates high selectivity, distinguishing IPA from closely related metabolites commonly found in the gut, which enables accurate detection even in complex biological environments such as blood serum.

“This is the first time we are able to directly and rapidly measure IPA levels in biological samples using an optical nanosensor,” says co-first author Mervin Ang, assistant professor at the National Institute of Education (NIE) within Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who was also associate scientific director at the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group within the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) when the research was initiated. “This novel approach, which moves away from traditional mass spectrometry, can pave the way towards faster and more accessible ways of monitoring gut health in real-world settings.”

This latest breakthrough is described in the research team’s open-access paper, “Fluorescent Nanosensor for Indole-3-Propionic Acid Detection in Gut Health Monitoring,” in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials. The work was led by researchers at NIE, MIT, and SMART, in collaboration with clinicians from the National University Hospital (NUH) and Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine within the National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine). 

From monitoring plants to sensing human health

The new nanosensor builds on SMART DiSTAP’s research into nano and optical sensor technologies. Originally developed to monitor plant health — including plant growth signals and stress responses —  the technology has now been adapted for human health applications by redesigning the nano- and optical-sensing platform to detect IPA.

“This work builds on technology at SMART DiSTAP on molecular recognition. We have used techniques like this to measure hormones and metabolites in living plants for agriculture, and have now applied it to the human gastrointestinal system. We were able to apply it to this long-standing challenge in gut health,” says Michael Strano, SMART DiSTAP lead principal investigator, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and corresponding author. 

“By focusing our molecular recognition on this important gut health biomarker, we’ve demonstrated a powerful new tool that could one day enable proactive, personalized health care. The tool promises near-instant insights into gut wellness, or the status of chronic diseases like IBD.”

A dual-mode platform for rapid testing and future monitoring

A key innovation of the technology is its dual-mode sensing capability. 

The nanosensor operates in both a visible fluorescence mode, enabling rapid, low-cost, high-throughput screening of biological samples; and a near-infrared mode, with wavelengths that can penetrate deeper into tissues. The near-infrared capability, enabled by carbon nanotubes, allows the technology to be adapted for in vivo applications and integration into wearable devices that could be used for home-based testing or continuous monitoring. This could, for example, help patients with chronic conditions like IBD detect flare-ups earlier and manage their health with greater autonomy. 

This flexibility allows the platform to be utilized in various environments, from laboratory tests to hospital bedside use, and wearable devices for real-time health monitoring. 

Validated in patient samples

To evaluate its clinical relevance, the research team collaborated with NUH clinicians to test the nanosensor on 125 human plasma samples across multiple patient groups, including healthy individuals and those with gastrointestinal diseases.

The study revealed significant differences in IPA levels between healthy individuals and patients with inflammatory bowel diseases, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Patients with active gut inflammation showed lower IPA levels — consistent with established clinical findings.

“From a clinical perspective, having a rapid and minimally complex way to assess metabolite levels like IPA could be very valuable,” says Jonathan Lee, senior consultant in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology within the Department of Medicine at NUH; adjunct associate professor at NUS Medicine; and co-first author of the work. “It has the potential to complement existing diagnostic tools and provide additional insights into patients with inflammatory bowel diseases.”

Faster, more accessible gut health testing

Beyond the laboratory, this research could pave the way for faster and more accessible gut health testing. Instead of relying on complex and time-intensive laboratory methods, the new nanosensor could enable rapid screening in clinics, or even portable or home-based testing, helping to detect gut diseases earlier and monitor treatment progress more easily.

Unlike conventional microbiome tests that focus on identifying which bacteria are present, this nanosensor measures what those microbes are actively producing, offering a more direct and functional snapshot of gut health. Directly measuring metabolite output, rather than bacterial composition alone, could provide more meaningful insights into overall health and support more personalized approaches to health care. 

Beyond clinical diagnostics, the technology can be used to track the immediate efficacy of dietary interventions. Users can see rapidly if specific foods or probiotics are successfully fueling their gut bacteria to produce anti-inflammatory molecules like IPA. The sensor also demonstrated reliable performance in complex biological fluids such as serum and plasma, an important step toward real-world clinical deployment and further translational applications. 

For pharmaceutical and therapeutic research, the nanosensor could be used to conduct rapid functional tests to determine the efficacy of new therapeutics or probiotics. By providing an instant readout of IPA levels, the platform could enable them to demonstrate in real time that their therapeutics are biologically active and effective, significantly accelerating drug screening and dosage optimization processes.

Toward point-of-care diagnostics, and beyond

“The transition from laboratory discovery to a point-of-care clinical tool is already underway,” says Ang. “With further development, the platform has the potential to be translated into clinical applications, and in the long term, adapted into portable platforms for routine health monitoring.”

Looking ahead, the research team has been awarded an Innovation to Startup Innovation Grant to incubate a Singapore proto-startup to advance validation and development. The focus would be to translate the sensor into a point-of-care clinical diagnostic tool, and aim to expand the platform to detect multiple gut metabolites simultaneously and AI-driven signal deconvolution, enabling more accurate, comprehensive and personalized gut health monitoring. 

Future developments may also explore integration into wearable devices, microneedle systems, or microfluidic platforms for continuous, real-time sensing.

The research was supported by the Intra-CREATE Seed Collaboration Grant, and research conducted at SMART was supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program.

A tiny ingestible sensor can measure temperature from inside the body

After being swallowed, the devices could offer continuous monitoring of patients who are sick or at risk of hypothermia.

In a hospital or at home, temperatures are usually taken using an oral or forehead thermometer, but these do not always accurately reflect the core body temperature. Measuring core temperature from within the body could make it easier to determine whether someone is sick, and whether they’re at risk of spiking a dangerous fever.

To make it more feasible to obtain core body temperature measurements, MIT engineers have developed an ingestible sensor that can send continuous temperature updates from the GI tract. 

The sensor is shaped like a tiny blueberry, 6 millimeters in diameter and 4 millimeters in height. That makes it much smaller than existing ingestible temperature sensors, which are more difficult to swallow and pose a potential risk of obstructing the GI tract.

“A sensor like this gives us the ability to monitor infections and identify them early,” 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. “That’s very relevant, particularly for at-risk populations like people who are immunosuppressed from chemotherapy treatments or immunosuppressive drugs.”

Ingestible sensors could also enable more accurate temperature measurements for fertility tracking, and for monitoring people during anesthesia.

Traverso and Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, are the senior authors of the new study. MIT postdoc Saransh Sharma is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Electronics.

Ingestible electronics

A handful of ingestible temperature sensors have become commercially available in recent years, but most are the size of a multivitamin or slightly larger, making them more challenging to swallow. Their size can also increase the risk of obstructing the GI tract.

Those capsules tend to be large due to the complex circuits they include, which require a great deal of power. That power is provided by relatively large, on-board batteries that make up much of the bulk of the capsule.

The MIT team wanted to design sensors that could measure temperature accurately, but at a much smaller size.

“The reason for them to be small is safety,” Traverso says. “We want something that is so small that the risk of any blockage or obstruction is highly mitigated, and also so that it can be easily ingested.”

To create a smaller device, the researchers set out to reduce the size of all of the main components — the temperature-sensing circuit, the antenna that relays temperature data, and the battery.

For the circuit, they created their own customized circuit that can fit onto a 1-square-millimeter silicon chip. To reduce the chip’s power consumption, the researchers designed an oscillator based on leakage current — the small current that flows through a circuit when it’s off. The frequency of this current varies depending on the temperature of the chip’s surroundings.

This circuit, which can detect temperature with an accuracy of 0.01 degrees Celsius, requires very little power — about 10 nanowatts. This means that it can be powered with a 1.55-volt coin cell battery, which is 4.8 millimeters in diameter and about 1.6 millimeter thick.

The new design further cuts energy consumption by using a communication strategy known as backscattering. This approach allows most of the power requirements to be outsourced to an external antenna that is located outside the body, within a foot or two of the sensor. The external antenna emits an ultra-high-frequency radio wave, which is then modulated by a tiny antenna within the sensor and sent back to the external antenna. By interpreting the changes in the radio wave, the external antenna can calculate the temperature value.

“We combined all of these different pieces together — the silicon chip, the battery, and the antenna — and we made it into an ingestible capsule, which is the smallest ingestible capsule that we have seen for temperature-sensing paradigms,” Sharma says. 

The internal antenna sends out a temperature reading once every second, allowing for continuous monitoring of temperature.

Tiny thermometers

The researchers envision that this kind of sensor could be useful in several scenarios, including monitoring infection and observing patients during and after anesthesia. Anesthesia often disrupts the body’s normal temperature regulation mechanisms, which can put patients at risk of hypothermia.

This type of device could also be used at home, for monitoring fevers in children, or measuring core body temperature as a marker of ovulation, for fertility purposes. It could also be useful for monitoring athletes, soldiers, or anyone else who might be exposed to extreme temperatures. 

To explore these possible uses, the researchers tested the sensors in animals while they were under anesthesia, and found that they could accurately detect and transmit temperature information. They also obtained accurate readings from animals that were awake and actively moving.

The researchers are now working on combining the temperature sensor with other sensors that could measure vital signs such as heart rate. They hope to begin testing these types of sensors in clinical trials within the next few years. 

If proven effective for people in high-risk situations, Traverso believes such sensors could become widely used by anyone who needs to monitor their temperature. 

“I think this could replace all thermometers, because it’s the most accurate way of taking temperature,” he says. “If we have miniature systems that can be easily swallowed and give very accurate data that’s superior to the current data, I think it can be helpful in so many ways.”

Other authors of the paper include Yubin Cai, Injoo Moon, Zhenming Yang, Peter Chai, Niora Fabian, Kailyn Schmidt, Alison Hayward, Andrew Pettinari, Maria Platero, Benedict Laidlaw, and Ashley Guevara.

The research was funded by the 711^th Human Performance Wing, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the 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.

Fact Sheet: Supporting MIT’s Jewish Community





Harriet having it all

From Boston to Moscow and across the U.S., Harriet Latham Robinson SM ’61, PhD ’65 has balanced an exciting career at the forefront of molecular biology with family, friends, and adventure.

In winter 1997, at age 60, when many researchers might be looking forward to retirement, Harriet Latham Robinson SM ’61, PhD ’65 was pursuing a faculty position as the chief of microbiology and immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. 

She got the job. 

There, she would also co-found GeoVax, a biotechnology company, based on her preclinical research, including work on developing an HIV-1 vaccine. 

Often, as the only woman in a room throughout much of her career, and in the still-developing and male-dominated field of molecular biology, her colleagues were referred to as “doctor” or “professor” at scientific symposia and committee meetings. 

“In contrast,” she recalls, “I was Harriet.”

Becoming a scientist

Robinson was born in 1938, the second of four children, to a mother, Ruth, and a father, Allen, from Ohio and Connecticut, respectively. After finishing grammar school, she attended the Girls’ Latin School, a public magnet school for college-bound young women. Although the school offered only two classes in science — one semester of chemistry and a health class — Robinson credits her time there for inspiring a lifelong love of learning, especially history and languages. 

“At our 50th and 60th high school reunions, I was struck by what my Girls’ Latin school classmates had done with their lives,” she says. “We had become not only wives, mothers, teachers, and nurses we were supposed to become, but also physicians, lawyers, professors, politicians, and businesswomen.” 

Robinson pursued her undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, where she intended to study political science. After an introductory biology course, however, she switched her major. Despite the shift, a love of languages persisted: Robinson took Russian and, the summer after her senior year of college, served as a Russian-English speaking guide at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Despite mounting tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, she served again in a similar role from September 1961 to January 1962 for a traveling transportation exhibition in Russia and Ukraine, where she was stationed by a Ford Thunderbird, wearing a TWA stewardess uniform.

“We were true entertainment, as well as education, and I worked to do my best to answer questions about America,” she says. “I was most surprised by the pride the Russian people took in the post-World War II accomplishments of their country.” 

Robinson might not have had a career in science at all had it not been for a dean at Radcliffe College who recognized Robinson’s interest in science. Robinson had thought it appropriate, as a young lady, to pursue marriage and to only further her education to become a teacher or nurse. Seeking permission to take chemistry instead of education courses to fulfill requirements for getting a teaching degree, she was referred to a dean who considered it perfectly appropriate for a young woman to pursue another career. Robinson recalls that the dean declared, “My dear, you want to be a scientist.” 

The foundation for a career

Robinson was soon accepted at MIT and was offered a fellowship to teach in an introductory biology lab to help pay her way. She returned from Moscow just five days before the start of a master’s program in biochemistry. In the Department of Biology at MIT, there were only a handful of women, no female faculty, and few ladies’ rooms in 1959. 

It was there that she met Walter “Wally” J.K. Tannenberg, a onetime partner but lifelong friend and companion, an MD taking courses at MIT. He wasn’t “at all taken aback by my becoming an educated woman,” Robinson says. He taught her to ski, and they sailed his lightening, the Ondine, in circles around Robinson’s parents’ comparatively slow motor sailor, the Palometa. 

Their breakup just before the winter holidays in 1963 precipitated her reentry to graduate school, to pursue her thesis work in the lab of Jim Darnell; she threw herself into studies to sit a qualifying exam less than a month after reentry. 

“A Bell Labs physicist who had just joined the Darnell Lab opined that any concept in biology could be mastered in two weeks,” Robinson says. “Much to everyone’s amazement, I not only passed my qualifying exam, but did much better than expected.”

It was at the University of California at Berkeley during her postdoctoral work that she met her husband. Although the marriage would not last the test of time, Robinson and her husband were blessed with three boys, each 13 months apart.

Robinson knew that she wanted to take time away from her career to stay home with her children before they entered primary school. As a graduate student at MIT, to prepare for both having a career and pursuing motherhood, Robinson hired a housekeeper and committed to being in the lab for only a typical 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday. If she were to compete with her male counterparts and be with her children, she needed to be able to get things done while working short hours. 

Robinson successfully completed her thesis work in just over two years.

“The difference between bearing children and rising up professional ladders is that you can start up the professional ladder after you are 40,” she advises. “Such is more problematic for having children.”

Robinson’s thesis work at MIT concerned how DNA, which is identical in all cells of an organism, produces different cell types from the same genetic blueprint. She explored this question through the lens of messenger RNA, a gene product that determines which DNA sequences are expressed in a cell. Later, her work on cancer-causing viruses in chickens would help lay the groundwork for gaining insight into genes that can cause tumors to form. 

“In contrast to becoming a wife, becoming a PhD from MIT did not falter, but rather provided me with the foundations for a career I loved in which I used molecular biology and chickens to study the genetic basis of cancer and pioneered the use of DNA as a new method of vaccination,” Robinson says.

Cancer-causing viruses

Robinson, supported by an National Science Foundation fellowship, pursued postdoc training at the University of California at Berkeley, in the lab of Harry Rubin. The Rubin Lab specialized in work on a virus known to cause cancer: the Rous sarcoma virus, which causes rapid tumor onset when introduced into chickens. RNA, it had recently been discovered, was the underlying genetic cause of tumors developing in chickens exposed to the Rous sarcoma virus. It cannot, however, do this deadly work without co-infection with something called a helper virus — in this case, avian leukosis virus. 

Both Rous sarcoma virus and its helper viruses were retroviruses, which can make DNA copies from RNA sequences, a departure from the previously accepted dogma that DNA is only transcribed into RNA, and not the other way around.

Robinson joined the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research in 1977, where she continued research on Rous helper viruses and had the opportunity to run her own lab for the first time. In 1998, she was recruited to be a professor of pathology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. While there, she conducted pioneering studies on the use of DNA for vaccination and worked on developing an AIDS vaccine. 

In 1999, she moved again, this time to step into the role of chief of microbiology and immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, where she began testing her candidate HIV vaccines in primates. While at the University of Massachusetts and Emory, Robinson and her lab used DNA vaccines, both with and without a poxvirus booster vaccine provided by Bernie Moss at the National Institutes of Health, to immunize animals against influenza, HIV, measles, and Ebola.

“From the early days of DNA vaccines, I had wanted to start a company to help move DNA vaccines from bench to bedside,” she says. 

Thus, GeoVax, short for “Georgia Vaccines,” was born. Robinson co-founded it with Don Hildebrand in 2001 after her move to Yerkes; Robinson would serve as chief scientific officer and a member of the board of directors during her tenure at the company. 

GeoVax successfully moved Robinson’s candidate AIDS vaccine into human clinical trials. These trials were stopped due to the generally poor performance of HIV vaccines in clinical trials, compared to the outstanding therapeutic potential of more recently developed anti-HIV drugs. GeoVax, however, continues to work on vaccines for Mpox, Covid-19, and Ebola, and has expanded its scope to include a cancer treatment.  

A well-deserved retirement 

After rounds of good-natured roasting from colleagues at Emory University and GeoVax, Robinson retired and has been enjoying returning to Palo Alto, California, where her oldest son, Bill, and his wife now live. 

Ultimately, Robinson hopes that her story can encourage everyone, especially young women, not to let pursuing a challenging and enriching career prevent them from realizing the dream of having a family.

“I have had a wonderful life, far exceeding what I ever could have anticipated,” Robinson says. “I have had international adventure, the romance of a man who truly loved me, the joy of motherhood, and the warmth, wonder, and adventure of family and friends, and last, but not least, the exhilaration of a career in molecular biology.”

MIT engineers find a way to deliver drugs directly to the esophagus

Their new gel-like drug formulation can coat the esophageal lining and release drugs that could help treat inflammatory conditions affecting the esophagus.

There are few treatment options available for people with disorders of the esophagus. Delivering drugs directly to this part of the body is difficult, so patients are usually treated with systemic drugs, which can have unwanted side effects.

To overcome that challenge, MIT engineers developed a gel-like oral drug formulation that can coat the mucosal lining of the esophagus after being swallowed, allowing drugs to pass through the tissue.

The formulation, which includes a hydrogel and other key ingredients that promote rapid drug absorption, could be used to deliver antibodies including infliximab, used to treat a number of autoimmune diseases, or other types of antibodies or small-molecule drugs.

“There are many people with esophageal disease, and if you look at drugs for these conditions, they’re very limited in their ability to target this part of the body and it’s very difficult to develop them. We hope this platform will make it easier to develop systems that can help patients suffering from these conditions,” 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 Biomedical Engineering. Former MIT postdoc Christina Karavasili, now an assistant professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, is the paper’s lead author.

Direct delivery

One of the most common disorders of the esophagus is eosinophilic esophagitis, a type of inflammation that is caused by food allergies and leads the esophagus to close up, making it impossible to swallow food. Crohn’s disease can also cause inflammation of the esophagus. 

These disorders are usually treated with systemic drugs, including infliximab, an antibody that neutralizes an inflammatory protein called tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha). However, this drug is an immunosuppressant that can lead to a higher risk for infections and other health problems.

Delivering the drug directly to the esophageal tissue could reduce those side effects, but this is inherently challenging because drugs taken orally pass through the esophagus so quickly. Adding to the difficulty, the esophagus is lined by a layer of tissue called stratified squamous epithelium, which is very impermeable to drugs.

Injecting drugs into the esophageal tissue is another option, but that is uncomfortable for patients and inconvenient because it has to be done at a doctor’s office. There is also at least one anti-inflammatory steroid drug that is formulated as a thick mixture, allowing it to remain in the esophagus longer after being swallowed, but the drug still has some difficulty passing through the impermeable squamous layer.

In this study, the researchers set out to develop new drug formulations that would include molecules that could increase the permeability of those esophageal cells, allowing more of the drug to pass through. 

To identify molecules that would enhance permeability, the researchers designed a screening system that mimics the structure of the esophagus. This system contains esophageal tissue pressed between two vertical plates. Drug formulations can be poured into the top of the system, simulating oral ingestion. The researchers can then measure how much of the drug passes through the tissue and is collected by wells in one of the plates.

Using this system, the researchers were able to measure how different excipients — inactive ingredients that help enhance drug effects — affect the permeability of the esophageal tissue. First, they tested about 100 different compounds and identified several top candidates. Then, they tested pairs of these excipients and found that the most effective combination was a pair of bile salts called sodium chenodeoxycholate and sodium cholate.

These salts appear to work together to loosen up the cell-cell junctions that normally act as a barrier to drug molecule entry. The researchers added those bile salts to a polysaccharide-derived hydrogel, which has a viscous consistency that allows it to lightly coat the lining of the esophagus.

“The hydrogel helps the formulation remain on the esophageal surface for longer, while the bile salts help increase transport across the tissue,” Karavasili says. “Our data suggest that the bile salts temporarily loosen these cell–cell junctions, mainly by interacting with calcium ions that help maintain junction integrity. This creates a more permissive pathway between the cells, allowing larger molecules to move into the mucosal tissue more efficiently.”

Minimizing side effects

In tests in animals, the researchers showed that this formulation could be used to effectively deliver infliximab to the esophagus. They also found that the loosening of the cell-cell junctions was temporary, and the cells returned to normal within three days.

This kind of delivery could help to avoid the side effects that patients sometimes experience when infliximab is given systemically, the researchers say. 

“We were interested in delivering anti-TNFs as a model drug, but also to help people who suffer from conditions like Crohn’s disease to have options that could be delivered to the site,” Traverso says. “If we have the possibility of site-directed delivery, we may be able to mitigate systemic side effects from these immunosuppressing agents.”

The researchers are now working on further optimizing the formulation for potential testing in humans. One key goal is to ensure that the gel adheres for long enough to deliver the drugs, but not so long as to cause discomfort for patients. The researchers are also exploring the possibility of using this approach to deliver other types of drugs. 

“This is a platform to enable the development of drug-delivery systems for the esophagus, which hasn’t been possible before because the tools haven’t existed,” Traverso says.

The research was funded by the Karl van Tassel Career Development Professorship, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, 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 of the United States government.

The long history of vaccine hesitancy

Thomas Levenson’s new book shows how arguments against vaccination reach back to the beginning of the technology itself.

Debates about vaccines are a recurring feature of contemporary politics. It turns out they actually date back more than 200 years, since the development of the first smallpox vaccine. MIT Professor Thomas Levenson, one of the country’s leading science writers, explores this important history in a new book about the contours of anti-vaccination thought. Levenson identifies different types of arguments vaccination opponents have developed through history, to help shed light on our current debates. He spoke with MIT News about his new book, “A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines,” published this week by Penguin Random House. 

Q: Your book is about the longer history of anti-vaccination arguments. How far back does this go, and what have those arguments been? 

A: Hesitation, skepticism, and outright opposition to vaccines is not a new thing. It didn’t just happen starting in the late 1990s. Opposition to vaccines dates back to the beginning of the vaccine era, around the early 19th century. The first kind of opposition to vaccines is this sense that it violates the moral or the natural order. If you believed that God has authority over all of us and is mindful of everything, intervening in the disease process could seem blasphemous. 

In the early 19th century, the first true vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, used material from a related disease, cowpox, that doesn’t cause human beings to fall ill but does provide immunity to smallpox. That shifted the initial focus on God’s plans to the notion that vaccination — sticking some cow-stuff into people — violated the natural order. That sort of uneasiness is easily co-opted by a broader philosophy that says: If you align yourself with nature, you don’t need to use vaccines. 

I want to emphasize that in the early history of the anti-vaccine movement, there were reasonable fears being expressed. That changes over time, because science advances and the mystery of vaccines falls away. Still, the current anti-vaccine movement includes an impulse we all have: We wish to be in control. I would never deny the value of exercise, sunlight, and sanitation, but they are not sufficient when you are faced with many pathogens, and that’s what the modern anti-vaccine movement obscures. We share this world with bacteria and viruses that do their thing no matter what we eat or how much we exercise. 

Q: One section of your book explores the argument that vaccines have been actively harmful. What is that historical trajectory like? 

A: The idea that vaccines are not just unnecessary but actively bad for you is certainly very contemporary, but it too goes back to the beginning of the vaccine era. The first true smallpox vaccine came into public use in 1798. Very soon afterward people started pointing to different harms. Most of them were spurious. They were just making things up or mistaking another infection that was already there. But there were some flaws in the early forms of vaccination. People thought it conferred life-long immunity, and that wasn’t always the case. Additionally, people mistook syphilis infections for cowpox infections and transmitted syphilis to healthy people. There were maybe 750 cases in Europe.

What is repeated over and over in the history of vaccination is that when problems became apparent, people found a way to address them. A problem with diphtheria antitoxin at the turn of the century led directly to the first U.S. regulatory body, the Division of Biological Controls. And when the first polio vaccine was released to the public in 1955, one of the five drug companies making it had shoddy production practices. Thousands got sick, a hundred died, and some were paralyzed. The flawed vaccine was identified after two weeks on sale and stopped cold, and that ended that particular problem. What came out of it was the development of an FDA vaccine division with teeth. 

This is an area where the rhetorical skill of the anti-vaccine movement is on display. Anything human beings do carries some risk. Anything you do medically. I had my hip replaced last year. That carries some risk, such as surgical site infections. Well, the risks of vaccines are incredibly small. The most common response is a sore arm the next day, and maybe feeling under the weather. There is extremely close control over manufacturing now. We have stories of great harm, but the various specific allegations of the last 30 or 35 years have proven to be incorrect. But there’s a power to an anecdote versus statistics. 

Q: This book raises an issue also explored in your last one, “So Very Small,” that the sheer success of vaccines has, paradoxically, created a situation in which people take their effects for granted and find it easier to argue against them. Can you explain this phenomenon?

A: The reason that occurs is because vaccines have worked so brilliantly well. At the turn of the century, life expectancy was much lower, 47 years in the U.S. Several top causes of death were infectious diseases, and child mortality was high. Now, life expectancy is around 80 years in every developed nation, and child mortality is a tiny fraction of 1 percent. By 1970, you had almost a complete set of vaccines against what used to be called childhood diseases. And those diseases, up until extremely recently, had essentially disappeared. And that’s amazing. 

In the 1950s, before the measles vaccine, for instance, everybody had an experience of what it meant to be at at the mercy of waves of infection. But by the 1970s, that was no longer the expected, ordinary, common experience of raising kids. So we’ve forgotten how unpleasant even an ordinary case of one of these diseases is that you recover from, much less the more severe problems and death. In 1952, there was the largest polio outbreak in U.S. history, and it was scary to let your kid go to the movies or a swimming pool. They could go to someone’s birthday party, come back, and two weeks later start feeling muscle aches and a fever, and two weeks after that were maybe paralyzed, or dead. Then in 1955 the Salk polio vaccine came out. We don’t live that way any more. 

And so, because infectious disease seems like a nonexistent threat, vaccines, even with a tiny potential of harm, are made to seem worse because we don’t realize what happens if we let our vaccine coverage lapse. Well, we’re starting to get a glimpse of it, because the measles rate in the U.S. is shooting up, and we see what happens when vaccine coverage wanes, and in particular, when we lose herd immunity. In every population, some people cannot be vaccinated: infants who are too young, some people who have had transplants and are on immunosuppressive drugs, or the elderly in whom sometimes immunity wanes. Some diseases are so infectious, and measles is famous for this, that about 95 percent of a population must be vaccinated or the disease spreads. If we’re not at that threshold, every newborn is at risk. 

We don’t know what it’s like to live with the genuine risk and fear of those diseases. If you were born in 1970, you’re 56 now, and you literally never lived in a world where these diseases were common. 

Q: One source of resistance to vaccines is not strictly medical, but political and philosophical at one level. This also has a lengthy history, it seems. 

A: Another major theme of the anti-vaccination movement is to argue the question: Who has the right to say that somebody else must put something in their body? Again, all this is not new: In the mid-19th century, in the United Kingdom, there was a requirement that children be vaccinated against smallpox, and these mandates brought immediate opposition as an infringement of liberty. 

In 1850 the country’s top doctor, John Simon, physician to the privy council in England, described the right that people claim against vaccination as the liberty of “omissional infanticide,” that you are killing kids by not protecting them. Where do I stand? This is a philosophical question. Does the state have the right to make me do something because it will make society as a whole safer? I think, “Yes.” We live in societies, we depend on each other for all kinds of things, we aren’t just atomized individuals. But I can understand those who say, “No.” I just think it’s wrong. But it’s an argument that’s winning in some places. What I realized as I worked on this book is that the argument against vaccination on philosophical grounds is a lonely view: I owe nothing to anyone, and nothing owes anything to me. I think it’s a fearful one, too.

Q: For the vaccine hesitant, for those questioning vaccines, what will they get out of this book? 

A: On social media you see some people calling vaccine-hesitant people stupid, but that’s not right. People are busy. We all have daily lives. Get the kids ready for school, pack their lunches, go to work, get home, fix dinner. All of us offload some decisions to people we trust as experts. I have a ton of sympathy and empathy both for people trying to think how to make it through an incredibly complicated world. They hear noise about how vaccines are problematic and there’s no easy way for them to get to the bottom of the issue. That’s an opening the anti-vaccine movement exploits.

I hope my book reaches people who are vaccine hesitant. It’s understandable that people might think that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But when you get down to the bottom question: Do vaccines help human flourishing, do they support the ability of human beings to live healthy, fulfilled lives? Yes, they do. Unequivocally, they are the greatest lifesaving invention humankind has ever come up with.

Jinhua Zhao named head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning

An expert in behavioral science and transportation, Zhao combines these studies with AI and public policy to address some of the most urgent challenges facing cities.

Jinhua Zhao MCP ’04, SM ’04, PhD ’09 has been appointed head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), effective July 1. Zhao is the Class of 1941 Professor of Cities and Transportation at MIT.

In making the announcement, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis noted that Zhao is a renowned transportation planner, educator, and scholar, and a world leader in imagining and shaping better futures for mobility.

“Jinhua is one of those rare scholars who moves seamlessly between cutting-edge research and real-world policy,” says Sarkis. “His work with governments and transportation agencies around the world is a model for what MIT’s impact can look like beyond our campus.” 

Zhao succeeds Professor Christopher Zegras, who has served as department head since 2020. Under his leadership, DUSP expanded opportunities for students to engage directly with communities and policymakers around the world and continued to strengthen its long-standing connection between research and practice. “I want to extend my gratitude to Chris Zegras for his excellent and level-headed leadership, especially in challenging times,” says Sarkis.

After earning advanced degrees at MIT, Zhao joined the DUSP faculty. He says he found the Institute’s lack of conventionality and its culture of sharing ideas across disciplines stimulating. 

“MIT is a small school in the best sense of the word,” says Zhao. “We have fewer boundaries than other universities — intellectually and physically. Our ‘infinite corridor’ literally connects us to so many disciplines.”  

Shaping mobility systems worldwide 

That connectivity has been key for Zhao’s research and programs he has founded at MIT. Respected as a global authority on mobility, his research has been put into practice across some of the world's most complex mobility challenges. He and his team have shaped policy for Transport for London, the Mass Transit Railway in Hong Kong, and Japan Railways. His research has positively impacted leading U.S. transit authorities including Boston’s MBTA, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Washington’s Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. He has guided strategic planning for mobility industry on the future of autonomous and digital mobility, and developed autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment strategy in Singapore and the Middle East.

“Every city I’ve worked with faces the same tension: The technology is moving faster than the institutions designed to govern it,” says Zhao. “My work has been about closing that gap.”

At MIT, Zhao founded the MIT Mobility Initiative, which engages mobility and transportation researchers across the Institute as well as leaders in these disciplines from around the world. Zhao hosts the weekly MIT Mobility Forum via Zoom, with each discussion open to the public. What began as a small internal list of participants has grown into a global platform, drawing more than 200 practitioners, policymakers, and researchers every week around the world. The sizeable interest in the subject doesn’t surprise Zhao.

“No single discipline owns transportation,” says Zhao. “AI and autonomous systems are reshaping urban living faster than most institutions can adapt. The question is no longer what we know. It is whether the people who need it most — municipal governments, transport agencies, federal ministries — can access it when they make decisions on transportation. This is why the forum exists.”

Zhao directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab that unites behavioral science and transportation technology to shape travel behavior, design mobility systems, and improve transportation policies. He is also a lead principal investigator with Mens, Manus, and Machina, an MIT initiative at the intersection of artificial intelligence, the future of work, and human learning, developing the tools and strategies for how cities, institutions, and economies can be designed to ensure AI augments, rather than displaces, the people within them.

DUSP’s global agenda

“If you look at the global agenda, what are the issues people are facing?” asks Zhao. “An aging society; AI and its impact on jobs; the energy crisis; traffic congestion. These are just some of the problems people feel connected to because they are embodied in our cities and communities. I want DUSP to engage with the city leaders and share our research and insights.” 

As he prepares to step into his role as department head, Zhao says he would like the research generated within DUSP to more quickly reach those who need it most: the planners, officials, and engineers making decisions in cities right now. A transit authority grappling with AV integration; a city government rethinking aging infrastructure; a leading transport ministry navigating the policy implications of AI — these are the constituencies Zhao believes DUSP should be in active conversation with.

“We know a great deal about how cities grow, how people move, and how that will change. The question is whether the people responsible for making these changes — in city halls, transport agencies, federal ministries — can access what we know, when they need it.”

Q&A with an MIT dining influencer

Michaela Brown loves telling stories about food and friends, from oxtail and ackee in Jamaica to Thanksgiving dinner in New Vassar, as an MIT Dining Ambassador.

Last fall, MIT Campus Dining recruited a group of students to make short videos and share their experiences as student diners on Instagram. The MIT Dining Ambassadors program is an effort to get students talking about — and helping to improve — MIT’s food services and systems. 

One of the inaugural ambassadors, Michaela Brown, a biochemical engineering major from Kingston, Jamaica, sat down to discuss what she’s learning as an ambassador, how she has adapted to dining-hall life, the best things about her mom’s cooking, what it was like to experience American Thanksgiving for the first time, and more.

Q: How did you get involved in the Dining Ambassadors program? 

A: Last October, my friend got a job. So I was like, I need to get a job. When I read the description, I said, Wait, this involves food, and talking to people, and posting on Instagram? That’s literally what I do every day. And I wanted to do my part. 

The ambassadors program has clear goals: They want to encourage students to use the dining halls, and they want us to find genuine issues MIT can work on. I wanted to be a part of that. The food at MIT is OK, but everything can be better. And you can’t make things better in any circumstance without trying. Plus — getting paid to eat food and talk? That is good money.

Q: What did you eat growing up? 

A: I love Jamaican food. On Sunday, we do a big dinner. (Well, my mom would do a big dinner; sometimes I would wash the vegetables.) She would cook rice, peas, and vegetables with a sauce, and either fried chicken with sauce or stewed chicken. We would eat that food on Sunday, and then maybe Monday, too. We call it “Sunday-Monday” in Jamaica. 

During the week, we eat flour dumplings, boiled green bananas, and lots of plantains. Sometimes, when my mom is on a health kick, she will boil everything, but plantains are so much better when you fry them! Often, she will serve that with ackee. That’s our national food. And she will cook saltfish or mackerel mixed with coconut milk. She also makes things like corned beef or tuna. On Fridays, we usually go out. 

For special occasions, sometimes we do pork or oxtail. Or sometimes we have escovitch fish; I think you fry it and you steam it. And then we have sides like dumpling, or banana, or bami, which is fried flour. And usually we eat these with okra and pickled onions, and add a little spice with Scotch bonnet pepper. 

And curry chicken! If I am home and I smell the curry, I get so happy. I genuinely feel better about myself. If you’re buying food from a vendor, like fried chicken and rice, you would ask for curry gravy because it is very essential in Jamaican culture. 

Q: What was your first project for the ambassadors program?

A: I did a video about Thanksgiving. I was excited, because it would be my first American Thanksgiving. As a kid in Jamaica, I saw it on TV. I watched Nickelodeon. Also, we learned about it in school. But we didn’t do Thanksgiving in Jamaica. So I was excited.

In the video, I was trying to cater to students who don’t normally celebrate Thanksgiving and show them the experience from a fresh perspective. I brought my friends with me and we all ate together. And luckily everyone thought the food was good. I really wanted to show the food — the mashed potatoes, the turkey, the jelly, the ham, all those things — because I think New Vassar did it really well. I wanted to show that. 

There are a lot of international students at MIT. I didn’t know what MIT was like until I got here. I wanted to show that I came here and liked it. Even while I was missing home, I was being introduced to other cultures — like the one in America — and MIT was helping me appreciate it through food.

Also, I wanted to show the community — being with my friends, giving thanks for the people around me. I really enjoyed that, and I thought it went well. My mom loved it.

Q: What have you done since then? 

A: Usually, I just try to take pictures when I’m in a dining hall and post them on Instagram. You know — regular life.

The other major thing was the global Olympics. Each day over two weeks, they had a special theme at each of the dining halls — Latin American at New Vassar, East Asian at Simmons, African at McCormick, European at Next House, Indian at Massey, and North American and Caribbean at Baker. 

My favorite was Baker, because, well, I’m a little biased. And also, I love the burgers at Baker. 
I told my friends they had to come. A lot of the cooking staff in Baker are Haitian. They would know how food from Haiti and Jamaica should taste. I knew they wouldn’t mess it up. 

I interviewed a lot of students, including two Haitians and one of my Jamaican friends. I asked about the food, about how it compared to regular dining hall meals. They were really positive. I think they liked the change. 

Q: Do you like to cook? 

A: Not really. The summer before I came here, I was like, OK, I’m gonna learn something. 
And then I proceeded to spend the summer out with my friends, and volunteering. So I wasn’t really in the kitchen. My mom would call me to come help her, and when I stepped in the kitchen it was so hot! I was like, I can’t do this, and I went back to my room. 

So I’m not really a cook, even though I live in Burton-Conner. It’s a cook-for-yourself dorm, so it doesn’t have a dining hall. A few weeks ago, I tried to do burritos. I got the beef and the seasoning. It was actually really good! I’m looking forward to it again. It’s just really hard to find the time. 


Q: When you’re posting, who do you imagine is looking at it? 

A: My friends. And my mom. Honestly, I just try to make sure you can understand what I’m saying because sometimes my Jamaican patois comes out, and I talk too fast. I also think about how the people I’m interviewing want to be seen, because this is not their job. They don’t have to be on camera, or help me. I try to make the experience as fun as possible for them. 

Q: What have you learned doing this work?

A: Walking up to strangers and getting their permission to record them is really new to me. I have learned so much about people. The other day, I was looking at a job application and it asked: Are you comfortable talking to other people and being social? This job has prepared me for all that so well. 

It also prepared me for dealing with people who might not be open to talking. I have learned to be OK with that, just walking away and handling it well. This is a skill set that I have now, and I look forward to working more and doing more interviews. I feel like, you know, a YouTuber!

Q: What dining stories do you want to tell next? 

A: I’m not sure. Dining is different for different people. For me personally, sometimes eating is a time to get together with other people. But sometimes I go to the dining hall by myself. It’s very much a time for me to decompress. Sometimes I don’t even want anyone to sit with me. I’m just trying to be with myself, watch my show, or do the learning sequence I have due at 11 o’clock. Or I just watch my TikToks. 

Maybe I’ll do a day-in-my-life dining story next, and go for breakfast at a dining hall. I would have to wake up earlier, but I would do it. 

Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationship

A new study shows people expect reciprocal generosity only in interactions with friends or others of equal social status.

When a friend buys you a cup of coffee, it’s likely that next time, you’ll return the gesture. This type of reciprocal generosity has been well-documented in behavioral economic studies.

However, anthropologists and other social scientists have known for decades that in the context of relationships where one person has more power, status, or influence, reciprocal generosity is usually not the norm. 

Researchers at MIT have now experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, that small changes to the relationship context can dramatically change people’s actions and expectations of reciprocal generosity. 

During interactions between people of different social status, people tend to expect that generosity will flow one way, and it can be either up or down. It may be that a professor always buys coffee for her students, or that a student always offers to help carry groceries for his resident advisor. Once the precedent is established, it is expected to continue.

One interpretation of the findings is that keeping track of whose turn it is to do a favor is the exception in social interactions, not the rule. That is, it is extra work that we do when we want to maintain equal relationships.

“In many intimate relationships, hierarchical relationships, or other kinds of role-based relationships, you don’t put in the work of trying to keep track of turns,” says Rebecca Saxe, the John W. Jarve Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and associate dean of science at MIT. “Under this interpretation, we just follow precedent because following a precedent is easier. We all know what to expect, and we don’t have to keep track of what happened last time.”

Saxe is the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Open Mind. MIT graduate student Alicia Chen is the paper’s lead author.

Changing expectations

Most experimental studies of generosity have been done in the context of behavioral economics and game theory. In such experiments, people are usually paired with a stranger and asked to play games that require coordination. Such studies have found that people tend to use turn-taking and reciprocity as their default strategies. These scenarios, however, are stripped from any social context that might exist between people in the real world.

Saxe and Chen wanted to see if they could measure the effects of social context by incorporating relationships into the type of experiments used to evaluate people’s expectations regarding generosity.

“Where generosity becomes hard and complicated is when it starts to occur in the context of existing relationships, because it changes the terms of the relationships,” Saxe says. “What’s expected of you is very different within a relationship than outside of one.”

To study these effects, the researchers designed experiments in which participants read stories about different types of interactions. In some of the scenarios, the subjects of the stories were described as having either symmetric or asymmetric relationships. In others, they were given specific social relationships such as aunt-niece or manager-employee.

Each story described interactions that might be seen in typical daily life, such as buying coffee for a co-worker or preparing a meal for one’s family. Participants were then asked to predict what would happen the next time the interaction occurred.

In all of these scenarios, the researchers found that people expected that generous acts would be reciprocated when they occurred between individuals in symmetric relationships such as friends, cousins, or co-workers of equal rank. However, their expectations changed for asymmetric relationships, where each person has a different social status. In those cases, people expected that any precedent that was set would continue in the future.

One possible explanation for this is that reciprocity is not the norm but an exception that only occurs in the interactions between equals or strangers, the researchers say. Many of our interactions are with people with whom we have asymmetric relationship, and to maintain those relationships, it’s simply easier to follow precedent.

“If there’s no need to keep track of our equal status, then in some ways it’s the default to fall back on following precedents,” Saxe says.

Maintaining relationships

The study showed that in asymmetric relationships, generosity could flow in either direction. Once that direction was established, it was expected to continue. For example, after an older brother bought concert tickets for a much younger brother, the study participants expected that the older brother would also buy the tickets for the next concert. 

“We found that when people know the relationship is asymmetric, they don’t expect reciprocity; they expect the same action to keep on going,” Chen says. “If the lower-rank person acts generously, people expect that to continue, and if the higher-rank person acts generously, people expect that to continue.”

Following precedents is not only easier, but keeping up these actions may help solidify and define existing relationships. For example, anthropologists have long known that gift-giving helps to construct and maintain social relationships. 

“Following a precedent can be a way of actively maintaining relationships and hierarchies, when the asymmetry of the exchange truly reflects the asymmetry of the relationship,” Saxe says. 

The researchers are now working on creating computational models that could be used to analyze different factors that people take into account when they’re considering whether someone might reciprocate a generous act. In addition to the factors examined in this study, others could include how much each person will benefit, what type of relationship they’re in, and culturally specific expectations of how people should act in different situations.

“One really powerful thing about these models is that we can build in existing theories, add things to the models, and then compare how much these extra factors, like considerations related to social relationships, matter in terms of explaining what people are doing,” Chen says. “This allows us to quantitatively compare the different theories to each other.”

The research was funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

New imaging system sees through murky waters

The “Sonar-MASt3R” combines sonar and visual data to create real-time 3D maps, even in cloudy water.

For remotely operated underwater vehicles, cloudy and turbulent waters are often a no-go. When vehicles settle on the seafloor or dig through a sandbed, they can kick up clouds of sediment that make it tough for onboard cameras to see through. Often, the only thing to do is to wait until the marine dust settles before a vehicle can safely proceed. 

But a new underwater mapping technique developed by engineers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) may allow vehicles to see through murky, low-visibility waters. 

The method fuses visual images from optical cameras with acoustic data from sonar sensors. The combination enables a vehicle to quickly map the general shape of its surroundings using sonar, even in low-visibility waters. A vehicle can move toward certain shapes in the sonar-mapped environment, coming close enough for optical cameras to visually resolve specific objects in detail. 

The technique is akin to pairing a dolphin’s echolocation with a sea turtle’s close-range vision to see and navigate through murky water, in real-time. 

The researchers tested the method in tank experiments where they could control the water’s degree of visibility. Even in the cloudiest conditions, the system was able to see through the sediment to map the tank’s environment and visualize centimeter-scale details of objects in the tank. 

The team is further improving the technique, which they’ve named Sonar-MASt3R. They envision that the mapping method could safely guide underwater vehicles through murky environments for a range of applications, including scientific exploration, underwater construction and maintenance, and deep-sea recovery. 

“We hope that this work enables us to do more operations in those challenging, low-visibility environments, and helps provide more coverage in areas that are difficult to operate in today,” says Amy Phung, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who led the work. 

Phung presented a paper detailing Sonar-MASt3R this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). The paper’s co-author is Richard Camilli, senior scientist of applied ocean physics and engineering at WHOI. 

The best of both

To see underwater, scientists have generally taken an either/or approach, using either optical cameras or sonar sensors to guide the way. Optical cameras can provide detailed visual imagery of a scene, but only in waters that are relatively clear and well-lit. In contrast, sonar sensors perform just as well in clear and murky water; by emitting acoustic waves and measuring the time and angle at which they return, sonar sensors can determine the exact shape, distance, and depth of objects in the environment, though a sonar map lacks any visual detail. 

To get the best of both modes, scientists have looked to combine the two in a new approach known as “opti-acoustic fusion.” In a handful of prior works, research groups have merged sonar and optical data in mapping techniques that are mostly geared toward object recognition and reconstructing workplace environments. Most techniques require time to sync and process the data and therefore do not work in real-time, while only a few can map an environment in 3D. None have been applied to high-resolution mapping underwater in murky, turbid conditions. 

Phung, who is a student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, and Camilli, her advisor, aimed to develop an opti-acoustic fusion technique that would generate detailed 3D maps of underwater environments in real time and in low-visibility conditions. The team was motivated, in part, by challenges in safely recovering unexploded underwater mines.

“There can be old explosives in areas that make it unsafe for ships to be in, and the ability to get rid of those safely is best done by robotics,” Camilli says. “But a lot of these explosives are set in surf zone environments where visibility adds to the challenge of doing this safely. That’s one of many applications that our technique can be used for.”

Cloudy, with a chance of mapping

The new method, Sonar-MASt3R, builds on an existing technique, MASt3R, that was developed by researchers in France. MASt3R is an image matching algorithm that is trained to take in visual images of the same scene and quickly estimate the relative depth of each pixel in the scene. In this way, MASt3R can generate a 3D map of the environment in real-time, based on a camera’s 2D images. 

“The downside is that there is no sense of scale,” Phung says. “It will say ‘this pixel is five units closer than this pixel,’ but it can’t say whether that’s 5 meters or 5 feet.”

Luckily, sonar provides absolute measurements of scale. The timing of sonar reflections can be translated directly into a specific depth and distance of objects that the signals bounced off, as well as their shape and contour. 

In their new work, Phung and Camilli used sonar data to correct MASt3R’s scaling and generate precise 3D maps of underwater environments. Even in murky water, the method’s sonar-corrected map would enable a vehicle to know the precise location of objects, and therefore how far to safely move in for a closer inspection, which the vehicle could then do using conventional optical cameras.

The team tested Sonar-MASt3R in experiments with a tank that they filled with water, sediment, and a variety of objects such as a small boulder, a coffee mug, and a packing crate. Inside the tank, they also set up a robotic arm, onto which they mounted an underwater camera, and a sonar sensor. 

For each experimental run, they first carried out a sweep trajectory, in which the robotic arm slowly swept from one side of the tank to the other to capture sonar and visual data. With this first sweep, Sonar-MASt3R quickly creates a coarse sonar-based map of the shapes and contours of the tank and its objects. The coarse map is then used to record close-up camera images of the objects, which are used to improve the map resolution. A “keyframe” approach quickly compares each new image frame to the last keyframe. If a frame provides new information not contained in the last keyframe, the image is added as a new keyframe to the map. If it is similar, it is immediately discarded. In this way, the approach can quickly fill in the map with relevant visual detail, in real-time. 

The researchers tested their new approach underwater, testing eight different levels of turbidity, which they created by stirring up the tank’s sediment. Compared with other opti-acoustic fusion approaches, Sonar-MASt3R generated more accurate 3D maps and resolved smaller, centimeter-scale details, and in cloudier conditions. In the cloudiest condition, which the robotic arm’s cameras could not see through, its sonar sensors were able to generate a rough map of the tank’s hidden objects. This initial map enabled the arm to move safely through the murk and closer to specific objects, which its underwater camera could then visualize in more detail. 

“An analogy would be if you were to go into a china shop in the dark, and try to pick your way around to find a specific coffee mug without knocking things over,” Camilli offers. “This would allow you to do that.”

The team plans to test the approach in natural underwater conditions, where they suspect that the mapping task should be more straightforward. 

“In a tank, it’s like an echo chamber,” Camilli says. “It’s like trying to do this in a funhouse mirror setting where you get all these distortions and reverberations and ghost images that really complicates the processing. If you put it in the real world, it should be easier.”

Then, they say, Sonar-MASt3R could help scientists safely explore in cloudy, turbid, and murky underwater regions.

“The real value in this effort is so we can use this technology in mission scenarios that are untractable right now,” Phung says. “And there are plenty of untractable missions because we don’t have the observational or perception capabilities.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA, and the National Science Foundation.

Myriam Heiman named director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory

Heiman, who studies neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s, will lead the institute beginning July 1.

Myriam Heiman, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, will become the director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, effective July 1. She succeeds Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai, who is stepping down after leading the institute for 16 years.

Heiman, a molecular neurobiologist and geneticist, studies the neurodegenerative diseases of the brain’s basal ganglia, including Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Using cutting-edge techniques, including single-cell genomics and a powerful transcriptomic technique she helped invent, called translating ribosome affinity purification, she aims to understand the molecular changes that eventually lead to cell death in these diseases. 

“Myriam is an extraordinary scientist, a proven leader within MIT, and a deeply caring and generous mentor. Her research to determine why specific brain cell types are particularly vulnerable to diseases such as Huntington’s has produced studies that are both deep in their insight and sweeping in their scope,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “I firmly believe that Myriam will be an excellent leader during the Picower Institute’s next chapter.”

“I am honored to take on this role to support the institute’s exceptional scientists and trainees as they pursue discoveries that deepen our understanding of the brain and improve human health,” says Heiman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS). 

The Picower Institute is a community of 16 neuroscience labs dedicated to understanding the mechanisms that drive learning and memory and related functions such as cognition, emotion, perception, behavior, and consciousness. Institute neuroscientists explore the brain and nervous system at multiple scales, from genes and molecules to cells and synapses to circuits and systems, producing novel insights into how disruptions in these mechanisms can lead to developmental, psychiatric, or neurodegenerative disease. 

Picower Professor Susumu Tonegawa founded the institute as a center in 1994 before a transformative gift from Barbara and Jeffry Picower enabled it to become an institute in 2002. Li-Huei Tsai has served as director since 2009, but announced in March that she would step down after more than 16 years to focus on her research.

Heiman joined the Picower Institute, BCS, and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in 2011, after completing her postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Princeton University. 

“Ever since joining the institute, Heiman’s research has been guided by the principle that fundamental understanding can lead to breakthroughs in addressing disease,” Tsai says. “Myriam has made it her mission to address these kinds of urgent questions in neuroscience.”

Heiman employs sophisticated DNA and RNA analysis technologies to gain detailed insights into how brain cell states change amid disease, revealing molecular pathways that contribute to the particular vulnerability of different cell types. In 2020, Heiman published the results of an innovative in vivo screening of every mouse gene’s impact on the survival of neurons in the brain, identifying hundreds necessary for sustaining neurons and highlighting a specific gene that promoted their resilience in the context of Huntington’s disease. 

Other studies, both in mice and in postmortem human brain samples, have revealed errant immune responses in neurons and in the brain’s blood vessels that contribute to the disease’s progression. The latter finding arose in a 2022 paper, published with MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory colleague Manolis Kellis, that also provided the field one of the first cellular atlases of the brain’s vasculature.  

Her research has also produced insights into other neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, including ALS and frontotemporal dementia. In 2024, together with Kellis, Heiman published a paper in Cell showing the diseases have remarkable overlaps at the cellular and molecular levels, revealing potential targets that could yield therapies applicable to both disorders. Heiman’s latest research is also producing new insights into substance use disorders and schizophrenia.

Her research program has garnered many awards. In 2021, Heiman became co-recipient of a National Institutes of Health Transformative Research Award, which “promotes cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approaches that could potentially create or challenge existing paradigms” as part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. The next year she also received a prestigious NIH R35 grant to find early triggers of disease progression.

Heiman is also a dedicated teacher and mentor. In 2017, she earned the Department of BCS award for excellence in graduate mentoring; and in 2020, she received the department’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. In 2024, she was named one of 23 faculty across MIT who are “committed to caring” — an award given out by MIT’s Office of Graduate Education to faculty members who have served as exceptional mentors to graduate students.

Beyond MIT, Heiman serves on editorial boards and the scientific advisory board of the nonprofit Huntington’s Disease Foundation, an organization that supports research aimed at finding treatments and a cure for Huntington’s and related disorders.. 

Heiman says she is looking forward to her new role in service to MIT by leading the Picower Institute.

“I approach this role with humility and enormous enthusiasm,” Heiman says. “The Picower Institute has an extraordinary legacy, and I’m eager to do everything I can to help support the next generation of transformative research.”

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero wins Kavli Prize in Nanoscience

The MIT physicist shares the honor with two others for foundational research establishing the field of twistronics.

MIT professor of physics Pablo Jarillo-Herrero is among 10 researchers worldwide to receive this year’s prestigious Kavli Prize. 

Jarillo-Herrero is co-recipient of the 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience “for foundational work that established the field of twistronics.” His co-recipients are professors Eva Y. Andrei at Rutgers University and Allan MacDonald from the University of Texas at Austin.

These three physicists are being honored for the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a new field of “twistronics,” where superconductivity, magnetism, and other properties can be obtained by rotating two-dimensional materials such as graphene to a “magic angle.”

A partnership among the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the Kavli Foundation, the Kavli Prizes are awarded every two years to “honor scientists for breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience that transform our understanding of the big, the small and the complex.” The laureates in each field will share $1 million.

“Pablo’s groundbreaking research has once again been given well-deserved recognition,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “Pablo and his co-recipients have pioneered twistronics, very fundamental scientific research that has opened up a new field with myriad possibilities for novel quantum materials.”

In 2009, using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy on graphene, most commonly found as a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure, Andrei and her research group demonstrated that small variations in twist angle profoundly modified the electronic structure. This demonstration — that geometric control, rather than chemical composition, could modify a material’s electronic structure — represented a fundamental advance in materials design and arguably launched the field now known as “twistronics.”

In 2011, MacDonald quantitatively explained the emergence of this electronic structure by geometries at discrete magic angles. This framework has since become the theoretical foundation of what are known as moiré materials, and has guided subsequent experimental and theoretical developments across a wide range of twisted and layered systems. 

In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero’s group observed correlated insulating phases and superconductivity in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene devices. The resulting platform, “combining atomic-scale structural simplicity with electronic tunability, has enabled systematic investigations has had broad and lasting impact across nanoscience and quantum material research,” according to the Kavli Prize citation.

“It was a big surprise, because the technique we used, though conceptually straightforward, was hard to pull off in the lab,” said Jarillo-Herrero recently. He is also the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. 

“I’m humbled and incredibly honored to be sharing this award with [Andrei and MacDonald],” Jarillo-Herrero noted in an essay describing his journey to the Kavli Prize. “I want to also emphasize that this award honors fundamental physics research in nanoscience. It is incredibly important for society to continue to support fundamental research: Although it often doesn’t have a direct near-term application, in the long run it happens to be the most transformative and impactful in society.”

“Pablo’s research has helped spark a revolution in condensed matter physics and nanoscience, inspiring physicists worldwide to explore superconductivity and other emergent phenomena in engineered quantum materials. This work could potentially lead to the creation of superconductors at room temperature, which would would have an enormous technological impact,” says Deepto Chakrabarty, physics department head and William A. M. Burden Professor in Astrophysics.

Jarillo-Herrero's win brings the number of all-time MIT faculty recipients of the Kavli Prize to nine. Prior winners include Nancy Kanwisher in neuroscience (2024), Bob Langer in nanoscience (2024), Sara Seager in astrophysics (2024), Rainer Weiss in astrophysics (2016), Alan Guth in astrophysics (2014), Mildred Dresselhaus in nanoscience (2012), Ann Graybiel in neuroscience (2012), and Jane Luu in astrophysics (2012).

Augmented reality system could make medical ultrasounds easier to interpret

MIT researchers have designed an ultrasound system that creates a real-time 3D representation of the object being imaged.

Interpreting medical ultrasound images is a difficult task, requiring a technician to look at 2D images and mentally arrange them into a 3D representation of what the tissue looks like. 

To make that job easier, MIT researchers developed a new approach to ultrasound imaging that allows the user to visualize a 3D augmented-reality image of the object being scanned. Using a virtual-reality headset, they can see a precise 3D digital representation of what the object actually looks like, making it easier to identify and analyze.

This technique could help speed up the training process for ultrasound technicians and other health care providers who use ultrasound. It could also be deployed for use in hospitals, for tasks such as using ultrasound to place a needle in the right location for a biopsy.

“For training, this could make ultrasound more intuitive and more understandable. On the clinical side, it could be less time-consuming, more accurate, and also give health care providers more peace of mind. They wouldn’t have to wonder if they missed anything,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.

MIT graduate students Jason Hou and Shrihari Viswanath are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications Engineering. Other authors of the paper include Bowen Wu ’24 and two MIT Summer Research Program students, Cinay Dilibal, a senior at Dartmouth College, and Tanisha Shende, a senior at Oberlin College.

3D representations

Ultrasound imaging works by bouncing high-frequency sound waves off tissues in the body, which are then reflected back to an ultrasound transducer. The transducer converts these sound waves to electrical signals, which are used to create a 2D image of the tissue. Ultrasound technicians are trained to convert these images into a 3D mental representation of the tissue.

“It's a difficult skill to master, and there are long learning curves,” says Hou. “The hardest thing is this mental tomography bottleneck where you’re trained to reconstruct the 2D slices in your 3D mental space. That is a cognitive burden that can lead to inaccuracies in scanning.”

To reduce that cognitive load, the MIT team thought it could be helpful to combine two technologies: 3D ultrasound imaging and augmented reality (AR). 

Three-dimensional ultrasound imaging is occasionally used in fields such as fetal imaging and echocardiography, which is used to image the heart, but most 3D ultrasound imaging systems are expensive and not widely available. For this study, the MIT team used a real-time 3D system they developed recently for use in breast-cancer detection.

Their new system includes an ultrasound probe, slightly smaller than a deck of cards, that transmits information using a chirped data acquisition system (cDAQ). The probe contains an ultrasound array arranged in the shape of an empty square, a configuration that allows the array to take 3D images of the tissue below.

Because this system has fewer ultrasound elements than a typical 3D ultrasound system, it requires less power and is less expensive to build.

The data collected by the ultrasound probe can then be compressed and streamed into a 3D computer graphics engine called Unreal Engine, which converts the voxel data from the ultrasound image into a direct 3D representation of the object, with no loss of information. Wearing an AR/VR headset, the user can see this 3D rendering representing the internal structure, superimposed over the object’s actual location — like X-ray vision. By tilting their head or approaching from a different direction, the user can see different views of the object, making it easier to identify.

Easier to use

The researchers tested their new technology, which they call AR-VIU (augmented real-time volumetric imaging in ultrasound), with a group of 18 participants. Nine of the subjects were experts in ultrasound technology (including sonographers and physicians), and nine had never used ultrasound before.

Each user performed identification tasks using four different ultrasound technologies. In one condition, they viewed 2D images on a regular screen, which is the way that most ultrasounds are now performed. They also viewed 3D images on a regular screen, as well as two augmented reality conditions: one 2D and one 3D (AR-VIU).

In one round of experiments, users were asked to identify an object embedded in gelatin — such as a spring, a ball, or a screw — inside an opaque container that was scanned with ultrasound. In a second set, they were asked to use a pen to mark the location of “tissue phantom” — a gel-like material engineered to mimic human tissue. This simulates the task of locating the right spot for a needle during a biopsy.

The researchers found that the AR-VIU system significantly improved all users’ ability to identify and locate objects. The effect was especially strong for novices, who performed nearly as well as experts when using AR-VIU. When using the traditional 2D imaging system, experts performed much better than novices.

“Overlaying images with the anatomy and providing 3D visual context makes ultrasound significantly easier for novices to understand,” Viswanath says.

In interviews after the experiments, most of the novices reported that they preferred the AR-VIU approach, with many saying that it made the tasks easier.

“The 3D system imposes less brain drain, it’s more intuitive, and it’s easier to understand what is happening in the targeted region,” Dagdeviren says.

Many of the experts said they preferred the traditional 2D imaging because that is what they were accustomed to and had been trained to use. However, those experts also said they could see the benefits of the AR-VIU system in some situations, such as placing a needle for a biopsy or visualizing the movement of the heart wall during echocardiography.

The researchers are now working on further improving the resolution of the imaging and doing additional tests to demonstrate the accuracy of the AR-VIU technology.

The research was funded by the MIT Media Lab Consortium, the National Science Foundation, an MIT HEALS graduate fellowship, and an MIT-Tata graduate fellowship.

Startup’s nuclear-inspired cooling system could make data centers more sustainable

Founded by two researchers from MIT, Ferveret reduces the amount of energy and water required to cool the chips that power AI.

The rise of artificial intelligence is riding on the back of an enormous data center expansion. Data centers are projected to account for anywhere from 9 to 17 percent of total electricity usage in the U.S. by the end of the decade. Today, around a third of data center electricity is devoted to cooling the chips that run AI models.

That’s the process Ferveret is working to make more efficient. The startup, founded by Reza Azizian, a former MIT postdoc in nuclear engineering, and Matteo Bucci, MIT’s Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, is adapting an approach from nuclear reactors to cool chips using no water and significantly less electricity.

The company’s cooling system submerges computer servers in a specialized liquid that absorbs heat much more efficiently than air from a fan. What makes the solution different from other liquid cooling systems are the bubbles: Ferveret’s Adaptive Phase Cooling (APC) solution produces much smaller bubbles at the surface of the server, which detach more frequently, accelerating the heat transfer process.

Ferveret is already testing its solutions with companies including CleanSpark, the data center developer and operator, as well as FuriosaAI, an AI accelerator company, and Switch, one of the largest data center operators in the U.S.

In a recent study in collaboration with the Samueli Computer Science Department at the University of California at Los Angeles, Ferveret found its APC solution led to a 15 percent improvement in computational power efficiency compared to state-of-the-art liquid cooling solutions. By combining those savings with Ferveret’s power control system to optimize operating conditions, the company says it allows data centers to get 35 percent more tokens — small pieces of text or data — from their AI models with the same amount of power.

“Our goal is to make data centers as sustainable as possible and help them use every single watt of power to generate tokens, which are the most useful outputs,” Azizian says. “Our system enables the operation of more powerful chips, it helps data centers waste a lot less energy, and it accomplishes all that with zero water consumption.”

From nuclear reactors to AI

Azizian was a postdoc at MIT in 2013 when he met Bucci, who was then a research scientist. With funding from the MIT Energy Initiative, they worked on heat transfer in nuclear reactors before Azizian went into industry, where he shifted his focus to cooling chips. Azizian first worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset and then joined Nvidia, which produces the graphical processing units companies use to train and run the latest AI models. Meanwhile, Bucci continued conducting research at MIT, becoming an assistant professor in 2016.

Azizian walked into his first data center in 2017, where he was struck by the massive, noisy fans that filled the building as they cooled.

“I thought, ‘Holy crap, this is not how you cool facilities,’” Azizian recalls, noting air cooling can still take up 40 percent of the power going into a data center. “It was not an efficient way of doing things, but since it wasn’t hurting the performance, no one cared that the cooling technology was 50 years old.”

Azizian began talking with Bucci about applying their knowledge around optimizing heat transfer in nuclear reactors to data centers. Scientists have spent decades finding better ways to move heat in nuclear reactors.

“Heat transfer determines how much energy you can extract from the reactor core, which translates directly to revenue,” Azizian explains.

The founders started Ferveret in 2021. A lot has changed since Azizian walked into his first data center. Chip companies have packed more and more components onto their chips as the explosion in artificial intelligence has put a premium on squeezing as much computing capacity as possible out of limited power supplies.

That has driven data center operators to use liquid to cool chips — often through a technique known as immersion cooling that submerges chips in liquid. The most effective form of immersion cooling brings the liquid to a boil.

“Liquid is a better heat transfer medium than air. That’s why when you stick your hand into room temperature water it still feels cold,” Bucci explains. “When liquid is boiling, it becomes even better at removing heat because the phase change requires a lot of energy, which is the energy you remove from the chip. That lets you transfer large quantities of heat with minimal temperature differences between the chips and the liquid.”

Unfortunately, boiling liquid adds complexity to the system because it forces operators to capture and reliquefy the bubbles while controlling for pressure, temperature, and fluid inventory.

Ferveret’s system is adapted from a process in nuclear reactors called subcooled boiling. It uses a liquid with a low boiling point and none of the toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” that other approaches rely on. At the surface of the chip, Ferveret’s liquid produces smaller bubbles than other immersion cooling approaches. Those bubbles detach more frequently and quickly recondense in the surrounding liquid, accelerating the bubble-rewetting cycle at the surface of the chip to hasten heat transfer.

Ferveret delivers its APC system in small boxes, each of which houses one server. The founders say their modular systems make it easier to deploy the system and simplify maintenance.

“The physics enable us to get to form factors that weren’t possible in the past,” Azizian says. “Most immersion cooling solutions are large tanks that people submerge the servers in. We have a smaller, modular rack-mounted solution that makes it adaptable to the current infrastructure, so it’s easier for people to deploy our technology.”

Ferveret also offers control software that adjusts the power going to each server in real-time to further improve efficiency.

“We deliver full-stack systems that include the cooling box, the rack, the cooling distribution units, and sensors that measure the temperature and pressure,” Bucci says. “Our software monitors those sensors and optimizes the operating condition inside each box to ensure that energy consumption is minimized in the system.”

AI with fewer resources

In addition to helping data centers to run more efficiently, Ferveret is also improving sustainability by making it easier to operate data centers in remote regions with more renewable energy.

“The sun shines in places where you don’t have much water, so the advantage of us being water-free is we allow you to build data centers where you have solar energy but nothing to cool the data center down,” Bucci says. “This technology can help deploy data centers in regions where normally you wouldn’t have the resources to do so, including Africa, the Middle East, and of course parts of America. It’s a huge unlock.”

Ferveret is in talks with the large cloud computing companies known as hyperscalers, and is currently part of Nvidia’s Inception program for startups. The company plans to announce expanded partnerships later this year. From there, the founders plan to quickly scale their technology to help the AI industry continue to grow without further straining the planet.

“The computing industry is facing a huge challenge in the form of access to power, and they have a problem with access to water in many regions,” Azizian says. “That will only become more limiting as the industry grows. The main goal for these data center operators would be to get more tokens from the power they have. We’ve shown we can do that.”

Chris Zegras appointed director and CEO of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology

The professor of mobility and urban planning will lead MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore.

Chris Zegras, professor of mobility and urban planning and the current head of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been appointed chief executive officer and director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), effective Sept. 1. Zegras succeeds Bruce Tidor, professor of biological engineering and computer science, who has served as interim CEO and director since January 2025.

Established in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Singapore in 2007, SMART is MIT’s only research center outside the United States​. Housed within the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise, SMART serves as a key platform for collaboration between MIT and Singapore’s research ecosystem, bringing together leading experts and institutions from the United States, Singapore, and the region for world-class research and innovation.

“Professor Zegras brings a distinguished track record of interdisciplinary leadership and a deep understanding of SMART’s mission and impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost, who announced Zegras’ appointment in a letter to the MIT community today. “His appointment reinforces MIT’s commitment to the alliance, which has advanced innovation and driven global impact, and which remains as important as ever in a time of accelerating technological and global change.” 

Zegras joined the MIT faculty in 2005 and has served as the head of DUSP since 2020. His own research spans interrelated areas critical to tackling metropolitan mobility challenges: leveraging computational technologies for understanding and modeling human behaviors and enhancing strategic planning capabilities.

Zegras brings extensive experience in interdisciplinary research and leadership and a long-standing connection to SMART, where he led collaborative research on next-generation mobility sensing and simulation systems. From 2010 to 2020, he was a principal investigator on the Future Urban Mobility interdisciplinary research group; from 2016 to 2020, he was the group’s lead principal investigator. During this time, the group spearheaded Singapore’s first-ever public autonomous vehicle trials, developed and deployed large-scale urban simulation and visualization systems, and conducted research that evolved into spinoff companies, among other activities. 

“Bringing together leading experts from the U.S., Singapore, and around the world, SMART has established itself as a unique hub for interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation that addresses pressing societal issues,” says Zegras. “Having experienced firsthand what this distinctive model can achieve, I look forward to building on this strong foundation to deepen collaboration, strengthen our innovation ecosystem, and accelerate the translation of research into meaningful real-world impact.”

SMART is built around interdisciplinary research groups, all headed by senior MIT faculty members. At present, there are six groups, focused on antimicrobial resistance; the use of living cells as personalized medicines to treat and prevent diseases; social and institutional challenges arising from the proliferation of AI and emerging technologies; new agricultural technologies; wafer-scale 3D sensing technologies; and wearable ultrasound imaging. SMART is also home to the SMART Innovation Center, which aims to get research ideas from lab to market.

3D-printed devices could streamline the production of drug-delivery microparticles

The cost-effective devices, which can be built in hours, leverage electrospray emitter technology to efficiently produce three-layered particles at scale.

MIT researchers have demonstrated a low-cost design of specialized electronic nozzles, called triaxial electrospray emitters, that could be used to manufacture time-release drug-delivery particles or self-healing materials efficiently and at scale.

Triaxial electrospray emitters use electricity to precisely dispense three liquids from microscopic nozzles to generate a steady stream with three distinct fluid layers. The liquid forms multilayered droplets, which can solidify into layered microparticles.

For instance, an array of triaxial electrospray emitters can be used to make three-layer drug-delivery nanoparticles. The outer layer might slowly erode in the stomach, revealing a second material that controls the release of a core material, which delivers medicine to a specific area of the intestines.

Developing a tiny array of electrospray emitters typically requires expensive and time-consuming microfabrication processes inside semiconductor cleanrooms, which limits their use. To overcome these drawbacks, the MIT researchers 3D-printed arrays of triaxial electrospray emitters that have 16 nozzles in an area of about one square centimeter. Each device contains an intricate network of three-dimensional microchannels that uniformly supply liquid to the nozzles. 

Their one-step fabrication process takes only a few hours to produce complex emitter arrays. 

When tested, the 3D-printed arrays generated uniform, three-layered droplets at scale. Such uniformity is key for high-throughput manufacturing of layered microparticles for applications like biosensors that detect chemical substances or artificial cells to aid in tissue regeneration.

“We couldn’t make a device like this in a semiconductor cleanroom. This is only possible because they are 3D-printed,” says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and senior author of a paper describing this advance. “The particles these devices generate, whether they are used for a self-healing composite or to deliver medicine, can have a big impact in many applications. We want to democratize this technology so the benefits can touch many more people.”

Velásquez-García is joined on the paper by lead author Bryan Ivan Quintanar-Abarca of the Technological Institute of Monterrey in Mexico. The research appears in Virtual and Physical Prototyping.

A precise process

Electrospray emitters apply a high voltage to a liquid as it exits the device’s nozzle, producing a steady stream of extremely tiny droplets. 

Triaxial devices contain arrays of three concentric nozzles that emit three immiscible, or non-mixable, liquids simultaneously into layered droplets, which can be used to generate compound microparticles with distinct layers.

For instance, one could use a triaxial electrospray emitter to create a biosensing particle that contains three different chemical markers, one in each layer. Electrospray emitters can make smaller microdroplets much faster than other techniques.

Miniaturization is key for electrospray devices, since the smaller the emitter, the lower the voltage required to generate droplets. The output of a single electrospray emitter is modest, so arrays of emitters are required to boost droplet production without sacrificing uniformity. 

Multi-emitter electrospray devices are typically manufactured in semiconductor cleanrooms, but traditional processes limit the shapes and sizes of device components. The researchers could not find any previous reports of a miniaturized triaxial electrospray array in the open literature, highlighting the novelty of this work.

“When you build a triaxial array, you need to find a way to create geometries that have many integrated parts and extremely fine structures in the smallest footprint possible. And you need to ensure the devices will work uniformly,” Velásquez-García explains.

To do this, he and his collaborators used a 3D-printing technique called vat photopolymerization, which utilizes light to solidify extremely thin layers of liquid resin, fabricating a complex device one layer at a time. 

This extremely precise process enabled the researchers to print layers that were only 25 micrometers tall, just a fraction of the width of a human hair. In this way, they could generate the complex internal geometry needed for a triaxial electrospray emitter.

Refining the design

The array, which is slightly larger than a U.S. penny, contains a network of internal coiled channels that carry liquid to 16 nozzles. These helical microchannels help maintain a uniform spray of microdroplets across all nozzles, while keeping the device as compact as possible. 

“In a sense, the emitters in the array never learn they have company, or otherwise there would be cross-talking and causing interference between them. We achieved uniformity because of the work that went into our designs,” Velásquez-García says.

They also needed to fabricate extremely tiny channels without support structures, which could clog the device, and ensure all uncured resin was removed before the array was used.

The microchannels funnel liquid to the concentric nozzles, which must be perfectly aligned to properly emit microdroplets in a consistent manner.

“We were able to aggressively optimize the design because we could iterate in a much timelier manner. This ability to exquisitely refine designs is a key advantage of 3D printing,” Velásquez-García says.

The researchers tested multiple architectures to determine the ideal combination of liquid flow rates to maximize the stability and consistency of emitted microdroplets. They were surprised to find that the viscosity of the middle liquid plays the most important role in achieving stability in a microdroplet, since it preserves the thickness of each layer. 

In addition, the researchers found that by adjusting flow rates and voltages, they could precisely tailor the thickness of each microdroplet layer. This would allow scientists to design drug-delivery particles with ideal layers so medicine releases at exactly the right time.

“By making such intricate devices more practical, we can empower others to pursue entrepreneurial and scientific advances,” Velásquez-García says. 

In the future, the researchers want to continue refining their fabrication process and designs to achieve even smaller dimensions and integrate conductive or dielectric materials to the devices to make more advanced electrospray emitter arrays.

This research was funded, in part, by the Tecnológico de Monterrey – MIT Nanotechnology Program. 

MIT astronomers discover the earliest known flickering quasar

When the universe was just 850 million years old, this voracious black hole was already surprisingly mature, a new study finds.

A supermassive black hole lies at the heart of every galaxy, including the Milky Way. When a black hole is active, it pulls material in as a whirlpool of high-temperature gas and dust. As this cosmic material piles up and falls onto a black hole, it lights up its vicinity, radiating a huge amount of energy. 

The most energetic supermassive black holes are known as quasars, and they are some of the most active and luminous objects in the universe. These voracious systems take in so much material that the energy they emit can outshine all the light in the surrounding galaxy. The pattern of light from a quasar can give scientists clues to how active supermassive black holes shape the galaxies around them. 

Now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a quasar flickering from the very early universe. The scientists traced the light from the quasar back to the “cosmic dawn,” just 850 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery represents the earliest flickering quasar detected to date. 

“Although there have been a lot of quasars found in the cosmic dawn, this is the first time we actually see one flickering,” says Gene Leung, a postdoc in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. 

The quasar’s flicker enabled the researchers to determine that, surprisingly, the ancient quasar’s whirlpool of gas and dust, known as an accretion disk, resembled a flat pancake, similar in shape to that of more modern-day quasars. 

Their findings add to a longstanding mystery in cosmology: Why do supermassive black holes exist so early in the universe’s history? Physicists have assumed that a flat accretion disk reflects a relatively mature black hole that is in a calm and stable state. Black holes that are just starting to form, like those in the very early universe, should be more unsettled systems, with accretion disks that appear more puffy and chaotic. 

The flat accretion disk around this very early quasar heightens the mystery of how supermassive black holes can grow and mature in a very short amount of cosmic time. 

“I think what this suggests is that  all the messy, very rapid growth phases that we expect all black holes to go through at some point happen very, very early on, before we see them as these very bright luminous quasars,” says Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “That’s the picture that’s emerging.”

Eilers, Leung, and their colleagues report their results in a paper appearing today in Nature Astronomy. Their co-authors include members of MIT Kavli and multiple other institutions. 

Past a pinprick

A supermassive black hole can be billions of times more massive than the sun. These gravitational giants are the central “engines” of most galaxies, helping to regulate a galaxy’s star formation and growth. 

“Without supermassive black holes, no galaxy would look the way it does today,” Eilers says. “Black holes play a major role in shaping how galactic ecosystems look.”

It was long assumed that it should take more than a billion years for the first galaxies to settle and mature, so scientists didn’t expect to see supermassive black holes in the very early universe. But observations since the early 2000s showed otherwise. Scientists have spotted more than 200 supermassive black holes in the universe’s first billion years. Such objects were detectable because they were in an extremely active quasar phase, giving off enormous blasts of radiation that could be seen from Earth, 13 billion light years away. 

These earliest quasars were observed as pinpricks of light, which signal the existence of a supermassive black hole at early times. But from these bright and distant dots, scientists aren’t able to tell much more about the black holes and their cosmic dawn environments. To do so, they need to catch a quasar’s “flicker.”

“People have known that quasars in the nearby universe can flicker,” Leung says. “The flickering comes from fluctuations in the way the gas is being fed into the black hole. And how a quasar flickers tells us something about the structure of a black hole’s accretion disk, and the kind of ‘bites’ that the black hole is eating.”

Mapping a flicker

Leung and Eilers looked to detect a flickering quasar from the early universe in hopes of learning more about the shape and structure of the earliest supermassive black holes. To do so would be a technical challenge: The further back in time and space an object is, the more distorted its light appears. This effect is due to the expanding universe, which effectively stretches, or “redshifts” light to redder, longer wavelengths. The same stretching occurs in time: Any flicker that naturally occurs over several weeks, for instance, would appear stretched out, flickering only every few months when seen from billions of light years away. 

To spot a flickering quasar from the cosmic dawn, the team needed to observe the distant universe at redder wavelengths, and specifically within the infrared spectrum, and over long timescales of many years. 

“This was the technical challenge we had to overcome,” Eilers says. “We needed data at longer, infrared wavelengths taken repeatedly over very long timescales.” 

The team ultimately found a flicker in data collected by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission — a space-based infrared telescope that scanned the entire sky over a total of about 14 years. Former MIT postdoc Kishalay De, who is now a faculty member at Columbia University, had launched a project to re-process archival data from NEOWISE. Based on the re-processed data, the team unearthed a signal, from just 850 million years after the Big Bang, which was confirmed to be the earliest flickering quasar. 

“We saw the quasar flickering randomly over the 14-year period, much like a candle’s flame flickers without a fixed pattern,” Leung notes. 

They estimate that the quasar is as bright as 12 trillion suns, and it is flickering by about 20 percent, meaning that it fluctuates up and down, by a brightness of about 2 trillion suns. 

The researchers also tracked how the quasar’s light flickered over several different wavelengths. The wavelength of light reflects a certain temperature of the material that is emitting the light. The closer material is to a black hole, the hotter it is. Researchers can therefore use wavelengths of light to map the shape and structure of material within the accretion disk around a black hole. 

Using NEOWISE data, the team analyzed the quasar’s flicker to determine the shape of the accretion disk surrounding the central supermassive black hole. They found that the disk is surprisingly thin and flat — a structure that astronomers mostly see around nearby, older black holes, that have had much longer to settle and mature. 

“This provides direct evidence that the same feeding processes and structures observed in the nearby universe were already in place at very early times, despite very different cosmic environments, which had never been seen before,” Eilers says. 

“This means something happened even earlier on that led to these systems to look so mature,” Leung adds. 

The team hopes to peer even further back in cosmic time to catch a quasar’s earlier, premature development. Then, scientists can start to piece together the conditions that brewed up the first supermassive black holes. 

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

Improving the performance of high-power electronics

By using a thin layer of diamond to manage excessive heat, researchers can boost the speed and energy-efficiency of next-generation wireless devices.

The silicon that forms the foundation of most computer chips has fundamental limits to how much power it can manage, which constrains the speed and energy-efficiency of wireless communication systems.

A promising solution is to build future wireless electronics out of transistors made from gallium nitride, an advanced material that can handle the speed and energy required for demanding wireless applications like 6G and satellite communications. 

But even in the best transistors, a very large fraction of that energy becomes heat. As researchers pack more gallium nitride transistors into a smaller area on a silicon chip, localized hot spots degrade reliability and hamper performance.

Now, a team from MIT and elsewhere has broken through this bottleneck by embedding gallium nitride transistors into an ultrathin layer of diamond. The diamond acts as a heat spreader that normalizes the temperature and allows the transistors to approach peak performance without reducing reliability.

The researchers used this technique to manufacture a power amplifier for wireless communications, which outperformed every similar amplifier they found in the literature. 

While their fabrication technique is extremely precise and requires the integration of different material systems, it can be performed at the scale needed for commercial applications.

“No single material can do everything well in a wireless device, so these 3D heterogeneously integrated systems are here to stay. The key challenge left has been reliability and thermal management, and we might have now unlocked the final step we need to make these systems operate at scale and high volume,” says Pradyot Yadav, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT and lead author of a paper on this advance.

Yadav is joined on the paper by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), and the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology; and Ruonan Han, a professor in EECS and a member of MTL and the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at Georgia Tech and Penn State University. The research was presented at the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium, part of the IEEE International Microwave Symposium.

A multimaterial method

To build faster and more energy-efficient electronics, researchers are studying heterogeneously integrated systems in which multiple materials are stacked into a unified package to leverage the beneficial properties of each one. 

For instance, MIT researchers previously stacked gallium nitride (GaN) on top of silicon as well as on top of glass to create higher-performance chips.

But in a heterogeneously integrated chip, each material has a different operating temperature, which can degrade the reliability of an electronic device. 

“If we can incorporate a material that manages the heat so the GaN and silicon are at the same temperature, then the reliability of the entire 3D chip will improve. The best material for that is diamond,” Yadav explains.

The researchers use lab-grown, jewelry-grade diamond — the same type one would find in some engagement rings. Diamond has the highest thermal conductivity of any known material. 

Advances in the growth process have significantly reduced the cost of single-crystal diamond wafers, making their use in computer chips more feasible.

In prior work, scientists have grown ultrathin, single-crystal layers of diamond on top of GaN transistors to manage heat. 

But this growth process, which is not easy to scale up, introduces unwanted capacitances in the chip. These store energy flowing through the circuit, diverting it from the transistors and slowing down their operations. 

The MIT researchers developed a completely different approach that reduces these unwanted capacitive effects. They embedded extremely tiny GaN transistors, known as dielets, into an ultrathin interposer, or substrate, made of single-crystal diamond. This diamond layer spreads and manages the heat, so the GaN and silicon operate at the same temperature without the unwanted capacitances.

“By putting these GaN transistors into a diamond interposer, we are actually able to improve the performance of the device, as opposed to degrading it. We can get the best of both worlds,” Yadav says.

Meticulous manufacturing

The fabrication process begins with the use of a lightning-fast femtosecond laser to cut prepared gallium nitride dielets out of a wafer. 

The researchers use the laser to drill precisely sized cavities into the diamond substrate. They carefully place a die attach film, which is only 20 microns thick, at the bottom of the cavity and drop a dielet on top of the film. 

Once the dielet is in place, they apply heat and pressure to mold it with the film and diamond substrate.

“That interface is key. If you don’t have that thermal die attach film placed just right, then the heat flow through the diamond to the GaN transistor will not be good enough. So you really need to have a very smooth, clean surface,” Yadav says.

The researchers then stack additional dielectric and metal layers on top of the GaN and diamond to build a working circuit.

They used this technique to fabricate a power amplifier, which is one of the key building blocks of any wireless system. Power amplifiers convert small electrical signals into larger ones that can then be transmitted long distances.

The amplifier they developed achieved higher output power, efficiency, and gain than any similar device the researchers are aware of, including an amplifier they designed in prior work.

“The power amplifier is the beating heart of a wireless device front end. Its performance will dictate the entire performance of your communication system. Our amplifier is powerful enough to ensure that a signal can be propagated for miles,” Yadav says.

These results show how their technique could be well-suited for demanding applications, like high-power radars, space communications, and industrial drones. 

It could also be used to manage heat in systems that perform power conversions inside data centers, improving energy-efficiency. 

Yadav hopes other researchers will build on these advances as they develop more complex heterogeneously integrated systems, opening the door to new possibilities with next-generation electronics.

“When I started my PhD, we wondered if any of this was even doable. It seemed like science fiction. Now we’ve shown all these systems that have outperformed anything that exists on the market today. GaN and 3D heterogeneous systems are going to be at the forefront of so many future applications. It is rewarding to know that we contributed a little bit to that space,” he says.

This research was funded, in part, by the Department of War, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships. Device fabrication and microscopy were conducted at MIT.nano and the Georgia Tech Institute for Matter and Systems. 

Startup helps retailers track their products in real-time

Using technology invented at MIT, Cartesian’s system for locating objects could also find uses in manufacturing, logistics, and robotics.

When you picture a worker at a retail store, you probably think of someone at a cash register or helping a customer. But employees also spend a lot of their time combing through stockrooms and shop floors, fulfilling requests or online orders and generally trying to keep track of all their inventory.

Keeping track of inventory takes so much time, in part, because retailers don’t always know where everything is located. That’s why when you ask a store associate to check if they have a shirt in your size, it may take them 20 minutes to get back to you.

Cartesian is helping retailers keep track of inventory with a technology invented at MIT. The system uses wireless signals from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to items to find their precise location in a store, from the stockroom to the shop floor.

Last year, Cartesian did a study with a retailer and found its platform delivered meaningful annual savings at the store level by streamlining inventory tracking, optimizing workflows, and improving customer experiences.

“The big problem we’re solving is that about 50 percent of working hours in retail stores go to managing inventory,” says co-founder Fadel Adib SM ’13, PhD ’17, an associate professor at MIT. “That is roughly a $15 billion problem in the U.S. alone. We use algorithms to decipher indoor locations using wireless signals. The core technology enables a new level of indoor localization.”

Cartesian is already deployed in more than 700 stores across 15 countries and is working with one of the world’s largest fashion groups, Inditex, which is the parent company to brands like ZARA, Pull&Bear, and Oysho.

Beyond retailers and warehouses, Cartesian’s platform could also improve indoor location tracking for manufacturers, logistics operators, and robotics companies.

“The broad vision for what we are doing is spatial AI,” says Adib. “Today, AI does extremely well in the digital world. Now it has to move into the physical world. That means allowing machines to perceive their environment in such a way that they can interact with it. That’s where spatial AI comes in and where Cartesian sits.”

From technology to product

Adib, who holds a joint appointment in MIT’s Media Lab and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been studying wireless signals at the Institute for more than 15 years, dating back to research during his master’s degree.

“My group today researches how to use wireless signals to sense the world in ways that were not possible before,” Adib says. “We develop the fundamental technology and then we build systems around them. Our goal is to see these systems deployed in the real world for impact.”

When Adib joined MIT’s faculty, the first project he worked on was indoor localization using RFID tags. Isaac Perper ’20, MEnG ’21 later joined his lab as a student, and together they developed machine-learning algorithms to process RFID data to translate them into location patterns, with an initial focus on helping robots locate RFIDs indoors.

In 2021, Adib went through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which challenges researchers to interview potential customers to find the right problems to solve with their technologies. That’s when he realized how big of a problem inventory management is for retailers.

Cartesian was officially founded by Adib and Perper in the beginning of 2023, after they received a small business award from the National Science Foundation. The pair worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to license patents from Adib’s lab. They also received support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service.

“Our goal was to reduce the cost of the technology to make it scalable,” Adib recalls. “Isaac focused on simplifying the product, leveraging progress in machine learning, and making it fast. It was a lot of iterating and testing early on.”

Retail workers spend much of their time locating items for a number of reasons. They might get an online order to fulfill, need to restock store shelves, or get a customer inquiry about items in the back.

Stores differ in how they organize their inventory. Most separate items by categories in specific shelves and bins then use barcodes or inventory systems that tend to get outdated fast.

“It’s a big problem for stores because customers may just leave before asking an employee to look for their size, or customers may get frustrated and leave if it takes too long,” Adib says. “The associate also wastes time looking for items they could spend doing higher-value work.”

Cartesian’s platform works with retailers’ existing handheld RFID readers, which store associates already use to manage inventory. Each store installs Cartesian’s software into their existing inventory apps or uses a custom app for employees to access directly.

“The RFID readers are how stores tell what’s in stock and what’s out of stock,” Perper says. “We figured out a way to leverage the same scans they’re already using with the reader, put the data they generate into our machine-learning algorithms, and generate maps of where all the items are.”

Customers can build analytics on top of Cartesian’s technology to keep track of inventory levels, show customers maps of where each item is located, and create other services.

“They use our location intelligence platform and build different products on top,” Adib says. “We can work with any device, any store, any type of RFID. It’s a simple interface. All the sophisticated location algorithms sit in the cloud.”

Beyond retail

Cartesian signed its first big contract in 2025 and soon expanded to several hundred stores. One of Cartesian’s advantages is its ability to quickly scale. Perper says they can add a store in about one minute. Cartesian’s team doesn’t even have to travel to a new store to turn on its system if it’s already working with the company.

“It’s as simple as flipping a switch, preparing the data, and sending it to our customers,” Perper says. “One of our first big bets was, ‘Can we build this entirely on existing hardware?’ That bet is starting to pay off.”

Cartesian’s models can also work with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, which the company plans to use with customers in other verticals.

“Right now, we’re focused on applications in retail, but this technology has a lot of value in manufacturing, warehouses, and other locations,” Adib says.

Cartesian’s team aims to be deployed in tens of thousands of stores over the next year and then begin expanding beyond retail into industries like manufacturing and robotics.

“What’s most exciting about Cartesian to me is we’ve built a lot of the technology foundation, and now that we have the fundamentals in place, we hope to build specific application layers,” Perper says. “Then we can ask customers in different verticals about their problems and apply our technology in different ways to solve it.”

Research from the ground up

A leading innovator in community-based archaeology, Professor Sonya Atalay works to link local know-how with academic inquiry across the globe.

When Sonya Atalay conducted her doctoral research, she studied pottery in Çatalhöyük, a remarkable ancient site in Turkey. It’s one of the world’s earliest known urban settlements, flourishing by at least 7000 B.C.E.

Yet even as Atalay was conducting field research and writing her doctoral thesis, she was scrutinizing standard archaeological practices, believing the discipline to be in need of an update. Indeed, it’s an issue she had been grappling with going back to her undergraduate days, when she first went to a dig site near Rome.

“When I started doing archaeological work, the local people were labor,” says Atalay, now a professor at MIT. “They came, they cleaned your clothes, they cleaned the dig house, they weren’t thought of as having important connections with the archaeology, and that really bothered me.” 

Surely, she believed, a culture producing the remarkable things worth studying is worth including in that research process, too. As she says, given “their place-based knowledge, it seemed like we should be talking to people about their heritage. They’re the ones who live on or near sites. I started thinking about what archaeology could look like if it included local communities in a meaningful way.” 

Atalay completed her dissertation while continuing to examine how researchers could alter their approach. She has since published articles and books about the subject, worked to introduce new research practices, and today, as an MIT professor, is a leader in the growing field of community-based archaeology, building partnerships between researchers and local residents.

Among other things, Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS), a National Science Foundation-backed project that helps train scholars and implement community-oriented work. She is convinced that community-oriented work creates better outcomes in many fields. 

“A community-based approach is highly applicable beyond archaeology and anthropology, outside of the social sciences,” Atalay says. “I think there’s a lot for engineers or designers or folks in a lot of different fields to learn by involving community members in the research process.”

Atalay joined MIT with tenure in 2024, where she is a professor in MIT’s Anthropology Section.

Roll me away

Atalay grew up in Michigan, not far from Detroit, where she was the first person from her family to go to college. Growing up, she hoped to be a physician. 

“I wanted to be a doctor. That’s what I thought I was going to do,” Atalay says. “I wanted to be a pediatrician.” 

But she also developed an interest in ancient history, something she can date to a precise moment. A 4th grade teacher named Barbara Eisman would give Atalay extra reading when Atalay would finish homework early. One day, Eisman produced a book about ancient Greece and Rome. 

“I remember thinking, this is amazing, discovering things I never knew existed,” Atalay says. “And that stuck with me.”

By the time Atalay enrolled at the University of Michigan, she was still planning to become a doctor. But as an undergraduate, she enjoyed taking archaeology electives to such an extent that she simply changed career paths. 

“I loved it and just got so into it,” Atalay says. And Michigan even provided opportunities for undergraduate fieldwork near Rome, although that meant Atalay had to dig deep to finance her first trip to an archaeological site. 

“I worked at a nightclub and put myself through college by bartending,” Atalay says. “I had a motorcycle, so I was tooling around Ann Arbor. Then I sold my motorcycle to buy the plane ticket to go to Rome so I could take part in the archaeological fieldwork.”

“Relationships are the task”

After graduating, Atalay was accepted into the graduate program for anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned an MA and then, in 2003, her PhD. While Atalay’s doctoral research focused on the ancient pottery at Çatalhöyük, she maintained a steady interest in helping archaeology evolve. 

And increasingly, she started drawing on her own observations about fieldwork in the U.S., too. Atalay is Native American, and she recognized the same patterns of exclusion and archaeological extraction being applied to the historical study of Native American societies. 

One additional influence in shaping Atalay’s thinking was the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by the U.S. federal government in 1990. It requires federal institutions to return human remains, sacred objects, and other cultural materials to Native Americans. Seeing the law enacted reinforced to Atalay that progress in this domain is possible. 

“The push for that act was really about Indigenous people standing up for sovereignty. To return what was wrongfully taken and to carry out research in an ethical way moving forward, there has to be trust and partnerships built,” Atalay says. While observing advocates trying to get NAGPRA passed, she adds, “I learned a lot from them.”

Over time, Atalay went on to serve multiple terms on the commission overseeing NAGPRA, first appointed by President George W. Bush and then President Barack Obama. Ultimately, her perspective has been fed by many sources, converging on similar themes.   

“I was really uncomfortable with how local people weren’t involved with studies of their own heritage,” Atalay says. “So I started thinking about what would it look like to truly partner with communities to plan and carry out research. And that’s how I started my first book, trying to set up a model for how to do ethical work in partnership with communities.”

That book, “Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities” was published by the University of California Press in 2012. In her work, Atalay has focused on a range of specific practices, from research development to fieldwork methods and protecting intellectual property rights for Indigenous people. But the starting point for any work, she emphasizes, is relationship-building and the creation of mutual trust. 

“I tell students, ‘Relationships are the task,’” Atalay says. “I know you want to get in there and carry out fieldwork, but the relationships are everything. Sitting down and talking and sharing life stories and developing trust. Those relationships move at the speed of trust. And that takes time to develop. That’s the key piece. And that’s going to lead to good research outcomes.”

Stronger together

After receiving her PhD, Atalay had postdocs at UC Berkeley as well as Stanford University, then joined the faculty at Indiana University. In 2012, Atalay moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining MIT two years ago.

Currently Atalay is working on multiple projects. As director of CBIKS, she is running an organization with eight research “hubs,” where nearly 100 affiliated scholars are working with over 50 Indigenous communities to establish partnerships that advance environmental, and scientific research projects. 

In some cases, the scholars are involved in familiar-seeming archaeological work, while other center projects involve topics such as enhancing salmon farming, clam cultivation, or returning native seeds from museums to tribes in the Southwest, where elders still retain knowledge for their appropriate use and care.

“Our team members across multiple disciplines are learning from each other,” Atalay says. “So archaeologists and heritage management scholars are talking to environmental scientists and team members who study seeds and agriculture.” The NSF sometimes refers to this as ”convergence science.” The center’s name uses the metaphor of braiding, to represent the ways different strands of knowledge can be woven together to form a sturdy whole.

“With braiding, each of the strands retains its integrity, and they’re stronger when they’re brought together,” says Atalay. She is also currently working on another book project, “Braiding Knowledges,” about how the community-based approach can enhance and strengthen research within universities; it is under contract with the University of Arizona Press. 

At MIT, Atalay adds, she is delighted by the range of students who have started taking her classes, begun thinking about applications to all kinds of projects, and who in turn may end up leading innovative, community-oriented projects of their own.

“I would encourage anyone, no matter what field they’re in, to think about working with a community,” Atalay says. “What we’re learning isn’t just about working with Indigenous communities. It’s applicable outside of anthropology, outside of the social sciences. There is a lot you can learn and contribute to society by carrying out research this way, in any number of fields.”

A new vaccine adjuvant could make it easier to eradicate polio

The adjuvant can help the injectable polio vaccine induce a strong immune response in the GI tract, which is considered critical to eradicating the virus.

In the United States, children routinely receive an injectable form of the polio vaccine. This vaccine is very effective at preventing illness, but it doesn’t block transmission of the polio virus as well as the oral polio vaccine does.

Poliovirus is usually transmitted through contaminated food or water, so the GI tract is where the body is first exposed. Because the oral vaccine induces a mucosal immune response within the GI tract, it is much more effective at preventing infection and spread of the virus. However, there is a small chance that the oral vaccine can become infectious, so many countries have stopped using it.

Researchers at MIT have now come up with a way to modify the injectable vaccine so that it can also promote a mucosal immune response. This vaccine could help to achieve polio eradication while avoiding the risks of the oral polio vaccine.

“People who are vaccinated with the injectable vaccine are not getting sick, but they may be helping the virus circulate. Mucosal immunity could help lower that shedding and ideally eliminate it,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator in MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

The researchers’ new vaccine consists of the current injectable, inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), delivered with a nanoparticle-based adjuvant that helps steer immune cells to the mucosal lining of the intestine. In a study of rats, the researchers found that this vaccine produced a 20-fold increase in the type of antibodies needed for mucosal immunity, compared to IPV alone.

Jaklenec and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Advances. MIT postdoc Behnaz Eshaghi is the lead author of the paper. 

Targeting polio

Polio, which can cause paralysis in severe cases, is now rare in most of the world due to extensive vaccination campaigns. The virus is highly contagious and is most commonly spread through consumption of food or water contaminated with the stool of an infected person.

Cases are occasionally seen in the United States and other countries, and the virus is endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While most of these cases are caused by the virus spreading among unvaccinated individuals, some cases may be due to the evolution of the live viruses used in the oral polio vaccine (OPV). These viruses are attenuated, meaning they are alive but weakened. In rare cases, they can mutate and evolve to become infectious again.

It’s also possible that wild poliovirus can be spread by people who have received the injected polio vaccine. These people would likely not experience any symptoms, but they could still shed the virus in their stool. Eventually, this could expose someone who isn’t vaccinated. Studies have shown that even in countries that with very high polio vaccination rates, the virus can be detected in wastewater.

To boost the chances of completely eradicating polio, it would be ideal to use a vaccine that cannot evolve to cause infection, like the current injectable IPV, and would also induce mucosal immunity, like the OPV. 

In hopes of achieving that, the MIT researchers teamed up with researchers at Harvard Medical School who have shown that using a derivative of vitamin A as a vaccine adjuvant can help stimulate immune cells to go to the GI tract.

That adjuvant, known as Am80, works well, but to generate a strong response, it needs to be injected for several days in a row, which is not feasible for most vaccine campaigns. 

To eliminate the need for repeated daily injections, the researchers set out to develop a nanoparticle formulation that would enable the adjuvant to be released slowly over several days. They tested several different types of nanoparticles and found that the one that worked best was a lipid nanoparticle (LNP).

“The purpose of the nanoparticle is making sure that we can engineer a platform with a sustained release of the cargo for a few days,” Eshaghi says. “That way we can overcome the bottleneck that for free administration of Am80 you need multiple daily injections.” 

Mucosal immunity

In tests in rats, the researchers delivered an injection of an inactivated polio vaccine, similar to the one that is now used in the United States, along with a separate injection of Am80 encapsulated in LNPs. After the first dose, boosters were given at four weeks and eight weeks.

After injection, the nanoparticles accumulate in the lymph nodes, where they interact with B and T cells that are also exposed to the polio vaccine. This interaction stimulates the B and T cells to produce two surface proteins that act as homing signals directing them to the GI tract.

The B cells also begin producing a type of antibodies called IgA, which protect body surfaces from infection by coating the mucosal membranes. In addition, the rats also produce IgG antibodies that circulate in the bloodstream, similar to the antibodies that are normally produced in response to the injected polio vaccine.

“IPV is a safe vaccine, but it cannot create mucosal immunity. OPV can create that mucosal response, but it is not as safe,” Eshaghi says. “By adding Am80 to lipid nanoparticle as an adjuvant, we are combining the safety of IPV with an adjuvant that can produce the mucosal immunity that normally you can only get with OPV.” 

The researchers now plan to test the vaccine in additional larger animal models, where they will inject the vaccine and adjuvant mixed together.

Using Am80 or other adjuvants to induce a mucosal response could also help researchers design improved vaccines for other pathogens that infect the GI tract, or for diseases that infect the lungs or reproductive tract. 

“You could potentially add it to any vaccine that’s injected,” Jaklenec says. “This particular work shows that cells can be directed to the gut and increase enteric mucosal immunity. Whether it works for the respiratory or vaginal mucosa is not yet clear.”

The research was funded by the Gates Foundation.

MIT chemists design impact-resistant plastics

Introducing weaker bonds into polystyrene and rubber helps these materials dissipate energy, making them more resistant to destructive forces.

With help from a novel cross-linking molecule, MIT chemists have shown they can substantially improve the ballistic impact resistance of common polymers, including polystyrene and a type of rubber used to make shoe soles.

Polystyrene is a hard, glassy polymer that is used to make many types of plastic containers, such as bottles and mugs, as well as disposable cutlery. It is also found in coatings for electronic devices, and its foam form is the basis for Styrofoam and other lightweight packaging. (While sometimes labeled with recycling code No. 6, polystyrene is difficult to recycle and rarely collected for reuse in the U.S.)

To make the polymer more resistant to sudden impact, the MIT team added weak bonds scattered throughout the material as cross-links, which allows the material to dissipate energy much more effectively under deformations. When struck by a projectile, these weak bonds selectively break at the site of impact to open up pathways for enhanced energy absorption.

The researchers found that this approach can also fortify styrene-butadiene-styrene rubber, and they are now investigating whether it will also work for other types of polymers such as latex or the rubber that is used to make tires. 

“These cross-linkers can substantially increase the amount of energy that the material absorbs under ballistic impact. You can imagine many applications of that, especially if this could be generalized to other polymers,”says Jeremiah Johnson, the A. Thomas Geurtin Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Johnson and Keith Nelson, the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature. Former MIT postdocs Zhen Sang and Suong T. Nguyen and MIT graduate student Kwangwook Ko are the paper’s lead authors.

Tougher plastics

In a study published in 2023, Johnson and colleagues at MIT and Duke University showed that they could make polymers tougher using a counterintuitive strategy: adding weak cross-linkers that are distributed throughout a polymer network. These weak linkages, also called mechanophores, break under tearing conditions in a way that helps preserve the stronger bonds that bear the load, allowing the material to dissipate more energy.

“As a crack starts to propagate through the material, these mechanophores split in two, which helps to dissipate energy and redirect where the crack goes. That means you have to put in more energy to tear the material,” Johnson says. 

Unlike their previous study, which examined toughening under slow tearing conditions, the new Nature study aimed to develop mechanophore-enabled strategies for resisting rapid deformation, such as that caused by sudden impact. The researchers were especially interested in applying the strategy to some of the most widely used polymers, such as polystyrene.

To do that, they developed a way to directly incorporate mechanophores as cross-links into common polymers. Then, they used a system invented by Nelson — laser-induced microprojectile impact testing (LIPIT) — to study how the resulting polymers respond to projectile impacts. With this system, tiny projectiles — silica beads about 10 microns in diameter — are fired at the film at about 750 meters per second (more than 1,600 miles per hour). The amount of energy absorbed by the material can be calculated by measuring the change in the particle’s velocity before and after it passes through the film. 

“We first developed this method to study microparticle impact and penetration into bulk polymer samples, where we would monitor particle propagation through about 100 microns of material and analyze after impact how polymer morphology had changed,” Nelson says. “Our new measurements show how much additional information can be extracted from particle velocities before and after penetration through a thin layer. They also show deeply informative deformation patterns both during particle impact and afterward.”

This technique allowed the researchers to mimic the type of forces that might be seen in the real world when a plastic object is hit with another object, or when you drop your phone on the ground. In their experiments, the researchers showed that mechanophore cross-linked polystyrene was able to absorb substantially more energy from an impact than regular polystyrene.

“It turned out that the mechanophore leads to substantial increases in energy dissipation compared to both uncross-linked and conventionally cross-linked polystyrene, a behavior that had not been observed in related previous work,” Johnson says.

Absorbing impact

To figure out how the mechanophores help make polystyrene more impact resistant, the MIT team enlisted help from collaborators at MIT, Purdue University, Northwestern University, and Duke University. 

Through experiments and simulations, they found that when a high-speed particle strikes the material, it raises the temperature at the impact site high enough to form a mobile zone. In this zone, the mechanophore bonds are selectively broken under force, opening controlled pathways that better absorb the energy of impact while leaving the area beyond the impact site relatively unaffected and stable.

“What is particularly attractive about this approach is the ability to bestow these properties upon ‘off-the-shelf’ commodity plastics, both glassy and elastomeric, with minimal chemistry which makes it in principle quite scalable and relevant. This study combines an elegant approach while providing an in-depth mechanical analysis of the failure mechanism,” says Yoan Simon, an associate professor in the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research.

The researchers also found that they could insert these mechanophores into styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS) rubber — which is used in shoe soles as well as asphalt and roofing materials — and observe a similar effect. They are now exploring whether this approach could also work with a related material, styrene-butadiene rubber, which is one of the major components of tires. 

If successful, this technology could yield longer-lasting tires and also cut down on the amount of microplastics generated when tires contact the road, which is estimated to account for at least 10 percent of the microplastics in the environment. 

“Materials with energy-absorbing mechanophores could one day help keep your vehicle's tires from blowing out on the highway or provide more protective cases for personal electronics,” says Katharine Covert, program director of the U.S. National Science Foundation Centers for Chemical Innovation, which invested in the team’s research. “This work really demonstrates how valuable new insights can be rapidly generated by bringing together researchers with different areas of expertise.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Center for the Chemistry of Molecularly Optimized Networks, the U.S. Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, a Schmidt Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

MIT researchers teach AI models to interpret charts

The new ChartNet training dataset could improve the accuracy of vision-language models that help analyze business trends or interpret scientific figures.

To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports.

But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding. A company that invests in a state-of-the-art model might still receive inaccurate or incomplete information.

To fill this performance gap, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab developed a multifaceted resource for AI users that is specifically designed to teach vision-language models (VLMs) how to effectively interpret charts. 

They used a novel data generation method to build a state-of-the-art dataset that includes more than a million varied charts. The dataset also encodes many visual, linguistic, and numerical components of each chart image, which enable models to robustly reason about the information in a chart.

The researchers used this dataset, called ChartNet, to train a series of open-source VLMs.  Many of these smaller models significantly outperformed orders of magnitude larger, commercial models on tasks like data extraction and chart summarization.

By enabling open-source models to outperform their commercial counterparts, ChartNet could allow small firms with limited budgets to more readily utilize AI. The open-source dataset can be used to improve the capabilities of AI models for tasks like business trend analysis and scientific figure interpretation.

“We developed ChartNet to be a one-stop shop for chart understanding, covering basically anything that an AI model and a practitioner who is training that model might need. We hope our work motivates researchers to achieve state-of-the-art performance with smaller models that don’t require infinite amounts of computation,” says Jovana Kondic, an MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on ChartNet.

She is joined on the paper by many co-authors from MIT, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, and IBM Research, including Pengyuan Li, a research staff member at IBM Research; Dhiraj Joshi, a senior scientist at IBM Research; Isaac Sanchez, a software engineer at IBM Research; Aude Oliva, director of strategic industry engagement at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, MIT director of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, and a senior research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Rogerio Feris, a principal scientist and manager at the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab. The research will be presented at IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference.

A dataset bottleneck

Researchers have made great strides developing generative AI models that excel at natural language processing and reasoning about natural images. But less work has focused on interpreting complex multimodal data contained within charts, Kondic says.

Yet for large and small businesses in nearly every industry, chart understanding is a critical task.

“The finance industry thrives on charts. If vision-language models can extract information out of charts, like descriptions of trends, that facilitates a lot of workflows that happen downstream,” Joshi says.

The lack of high-quality training data is a major bottleneck holding back the development of VLMs that can accurately interpret charts. Many datasets contain limited chart images pulled from the internet and often lack the necessary scale and additional information to help a model interpret the underlying data.

“A vision-language model, unlike our brains, may need to see thousands of examples during training to reliably recognize something as a line chart,” Kondic says.

The researchers sought to overcome those shortcomings by generating synthetic data. Synthetic data are artificially generated by algorithms to mimic the statistical properties of actual data. 

The ChartNet dataset holds more a million high-quality chart images, along with the corresponding code used to generate each chart, a textual description, and a table that contains its numerical information. In addition, each datapoint includes question-and-answer pairs to teach the model how to correctly answer questions about the chart image.

“These additional modes of data guide the model to connect and align the different pieces of information that the chart image encodes,” Kondic says.

Data generation

To build ChartNet, the researchers created a two-step, synthetic data generation pipeline.

First, their automated system translates any pre-existing set of chart images into code. Then the system iteratively augments that code to change different aspects of each chart, such as chart type, data values, topic, colors, etc.

“We can start from a single chart that we use as a seed and come up with hundreds of augmentations of it. This is how we were able to build a dataset with more than a million diverse images,” Kondic explains.

They also incorporated an automated quality check process to ensure the synthetic data are high quality. This process verifies that the code is executable and rendered chart images are accurate and clean.

“We don’t want to just be generating diverse samples. We also want the information to be presented in a meaningful way,” she says.

ChartNet also includes a selection of chart datapoints annotated by human experts. This provides access to additional types of charts and supporting data that carry validity guarantees.

A practitioner could use the annotated data to fine-tune an existing VLM, further boosting performance for a specific application, Joshi adds.

The researchers tested ChartNet by training IBM’s Granite Vision series of models as well as several other open-source models of various sizes and evaluating them on various chart interpretation tasks. The dataset improved the accuracy of all models in chart reconstruction, chart data extraction, chart summarization, and chart question answering. 

With ChartNet, small open-source models consistently outperformed much larger  commercial models. 

“A lot of prior training datasets only focused on answering simple questions about a chart. We tried to go beyond that with ChartNet by generating data that support all aspects of robust chart understanding,” Kondic says.

In the future, the researchers plan to continue expanding ChartNet by incorporating data with added levels of complexity. They also want to draw on feedback from the research community. 

This research was funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab.

Ultrasound-based pacemaker noninvasively steadies the heart

The new design could offer a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.

MIT engineers have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound. The design could one day provide a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.

The new device is designed as a small sticker that can be worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker send ultrasound pulses through the chest to stimulate the heart. The ultrasound waves trigger the opening of certain ion channels in heart cells, an effect the researchers amplified through genetic engineering. When the channels open, they let in calcium, which signals a heart cell to squeeze and beat. 

In experiments in the lab, the researchers applied ultrasound waves to engineered human cardiac cells and found that the pulses effectively maintained the cells’ healthy contractions. They also tested the ultrasound sticker on rats and found the device quickly, safely, and noninvasively corrected arrhythmias and restored normal, regular heart contractions. 

The team has fabricated a prototype that includes the ultrasound sticker (about the size of a postage stamp) and a small, pocket-sized device containing associated batteries and electronics. The same group previously demonstrated a sticker design that uses ultrasound to image deep organs and tissues. They now plan to combine the two approaches into one ultrasound sticker to simultaneously monitor and regulate the heart’s activity. 

“We believe you could one day have stickers on the body that could do long-term imaging deep in the body and also do stimulation for therapeutic effects, in a noninvasive closed-loop way,” says Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

Zhao and his colleagues, together with collaborators from Professor Qifa Zhou’s group at the University of Southern California (USC), have published their results in a study appearing today in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Chen Gong, together with Runze Li, Won Jun Song, and former postdocs Gengxi Lu, Shucong Li, and Hsiao-Chuan Liu. Other collaborators include researchers from Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and other groups at USC.

Sound genes

Today, around 3 million adults in the United States live with pacemakers. The small battery-powered devices are surgically implanted in a person’s chest, and act to deliver electrical impulses to regulate heart rate. Implantable pacemakers are a well-established and generally safe medical treatment that nonetheless comes with risks.

“Pacemakers are one of the most important and widely used human implants, and they have saved millions of lives,” the paper’s co-corresponding author, Gengxi Lu, says. “But they are invasive, and they make direct contact with the beating heart. The dream for many years has been noninvasive heart stimulation with ultrasound.” 

Ultrasound encompasses a range of acoustic waves that safely penetrates the body. Ultrasound waves reflect and resonate off structures in characteristic ways that allow technicians to resolve and image organs and tissues inside the body. Ultrasound can also be directed and focused to stimulate certain therapeutic effects, for instance in the brain, where scientists are exploring the use of ultrasound to treat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and other brain disorders. 

Scientists have also found that ultrasound can benefit the heart. Previous studies in animals have shown that focused ultrasound can safely activate heart cells, though the effect has been inconsistent and weak. 

Zhao and his colleagues looked to amplify ultrasound’s effects on the heart. In their new study, they applied sonogenetics, which is a relatively new approach that takes after optogenetics — a technique that involves genetically manipulating specific parts of a cell to respond to light. Similarly, sonogenetics aims to genetically engineer cells to respond to sound, including ultrasound. 

In their work to develop an ultrasound pacemaker, the team first looked to increase heart cells’ sensitivity to ultrasound, through sonogenetics. In the lab, they used standard practices to derive heart cells from embryonic stem cells, and then delivered a genetic alteration to the cells that increased their sensitivity to ultrasound. Specifically, the manipulation produced ion channels that opened more readily in response to ultrasound. 

“These channels can now ‘hear’ ultrasound better, and can open to let calcium in, which is what directly activates the cell and causes it to beat,” explains by the paper’s first author, Chen Gong. 

Sticker health

In experiments with sonogenetically engineered heart cells, the researchers found that when they exposed the cells to ultrasound, the cells beat in sync with the waves, unlike cells that were not genetically manipulated. 

In any clinical application of an ultrasound pacemaker, the team envisions that a patient could first receive a one-time injection, similar to a vaccine, that would act to genetically boost the sensitivity of cardiac cells to the pacemaker’s ultrasound waves. The injection would be a form of gene therapy — a treatment that is currently approved by the FDA to treat certain inherited conditions such as sickle cell disease and spinal muscular dystrophy.

“We think this step would be clinically translatable as a form of gene therapy that could enable noninvasive pacemakers,” Gong says.

The team then designed the core of the ultrasound pacemaker, in the form of a postage-stamp-sized sticker embedded with tiny ultrasound transducers. The sticky part of the device is made from a hydrogel material that Zhao’s group has refined over the years to adhere strongly to skin and many types of materials, while also allowing ultrasound waves to pass through without weakening. The transducers within the sticker can be tuned to generate ultrasound waves at specific frequencies. 

In experiments with rats, the researchers first administered a sonogenetic, ultrasound-boosting solution through their tails. They then adhered a miniature version of the pacemaker to the rats’ chests. When they turned the stickers on, they observed that the ultrasound quickly regulated the animals’ hearts. Some individuals with slow heart rates were brought up to a normal rate, while others with irregular heartbeats were steadied, keeping in sync with ultrasound’s “ticks.”

“We can now use low-intensity ultrasound to open ion channels in cells to have very effective heart pacing,” Gong says. “We are now making these stickers into smaller form factors, and more integrated, so they are easier to wear, more stable, and more accurate over a longer term.”

“In this paper, we demonstrated noninvasive pacemaking. However, we think this concept could be useful beyond just the heart,” Zhao says. “We believe you could one day have stickers over different parts of the body that could do long-term imaging, monitoring, and closed-loop therapeutic stimulation.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Opthamology from Research to Prevent Blindness, and the U.S. Department of War.

A plan to preserve wetlands without stopping development

Study shows the tradeoff between conservation and growth is less stark with a locally adjusted policy featuring both tradeable offsets and taxes.

Balancing economic growth and environmental protection is not easy. Consider wetlands, which provide flood protection, aid water quality, and are linchpins of larger ecosystems. How can we best preserve wetlands while enhancing economic activity? 

According to a new study, one solution involves supplanting traditional conservation mandates, which require replacing affected wetlands locally, with tradeable offsets. Through this system, a developer can build on a wetland by purchasing credits representing an equivalent environmental value created by improving a wetland somewhere else in the same watershed, away from concentrated development. 

While this has largely been the approach of U.S. federal and state regulators since the mid-1990s, current regulations do not account for the flood protection benefits of wetlands. The new study finds a workable solution in an offset policy that also includes a locally varying tax on development, precisely to compensate for the increased flood risk it causes. 

In the lower 48 states of the U.S., wetlands are heavily concentrated in California and Florida, two high-population states. Through a highly granular look at Florida’s wetlands from 1995 to 2020, with a new scholarly methodology that carefully weighs local factors, the scholars estimate that development of wetlands led to $2.4 billion in net economic gains. Their alternate policy would have preserved most of these gains while also preventing about $1.6 billion in flood damage. 

“You’re retaining two-thirds of the private gains from trade,” says Daniel Aronoff PhD ’22, a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Economics and co-author of a newly published paper summarizing the study’s findings. “And the flood damages shrink by an order of magnitude, so only you’re incurring a small fraction of the flood damage while collecting that amount in increased tax revenue, which can subsidize the cost of restoration after flood damage has occurred.”

This system is neither a simple conservation mandate nor a free ride for developers. The scholars say it would provide a better way of balancing wetlands preservation and economic gains, while lowering flood risk.

“You could do this,” Aronoff says. “It’s an implementable thing. You could build a policy out of this.” 

The paper, “Conservation Priorities and Environmental Offsets: Markets for Florida Wetlands,” appears in the May issue of the American Economic Review. The authors are Aronoff, who is also a research associate at the Laboratory for Economic Analysis and Design at MIT and a research collaborator at the Digital Currency Initiative; and Will Rafey PhD ’20, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

No net loss — but more risk

Federal wetlands policy in the U.S. has been governed since the 1970s by a “no net loss” objective, meaning that development must be accompanied by approved actions to offset any loss of wetlands functionality. State laws have often mirrored this federal approach. The current rules work on a watershed level, enabling public and private developers to offset the impact of developing a wetland by purchasing offset credits from a “wetland mitigation bank” in the same watershed.

The researchers developed their study as an ambitious, data-rich project. They obtained comprehensive data on environmental offset credits issued, and transfers to developers from state and regional regulators; a record of offset prices from a private broker as well as state and county purchase records; maps detailing wetlands development and private property ownership; and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data on flood risk policies and claims. 

The scholars then built a detailed database of development from every wetland bank permit issued in Florida that included enhancements, land acquisition, estimated costs, and offset credit release schedules, as well as records of actual releases and sales over time. They used these data to build a dynamic model of the wetland offset market, from which they obtained their estimates of economic gains and flood risk costs.

Whereas other work has applied national data to wetlands analysis, this more granular approach allowed the scholars to conduct a locally focused examination of economic activity, floods, and policy specifically applying to Florida. 

“The functional form that has been used to estimate the relationship between wetlands and flood risk across all America is not compatible with data on wetlands and flooding in Florida,” Aronoff says. 

The study also underscores an important distinction in the kinds of offset policies that have previously been deployed. The first iteration of offset policy required a developer to restore wetlands adjacent to any wetlands area that is newly developed. A second iteration, the one still in use, allows developers to purchase offset credits — which might apply to wetlands that are not adjacent to the development in question. The latter carries with it greater risk of flood damage to developed property, as an equivalent amount of restored wetlands in a rural area will not serve as a flood buffer for as many structures. 

The proposed policy solution would levy a tax — either on offset sellers or buyers — that would equal the estimated increase in flood risk created by the development. 

“Going from the first policy iteration to the second iteration could have created a lot of value, because you have development taking place with wetlands created in the lowest-cost way,” Aronoff says. “But that gave rise to an externality: the flood risk. Because you’re creating flood risk by developing in urban areas with lots of buildings, while creating wetlands in rural areas without buildings around.”

Tuning the policy

Ultimately, that is why the empirical analysis developed by the economists shows a more optimal path using so-called Pigouvian taxes, named after 20th-century economist Arthur Pigou. These taxes add a levy when people create negative circumstances for society at large. Taxes to inhibit pollution, for instance, are Pigouvian. The modeling in the current study indicates the same concept would work effectively for wetlands policy. 

“Economics is about tradeoffs,” Aronoff says. “And this is a tradeoff. Flood risk is expensive — that’s a cost. But development creates value because it is only profitable to the extent that the end user desires it.”

Ultimately, the scholars think, implementing systems that balance factors will work better in the long run than many kinds of prohibitions on economic activity — or than allowing unrestricted activity without weighing the public good. 

“If you choose an absolute, you’re choosing one over the other in all instances,” Aronoff says. “And what is at the core of the outlook of an economist is to assume there’s a tradeoff, and the question is how do you negotiate that tradeoff in an optimal way. That’s what we are trying to get at here.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the George and Obie Schultz Fund. 

New propulsion system could make tiny satellites both fast and fuel-efficient

For satellites as small as a briefcase, getting around in space just got a whole lot easier.

MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters. 

The system could enable the design of nimbler, more flexible small satellites, which could perform both fast, powerful maneuvers and slower, precise adjustments, depending on the mission and moment at hand.

The key to the new system is a special propellant that can power both chemical and electrical thrusters, which traditionally have required separate, bulky fuel sources. 

“If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Amelia Bruno, a former postdoc in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform.” 

Bruno is the lead author of a study appearing this week in the Journal of Propulsion and Power showing that a type of “green monopropellant” originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for use in chemical propulsion in space can also effectively power tiny “electrospray” thrusters. Electrospray thrusters are dime-sized rockets that use electric fields to charge up a liquid propellant’s particles, which are then shot into space as a thrust-generating spray.

Electrospray thrusters are extremely fuel-efficient and can perform slow and precise maneuvers, such as pushing a small spacecraft bit by bit through a long, interplanetary journey. Chemical thrusters, in contrast, require a large fuel supply to perform short and fast bursts, for instance to quickly ascend and descend, or speed up and slow down. 

Now that the MIT group has found a propellant that can fuel both chemical and electrospray thrusters, they see big potential for small spacecraft. The team is working with NASA to launch the Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission — a briefcase-sized CubeSat that will carry a chemical thruster and four electrospray thrusters, all fueled by a single propellant tank. The mission will be the first to test such a two-in-one propulsion system for small spacecraft. If it is successful, Bruno says the mission could pave the way for small satellites to explore beyond Earth’s orbit. 

“We could send CubeSats to Mars, or the asteroid belt, where they could make the journey slowly, using electrospray thrusters,” says study co-author Paulo Lozano, the Miguel Alemán Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “You could then use your chemical thrusters to quickly move to look at interesting features. You could have a lot more flexibility to do a lot more things.”

The study’s co-authors also include Matthew Corrado SM ’22, PhD ’26.

A sea of ions

Lozano’s group at MIT designs, fabricates, and tests electrospray thrusters for use in satellites that range from the size of a lunchbox to a small carry-on suitcase. Compared to conventional satellites, these microsatellites are significantly smaller and cheaper to launch into space.

But smaller spacecraft require smaller everything else, including propulsion systems. In that respect, electrospray thrusters are a good fit. The thrusters Lozano develops are about the size of a thumbnail. Each thruster sits atop a small reservoir of ionic liquid propellant. When the reservoir is connected to a battery, the battery supplies some amount of voltage that electrically charges a corresponding amount of ions in the liquid. The charged particles are then channeled out of the reservoir, through the thruster’s tips and into space as a thrust-inducing spray. 

Over the past decade, Lozano has tested many thruster designs, under varying conditions, and with various types of ionic liquid propellant — a fuel that is essentially made from salts that can remain in liquid form. 

“Ionic liquids are very stable and can even remain a liquid in space, which not a lot of materials can do,” Bruno says. “And it’s basically a sea of ions, which is why we base our technology around it, so we can pull those ions out into an electrospray.”

Bruno and Lozano have collaborated with the U.S. Air Force, which synthesized a new kind of ionic liquid propellant — the Advanced SpaceCraft Energetic Non-Toxic propellant (ASCENT) — which was being tested in chemical thrusters. Chemical thrusters are high-force propulsion systems typically associated with launching rockets and performing hard and fast maneuvers once in space. ASCENT was designed as a “green,” less toxic alternative to hydrazine, which has been the traditional fuel source for chemical propulsion and is extremely hazardous to handle. 

“ASCENT happens to be an ionic liquid mixture,” Bruno says. “And we said, hey, that’s the stuff we typically use. Theoretically, this should work. Let’s go figure out how.”

Spray and spin

In their new study, Bruno, Lozano, and Corrado tested the performance of electrospray thrusters that they fueled with ASCENT. Each thruster they used was attached to a small cube-shaped reservoir about the size of a Lego brick. They filled each reservoir with 1 gram of ASCENT, a liquid that has a viscosity similar to baby oil. They then attached a thruster to opposite sides of a CubeSat, which they set on a MagLev stand — a custom testbed that is designed to magnetically levitate a sample or device. The MagLev in Lozano’s lab is installed inside a large vacuum chamber, which the researchers can tune to mimic the conditions in space.

Over multiple experiments, the team remotely applied varying levels of voltage to activate the thrusters, which in turn produced a spray that spun the CubeSat around, like a floating, spinning top. The researchers measured the amount of thrust produced with each trial, and calculated ASCENT’s fuel efficiency as they ran the thrusters continuously over periods lasting up to 100 hours. 

In the end, they found that ASCENT was able to successfully fuel each electrospray thruster. What’s more, the propellant, which was originally intended for chemical propulsion, was just as efficient as other, conventional ionic liquids at propelling electric thrusters.

“Compared to our normal electrospray propellants, ASCENT can provide similar performance in terms of thrust,” Bruno says. “Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better.” 

Now that ASCENT has been proven to work in both chemical and electrical propulsion, she and Lozano say that a single tank of the fuel can be used to power both types of thrusters, all in a compact, two-in-one system that could fit within a small CubeSat. The team will test the idea with NASA’s Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission, which is scheduled to launch in November. 

“This will be the first time that a satellite will have a shared propellant tank,” says Lozano, who notes that in addition to long, exploratory interplanetary missions, small satellites equipped with both chemical and electrical propulsion could also be useful for missions closer to Earth, such as for weather and climate observations. 

“Say there’s a storm coming, and you’d want to deploy your constellation of small satellites to observe over one location,” he says. “You could choose to send them quickly or slowly depending on the nature of the observation. And the only way to do that is if you have two propulsion systems, which is now possible.”

This research is supported, in part, by NASA.

Enzymes that assemble into droplets can speed up cellular reactions

MIT biologists find highly concentrated droplets can help cells keep enzymes organized and control growth signals.

Within the past decade, biologists have discovered that one strategy cells use to keep their contents organized is a phenomenon known as phase separation. 

Similar to the way oil forms droplets that float in a vinegar solution, proteins inside cells can phase separate to form highly concentrated droplets that keep them organized within the cell. In a new study, MIT researchers have now shown that this droplet formation is critical for controlling the function of a class of enzymes called kinases.

The researchers found that condensing into droplets optimizes the biochemical conditions needed for kinases to catalyze reactions, allowing them to more rapidly activate cell signaling pathways. In some cases, droplet formation can even change which reactions the kinases perform. 

“Many biological molecules have this propensity to spontaneously separate. We were really interested in asking, if we have these kinases forming droplets, what is the consequence of that in the context of signaling?” says Lindsay Case, an assistant professor of biology at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Learning more about how these droplets form could help researchers design drugs that target kinases, some of which can be overactive in cancer cells.

“Understanding the chemistry of these compartments, and what molecules go into them and what molecules don’t go into them, could help us design drugs that better localize to their target of interest,” Case says.

Nicholas Lea, an MIT graduate student, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Cell Reports.

Forming droplets

Since her days as a graduate student, Case has been studying how the physical organization of molecules inside cells affects their function. As a postdoc, she began studying how phase separation might affect a signaling pathway that allows cells to sense when they’re attached to their environment, so they can respond appropriately. 

Some of the proteins in this pathway are kinases, which activate other proteins by adding phosphate groups to them. Kinases can also activate themselves through a process called autophosphorylation.

“Inside of the cell, you have these kinase molecules that are responsible for carrying a signal through the cell, and we know that the organization of these molecules changes. When the information is present, they’re organized in a different way than when the information is not present,” Case says. “We think that having the right molecules in the right place is incredibly important for the right biochemistry to occur.”

Phase separation is one of the methods that cells appear to use for this organization. The most familiar example of phase separation can be seen in a salad dressing, where oil forms droplets to minimize contact with water-based vinegar. Proteins can phase separate when they are highly concentrated, leading them to self-assemble into dense droplets floating in the cell’s cytoplasm.

Case hypothesized that this phase separation, which brings kinases together at a high density, might help cells to boost the enzymes’ activity because they are more likely to bump into and phosphorylate each other.

In this study, Case and Lea set out to test that hypothesis, focusing on an enzyme called focal adhesion kinase (FAK). This kinase, which becomes activated when cells attach to their surrounding environment, activates pro-growth and pro-survival signals. In cancer cells, this signaling pathway can go awry, allowing cells to proliferate even when they detach from their original locations.

Scientists already knew that when cells are properly attached to their environment, that adhesion signal causes FAK to accumulate at the cell membrane. In the new study, the MIT team mimicked that effect by overexpressing FAK in cells. These cells were floating freely in a solution, not attached to any surface. Even so, the high concentration of FAK caused the kinase to phase separate into droplets, which turned on the pro-growth signal.

“It was surprising that just by condensing this protein into a droplet, you can actually turn on a signaling pathway that should be turned off,” Case says. “If FAK concentration is too high, you’re always getting these droplets and you’re always signaling, regardless of what the receptors that are supposed to be controlling this are doing.” 

The findings suggest that in cancer cells, overexpression of FAK may lead to phase separation, which then helps to drive cancer progression and metastasis. 

“It may be that for some kinases, you’re not supposed to form these droplets in the cytoplasm because it leads to this always-on signal, and then the cells no longer listen to the information coming from the environment,” Case says.

Interfering with FAK’s ability to form droplets could offer a new strategy for cancer drug development, she says. 

Controlling reactions

The researchers also studied two other kinases, Mst2 and Abl. They found that these enzymes could also phase separate at high concentrations, and that this increased their activity. While phase separation of FAK in the cytoplasm may occur only in cancerous cells, for Mst2, it appears to be a strategy that healthy cells use to control a signaling pathway called Hippo, which promotes cell growth and survival.

Additionally, for both Mst2 and Abl, the researchers discovered that phase separation can lead the enzymes to phosphorylate additional targets, which may lead them to activate different signaling pathways.

“It’s not just that you’re getting faster phosphorylation, but in those cases, the patterns of what is actually getting phosphorylated were very different inside of the droplet compared to what might be happening in a non-droplet context,” Case says. “The kinase is able to phosphorylate amino acid residues beyond the set of canonical sites that have been described before.”

The researchers also found that when these droplets form, they attract high concentrations of ATP, the molecule that kinases use as a source of phosphate. This occurs because kinases tend to contain floppy sections containing many positively charged amino acids, which attract negatively charged ATP.

Using a machine-learning model, the researchers predicted that about 45 percent of the 500 kinases found in human cells would have the ability to form droplets like those seen in this study. Those kinases were also more likely to be highly positively charged, which could help them to recruit ATP into the droplets.

In future work, Case hopes to explore the possibility of designing drugs that could mimic ATP’s ability to be attracted into droplets within a cell, which could help reduce negative side effects of the drugs. 

“By localizing drugs to the compartment where your target localizes, that could reduce off-target effects by concentrating the drug with the target of interest and reducing interactions with other molecules,” Case says. 

The research was funded by a Searle Scholars Program Award, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Institutes of Health, the Royal G. and Mae H. Westaway Family Memorial Fund, and a David H. Koch Graduate Fellowship.

Photos: The Class of 2026 turns the page

Family, friends, at least one beloved pet celebrated with the new graduates during three joyful days of Commencement exercises.



Alejandro Aravena urges School of Architecture and Planning graduates to lead with kindness, honor the truth

“All of us need to feel we are valuable,” says the SA+P Commencement speaker, a Chilean architect and Pritzker Prize winner.

What distinguishes the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s Class of 2026? According to faculty and staff across the school, it’s their hearts.

“They’re big-hearted in the way they deal with each other, with their work, and with the world,” said Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, in his opening remarks at the school’s 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony. As a nod to the class’s generosity, Sarkis announced the creation of the Class of 2026 Scholarship fund to help support incoming students.

“Education is a right, not a privilege, and this fellowship brings us closer to our goal of giving this right to every student and becoming tuition-free as a school,” said Sarkis.

The news was met with joyful and sustained applause.

The SA+P Class of 2026 represents graduates from each of the school’s departments: Architecture; Urban Studies and Planning; Media Arts and Sciences (MIT Media Lab); and the Center for Real Estate. The 206 graduates — including six with dual degrees — represent nearly every corner of the globe. Fifty-seven percent are from the United States, 10 percent are from China, and 5 percent are from India.

This year’s speaker was Alejandro Aravena, a celebrated Chilean architect whose credits include curating the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale “Reporting From the Front,” and being awarded the Pritzker Prize (2016), the most prestigious award in architecture — for which he currently serves as jury chair. Aravena leads the architectural firm ELEMENTAL, based in Santiago, Chile, with work that spans a variety of public and private projects developing novel approaches to community engagement shaping how architects and policymakers think about the built environment.

Sarkis said Aravena speaks eloquently to the breadth of fields represented in SA+P, and to the school’s values, “[from] the power of architecture and design to enable society to his innovative models of social housing to creative approaches to community engagement — be it in emergency planning after earthquakes, or in institutional buildings — and to putting architecture front and center in the discussions around the new constitution of Chile.” 

Addressing the students and their guests, Aravena shared a series of vignettes that illustrated a world at a “tipping point.” Will it land on the side of civilization, or barbarism?, he asked. One story was of his firm’s work on a project in Chile where his team encountered the “law of the jungle.” During a slum-upgrading project, two social workers from the Ministry of Housing were stalked on their way home by hired killers. With knives at their throats, they were warned never to return if they intended to interfere with the territorial power of organized crime. The message was clear: Come back, and your families will pay the price, he said. A more recent project — building a hospital for victims of sexual violence linked to the armed conflict in Colombia — had the architects questioning the level of violence that people inflict on each other.

If the “law of the jungle” was going to be the new normal, Aravena said, he needed to understand what that meant. Measuring the sizes of a prefrontal cortex — the brain’s command center that controls emotions, complex decision-making, and executive function — within the animal kingdom, humans have the largest capacity for emotions and behaviors.

“The history of humanity and the evolution of the human condition is connected,” he said. “It’s moving in the direction of the prefrontal cortex. Yet, somehow, we’re turning backwards.”

Aravena suggested the students use their newly acquired skills to work on projects that matter to others, and not to just themselves.  

“Leveling the playing field, having more people behaving and coexisting in a more even playground, is very bad news for predators,” said Aravena. “Try to use this knowledge and wisdom you have and the training you have received in common interests, and not in just the self. Let’s try to bring back decency. Let’s try to bring back kindness. Let’s try to bring back honoring the truth. And let’s join forces to make the coin fall on the most human possible side.

“Class of 2026, together, let’s make the prefrontal cortex great again,” Aravena concluded. 

Scene at MIT: A nanoscientist graduates with her very good boy

Vinny, an unofficial member of the Strano Lab at MIT, dressed up to celebrate Commencement alongside his human, Michelle Quien PhD ’26.

“I’m originally from Moorestown, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. While my degree is in chemical engineering, I consider myself a materials scientist, and I’m passionate about using innovative materials to propel next-generation technologies. When I started my bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, I was introduced to polymers and nanotechnology and even got to partake in some meaningful industry experiences in the medical device field. While the work I did felt impactful, I felt like I lacked a sense of driving innovation, and so I decided to pursue a PhD at MIT.

My doctorate in Michael Strano’s lab has focused on a novel material at the intersection of polymers and nanomaterials. This material, called 2DPA-1, is like a combination of graphene, the strongest and most conductive material, and Kevlar, which is what makes up bulletproof vests. My thesis has been pivotal in establishing the characterization tools for this material so that future researchers can optimize its properties for different applications. Going forward, I’ve signed an offer letter with a startup that is making portable nuclear reactors for areas without stable grid electricity. I’ll work on various problems surrounding the materials that make up the reactors. 

I always knew that I wanted my dog, Vinny, to have a doctoral gown for graduation. He’s been with me throughout my entire PhD and has been a pivotal member of my research group, helping everyone by being cute and reducing their stress. I couldn’t find any specific vendors online, and I love learning crafts to make custom items (crochet, knitting, and embroidery to make my own clothes; bookbinding to make my own journals and my physical thesis; and pottery to make my own mugs and dishes), so I thought: Why not try to sew a gown for him? I watched and read a few tutorials, used the sewing machines at Metropolis, and hand-sewed the finishing touches. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and could keep working on it, but I know that Vinny looks cute regardless of what he wears. I am so delighted and grateful that Vinny was part of my ceremony. He’s been such a pivotal part of my PhD journey, and my life as a whole. I can’t imagine a finer end to my time at MIT!” 

—Michelle Quien PhD ’26, graduate of the Department of Chemical Engineering

At a spirited Commencement ceremony, the Class of 2026 is urged to “run toward the hardest problems”

Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, Advanced Micro Devices CEO, tells graduates to apply “purpose, judgment, and courage” in their lives.

After years of study and instruction, MIT’s Class of 2026 received one last piece of guidance this afternoon en route to picking up their diplomas and starting the next chapter of their lives.

“Run toward the hardest problems,” said Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, the chair and CEO of semiconductor powerhouse Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the featured Commencement speaker at today’s OneMIT ceremony. “Hard problems really teach you what you’re capable of.”

Su’s career as one of the world’s leading technology executives has long been intertwined with MIT. She holds three degrees in electrical engineering from the Institute, along with another distinction: Building 12, home of the MIT.nano facility, was named after her in 2022. 

A central theme of Su’s address involved learning by taking on difficult challenges. At MIT, as she put it, she acquired “not the confidence that I would always know the answer, but the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer, I could figure it out.”

Speaking before a large and appreciative audience in MIT’s Killian Court, Su also urged MIT’s new class of graduates to lead purposeful lives, with a sense of the greater good and an eye toward addressing societal challenges. 

“The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools,” Su said. “It needs people who know what to use them for. People with a sense of purpose. Judgment. Courage.”

Science: Curiosity on a Mission

The OneMIT ceremony is an Institute-wide Commencement event with a featured speaker and other traditional elements. MIT’s Commencement week also includes specific ceremonies in which undergraduates, and graduate students in the Institute’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, walk across stage to receive their diplomas. 

After Su spoke, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth delivered a charge to the graduates, discussing the Institute’s core values, especially the ideas of excellence and curiosity. She also emphasized MIT’s role in making advances that benefit the nation and society at large, from medicine to energy, agriculture, and other areas of need. 

“A few of those values that will serve you wherever you go,” Kornbluth observed, while noting MIT’s commitment to “the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence” in its work. She observed that the Institute lives this ethos, by spurning legacy admissions and “back-door” admissions for donors’ families, among other merit-based practices.

“MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps,” Kornbluth said, offering that “curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel — and that fact is enormously important for our society as a whole.”

She added: “At MIT, we know that curiosity-driven science is the path to new knowledge,” Kornbluth said. “The kind that spawns world-changing innovations. Curiosity is the force that transforms deadly cancers into treatable conditions. That turns fusion energy from a dream to a reality. That uncovers new ways to grow more food using less of every resource.”

Indeed, Kornbluth emphasized, “We like to say that science is curiosity on a mission.”

“The responsibility to work with others”

MIT students earned a total of 1,165 undergraduate and 2,817 graduate degrees this academic year. The OneMIT ceremony began with the annual alumni parade, which has come to feature graduates from the 50th anniversary class. In this case the undergraduate class of 1976 had the honors, entering with processional entry music from the Killian Court Brass Ensemble, conducted by Kenneth Amis. 

In another annual component of the OneMIT ceremony, Thea Keith-Lucas, the Chaplain to the Institute, delivered the invocation. The Chorallaries of MIT sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at the outset of the event. Near the conclusion, they sang the school song, “In praise of MIT,” and another Institute anthem, “Take Me Back to Tech.”

By tradition, speakers at the OneMIT event also included Teddy Warner, president of MIT’s Graduate Student Council, and Heba Hussein, president of the undergraduate class of 2026.

“As MIT graduates, we have the responsibility to work with others to generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges,” Warner said. “We cannot solve global problems without global cooperation or with limited techniques. I implore everyone to apply the cooperative, interdisciplinary skills used every day at MIT to effect positive change in all areas of the global community.”

In her speech, Hussein reflected on the many ways her classmates supported each other during their time at MIT. “As we move forward, I urge you to continue to carry care,” Hussein said. “Care for our work, for each other, and for the people far beyond MIT whose lives are connected by what we choose to do.

Following the students’ remarks, Stephen DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, president of the MIT Alumni Association, issued a welcome to the new graduates. 

MIT: “Where I really learned to solve problems”

For her part, Su recounted that when she first came to campus, she was “pretty sure I was good at math.” Then, drawing laughs from the audience, she recalled stepping into two MIT first-year courses, 6.001 and 6.002. 

“Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math,” Su said. 

She stuck with it, and, as she told the crowd today, “Along the way, I started believing in myself. … What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor device physics.” Referring to MIT’s enduring motto of “mens et manus,” or “mind and hand,” Su underscored the importance of both thinking through problems and working to solve them in practical terms. 

“When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto,” Su said. “Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT so special. MIT teaches you to think deeply. But it also teaches you to build. To test ideas. To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work. And over time, you start believing that you can solve problems that once felt impossible. I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus.”

Su’s remarks specifically credited the mentorship of MIT electrical engineer Dimitri Antoniadis, one of her PhD advisors, who today is the Ray and Maria Stata Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in whose lab she worked as a doctoral candidate. 

“That was where I really learned how to solve problems,” Su said. 

After receiving her PhD from MIT, Su worked at Texas Instruments; IBM; and Freescale Semiconductor. In 2012, she joined AMD, which she has helped revitalize as a global leader in the semiconductor space. In 2014, she was named president and CEO of the company. Under her guidance, AMD has both grown and diversified its products, with expanding reach in high-performance computing, among other areas. 

Su has received many awards and honors in her career, including the IEEE’s Robert Noyce Medal in 2021; she was the first woman to be awarded the honor. 

In her remarks, Su referenced the many technology advances of recent decades, and noted the potential for new changes due to artificial intelligence. Su outlined her hope that AI can “accelerate discovery in every field,” including medicine and health care, suggesting it could help assemble more information than ever in valuable ways.

“This I think is the promise of AI at its best,” Su said. “It makes each of us more capable. Medicine. Science. Energy. Climate.”

At the same time, Su observed, “Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like.” Rather, she noted, people do: “For everything AI can do, AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It can’t make the hard judgments when the data is not there. It can’t take responsibility for the outcome. These are actually our responsibilities. And they matter more now than ever.”

“The commitment to act ethically”

In her charge to the graduates, Kornbluth also encouraged the MIT class of 2026 to  apply their knowledge and skills in socially beneficial, responsible ways.

“I mentioned excellence and curiosity, two of MIT’s core values,” Kornbluth said. “But I hope we also hold, together, another core value: the commitment to always act ethically, with integrity, and with consideration for our fellow human beings.”

She added: “I have no doubt that … with your uncommon talent, you can do it! And if you keep that goal in sight, I know you will do great things for the world. Congratulations — and warmest best wishes to all of you for a happy life and a fulfilling career.”

Commencement address by Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94

“Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like,” the chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices told the Class of 2026.

Below is the text of Lisa Su’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.

Good afternoon.

President Kornbluth, Chairman Gorenberg, trustees, faculty, families, friends … and most importantly, the MIT Class of 2026.

Congratulations.

You earned this. 

Standing here feels different than I expected.

I've given a lot of talks over the years … but this one is personal. And as Murphy’s Law would have it, I somehow managed to lose my voice this week … so please bear with me if my voice sounds a little rough.

I came to MIT in the fall of 1986. My parents dropped me off at Next House. I was 17 years old. Born in Taiwan, raised in Queens … and pretty sure I was good at math.

Then I walked into 6.001 and 6.002.

Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math.

I remember staring at those first problem sets thinking … man, these are super hard.

I had never really pulled all-nighters until freshman year …  it was a new experience, but it was a lot of fun doing it together with your classmates. 

MIT has this incredible way of pushing you further than you thought you could go.

You wrestled with the problem.

You blew up a circuit or two.

And then, somehow … the thing worked.

And suddenly, you realized you could build something real.

And, that’s when I started feeling like an engineer.

One of the best parts of MIT is UROP.

The opportunity, as an undergraduate, to work on real research.

That changed my life.

My first UROP was in Professor Hank Smith’s lab in Building 39 … making X-ray lithography mask blanks for a graduate student.

To be clear, at the time I had absolutely no idea what that actually meant.

But I got to put on my first bunny suit, walk into the clean room, and start building devices on little 2-inch wafers.

I learned very quickly to be careful because those wafers were delicate, and I definitely did not want to be responsible for breaking them.

I ran a bunch of experiments. Most of them didn’t work the way we expected. So, we adjusted. And tried again.

It was the coolest thing ever.

For the first time, I wasn’t just learning about technology in a classroom. I was part of a team trying to discover something new.

I remember thinking: wow, we can build things this small?

Things tiny enough to fit on a die the size of a coin … but powerful enough to change the world.

And that is when I fell in love with semiconductors.

Later, I had the privilege of working with Professor Dimitri Antoniadis, who became my PhD advisor.

That was where I really learned how to solve problems.

I remember spending weeks in the clean room fabricating devices, then bringing my wafers up to the test lab, only to discover they didn’t behave the way I expected at all.

So, I’d go back to Dimitri’s office, and we’d figure out what experiment we should try next.

Looking back, that was probably where I grew the most at MIT.

Because little by little, I went from a new grad student learning about the field…to someone doing original research and actually contributing something new to the field. 

And along the way, I started believing in myself.

Not the confidence that I would always know the answer.

But the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer yet…I could figure it out. 

What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor physics.

Mens et manus.

Mind and hand.

When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto.

Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT special.

MIT teaches you to think deeply.

But it also teaches you to build.

To test ideas.

To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work.

And over time, you start believing you can solve problems that once felt impossible.

I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus.

When I joined IBM, I found myself starting all over again.

IBM had hundreds of thousands of employees. I was 25 years old wondering how I could possibly make a difference in a company that big.

But I learned something important very quickly: engineering doesn’t care how old you are.

It cares whether your ideas work.

And one of my mentors told me something that I’ve never forgotten:   

Run toward the hardest problems.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. 

But over time, I realized this was the best advice I ever received.

Hard problems teach you what you're capable of. 

Fast forward a bit … 12 years ago, I got a chance to put that lesson to the test.

I had the opportunity to become CEO of AMD.

AMD had enormous potential, but the company had been through some tough years.

Some of my mentors thought taking the job was risky.

But for me, this was my dream job.

This was what I’d been training for all those years.

The opportunity to work at the bleeding edge of technology on problems that really mattered.

The first thing we had to figure out was what we wanted to be when we grew up.

We made a long-term bet that high-performance computing would be the most important technology of the future.

We gave our talented team the room to think big. 

Over the next several years, we built technology to enable the most powerful computers in the world.

And, through all of it, I used every skill that MIT ever taught me … And then some. 

I call it the engineer’s instinct. 

The ability to face what seemed like an unsolvable problem, break it down, and methodically work through it step by step.

But, at AMD, I learned something else. 

The engineer’s instinct is even more powerful when it becomes shared by a team. 

And the greatest satisfaction of my career has been bringing people together to do something more than any of us thought was possible.

Which brings me to today.

Over the last few decades, we’ve experienced several major technology shifts.

The internet changed how we communicate.

Mobile computing changed how we live.

Cloud computing changed how we work.

And now we are at the beginning of the AI wave.

To me, AI is different from those earlier technology waves. 

It is not just a tool that can help us do things faster. It is deeper than that. 

It has the potential to accelerate discovery in every field and help us solve problems we have never been able to solve before.

To make it personal, one of the areas that excites me most is medicine and healthcare. 

We’ve all experienced firsthand what it feels like when someone you love is sick.

And even with incredible doctors and the best care, you realize how hard it is for any one person to bring together all of the knowledge that exists in the world to help in that critical time of need. 

AI can help us change that. 

It can help doctors and researchers bring the world’s best expertise to each patient … and deliver care with the best chance of a successful outcome.

That is the promise of AI at its best.

It does not replace people.

It makes each of us more capable.

Medicine. 

Science. 

Energy. 

Climate. 

We may discover more in the next ten years than we have in the last thirty.

Now let me be clear. 

Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like. 

People do.

For all the promise of AI …

AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving.

It cannot make the hard judgment calls with imperfect information.

It cannot take responsibility for the outcome.

These are our responsibilities.

And they matter more now than ever. 

That is why this is such an extraordinary moment to graduate from MIT.

Because the world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools.

It needs people who know what to use them for.

People with a sense of purpose. 

Judgment.

Courage. 

People who look at a hard problem and say: I know this is important, and we can figure this out.

And that is exactly who you have become here. 

So here is what I want to leave you with.

I am fortunate in many ways.

I am fortunate to have great parents.

I received an extraordinary education.

I have had the chance to work with great people.

But I also believe I’ve been very lucky in my career.

When people ask me for career advice, I often tell them: work hard … but also understand that luck matters.

And, over time, I’ve come to believe that the best people find ways to make their luck.

Luck is not just being in the right place at the right time.

It is taking the risk to work on something hard. 

It is challenging yourself.

Choosing problems at the edge of what you know.

Surrounding yourself with people who make you better.

And believing that, yes … you can change the world.

So be ambitious about the problems you choose.

Run toward the hardest ones.

And trust your engineer’s instinct.

That is how you make your luck. 

I want to take a moment to acknowledge all the families and loved ones here in the audience today.

None of these graduates got here alone.

Thank you for believing in them, supporting them, and helping them reach this moment. 

This achievement belongs to you too. 

And to the Class of 2026…

Remember … somewhere in the years ahead, you’re going to walk into another room where you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.

You’ve done this before.

Go figure it out.

As one MITer to another … I am incredibly honored to be here with you today.

Congratulations, Class of 2026.

New laboratory at MIT aims to advance quantum research for the nation

The Quantum Systems Laboratory will catalyze quantum innovation and be open to government, academic, and industry researchers.

On May 28, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced plans for a new laboratory to accelerate the development of next-generation quantum technologies that will enable Massachusetts to remain a national hub for quantum innovation.

Speaking at the Samberg Conference Center on campus, the leaders introduced the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a shared-use facility that will catalyze quantum development in the region and help keep America at the forefront of a technology seen as critical for a range of industries.

“Quantum technologies have the potential to drive transformative change in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration,” Kornbluth said. “Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent of anywhere in the world, so it has been clear to us for some time that if we could magnify all of that talent with the right facilities — a shared quantum toolbox — we could establish Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and help catalyze the next generation of quantum technologies.”

The Quantum Systems Laboratory will join a state-of-the-art quantum computer with the components needed to make it a scalable, practical technology for solving complex, real-world problems. Such components include peripheral hardware such as sensors and quantum interconnects, which are physical channels that transfer quantum information. Located at MIT’s Building 39, the facilities will be open to researchers both from and beyond MIT. 

Thanks to a $25 million investment from the state, announced today, which will match a portion of the federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute is now in a position to move forward as early as this summer with construction on the QSL facility. The Commonwealth’s investment adds to MIT’s own financial commitment, as well as generous philanthropic support from Thomas Tull.

“This is good news for MIT, good news for Massachusetts, and frankly, good news for the world that we’re working together to make this happen,” Healey said. “The return on investment is clear: We know the Quantum Systems Laboratory will be a first-of-its-kind center for the shared study and development of quantum science and technology. It’s going to unleash the great power of scientists and innovators from around the state and across the world, and also be a place for collaboration, both for academic and commercial ventures. It will offer incredible opportunities for both scientific progress and economic growth. It’s a testament to MIT’s unrelenting, unyielding belief in the power of openness and collaboration to advance science.”

The new lab will be the physical home for the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT) announced by President Kornbluth in December. It also complements advanced facilities already used for quantum research at MIT, such as MIT.nano and MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s SQUILL foundry, both of which share the mission of democratizing access to world-class facilities. SQUILL and MIT.nano have already made a major impact on the quantum industry through research, startups, and new standards for creating and transmitting quantum information.

“I want to emphasize that just as MIT.nano is a facility for all, there will be many people from beyond MIT that come to use this equipment” at QSL, Kornbluth said. “This is a hub to make Massachusetts the center of the world for quantum. These resources are rare enough that we have to make sure they are available to our colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard, and beyond. Our plan is to mobilize all the talent in the area through this facility.”

Leading in quantum innovation is important for the prosperity and security of the country, but quantum research requires meticulously controlled environments. The new facilities will give scientists access to the cutting-edge quantum hardware and specialized experimental capabilities needed to achieve the full transformative potential of quantum science and engineering.

The new laboratory’s underlying mission is to return broad scientific, workforce, and economic benefit to the public.

For example, quantum technologies provide significant opportunities in the fields of life sciences and defense technologies, which are $50-billion contributors to the local economy, with dozens of startups working in the area. The new lab is designed to create new job opportunities in the form of academic research, startups, and more. Construction on the QSL facility alone is anticipated to create over 150 full-time, on-site jobs, plus another 75 to 100 jobs across the Commonwealth in supply chain and professional services supporting the project.

Startups from MIT are also a key driver of the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem; in 2015, Sloan Professors Edward Roberts and Fiona Murray published a report detailing how the Institute’s alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 30,000 active companies, employing 4.6 million people and generating annual global revenues of $1.9 trillion, a figure greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s 10th-largest economy, as of 2014. The QSL facility will provide the necessary equipment and facilities for startups working on quantum technologies, thereby strengthening the region’s innovation economy. 

Sally Kornbluth’s charge to the Class of 2026

MIT’s president asked graduates help the world understand the importance of curiosity — “our intellectual rocket fuel” — to society as a whole.

Below is the text of President Sally Kornbluth’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.

Technically, as MIT’s president, it’s now my job to deliver a “charge” to the graduates. 

But this year, I faced that assignment with a serious case of humility. You’re entering a world that I’m certain you’ll navigate better than I could.

So, for your “charge,” I decided to draw on a special resource: the collective wisdom of our alumni.

I talk with a lot of MIT graduates — around the world, across the country, on our faculty.

They each put it their own way. But nearly all of them talk about how MIT changed their lives. It wasn’t a subject they studied, or a skill they acquired. It was the whole MIT experience! Of living and working here, together, and of belonging to a community with our distinctive passions and values.

So, as you go out into the world, I want to emphasize a few of those values that will serve you wherever you go. The banners in Lobby 7 feature our whole MIT Values Statement.  Let’s focus first on the two words at the top: Excellence and Curiosity.

Now, “excellence” is an easy thing to say. Most companies claim it. Probably every university too. But I have never seen a community live its commitment to excellence the way it’s done at MIT.

It’s easy to measure in the outward accomplishments of our faculty and graduates: the prizes, the discoveries, the inventions. The architecture and the industries. The companies and cures. 

But you also feel it here, every day — when everyone you meet in the hallway wants to tell you about what they’re working on – and it just blows you away. 

As members of this community, we strive to hold ourselves to “the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence.” Just as important, we inspire each other to reach for those standards too!

(As one timely metaphor: This week 400 of you apparently felt that earning a degree from MIT wasn’t hard enough – so you also had to jump out of a plane!)

As an institution, we support these standards of individual excellence with a systematic focus on merit. For instance: No legacy admissions. No back-door admissions for donors. 
Because we value “potential over pedigree.”

A long-ago colleague had a sign in his office. It said, “If you take a lick of the lollipop of mediocrity, you will suck forever.” 

Now, let me be clear — I’m talking about self-discipline, not self-regard.

In the work we do, a conscious commitment to excellence is not the same as arrogance. 

In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.

The American poet Walt Whitman captured this idea. As he wrote, 

“I like the scientific spirit — the holding off, the being sure, but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: This … keeps the way beyond open [and] … gives the whole man a chance to try over again.”

So I hope, wherever your life and work lead you, that you’ll strive to sustain our MIT standards of excellence. 

And I also hope, in the spirit of Whitman, that you’ll “accept the risk of failing as a rung on the ladder of growth.” Because, in all the fields you’ve studied, the willingness to try, and fail, and try again is the golden path to breakthroughs!

Now, for curiosity.

A few months ago, I was interviewed by a journalist who understands the current challenges for higher education. 

He described me as “inexplicably ebullient.”

(He doesn’t see me every day!) 

But honestly, if I’m ebullient in leading this community, it’s entirely explicable! 

MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps. Which describes our faculty, our staff, our alumni — and every one of you.

Feeding that curiosity is an incredible source of pleasure. You don’t need me to encourage you in this life-long feast!

But I do hope I can count on you to help the world understand that curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel — and that this fact is enormously important for our society as a whole.

At MIT, we know that curiosity-driven science is the path to new knowledge – the kind that spawns world-changing innovations. 

Curiosity is the force that transforms deadly cancers into treatable conditions, that turns fusion energy from a dream to a reality, that uncovers new ways to grow more food using less of every resource. 

We like to say that science is curiosity on a mission.

But we also know that the “curious” path to those deep discoveries can look like a wandering road.
 
(Years ago, after a long conversation about my PhD work, my own grandmother once asked, “Wait, you’re not trying to cure cancer in humans, you’re trying to give it to chickens?”)

Luckily, over eight decades, the United States had the foresight to see the value of discovery science. It invested public money with steady patience, knowing that the “practical payoff” could be 20, 30, 40 years away. 

Today – as many of you know from experience in your own labs — US investment in curiosity-driven science is in sharp decline. 

The tragedy here is that shrinking the pipeline of basic discovery research means choking off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and shrinking the supply of future scientists.

So I hope you will join in a great shared effort to sustain the work of scientific curiosity — on a mission to serve.

A final thought: Every one of you here possesses uncommon talent. And with great talent comes great responsibility. 

I have no doubt that, like our alumni, you will be top-flight performers in your fields: Innovators. Engineers. Scientists. Doctors and designers. Entrepreneurs, investors and astronauts. Pioneers in whatever realm you chose. 

I mentioned Excellence and Curiosity, two of MIT's core values. 

But I hope we also hold, together, another core value — the commitment to always act ethically, with integrity, and with consideration for our fellow human beings. 

After more than six decades on Earth, I know that living up to this standard requires constant reinforcement and awareness! You will face many temptations, and opportunities to lose focus on that north star. 

And you simply have to resist. 

I have no doubt that, with your uncommon talent, you can do it!

And if you keep that goal in sight, I know you will do great things for the world. 

Congratulations — and warmest best wishes to you for a happy life and fulfilling career!

MIT researchers develop a low-cost technique to get lithium out of rocks

The low-temperature process could unlock cleaner lithium from America’s abundant hard rock while minimizing waste.

Demand for lithium has surged in recent years as lithium-ion batteries power increasingly more of our world. And yet, even as places like the U.S., Europe, and Australia have abundant lithium resources within their borders, China dominates global lithium refining. The biggest hurdle to tapping into the U.S. and Australia’s lithium is getting it out of hard rock minerals in a form that is useful.

Extracting lithium from hard rock today is an energy- and waste-intensive process that is often far more expensive than getting lithium from brine water, which also has major environmental drawbacks. Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded.

Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. The process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts: not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica. After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so waste levels approach zero.

The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water.

A paper describing the process was published today in Science. The researchers have already begun commercializing the technology through an MIT spinout, Rock Zero.

“By 2040, we need to quadruple production of lithium globally, which amounts to hundreds of new lithium producing assets,” says author Camden Hunt, a former project manager in MIT’s Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry. “Hard rock is abundant; you can find it everywhere. But most hard rock refining is done in China. Our central thesis is if you can find an easier way to crack the rock, get lithium out, and make battery-grade lithium salts, you can change the lithium market. It aligns with the recent push to onshore production of critical minerals in the U.S.”

Joining Hunt on the paper are former MIT postdoc Benjamin Mowbray; PhD candidate Kalyn Fuelling; MIT undergraduate Jacqueline Prawira; Khashayar Jafari, a former senior research scientist at the MIT green cement spinout Sublime Systems; and Yet-Ming Chiang, MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

From bathrooms to batteries

The research has its roots in a bathroom renovation. About 25 years ago, as Chiang made a trip to a hardware store to look for something that would turn clear glass blocks translucent, he stumbled on a glass etching cream that works by “eating away” at the surface of the glass. The active ingredient turned out to be ammonium fluoride.

More recently, as Chiang was brainstorming ways to chemically break apart the most abundant lithium-bearing mineral, spodumene, he thought back to that etching cream. Spodumene, like glass, consists mostly of silica. Conventional chemistry-based methods for extracting metals from ores preferentially dissolve more reactive elements and leave behind a silica-enriched residue because of the strength of silicon-oxygen bonds. By designing their process to use a mixture of water and ammonium fluoride, the researchers are able to dissolve silica first, reversing the process.

The researchers showed they could dissolve spodumene rock at room temperature, which represented a breakthrough over traditional processes requiring extreme heat. But it was still only the first step to a closed-loop system that produced useful materials.

“Dissolving silica is the hard part in mining,” Mowbray says. “The next question was how do we apply it to impactful mineral processing problems?”

The mineral spodumene is mainly made up of three components: lithium, aluminum, and silica. Mowbray and Hunt, who both have their PhDs in chemistry, began exploring ways to refine those components separately after they were broken apart in the ammonium fluoride solution.

First, the researchers isolated lithium fluoride, a useful input for common electrolyte materials used in batteries. Chiang, who has founded several battery companies over his multi-decade career at MIT, next asked the research team if they could isolate lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate, two lithium salts useful for making battery cathodes. The researchers went back to the lab and found they could make both by developing new processes, some of which involved adding carbon dioxide or sodium carbonate. Chiang tasked the research team with a similar challenge for the aluminum part of the rock, which was isolated using a high-temperature separation technique, and then silica, which was isolated by precipitation.

“First our goal was to produce these products, then there were additional steps of characterizing their purity and properties and making sure our products met the specifications for target markets,” Mowbray explains. “For the lithium salts, we identified the purity specifications for battery-grade lithium carbonate, the most widely used lithium salt. For the silica, we wanted it to be used as a cement additive, so we did cement reactivity tests and eventually created cubes of cement from it for strength testing using industrial methods. For aluminum, we targeted smelter-grade aluminum. If any product didn’t meet the target specs, you’d end up with a waste stream.”

The researchers then developed a process to reuse the ammonium fluoride and water that starts the reaction.

“We’re able to dissolve the rock with the spodumene in it, and that liberates all the elements, including the aluminum and lithium,” Chiang says. “The silica is in the solution, but on the way to making ammonium fluoride, ammonia gas also comes off. If that ammonia gas is then reapplied, it precipitates the silica again. That sequence gives us back the starting ammonium fluoride. That’s why it’s a circular process.”

The researchers successfully processed 17 different spodumene rock sources, showing its widespread applicability using rocks around the world.

“You’ve heard of nose-to-tail eating?” Chiang says. “We refer to this as nose-to-tail mining. Our researchers came to MIT to look for impactful problems to work on in sustainability. With their skill sets, it was just a matter of setting them loose on this problem. We went through all these steps, and for each one, I’d just say, ‘Can you do this next step?’ And a week or two later they’d say, ‘Okay, we’ve shown we can do that.’ That’s how this entire process got built.”

Scaling the process

Chiang further challenged his research team to evaluate the commercial feasibility of their new system.

“Once we had these core operations worked out, Yet encouraged us to do some math,” Mowbray explains. “Is there enough spodumene in the world to supply 100 terrawatt-hours of battery production? The follow up was: If you supply all the world’s batteries with this process, what are the volumes of the co-products? Do they match global commodity markets? Then we started looking at the cost of the reagents, the cost of the energy, equipment. We started gaining conviction that this could have a big impact.”

The work has special significance for Mowbray, who grew up in a historic mining town in rural British Columbia.

The researchers worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to spin out their company, Rock Zero, which is now located at The Engine and scaling up the system.

“We believe this approach is the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium not only out of hard rock, but period,” Chiang says. “That’s what’s motivating us to scale this. It will enable the energy transition through batteries that use lithium. This was one of the goals of The Climate Project at MIT — to work on projects that, within a short number of years, could transition from the lab to commercialization and impact.”

The work was supported, in part, by the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the MIT Climate Grant Challenges program, and the National Science Foundation. The work made use of MIT.nano facilities.

A new sensor could enable earlier detection of bladder cancer

Using a catheter coated with carbon nanotubes, researchers can detect biomarkers produced by cancer cells in the bladder.

Every year, about 85,000 Americans are diagnosed with bladder cancer. While treatment is often successful, bladder cancer has one of the highest rates of recurrence of any cancer: Following treatment, about 50 percent of patients develop tumors again within the next five years. This makes it one of the most expensive cancers for society to treat.

MIT researchers have now developed a new way to regularly monitor those patients, which could enable regrowing tumors to be detected much earlier. Using a catheter coated with specialized nanosensors, the team showed that they could detect very low levels of a protein produced by bladder cancer cells and image their location in tissue.

The researchers calculate that this sensing approach is nearly 50,000 times more sensitive than urinalysis, an approach that has been used to monitor bladder cancer in patients. In an animal study, they showed that fluorescent signals produced by the sensors can be used to pinpoint the location of the tumor within the lining of the bladder, providing a chemical image.

“It’s like a camera for molecules instead of light,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “If you have a billion nanosensors in an array, you can use them to make a chemical image that helps you locate their source.” 

Strano is the senior author of the study, which appears today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Wonjun Yim, a Schmidt Science postdoc, and Hohyung Kang, an MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper. Other authors include MIT graduate student Marco Machado, undergraduate student Maeve McGinnis, and postdoc Byungha Kang.

“Chemical images”

The new detection approach is based on carbon nanotubes — hollow, nanometer-thick cylinders made of carbon that naturally fluoresce when exposed to laser light. Over the past 10 years, Strano’s lab has shown that these nanotubes can be customized to sense different molecules by coating them with “synthetic antibodies” — polymers that can be designed to interact with a specific target.

When the target analytes are present, their interaction with the synthetic antibodies causes the carbon nanotubes to shift the wavelength or change the fluorescent intensity that they produce. Strano’s lab has previously developed about two dozen different sensors that can detect different targets, including hydrogen peroxide, riboflavin, and viral proteins.

For the new study, the researchers designed a sensor that could detect a protein known as nuclear matrix protein 22 (NMP-22), which is already FDA-approved for use as a biomarker for bladder cancer. NMP-22 can be detected in urine samples, but it is often significantly diluted, degraded, and cleared after secretion. This means that tumors can only be detected once they have reached more advanced stages.

To enable earlier detection, the MIT team sought a way to deploy their sensors inside the bladder, where they could detect NMP-22 near the tumor at locally elevated concentrations. The device they designed consists of a urinary catheter coated with nanotubes that can sense NMP-22. The catheter also contains a tiny device known as a ball lens, located within the tip of the catheter. 

This lens rotates 360 degrees, emitting laser light and then absorbing the fluorescent light emitted by the nanosensors. By analyzing the color and location of these fluorescent signals, the researchers can map the location of any biomarker that is detected.

These chemical images can reveal not only whether the biomarker is present, but also the location of the cancerous cells.

“If you are scanning over a region of tissue, you would like to know not just that there is a signal indicating that a tumor is there, but also its location so that you can treat it or perform a biopsy,” Strano says. “Before an early-stage tumor breaks through the urothelium so that it’s visible, it’s under the surface but still emitting chemical signals that can be imaged. When a chemical hits the catheter, we don’t just detect its presence, but we collect a map that pinpoints its location.”

Tests in animal bladders showed that this type of detection can be 180 times more sensitive than performing a conventional urinalysis because it detects biomarkers directly where they are produced in the bladder, rather than measuring them later in dilute fluids such as urine, where their concentration is much lower. This high degree of sensitivity would allow the sensors to detect signals from a tumor as small as 16 square millimeters, the researchers say.

Earlier detection

Researchers in Strano’s lab are now working on designing a more compact version of their prototype imaging system, so that it could be used more easily at a doctor’s office. They also hope to incorporate their sensors into a type of catheter known as a cystoscope, which has a camera attached and is used to visualize tumors in the lining of the bladder. 

Currently, patients who have been treated for bladder cancer undergo cystoscopy annually, or in some cases even more often, to monitor for cancer recurrence. The new MIT diagnostics should be able to detect recurring tumors earlier than cystoscopy, making them easier to treat and cutting down on the costs of treatment and monitoring, the researchers say.

“What we’re looking for is something that could be faster and more effective. It could be used right in a doctor’s office, and it could make that screening more efficient and less invasive, with much lower cost. The goal is to be able to detect potential tumors much earlier,” Strano says. 

“This paper is exciting because it shows how diagnostics can be more effective when the sensor is brought to the individual,” says Daniel Heller, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, who was not involved in the research. “Strano and colleagues demonstrated that a carbon nanotube-based nanosensor technology can be used to monitor a cancer right where it is, improving the speed of cancer detection, and potentially enabling the improvement of cancer treatment.”

This approach could also be integrated with endoscopy to detect other types of cancer or other diseases, such as cardiovascular or gastrointestinal diseases, by swapping out the nanosensors attached to the catheter.

“The beauty of polymer chemistry is that if we understand the molecular structures of target biomarkers and the design principles of binding sites, we can develop new sensors tailored to different diseases,” Yim says. “You can imagine if these sensors were integrated onto the catheter, they could reveal invisible biomarkers that current endoscopic procedures miss, opening the door to detecting many other diseases in the future.”

The research was funded by the Bridge Project of the Koch Institute and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a Schmidt Science Fellowship, the MIT UROP Program, Mathworks Inc., and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Media Advisory: MIT to establish regional quantum hub

With $25 million investment from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, MIT to build a new shared-use facility to serve as a statewide quantum toolbox.

• MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, which will be open to researchers across the region. 
• With the new funding from the state, which will match federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute aims to begin construction on the QSL facility this summer. 
• The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains, including life sciences and national defense.

Quantum technologies promise transformative changes in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration. But how do we ensure Massachusetts stays on the leading edge of our nation’s coming quantum leap? Doing so is vital to the prosperity and security of our Commonwealth and country, serving to protect and advance America’s technological leadership in a world that has been upended by geopolitical rivalries.   

On Thursday, May 28, Governor Maura Healey joined President Sally Kornbluth at MIT to announce a new effort aimed at establishing Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and catalyzing next generation quantum technologies. MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a new shared-use facility that will serve as a quantum toolbox for the region, aimed at accelerating quantum research, innovation, and growth in this critical field.

The QSL seeks to be the first facility in the world to bring together state‑of‑the‑art quantum computers with quantum sensors and peripherals, joined by quantum interconnects (physical channels that transfer quantum information). The facility will provide researchers from MIT and other institutions hands‑on access to significant quantum hardware and specialized experimental capabilities that are necessary to achieve the full transformative potential of quantum science and engineering. 

Thanks to a $25 million investment from the state, which will match a portion of the federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute is now in a position to move forward as early as this summer with construction on the QSL facility, positioning the region to dominate the next generation of quantum research, according to Institute officials. The Commonwealth’s investment adds to MIT’s own financial commitment, as well as generous philanthropic support from Thomas Tull.

“Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent anywhere in the world, working on a range of potential applications. Through the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we will help position Massachusetts to lead the next era of quantum technologies,” says Kornbluth. “This facility will serve those at the edges of our wildest imaginations in physics and quantum computing, yes. But it will also equip the talent in our region -- and ultimately, our nation -- to push our knowledge to new limits, and new innovations.” 

The QSL will be located at Building 39 on the MIT campus and will serve as a multi-disciplinary quantum hub with modern experimental infrastructure. Because quantum research involves the creation and study of coherent phenomena in systems that are isolated from the rest of the universe, it must take place in a highly controlled environment. Work is already underway in Building 39, with significant investments by MIT, to upgrade the physical infrastructure for these unique demands. The state’s support will supercharge this work and allow for the transformation of the lab into a hub for scientists across the region working on next-generation quantum technologies, startup applications, defense and health tech, and more. 

“Our region has unparalleled strengths in science-intensive innovations and tough tech breakthroughs that combine engineering, science, and computing,” notes Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost. “With the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we aim to arm Massachusetts with the compute power and integrated platforms needed to lead the coming era of quantum technologies.”

By the numbers 

The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains. As a shared-use facility, the QSL is being developed with the underlying mission of returning broad scientific, workforce, and economic benefit to the public. 

For example, quantum technologies provide significant opportunities in the fields of life sciences and defense technologies, which are $50 billion contributors to the Massachusetts economy, with dozens of startups working in the area. During a time of increased economic anxiety and labor market concerns, investing in foundational quantum facilities will infuse our region with new job opportunities, in academic research institutions, startups and more. Construction on the QSL facility alone is anticipated to create over 150 full-time, on-site construction jobs, plus another 75 to 100 jobs across the Commonwealth in supply chain and professional services supporting the project. 

Startups from MIT are also a key driver of the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem; in 2015, Sloan Professors Edward Roberts and Fiona Murray published a report detailing how the Institute’s alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 30,000 active companies, employing 4.6 million people, and generating annual global revenues of $1.9 trillion, a figure greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s 10th-largest economy, as of 2014. The QSL facility will provide the necessary equipment and facilities for startups working on quantum technologies, thereby strengthening the region’s innovation economy. 

“The new QSL will introduce modern experimental infrastructure to quantum research at MIT and beyond, allowing us to scale experiments and expand into critical domains in disciplines such as biology and chemistry, where we see enormous innovative potential,” explains Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research. “As the new physical home of the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT), the QSL will serve not only as an on-campus incubator, but more broadly, a regional hub to catalyze quantum innovation, growth, and investment in this critical R&D sector for the Commonwealth.” 

One floor of the facility will allow for development of radio-frequency (RF) electronics for controlling and interfacing with quantum systems. The QSL will also support researchers in the creation of customized quantum experiments with advanced high-frequency packages, which are required to protect quantum data in real-world applications. The facility will also develop the associated THz electronics needed by advanced quantum systems. 

A history of future-focused plays

Nearly a decade ago, MIT made a similarly big bet on nanotechnology, developing MIT.nano — a state-of-the-art, shared-use facility with more than 200 tools and instruments that support nanoscale discovery and innovation through imaging, fabrication, characterization, and prototyping. Set in the heart of campus in the Lisa T. Su Building, MIT.nano is home to a thriving research community, an industry consortium, and a startup accelerator. More than a fifth of the 1,500 users of MIT.nano come from outside of MIT, and half of the companies in its START.nano accelerator have had non-MIT founders.

The QSL will also complement the capabilities of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s SQUILL Foundry, a quantum fabrication hub for superconducting qubit systems that serves researchers across Massachusetts and the nation free of charge.

MIT Corporation elects 10 term members, two life members for 2026

The term members will each serve five years on MIT’s board of trustees.

The MIT Corporation — the Institute’s board of trustees — has elected 10 full-term members, who will serve five-year terms, and two life members. Corporation Chair Mark P. Gorenberg ’76 announced the election results today.

The full-term members are: Kate A. Bergeron, Elizabeth Choe, Kevin B. Churchwell, Stephen P. DeFalco, Bennett W. Golub, Pearl S. Huang, Steve Isakowitz, Adrianna C. Ma, Pamela Melroy, and Alex Morcos. The life members are Eran Broshy and Ray A. Rothrock. Gorenberg was also re-elected as Corporation chair.

David L. Fung ’85, the 2026-2027 president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT, will also join the Corporation as an ex officio member. He succeeds Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88.

As of July 1, 2026, the Corporation will consist of 75 distinguished leaders in education, science, engineering, and industry. Of those, 22 are life members and eight are ex officio. An additional 33 individuals are life members emeritus.

The 10 new term members are:

Kate A. Bergeron ’93, MBA ’13, vice president of hardware engineering at Apple, Inc.

Bergeron joined Apple in 2002 as a senior mechanical engineer and has served as vice president of hardware engineering since 2014. Previously, she was senior director for ecosystem products and technologies and senior director of Macintosh product design. Bergeron co-developed the course MIT D-Lab: Design for Scale, which she co-taught from 2013 to 2017. Earlier in her career, she worked as a mechanical engineer at EM Designs and at the Palo Alto Design Group (now Flextronics International Ltd.). She has regularly been named by Business Insider as one of the most powerful female engineers in the world and was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2022.

Elizabeth Choe ’13, PhD ’25, director of AI strategy for translational medicine at AstraZeneca 

At AstraZeneca, Choe oversees the deployment of biomedical deep-learning models for cancer drug development and leads upskilling programs for biologists and clinicians. As an MIT PhD student, she worked on brain cancer therapies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she worked in digital media in several roles: leading MIT+K12 Videos, producing media for National Geographic and the National Institutes of Health, designing global online teacher training programs at the MIT Media Lab’s Learning Initiative, and serving as assistant director of communications in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Throughout her graduate studies, she was actively involved in campus leadership, serving as a graduate resident advisor and participating in the Graduate Student Council, the Presidential Search Committee, and other groups.

Kevin B. Churchwell ’83, CEO of Boston Children’s Hospital

At Boston Children’s Hospital, Churchwell leads an organization dedicated to advancing child health through clinical care, research and innovation, medical education, and community engagement. Since joining the hospital in 2013 as chief operating officer and executive vice president of health affairs, he led a transformation that significantly reduced safety events affecting patients and employees. Earlier, Churchwell served as CEO of Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington and CEO and executive director of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He is currently a professor of pediatric anesthesia and the Robert and Dana Smith Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School.

Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, executive chair of Creation Technologies

Before assuming his current role, DeFalco served as chairman and CEO at Creation Technologies, an electronics manufacturing services provider, for six years. Prior to that, he was a partner at Lindsay Goldberg Private Equity, following a role as president and CEO of Crane Currency. DeFalco has also held CEO roles at MDS, a global life sciences company; Senseonics, a diabetes care company, where he is still chairman; and PathoGenetix. He was also president of PerkinElmer Instruments, a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, and a product development leader at IBM.

Bennett W. Golub ’79, SM ’82, PhD ’84, co-founder of and senior advisor at BlackRock

In 1988, Golub was one of eight people to start the global asset management company BlackRock, Inc; he stepped down from his day-to-day activities in 2022 to assume a part-time role of senior policy advisor. Formerly, he served as chief risk officer with responsibilities that included investment, counterparty, technology, and operational risk, and he chaired BlackRock’s Enterprise Risk Management Committee. Beginning in 1995, he was co-head and founder of BlackRock Solutions, the company’s risk advisory business. He also served as the acting CEO of Trepp, LLC. and as vice president at The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse).

Pearl S. Huang ’80, CEO and president of Dunad Therapeutics, Inc.

Huang has decades of experience spanning the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, with oversight across early drug discovery and development, translational research, and alliance management. Prior to Dunad, she was CEO and president of Cygnal Therapeutics, founded by Flagship Pioneering, where she was also a venture partner. Earlier, she held leadership roles as senior vice president of therapeutic modalities at Roche; vice president and global head of discovery partnerships with academia at GSK; and vice president, oncology franchise integrator, at Merck. She was also a founder and acting chief scientific officer of Beigene. 

Steve Isakowitz ’83, SM ’84, former CEO and president of the Aerospace Corporation

Throughout his career, Isakowitz has worked across the public and private sectors to advance U.S. leadership in space. At the Aerospace Corporation, he led a strategic transformation of the organization to address the rapid commercialization of the space sector, the emergence of space as a warfighting domain, and the need for faster, more agile technical execution. Before that, he held leadership positions as chief technology officer at Virgin Galactic, and later president of the company’s space ventures business; chief financial officer at the U.S. Department of Energy; and deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA. He also served in roles at the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

Adrianna C. Ma ’95, MEng ’96, operating partner at Index Ventures

At Index Ventures, Ma oversees operations, facilitates the investment process, and is responsible for fundraising and capital partnering. Previously, she was a managing partner of the investment firm the Fremont Group, a managing director of General Atlantic, and a technology mergers and acquisitions banker at Morgan Stanley. At the Fremont Group, she oversaw a portfolio of actively managed funds, public securities, and private co-investments; chaired the investment committee; and assisted with Fremont’s direct private equity investments. During her 10 years at General Atlantic, she led investments in, and served on the boards of, growth-stage technology companies around the world. At Morgan Stanley, she focused on technology-related mergers and acquisitions.

Pamela Melroy SM ’84, president and managing partner of Melroy and Hollett Technology Partners

As deputy administrator of NASA, Melroy was responsible for laying the agency’s vision and representing NASA to the executive office of the president and others. Before retiring from the U.S. Air Force in 2007, she logged more than 6,000 flight hours as a co-pilot, aircraft commander, instructor pilot, and test pilot. She is a veteran of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and Operation Just Cause. As a NASA astronaut, Melroy served as pilot on two space shuttle missions and was the mission commander on a third. She later took on a number of leadership roles, including at Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Nova Systems, and as an advisor to the Australian Space Agency.

Alex Morcos ’97, ’98, MEng ’98, co-founder of Chaincode Labs

Morcos co-founded Hudson River Trading in 2002, where he spent 10 years helping to build the quantitative trading firm. In 2014, he and fellow co-founder Suhas Daftuar started Chaincode Labs, a research and development center for Bitcoin, with a focus on open-source software and education. Recently, he applied his interest in emerging technologies to help found Fulcrum Science, a public good initiative to use AI to accelerate scientific research.

The two new life members are:

One stage at a time

Associate Professor Sara Brown, an accomplished theater set designer, teaches MIT students to create and think visually.

In a theater, the first thing the audience sees, and looks at the longest, is the stage. Even so, set design is something most of us know little about. Why does a set have its form and elements? How does it suit the performance? 

Consider a set that designer and MIT Associate Professor Sara Brown created in 2015, when the Brooklyn of Academy of Music adapted the canonical Japanese Noh play “Hagoromo,” turning it into a chamber opera with dance. 

Noh plays have a traditional structure and a crucial final transformation. In “Hagomoro,” an angel loses her cloak; a fisherman only reluctantly returns it, after the angel performs a ritual dance; the angel then ascends to the heavens. To focus on the main characters, Brown’s design featured three high walls surrounding center stage, with musicians and a chorus elevated behind them. 

“That set was a framing device more than anything else,” says Brown, who is also associate head of MIT Theater Arts within the Music and Theater Arts Section. “It lifted the musicians to a different plane, almost a heavenly place, so we have a heaven-and-Earth contrast. It allows the dancers to be seen against a plain backdrop. I didn’t want to lose their bodies in a sea of other bodies.”

For a formal play structure, then, Brown created a formal setting, with vertical layering suggestive of its contents. The trickiest part was lighting: Brown worked with the lighting designer Clifton Taylor to cut vents in the high walls for more light, while a rigging structure allowed them to spotlight dancers.

“Solving for those things is what makes the design,” Brown says. “There’s an artistic idea that underbeds everything, and there are practical considerations, which are as important, to make the piece work the way you want.”

Brown has designed sets at many major venues, tackling everything from “Carmen” to “Death of a Salesman” and debut productions. She ranges broadly across theatrical genres, while teaching classes that get MIT students thinking visually, intellectually, and creatively.

“Every play you’re working on should have something you grab onto as a creative challenge,” Brown says. That challenge is a collective one; it involves working with directors, performers, and design teams focused on lighting, sound, media, and costumes.

“In theater-making, you have to work in a community,” Brown emphasizes. “You might bump up against some rough edges, but you develop strategies to work with everybody with dignity, and that’s important.”

For her extensive work and teaching, Brown received tenure at MIT last year. 

Minnesota kind

Brown grew up in Minnesota, where her parents made sure the whole family grasped the value of humility. 

That experience, says Brown, has given her “a voice I carry with me that channels my family. The worst thing you could be where I grew up was too big for your britches. So it’s a voice that says, ‘What are you doing and what is the value of this?’ Because of my upbringing and my family, it’s a kind voice, but it is a self-reflection I try to carry with me.”

Brown received her BA from Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, then earned an MFA from the University of Virginia. At MIT, she has successfully combined professional set design with classroom teaching.

When Brown agrees to design the set for a production, the first thing she does is read the work in question. Then she sits down with the director to talk about it.

“Usually I’ll talk to the director after my first read of the play,” Brown says, citing the influence of a prominent U.S. set designer, the late Skip Mercier. “He said the only thing he brings to the first meeting is a love of the play. That is a great approach. You come understanding the material, wanting to find something within it you love and are excited to work on. You’re not closed; you’re there to discover what you have in common.” 

Indeed, Brown emphasizes how much she appreciates the collaborative aspects of theater. Inevitably, directors, designers, and actors will not agree on everything, but from sorting through those varying viewpoints, a production emerges. 

“It’s about serving the whole instead of being your personal project,” Brown says. “There will always be tension, but the idea is that through that tension, something is going to result that will be better than anything you could do by yourself.”

Brown does have some creative tendencies that reappear across productions. She will often opt for simplicity and adaptability on stage. For a production of “Pride and Prejudice” in Hartford, Connecticut, Brown designed a circular space at the front of the stage, with a slightly elevated rear area containing a piano and columns, allowing the set to shift among the many social settings of the work. 

Remarkably, another set Brown designed was actually used for two different plays running at the same time: “Death of a Salesman” and “Skeleton Crew,” a 2008 play about a closing auto plant in Detroit.

“A throughline in my work is that I gravitate to things that appear to have a simplicity and integrity or formalism, and then reveal different aspects of themselves, so they change over time,” Brown says. “But there is something essential in them. I’m drawn to simplicity, something without a lot of noise.”

“Where the good stuff is”

Still, Brown is always open to new challenges. She once designed the set for the contemporary play “The Lily’s Revenge,” which has five acts and requires the audience to move around in the theater.

“You have to figure out how to reconfigure the space in many different ways with the available materials and it has to feel like a big transformation,” Brown says. “Sometimes you’re working on things and don’t understand the totality of it [the production] until you step back and see it all together.”

Much as Brown works on a variety of theater projects, she also works with a variety of MIT students, from any given course of study, in the classroom. 

“It’s everybody, which is great,” Brown says. “There are students who did high school theater and people who have never seen a play.”

While teaching classes in the theater arts program — which include classes on set design, the foundations of design, and drawing for designers — Brown has also served as a faculty advisor for MIT Morningside Academy of Design, an interdisciplinary hub for design on campus. 

“There’s an underlying process of design that does unite disciplines,” Brown says. Consider set design and architecture, for instance:

“Sometimes in theater you’re trying to make spaces that actually express an inefficiency. You’re creating obstacles for people onstage,” Brown says. By contrast, architects might be trying to get people to flow efficiently through buildings. Still, she adds, “It’s the same process, with different results.” Besides, architects do try to design common spaces, whether atriums, lounges, or meeting rooms, where people stop and interact, mirroring set design to an extent.

In any case, Brown notes, when she is working with MIT students in design classes, she is often “reversing the idea that there’s something external you’re seeking that is the right answer, which I think they’re used to doing in other realms of education.”

Instead, in theater, whether it’s Brown’s own professional work, or a first-time design for a student, she says, “This is a process where you have to mine your interior life and think about what you want to bring out in this event that’s going to happen onstage. That can be scary, but that’s where the good stuff is.”

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A new short film from MIT Open Learning explores the origin, influence, and global reach of MIT OpenCourseWare, reflecting on its role in establishing MIT, in 2001, as the first higher education institution to make educational resources freely available to learners across the world.

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Video by MIT Open Learning | 15 minutes, 22 seconds