Without federal support for curiosity-driven research, the innovation and talent pipeline that has helped ensure our nation’s prosperity and safety could run dry, warned President Sally Kornbluth during a Washington Post Live event.
During "The Next Generation," a panel discussion moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb at The Washington Post’s “Building America Summit,” Kornbluth and Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow joined forces for a spirited discussion on the importance of curiosity-driven research, examining how universities are preparing the next generation of scientists to lead in America’s rapidly changing technological landscape.
“Many of the things we have in our everyday lives, whether they be medical advances, technological advances, a lot of these things came from 30, 40, 50 years of scientists just trying to figure out how things work,” emphasized Kornbluth.
Kornbluth pointed to MIT’s curriculum that focuses on teaching foundational skills that can be applied to a myriad of technological advances, skills that will be indispensable to leading in an AI-enabled world.
“I do not think that any of our traditional subjects are now outmoded [by AI]. It’s how you approach them,” said Kornbluth. “In our new curriculum, not only are we leaning into basic STEM fields. We really feel we have to resurrect some of the old, moral and civic and ethical educational goals much more strongly because we want all these kids that are learning to be leading-edge technologists, to come at it from a moral, civic and ethical perspective.”
Artificial intelligence
Key to Kornbluth’s mission is maintaining a human-centric approach to AI. Inspired by MIT’s motto, “mens et manus” (mind and hand), she shared: “We really want students to be able to use physical AI. We want our students to still be able to build things, but use AI as an augmentation tool.”
Kornbluth expressed the importance of teaching interested faculty and students how to best use AI as a tool and her commitment to uplifting student collaboration.
“We’re putting a big emphasis on things like teamwork. So, [students] need to be able to use these tools and come together towards goals, because you could imagine a situation that AI becomes your buddy instead of your study group. We don’t really want that to happen,” said Kornbluth.
Using AI effectively requires writing strong prompts. Kornbluth discussed how foundational knowledge in fields like math, physics, biology and chemistry, along with teaching students how to write and communicate clearly and effectively, enables students to use AI responsibly when it comes to applying these new technologies to scientific research.
Students need to be able “to take that knowledge and think about how they can use AI to the greatest good and also learn to write the right prompts,” said Kornbluth.
Kornbluth noted the MIT Sloan School of Management’s unique role in AI exploration. “It’s because the students are all coming with business experience and the demand out there in the field for them to have really strong AI knowledge is very high,” she said.
The impact of frozen funds
Federal funding fuels curiosity-driven research—the groundwork of medical, technological and countless scientific breakthroughs.
“It is very difficult to make a groundbreaking discovery that’s going to revolutionize human life because you want to do that. You really have to be figuring out how things work and traditionally that sort of research in this country has been funded by the government because it does not have an immediate return,” said Kornbluth.
Discussing issues with federal funding, Kornbluth said that although money has been appropriated for universities, it has not been released to them by and large.
“We’re really trying to figure out what the funding stream is going to be going forward,” said Kornbluth.
When asked about the consequences of these frozen funds, Kornbluth pointed to the long timeline required to develop life-saving treatments.
As one example, Kornbluth pointed to diabetes treatments.
“[Treatments] started with injections of insulin saving people and now it’s automated pumps and CGMs [Continuous Glucose Monitors],” said Kornbluth. “The next phase is going to be an actual functional cure, which is stem cell implantation—masking the cells so they’re not rejected by the immune system. But it takes a lot of basic work to be able to get there.”
“That [diabetes] is just one area. You can extrapolate that to cancer therapy,” said Kornbluth.
Investment in basic research can advance treatments such as immunotherapy.
“Immunotherapy is just in its infancy—it doesn’t work in every possible kind of cancer at this point. But all of the modifications that are being done now in basic science laboratories through to pharmaceutical companies and biotech are making it more and more broadly applicable so that pancreatic cancer is not absolutely a death sentence now,” Kornbluth emphasized.
National impact
Beyond research and AI, the president concluded by highlighting the strength of MIT’s student body, programs, and spinouts.
Kornbluth underscored the value of an MIT education for students and the greater economy.
Twenty percent of MIT’s class of 2029 were first-generation students. Education“is the best pathway to economic mobility,” said Kornbluth.
She continued: “MIT has spun out north of 30,000 companies. The economic impact of MIT on this country is equivalent to the 14th largest GDP in the world. We are having a huge impact on the economy and we’re producing the next generation of talent.”
Though MIT is highly selective, Kornbluth noted it is financially accessible through its free tuition program for students with parental incomes under $200,000. She further highlighted MIT for America, an initiative expanding access to calculus, a required course for institutions such as MIT, in under-resourced high schools nationwide.
Kornbluth and Crow concluded the panel by highlighting how their respective universities learn from one another.
“What we [ASU] learn from MIT is, where’s the edge of technology,” said Crow. “We learn how master technologists, and master scientists work in small groups.” For ASU, which has a student population of over 150,000, “ it’s instructive to learn and then operate at a different scale and in a different way. There’s a lot of back and forth,” he said.
Kornbluth expressed her hope for MIT to continue its longstanding tradition of research and education in service of the nation’s next 250 years.
“As a smaller private institution, we’re putting a much stronger footprint in how we can impact people well beyond the MIT walls,” said Kornbluth, “as well as having a scientific impact on society through our discoveries.”
Boleslaw Wyslouch steps down as director of Laboratory for Nuclear ScienceWyslouch remains the director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center and will continue research on heavy ion collisions.After more than 10 years at the helm of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), Boleslaw “Bolek” Wyslouch will step down to continue research in nuclear physics as director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center, a subgroup of LNS.
“LNS scientists, including Bolek himself, are world leaders in particle and nuclear physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “Bolek has ensured that LNS has flourished during his time as director, supporting our teams’ critical large-scale, international, collaborative research.”
The largest university-based program of its kind in the country, LNS was established in 1946 to provide support for basic research in the fields of nuclear and high-energy physics. Wyslouch has served as LNS director since 2015.
Since Bolek’s appointment as LNS director in 2015, he has helped significantly increase the Laboratory’s research volume. This growth reflects expansion across many areas of nuclear and particle physics, with LNS supporting several new faculty members. His vision was instrumental in bringing low-energy nuclear physics into the laboratory as a major new research area, the only subfield of nuclear physics in which the laboratory had not previously engaged.
“The leadership to inspire this capacity growth brought in young and vibrant faculty research groups, which helped lead to the expansion in LNS research volume,” says Rick Peterson, executive director of the lab. “Further, this new technical expertise facilitated new partnerships across the national laboratories, enabling LNS to develop and build a presence at all U.S.-based nuclear physics labs.” Most recently, LNS is engaged in an effort to compete for bids to the Department of Energy’s Genesis mission, a potential source of funding in the AI era.
During his tenure, LNS saw the successful bid for the National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, led by LNS scientists and supporting more than 25 physics and AI senior researchers at MIT and Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities. Last year, the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), part of LNS, also received a $20 million donation from the Leinweber Foundation to create a Leinweber Institute within CTP.
“Perhaps most importantly, Bolek led LNS toward a culture where each individual is valued for their own contributions, regardless of their status within a lab group,” says Peterson, adding that he developed new pathways for postdoc support and sponsored other community-building activities.
At Bates, Bolek has led and overseen a wide range of complex engineering and scientific projects. These include the development of advanced particle detectors for major international research facilities such as CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Jefferson Lab. Under his leadership, the laboratory established collaborations with industry partners on innovative technologies, including next-generation batteries, advanced accelerator systems, and medical applications of nuclear science. Through these efforts, the laboratory is helping advance both fundamental research and the development of technologies with broad scientific and societal impact.
In his own research, Wyslouch is one of the founders and leaders of the relativistic heavy ion program in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.
Wyslouch studies the interactions between subatomic particles by looking at the very energetic collisions of heavy ions. The earliest runs of the LHC showed that hot plasma strongly suppressed production of high-energy jets, redistributing the jet energy among slow particles. Wyslouch’s CMS group further discovered surprisingly strong collective effects in ion-ion collisions, as well as in proton-proton and proton-ion collisions.
Before joining CMS, Wyslouch conducted high-energy and nuclear experiments at CERN and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility, and took a leadership role at Brookhaven in creating PHOBOS, a project designed to create and study a quark-gluon plasma.
After completing his undergraduate work in physics at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in 1981, Wyslouch began his association with MIT as a doctoral student, earning a PhD in physics in 1987. After postdoctoral appointments at LNS and CERN, he joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Physics in 1991. He has also served as the head of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Division of the Department of Physics since 2013.
Wyslouch was recognized for his contribution to education at MIT with a 2004 William W. Buechner Teaching Prize. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013, and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.
A portable ultrasound system could make reliable breast imaging more accessibleThe new technology, which generates high-resolution, 3D images of breast tissue, requires no expertise to operate and could be used at home.For people at high risk of developing breast cancer, yearly mammograms may not be enough to detect tumors early. To make earlier diagnosis easier, an MIT team has developed portable detectors based on ultrasound, which could be used much more frequently.
In a new paper, the team reports that they have improved the resolution of the images produced by their system, making it easier to spot potential tumors, as well as cysts and microcalcifications. The researchers also created a user interface that makes it simple to use the ultrasound probe, even for people with no expertise in ultrasonography.
This system, they believe, could not only enable earlier detection, but also allow for long-term monitoring following breast cancer treatment — either in a doctor’s office or at home.
“At each time interval, the computer interface guides you to position the device in exactly the same location, which is important for the longitudinal monitoring of a given tissue. It’s very intuitive and quite easy to use,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.
Former MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem and MIT graduate students Shrihari Viswanath and Hyeokjun Yoon are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.
Higher-quality imaging
While many people receive annual mammograms to check for breast cancer, it is possible for cancer to develop in between these annual screenings. These cancers, known as interval cancers, tend to be more aggressive, and they account for 20 to 30 percent of all breast cancer cases.
After losing an aunt to an interval breast cancer in 2015, Dagdeviren was motivated to develop a screening technique that would be more effective on women with dense breast tissue and could be performed more often than mammography. She decided on ultrasound, which uses sound waves to create images of tissue. Ultrasounds are often used to follow up on abnormal mammograms, but current ultrasound technology requires large equipment and a trained operator.
Earlier this year, Dagdeviren’s lab published a study in which they demonstrated a small ultrasound probe attached to an acquisition and processing module that is a little larger than a smartphone. This compact system can create a 3D image of the entire breast by scanning just two or three locations.
In the new Nature Communications study, the researchers reported several advances that allow for higher resolution imaging and greater ease of use.
One key advance is the addition of a “backing layer” to the ultrasound transducer. This layer helps to contain and focus the ultrasound waves, improving the resolution and quality of the resulting images. It also increases the range of soundwave frequencies that can be absorbed, and reduces both acoustical noise and electrical noise, further enhancing the images.
“With the backing layer, the device produces more accurate and sharper images, with a wider operating range of frequencies,” Nayeem says.
To further improve the quality of the images, the researchers designed an algorithm that adaptively performs a process called beamforming. This algorithm allows the system to compensate for differences in the speed at which sound waves travel through different types of tissue, such as skin and fat.
“What we are trying to do is predict the speed of sound properties of the tissue you’re imaging, and then use that to reconstruct the image more accurately. We see up to a 10 percent improvement in the resolution just by applying this technique,” Viswanath says.
The researchers asked 10 volunteers, who were not experts in ultrasound technology, to use the system to try to identify small micro targets embedded in a “tissue phantom” — a gel-like material engineered to mimic human tissue. Participants had a much higher success rate locating the spheres when they used the new system than when they used a traditional ultrasound probe.
A user-friendly system
For the new version of this system, the researchers also created a user interface, displayed on a computer screen, that guides the user to place the probe in the correct location. This could be especially important for tracking progression of treatments such as neoadjuvent therapy, or long-term monitoring of known abnormalities such as fibroadenomas or microcalcifications.
In a trial with seven people, the researchers found that the users were able to accurately place the probe in the correct location each time they did a scan.
“Conventionally, you need an operator to move the probe around the breast, but we made a computer-vision interface for users to do it by themselves. This is very user-friendly and it shows live images on the screen,” Yoon says.
For future versions of this technology, the researchers hope to create an interface that could be used with a cellphone or tablet, making the system easier to carry. In addition to enabling earlier diagnosis, this type of system could make ultrasound more accessible to patients in areas where there aren’t enough trained ultrasound technicians, the researchers say.
Dagdeviren and some of her students now hope to form a company to work toward making the technology commercially available. While breast cancer diagnosis is their first target application, they hope to expand it to many others.
“The technology is so versatile that it can be used for any soft tissue imaging, from ovarian cancer to measuring endometriosis progression, or fetal monitoring,” Dagdeviren says.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the Lyda Hill Foundation, the MIT Media Lab Consortium, and a Tata Center Technology and Design Fellowship.
How urban design leads to better wellnessAn extensive study of U.S. cities identifies walkable neighborhoods, urban greenery, and access to amenities as key contributors to residents’ health.A new big-data analysis of the U.S. pinpoints how urban design aids the health of city residents — especially when cities provide walking opportunities, greenery, and mixed-use streets with a blend of commercial and residential activity.
The study examines tens of thousands of urban census-bureau tracts in the U.S., seeing how city features correlate with population health measures, while accounting for socioeconomic considerations as well.
“We found that on a very large scale, urban planning and design, such as the availability of different amenities and their spatial arrangement, plays a critical role in population health outomes,” says Winston Yap, a visiting scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab, a postdoc at Cornell University, and co-author of a new paper outlining the study’s findings.
While there is not one design template for all locations, short and well-connected blocks with a variety of amenities, as well as the strategic placement of parks, all help well-being — physiologically and psychologically.
“We usually think about physical health first, but we also found a high correlation between good design and mental health,” says Fabio Duarte, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. “If you are walking more, it is not only a matter of physical fitness, but gives people a chance to avoid isolation, have serendipitous meetings with people, and at least see there are others around.”
The paper, “Urban motifs associated with population health,” appears today in Nature Health. The authors are Yap; Duarte, who is associate director and a principal research scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab; postdocs Yu Zheng, Kee Moon Zhang, and Peng Luo, who is also an incoming assistant professor at the University of Iowa; Paolo Vineis, a professor at Imperial College, London; Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; and Filip Biljecki, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.
Only connect
The researchers say they conducted the analysis not just due to an interest in cities, but out of recognition that health care systems are often swamped, and preventative health measures are ever-more important.
“We wanted to do this study because health care systems around the world are overloaded,” Yan says. “There’s a lot of burden on health care systems, and there is a need not just for treatment but for prevention as well, for obesity, high cholesterol, depression and other mental health issues, and more.”
To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed 28,323 census tracts, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau along with health data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They then used geospatial data, including more than 8 million street view images, to see how urban form related to the health status of residents in those areas. The study accounts for socioeconomic factors and other variables in building an assessment of the relationship between design and health. The study confimed that by themselves, socioeconomic factors are associated with urban health disparities; it then examined the relative impact of differences in urban design in those different settings.
“By bringing together open demographic, health, and environmental data, the study highlights the importance of open data accessibility for planning healthy cities,” says Ratti.
The scholars also applied a graph deep-learning model to the data, an emerging machine-learning technique they used to help understand which key factors in urban design are most connected to health outcomes.
The research reveals that in some cases, rectangularity in city blocks, and “building spread,” meaning structures that cover the full size of their lots, can enhance wellness. Examples of this include Manhattan or Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, where mixed-use buildings on relatively short blocks create many amenities and a variety of walking routes. That said, circular and curving street forms can also work, as long as they feature a lot of interconnectedness as well.
Urban greenery is almost always a significant factor in urban wellness, with parks scoring high as a facet of city design that helps resident health. Beyond that, expanding the tree canopy can also help urban health outcomes.
The presence of cultural institutions and restaurants are also linked to general health, while access to health care amenities are understandably connected to physical health improvements. In general, access to points of interest, broadly defined, whether cultural or commercial, is a significant factor in abetting better health, in cities across the country.
“One of the major contributions of the study is that we look at not only one or two cities, but the entire United States,” Yap says. “In a large-scale study, we were trying to find patterns that were consistent across different urban contexts, as well as populations with different characteristics. Just using this data, we can predict very confidently the population health outcomes for a neighborhood.”
Knowing where to intervene
The research also provides a kind of road map for urban planners and city officials when it comes to policy decisions and local improvements. Among other things, the study suggests where cities might see the greatest return on investment in urban improvements, in health terms. Improvements in lower-income neighborhoods, on aggregate, may generate about four times the added health benefits than the same level of investment in better-off areas that already realize the benefits of good urban amenities.
“It’s important to know where to intervene,” Yan says.
“I think for me it shows how intertwined different policies are,” Duarte adds. “Some funding for urban development could have a direct influence on health, and could be more inexpensive than [direct spending on health].”
The researchers regard the study as just one empirical step in this domain. As they note, additional studies could observe changes over time, to further enhance our picture of the connection between urban design and health. Still, as the authors write in the paper, “we believe that our broad picture provides an overarching scaffolding for the understanding of the social and material determinants of health and can guide [further] analytical studies.”
The research received support from the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program of the National Research Foundation Singapore; the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); and the MIT Senseable City Lab consortium. It is part of the Largescale 3D Geospatial Data for Urban Analytics project, supported by the National University of Singapore.
The brain’s language network is more extensive than previously thoughtA new study reveals that parts of the brain located far from the canonical language-processing centers are also involved in language comprehension.For decades, neuroscientists have known that specific regions in the brain’s left hemisphere are responsible for processing language. However, a new study by MIT researchers shows that language processing also occurs in many other parts of the brain.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from more than 700 people, the researchers identified 17 additional regions of the brain that appear to play a role in language. These regions are scattered across the brain, including parts of the cerebellum, hippocampus, and cerebral cortex, and they make up about 5 percent of the total volume of the adult brain — about the size of a large strawberry.
“Even though there are all these distant components, it’s pretty restricted in terms of volume. You don’t need that much of the brain to do language,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research,and the senior author of the study.
Exactly how these regions contribute to language processing is still to be discovered, although the researchers have made some progress toward determining the functions of the cerebellar regions that they identified.
MIT postdoc Agata Wolna is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience. Other authors include Aaron Wright, a K. Lisa Yang Post-Baccalaureate Research Scholar at MIT; Colton Casto, a graduate student at Harvard University; Samuel Hutchinson, a graduate student at MIT; and Benjamin Lipkin PhD ’26.
Tracking language
The brain’s language processing centers include Broca’s area, first discovered in the 1800s, plus additional regions in the left frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Scientists have found that some of the corresponding areas of the right hemisphere also contribute to processing language, especially the social-emotional components of language.
There have also been hints that other parts of the brain might be involved in language processing. Early in her career, Fedorenko’s language studies often showed active brain regions outside of the canonical language centers, but she says she was discouraged from including them in her papers.
“When we initially started looking at language, in the first couple of papers, I tried to be comprehensive and include anything that seemed consistent across participants, and there was a huge amount of resistance,” she says. “People would say things like, ‘Well, we know those are not language areas, so please focus on the language areas.’”
In the new study, she and Wolna wanted to revisit those brain scans and see if they could systematically identify language regions outside of the standard language-processing areas.
To do that, they analyzed data from 772 people who had been scanned in Fedorenko’s lab since 2013. Each of these participants underwent a task known as a language localizer, which is used to determine the location of language processing areas for each subject.
During the test, participants read or listen to sentences as well as sequences of nonwords. For each person, the researchers measure the difference in strength of response when reading real sentences or nonsense sequences. The brain areas that work harder during the sentence condition are considered to be doing something relevant to language, especially if they respond while both reading and listening to sentences.
“It’s a very simple paradigm that lets you identify this core language system in individual brains,” Wolna says.
When searching for language areas, the researchers usually use a relatively strict statistical threshold. In this study, they relaxed the threshold and also used some targeted searches in subcortical areas, in hopes of finding all areas that may contribute to language processing.“We always see this frontal temporal network, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that there are other regions that are also critical for language processing,” Wolna says. “By using a laxer threshold and zooming in on areas with weak MRI signal, we tried to maximize the chances of finding small and weakly responsive regions outside of this left frontal temporal system.”
A widespread network
For about 490 of the participants, the researchers also had data on how their brain responded during a spatial working memory task — remembering the locations of flashing squares on a grid. This task engages a brain network called the multiple demand system, which does not overlap with the core language areas.
This task allowed the researchers to ask whether any of the newly identified language-sensitive regions specifically respond to language and not more general cognitive processes.
Of the 17 new language sites that were revealed by this study, five are located in the cerebellum, which is mainly involved in coordinating the body’s movement. In a study published earlier this year, researchers led by Casto found that three of those cerebellar regions also became engaged during some nonlinguistic cognitive tasks, which was also seen in the new study.
“Those areas that respond to both language and some other tasks could be really interesting and important because they may be doing something like integrating information from different cortical systems,” Fedorenko says.
They also found language-selective regions in the medial frontal cortex, the bottom surface of the left temporal lobe, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. The researchers now plan to further study how these brain regions might contribute to language processing.
“We can now test some ideas from past work, and also more rigorously characterize these regions across different kinds of language manipulations, and different kinds of nonlinguistic tasks, to try to understand what it is that they’re doing,” Fedorenko says.
The research was funded by the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, the McGovern Institute, MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence.
MIT-Kalaniyot program expands, with new cohort of scholars The innovative effort bringing researchers from Israel to campus keeps growing while enhancing community connections and academic inquiry.As a new academic year dawns, the MIT-Kalaniyot program is welcoming its second cohort of scholars to campus, expanding an innovative effort to build new connections between MIT and researchers from Israel.
In fall 2026, MIT-Kalaniyot has 11 new scholars arriving at MIT to pursue research, collaborating with Institute faculty across a wide variety of disciplines. They consist of seven new Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows and four new Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, who are faculty on leave from institutions in Israel.
It is another step forward for a program which, less than two years ago was still an idea on a drawing board. The project aims to enhance research and create stronger community ties — not only among those connected to the program, but across the MIT campus.
“The goals of the program are to build academic ties between MIT and Israel, alongside a strong, supportive community,” says Or Hen, an MIT nuclear physicist and a co-founder of MIT-Kalaniyot. “MIT has a mission that revolves around research, education, and entrepreneurship, and MIT-Kalaniyot strengthens MIT, to help meet that mission for the world.”
The scholars will be working on a wide range of topics, including mathematics, materials science, behavioral economics, architecture, modern history, chemistry, quantum computing, and computational methods for examining cellular activity.
“We designed Kalaniyot to strengthen MIT’s research and its community at the same time,” says Ernest Fraenkel, a professor of biological engineering and a co-founder of MIT-Kalaniyot. “We now have scholars in the program working in each of MIT’s five schools. The academic breadth shows our model is working.” MIT-Kalaniyot will also feature its first teaching fellow at the Institute, hosted by MIT’s History program.
MIT-Kalaniyot was founded by Hen and Fraenkel as a constructive response to discord over conflict in the Middle East. Hen is the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science; Fraenkel is the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.
Fraenkel and Hen credit multiple members of MIT’s community and upper administration for backing the MIT-Kalaniyot idea from the start, making it feasible for the program to launch.
“When we first shared the idea, we were very encouraged by the response from MIT’s senior leadership,” Fraenkel says. “They understood the value of a faculty-led effort, and their constructive response gave us confidence that our approach could be successful.”
“This would be impossible to do the way we’re doing it without the administration’s support,” Hen says. “The program is faculty-led and institution-backed. That’s what you want.”
Hen adds: “I think MIT today is home to one of the most, if not the most, accepting and welcoming communities for Israelis, and I can stand by that statement very strongly. The way our community grew these past years is remarkable.”
Embedded at MIT
MIT-Kalaniyot, named for a well-known flower that grows in Israel and other parts of the region, welcomed its first cohort of scholars to the MIT campus for the 2025-26 academic year. Hen and Fraenkel also give Tal Cohen, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, substantial credit for developing the concept.
Scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities are eligible to seek the MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships, which enable research, collaboration, and training at the Institute. The scholars come from a range of academic and personal backgrounds, including both Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.
The program is highly competitive, with many more applicants than positions currently available. Applicants are encouraged to identify in advance MIT faculty they would like to work with; accepted applicants then already have a “faculty host” lined up. Many of the new fellows will be working with researchers in established MIT labs, for instance.
“When they’re here, they are treated exactly like anybody else in an academic unit at MIT and that’s really important,” Fraenkel says. “They’re embedded in these places.”
The program is also intended to generate the kinds of community connections that help scholars flourish, both professionally and personally. MIT-Kalaniyot features weekly lunches, attended by people from the larger community, where scholars can forge connections and friendship.
The program also features informal academic talks and discussions, with the talks given by MIT researchers both within and outside of MIT-Kalaniyot. Hen, for one, has already seen the benefits of such events; one paper he has recently co-authored directly stemmed from discussions he had at a program event.
“The range of MIT faculty who stepped forward as hosts has been one of the most gratifying parts of the program,” Fraenkel says. “It shows that this is not confined to one field or one corner of the Institute. It is becoming part of MIT’s broader academic life.”
Adds Hen: “I think it sends a very strong and important message. We’re able to move forward at MIT and build collaborative partnerships with strong ties.”
An additional facet of the program is the potential impact of MIT-based research in practical, tangible ways. One of the 2025 fellows, a leading physician, focused her MIT work on new methods of breast cancer detection, and now, back in Israel, is working to apply those findings in active medical settings.
Plans for future growth
Having first taken root at MIT, the MIT-Kalaniyot concept is now spreading to other places. In the last two years, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California have implemented the concept, with other universities in the process of adopting it as well.
“This national movement all started by replicating the MIT model,” Hen says. “Each university then innovated in their own way. They start from the MIT approach, and then they adapt to what’s happening on their campus. They learn from us, we learn from them, and together we support a broad academic network.”
The progress at MIT and elsewhere has led Hen and Fraenkel to feel optimistic about the ongoing evolution of MIT-Kalaniyot.
“We started at a tense time on our campus, not really knowing what the future would hold, and it’s exceeded our hopes,” Fraenkel says. “Now we want Kalaniyot to become a recognized center at MIT, funding seed grants for research that wouldn’t happen any other way.”
While Fraenkel and Hen do not yet have a firm timetable for those developments, they regard them as being realistic.
“Now we see Kalaniyot as a program that helps MIT well beyond our community,” Hen says. After all, he observes, simply as a vehicle for research, the program has the potential to provide added capacity for MIT, as well as the further connections to top scholars being generated by the effort.
Indeed, Hen reflects, he is motivated the question: “How do we best support MIT in realizing its mission for the world?” Overall, he says, “I think that’s the ultimate goal of Kalaniyot. We do it in one way, other people can do it in other ways, and as long as you do net good, and support the MIT mission, we value and treasure that, and just want to be part of it.”
“I really believe this is the DNA of MIT,” Fraenkel says. “We’re all about finding practical solutions to society’s biggest problems. Kalaniyot brings extraordinary people here to do exactly that, and the whole Institute is stronger for it.”
MIT student teams win top honors in NASA competitionThree MIT teams took five top awards in the 2026 NASA RASC-AL Competition for designing critical elements for the moon base and future missions to Mars.Three teams comprising 35 students across eight different MIT departments and Wellesley College have been at work since fall 2025, designing critical early infrastructure elements that a moon base would require. This June, their designs were recognized with five awards at NASA’s 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Forum.
Among 75 submissions and 14 finalists, the MIT teams earned first and second place in the competition, as well as three best-in-theme awards. The Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm (ECLIPSE) team won first place overall and first in its theme category, lunar surface power. The communications and navigation constellation team, MELIORA, won second place overall and first in its theme category on Mars communications, position navigation and timing, which included a strategy for proving the design at the moon. And CHEESEBURGER, a campaign to mine and process lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks, won first in its theme category, lunar technology demonstrations.
“NASA spent the spring telling the world what critical early infrastructure their upcoming permanent moon base will need,” says George Lordos, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and in System Design and Management (SDM), who co-advised all three teams. “Over 30 MIT students spent this academic year designing much of the moon base — systems for generating, storing, and distributing power; robust systems for positioning, navigating, and communicating; and early experiments with essential technologies to live sustainably off the moon’s own dirt.”
A power grid for surviving lunar night and winter
The hardest constraint on NASA’s moon base is staying powered, because a failure in life-support power would doom the crew within hours. ECLIPSE is a reference design for a lunar grid engineered to stay up for more than 99.995 percent of the time — fewer than 27 minutes of downtime a year in the worst-case scenario, the standard demanded of the most critical data centers on Earth. It pairs two power sources that fail in different ways: banks of 20-meter solar masts in the sunlit highlands near the south pole, and, for the roughly 18-day stretch each year when the sun drops below the horizon, a pair of buried 20 kilowatt microreactors the team named CARROT, (Compact Autonomous Regolith-shielded Reactor Operating for Ten years). The CARROT reactor, a novel design developed independently by the ECLIPSE team, ended up being similar in design to NASA’s SR-1 reactor for the 2028 mission to Mars, both aiming to maximize speed-to-deployment.
“Burying each reactor 1.3 meters down shrinks the keep-out zone from kilometers to meters, so crews can work nearby, and it saves tons on required shielding mass,” says Taylor Hampson, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and ECLIPSE team co-lead.
The full design delivers an initial 120 kilowatts using a grid of buried aluminum cables and shielded direct-current power equipment. Laser-equipped rovers provide “Frontier Power” capability, beaming up to 10 kilowatts to sites beyond any cable, from a shadowed crater to a new outpost before its own grid exists. Patrick Riley, a graduate student in the Department of AeroAstro and ECLIPSE team co-lead, says the design’s point is to put reliability ahead of mass: “We sized it so the most likely failures never reach the moon base inhabitants, and so it scales from a first crew of six up to industrial demand without interrupting a commercial lunar economy.”
A network for exploring the moon and Mars, and calling home
MELIORA acts as the base’s relay and GPS. Although RASC-AL framed the communications, positioning, navigation, and timing competition sub-theme around Mars, the team also proposed a plan to validate their design in lunar geometry first, in step with the agency’s strategy to prove technology on the moon before extending it to Mars. To find the best design, the team ran a trade study across 5,764 candidate constellation geometries. The result grows from an initial three satellites to 23, returns more than 100 megabits per second to Earth-orbiting data networks over free-space optical links, and pins a user’s position to within 10 meters. For the Mars design, four relay satellites parked at gravitationally stable Lagrange points keep the link alive even during solar conjunction, the weeks when the sun sits between the two worlds and ordinarily cuts communication. On the surface, a user needs only a portable radio terminal and a chip-scale atomic clock — a timekeeper the size of a matchbox.
“You should never have to think about whether the network is there — it just is, the way you don’t think about a cell tower,” says Ekaterina Tiukhtikova, an undergraduate studying both AeroAstro and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and a MELIORA team co-lead. “We put almost all the complexity up in orbit, so everything on the surface stays portable and simple,” adds Clayton Lieberman, a graduate of the SDM program and team co-lead who wrote his thesis on MELIORA.
Making oxygen, metal, and bricks from lunar dirt
After power and communications, the third essential pillar of a lunar base is living off the land. The moon’s own regolith can supply oxygen to breathe and burn, metal to build with, and shielding to hide behind for protection from deadly radiation. CHEESEBURGER is a campaign of five robotic payloads that prove the supply chain one link at a time, followed by integration of the five into the first end-to-end lunar industry.
The payloads carry a kitchen’s worth of names: SWISS prospects for the richest ore, BRIOCHES digs and sorts the regolith, BACON casts it into bricks, GRILLED MEAT melts it electrically to pull out metal and oxygen, and AVOCADO is the robotic builder that stacks the products into structures, including interlocking Moon BRICCSS that shield a habitat from radiation. The food theme was born during a January team outing at Sandwich, Massachusetts. “Naming the prospector SWISS and the metal extractor GRILLED MEAT turned a wall of acronyms into something the whole team could enjoy,” says Cesar Meza, a graduate student in AeroAstro and CHEESEBURGER co-lead. “It sounds like a joke until you see that each acronym clearly describes a serious piece of hardware doing one job in the pipeline.”
Thirty students, eight departments, and three teams for one moon base
More than 30 students contributed across the teams, from AeroAstro, SDM, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), EECS, Mechanical Engineering (MechE), the Technology and Policy Program, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), along with a student from Wellesley College. Several student mentors and faculty advisors worked across more than one team, which is why ECLIPSE’s grid is sized to power CHEESEBURGER’s processing, CHEESEBURGER’s regolith handling is used to bury and shield ECLIPSE’s grid, and all three projects are designed to translate moon base lessons for a future mission to Mars. The teams were advised by Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems and interim department head of AeroAstro, who led ECLIPSE; Kerri Cahoy, the Sheila Evans Widnall Professor of Aerospace Engineering, who led MELIORA; Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro and a former NASA astronaut, who led CHEESEBURGER; Koroush Shirvan, Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies in Nuclear Science and Engineering, who co-advised ECLIPSE; and Lordos, who co-advised all three. Much of the day-to-day mentorship work is led by PhD student volunteers and runs through the MIT Space Resources Workshop, which Lordos founded in 2019.
“The winning teams demonstrated how academic innovation can support Artemis mission goals,” says Daniel Mazanek, RASC-AL program sponsor and senior space systems engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in NASA's announcement of the awards. “Their work highlights the important role student research plays in shaping future space exploration.”
NASA expects astronauts living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s — the window ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER were designed for. The picture the three teams had worked toward is unified: a crew at the lunar south pole, the lights on through the winter night, the network always up, and the first oxygen and bricks coming out of the ground beneath them.
“A permanent base is no longer a slide in a strategy deck; NASA begins landing the first elements in 2027,” says de Weck. “Studies like these three let the agency see, before the concrete sets, how its power, communications, and resource choices depend on one another. That is precisely when independent, integrated architecture work has the most influence on the real plan.”
RASC-AL is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA. MIT has a long record in NASA’s student design competitions, with recent winning teams including the HYDRATION Mars water production system, the Pale Red Dot Mars homesteading architecture, the deployable lunar tower MELLTT, the MARTEMIS lunar Mars analog campaign, the MAPLE autonomous lunar robot pathfinding system, the CERBERUZ lunar recycling project, and the THERMOS cryogenic fluid management system. This work was supported in part by NASA, the Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop. One student was supported by a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity Fellowship.
The full teams:
ECLIPSE — Team leads: Taylor Hampson (graduate student, Nuclear Science and Engineering) and Patrick Riley (graduate student, AeroAstro). Reactor team: Liliana Arias, Sydney Menne, Julian Rocher and Pavel Shilenko (graduate students, NSE). Power management and distribution team: Evrard Constant and Mary Foxen (graduate students, AeroAstro), Janhavi Joglekar and Asma Patel (undergraduate students, AeroAstro). Solar and architecture team: Zachary Dawson (graduate student, System Design and Management), Sreeja Akula and Ian Jimenez (undergraduate students, AeroAstro; EAPS), Yohan Lim (graduate student, AeroAstro/Technology and Policy Program), CJ Taglienti (graduate student, AeroAstro/MBA). Student co-advisors: Yana Charoenboonvivat, Lanie McKinney (AeroAstro), Palak Patel (MechE). Industry mentor: Sully Marigliano-Crevecoeur (Technetics). Faculty: Olivier de Weck (lead) and Jeffrey Hoffman (AeroAstro), George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM), and Koroush Shirvan (NSE).
MELIORA — Team leads: Clayton Lieberman and Katiyayni Balachandran (System Design and Management), Ekaterina Tiukhtikova (undergraduate, AeroAstro and EECS), Celvi Lisy (AeroAstro). Team members: Thomas Harrington and Zachary T. Barnes (SDM), Asael Acosta (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Student co-advisor: Lanie McKinnery (AeroAstro). Faculty: Kerri Cahoy (lead), Jeffrey Hoffman and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).
CHEESEBURGER — Team leads: Cesar Meza (graduate student, AeroAstro) and Elizabeth Romero (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Team members: Rachel Dunphy, Shreya Kothnur, Hailey Polson (undergraduates, AeroAstro), Christopher Kwon, Jose Soto, Lanie McKinney (graduate students, AeroAstro), Marvin Martinez (undergraduate, MechE), Ananda Santos Figueiredo (graduate student, Technology and Policy Program), Evangeline Haiqi Wang (undergraduate, Computer Science and Psychology, Wellesley College). Faculty: Jeffrey Hoffman (lead) and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).
MIT researchers advance toward greater bandwidth, more energy-efficient communicationsThe FUTUR-IC research program integrates electronics and photonics in microchip systems.An MIT-led research program aimed at creating future microsystems capable of sustainably transmitting data with greater bandwidth and higher efficiency than is possible today has made several significant advances since it was established in 2022.
These include the invention of devices within systems that can much more easily integrate electronics — manipulating data with electricity — with photonics, which does the same with light. The microsystems, the first of their kind, also promise to be cost-effective because, among other advantages, they can be manufactured using existing equipment in traditional electronics foundries and packaging houses.
“Our disruptive electronic-photonic integrated solutions will enable us to leap from [transmitting data at] hundreds of terabits per second to greater than 1 petabit per second,” said Anu Agarwal, who leads MIT’s FUTUR-IC, at an April webinar titled, “Shaping the Future of Semiconductors: Power, Performance, and Possibility.” The event was sponsored by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Startup Exchange.
An advanced system using co-packaged optics can provide improved bandwidth and energy savings compared to what is used today, which is electronics-only or pluggable optics.
Toward sustainability
The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging can be traced to about 500 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent lifetime emissions in 2021, and every year the world produces more than 50 million tons of electronic waste. Further, the huge data centers necessary for complex computations like on-demand video are growing, and will require close to 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.
“This is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue,” Agarwal has reiterated over the years. FUTUR-IC, funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, was created to address these resource-efficiency issues.
For example, integrating photonics with the electronics that underpin today’s microchips could address energy use because the transmission, or communication of data, using light is much more energy efficient. “Our mantra is to use electronics for computation and photonics for communication to bring this energy crisis under control,” says Agarwal.
Currently, however, it is difficult and expensive to connect electronic chips with their photonic counterparts within a single package. That’s partly because the supply-chain ecosystem for co-packaged optics is still immature.
New devices
Enter two new devices developed through FUTUR-IC aimed at making it easier — and less expensive — to integrate photonic chips with microchips. One, the evanescent coupler, was featured on the cover of Advanced Engineering Materials last year. Another, known as the graded index coupler (GRIN), was reported in the March 2026 print issue of the Journal of Physics: Photonics.
A third new coupler was developed by an MIT team led by Professor Juejun Hu of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. It was reported in a 2023 issue of Laser & Photonics Reviews. That work was supported by the Department of Energy.
The three couplers are the first optical equivalents of “solder bumps,” or the tiny dots of metal that allow chip-to-chip or chip-to-substrate connections for electron flow. Until this MIT work, there were no analogous “optical bump” options for photonics.
And if photonics is to be integrated with electronics, “you’ll need both metal bumps and optical bumps, because there are devices on your photonics chip that will require both an electrical signal and an optical signal,” says Drew Weninger PhD ’25, first author of the papers on both the evanescent and GRIN couplers. Weninger is now at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
As with electronics, many options of optical bumps will be necessary, as “each type has substantial trade-offs,” wrote Weninger and colleagues in a review article in Nature about coupler advances published earlier this year.
For example, the GRIN coupler can be used over a wider spectrum of light than is possible with the evanescent coupler, Weninger says. The evanescent coupler, however, is easier to fabricate and can be packed in tighter to form a higher number of connections.
Additional advances
FUTUR-IC is organized into three dimensions: Technology (the coupler work is a good example), Value Chain Innovation, and Workforce.
Under the Value Chain sector, researchers developed a new tool to support companies’ decisions toward sustainability. Earthster provides a visual model for quickly determining the energy, materials usage, and environmental sustainability across a company’s products. For example, says Agarwal, “looking at [Earthster], a supplier can tell right away their hot spots for carbon emissions, and start working to minimize them.”
FUTUR-IC has also developed several programs aimed at developing a future workforce for next-generation microchips. For example, “it is introducing an online course on semiconductor resource efficiency,” Agarwal says. “We also offer gamified digital learning and problem-based learning, plus a summer academy and a hands-on bootcamp.” For K-12 awareness, FUTUR-IC has created TED-Ed videos.
Agarwal concluded her April webinar by acknowledging the range of industries FUTUR-IC aims to help. “If you’re a packaging vendor, a materials vendor, or you are in the supply chain for data centers, FUTUR-IC can provide value.”
Additional authors of the paper on the GRIN coupler are Agarwal; Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Christian Duessel BS ’25, now at SiLC Technologies, a silicon photonics company; and Samuel Serna, professor of physics, photonics, and optical engineering at Bridgewater State University.
Additional authors of the Nature review paper are Serna; Luigi Ranno PhD ’25, now at Ayar Labs; Kimerling; and Agarwal.
Q&A: What is agentic AI today, and what do we want it to be?Computer scientist Phillip Isola cuts through the hype to explain how AI agents work and what the future might hold for this rapidly advancing technology.The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon.
To understand the fundamentals and potential impacts of these increasingly popular tools, MIT News spoke with Phillip Isola, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who studies the intelligence AI agents possess, as well as the underlying models and mechanisms that power agentic AI systems.
Q: What is agentic AI and how is it different from generative AI models like ChatGPT and Claude?
A: Agentic AI is AI that takes actions in the world. These actions could be a physical action, like robotic manipulation, or a digital action, like booking a flight. On the other hand, we think of generative AI as making up stories, poems, art, and images, rather than taking actions for us.
The word “agent” is just a brand name. It usually means AI that is going to help people interact with an application, a website, or the physical world. Most agents we encounter today are digital agents, like customer service agents you can talk with about product complaints.
Most companies that offer agents use the same few AI models under the hood and give them the ability to take actions and remember what happened. An agent starts with a fundamental generative AI system, like Claude, at the core. Then companies put different wrappers around that foundation model for their product or application. Those wrappers might be specific tools that agent can use, and those tools depend on the application. Maybe the agent has access to a calculator so it can solve math problems, or maybe it has access to a more complicated hard drive and operating system so it can remember a firm’s financial data and past business negotiations.
The biggest challenge in developing agentic AI comes from a lack of training data. If I want to create a system that can go online and book a flight for me, that seems pretty simple. But we don’t have a lot of data that spells out exactly how to do that — where to move the mouse, which buttons to click on, what to do if something goes wrong, or how to call somebody and negotiate about the price of the airline ticket. One way to train a system like this is to have the AI agent visit airline websites, try things out, and see what works and what doesn’t work. These environments are hard to model, so often the agent must learn by trial and error.
Q: What are some promising applications of agentic AI?
A: I think the area where we’ve seen the most success has been with coding agents. This is something that evolved from generative AI. People trained language models on code, and then they can predict what a human would do to solve a coding problem. In addition, an agent can learn to do this by going through a feedback loop where it tries out different solutions and checks to see if it got the answer right. As long as it can check the answer, the AI agent can perform this trial-and-error loop until it figures out a good strategy.
But there is always a balance between automating decision making versus simply assisting and informing humans. Analytical AI methods, like the systems that help predict possible outcomes of decisions, are not agentic in nature, but are very informative to human decision-makers. For cases that are either high-stakes or safety-critical, like medicine, security, high-level business policies, etc., the technology might not be ready for AI to completely automate those processes, or we might not even be comfortable with that.
Q: Are there risks we should be thinking about when using AI agents?
A: One big risk area comes from the fact that it is often very easy to get agents to do certain types of work for you. With coding agents, you can “vibe code” and just ask the agent to make a code for you, so you don’t have to do the hard work yourself. There is a big risk that, because it is so easy, people will not put enough effort into verifying that it is doing the right thing. Bugs will be introduced, private data will get leaked — this is already happening.
Agents aren’t perfect, in the sense that they might make mistakes because they are not well-trained and don’t know what to do. But even if they are very competent, if a human doesn’t use them appropriately or gives them an instruction that is too vague, the AI agent could make a mistake because the human made a mistake. If humans are less involved in thinking through all the consequences, I think we might be more prone to making those mistakes.
An additional aspect is the risk of de-skilling. It is unclear how far this will go, but when we are relying on agents to do our homework, our coding, and our math, we might lose the ability to do that ourselves, and we might lose that ability too soon because the technology is not yet ready to fully automate those processes.
Q: What does the future hold for agentic AI?
A: What we think of now as agentic AI refers to large language models using tools to interact with digital and physical systems. One obvious limitation is that, under the hood, these have the architecture of a language model and are trained on text data. To make even more powerful AI agents, we might need to model videos, physical forces, time series, radar scans, and other modalities. We might need to have models with fundamentally different architectures that can handle continuous data, high-dimensional data, stochastic data, and so on.
But, on the other hand, maybe an extremely good coding model could act as a puppeteer to interface with sensors, actuators, and web APIs? Perhaps, once you have a super-smart reasoning system that understands math, language, and code, you can give it a camera and a keyboard and it will figure out what to do in the spatial domain. Is the next wave of AI just going to be Claude with sensors, actuators, and tools, or is it going to be something built in a new way from the ground up? That’s the big question a lot of people in AI are grappling with right now.
Scientists find ozone depletion began decades before discovery of ozone holeUsing modern tools, they also determined that carbon tetrachloride, used as a dry-cleaning and degreasing agent as early as the 1930s, was at the root of early ozone loss.The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered in 1985, when scientists observed a severe depletion in the Earth’s protective layer of stratospheric ozone. Industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), then widely used as refrigerants, propellants, foam-blowing agents, and solvents, were at the root of the ozone depletion. After concerted global effort to phase out the use of CFCs, ozone today is recovering, especially in the Antarctic.
The discovery of the ozone hole was possible thanks, in part, to the measurement tools that were available at the time. Advances in those tools, along with satellites and other monitoring technologies, have since allowed scientists to track ozone’s recovery.
But what if today’s tech was available much earlier? Would scientists have been able to spot even earlier signs of human-induced ozone depletion? And if so, when would those first signs have popped up, and where?
MIT scientists now have some answers. The team, led by atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, has carried out a thought experiment in which they consider a hypothetical world where today’s atmospheric monitoring capabilities were available throughout the last century. In this scenario, they simulated the atmosphere’s chemistry through history and discovered not only when the earliest sign of ozone depletion would have been detectable, but also where, and why.
In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists suggest that the first signs of ozone depletion appeared as early as 1957 — about 30 years before the ozone hole was discovered. And, this first signal of ozone loss popped up not in the Antarctic, but in the upper stratosphere of the tropics. What’s more, the cause of this early depletion was not due to CFCs, but to another industrial chemical: carbon tetrachloride.
“What we’ve learned from textbooks is that CFCs result in ozone depletion,” says the study’s first author, Jian Guan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It turns out there was another compound that caused ozone depletion much earlier than CFCs. This was a big surprise.”
For Solomon, who was an early pioneer in the study of ozone’s effects on the atmosphere, and who was the first to show that CFCs were the main agent eroding Antarctic ozone, the new results were a complete shock.
“The fact that ozone depletion would have happened as early as the late 1950s, which is much earlier than I would have thought, just absolutely blew my mind,” says Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry at MIT. “This study shows it’s really important to keep monitoring so that we can fully understand how the atmosphere responds and recovers.”
The study’s MIT co-authors include Peidong Wang, Yaowei Li, and Kane Stone; along with Benjamin Santer of the University of East Anglia; Qiang Fu of the University of Washington; Rolando Garcia, Douglas Kinnison, and Jun Zhang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Jean-Francois Lamarque of Climate Modeling and Analysis LLC; and Gabriel Chiodo of the Spanish National Research Council.
Chlorine connection
Ozone is a highly reactive molecule, made from three oxygen atoms, that exists naturally in the upper layers of the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, ozone acts as a shield, absorbing the sun’s rays and reducing the harmful ultraviolet radiation that can reach the Earth’s surface.
In the late 1980s, after scientists first observed signs of ozone depletion in the Antarctic, Solomon led expeditions to the region to measure the stratosphere’s composition. Those measurements confirmed that ozone’s agent of destruction was CFCs — the chemicals which were used globally in refrigeration, air conditioning, and aerosol propellants, among other uses.
Specifically, Solomon measured higher-than-expected levels of chlorine dioxide in the Antarctic stratosphere. The presence of this molecule, in the same place where ozone depletion was observed, had only one chemical explanation: Ozone was being broken apart by rogue atoms of chlorine. At the time, chlorine-heavy CFCs were in wide use, and MIT chemist Mario Molina proposed that if CFCs drifted up to the stratosphere, photons from the sun could break apart the molecules and release atoms of chlorine, which would then be free to break apart ozone’s oxygen atoms.
Molina’s work, and Solomon’s measurements, were key in showing that CFCs could deplete ozone — a discovery that earned Molina a share of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Soon after, nearly every country in the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which ultimately led to the successful phase-out of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances. In recent years, as a result of that global cooperation, scientists have observed initial signs of ozone recovery.
“We know what we have now, and ozone is starting to recover,” Solomon says. “But no one has ever really documented where and when and why the first ozone depletion would have happened.”
Signal over noise
For their new study, Solomon, Guan, and their colleagues took a “what-if” approach, posing the question: What if the past had the monitoring capabilities of the present? When would we have been able to detect the earliest sign of human-induced ozone depletion?
Today’s monitoring tools are sensitive to a certain signal to noise, meaning they can identify patterns of ozone loss that are more likely a “signal” of human-induced depletion (such as from CFCs), versus ozone loss that is due to “noise,” such as random fluctuations from weather and natural phenomena.
With this in mind, the team looked to reproduce the chemistry of the atmosphere over the last century to see whether they could see a signal over the noise, based on the sensitivity of today’s monitoring tools.
The team used 16 different model runs, each of which simulates varying conditions and dynamics of the atmosphere at various latitudes and altitudes, as well as the concentrations and interactions of ozone and other molecules. Ozone is affected by not only human-caused chemicals but also natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and El Niño weather patterns. Each model run simulates ozone’s response to these natural phenomena, which the team combined to establish a range of “noise,” or ozone depletion that likely is due to natural variability.
They added to each model the various industrial chemicals that were known to have been produced at various times over the last century.
“Year by year, we have estimates from industry of how much of these chemicals were made and sold globally, and the emissions of all these chemicals, which the models include,” Solomon explains. “And in the case of carbon tetrachloride, the really cool thing is, we also have ice core data.”
Ice cores are drilled-out cylinders of deeply buried ice, that had formed in the Antarctic and Arctic from the falling and layering of snow over hundreds of years. Ice cores contain the remnants of snow, as well as whatever trace chemicals in the atmosphere the snow originally fell through. Scientists can therefore use ice cores to estimate the composition of the atmosphere through history.
“We actually see in the ice cores that carbon tetrachloride starts increasing already by the 1940s,” Solomon notes.
The team incorporated industrial and ice core data into their models, then looked to see whether a signal of human-induced ozone loss stood out from the noise of natural fluctuations. Their analysis revealed that a signal did appear, as early as 1957. Not only did they see when the signal appeared, but also where: in the tropics, rather than the Antarctic.
The researchers say that human-induced ozone loss was likely occurring globally, but was easier to spot in the tropical upper stratosphere, since that is the region where the range of natural fluctuations is the smallest, and therefore where a signal can stand out better.
Finally, the analysis indicated that carbon tetrachloride, and not CFCs, was the cause of the earliest ozone depletion.
“That’s the only ozone-depleting substance that was increasing that early,” Solomon says. “We started using carbon tetrachloride in the 1930s as a dry-cleaning agent, and as a degreasing solvent. We didn’t start using CFCs until quite a bit later.”
Carbon tetrachloride has since been phased out of use in most of the world, initially due to its health concerns; the chemical can cause nervous system disorders with prolonged exposure and is a suspected carcinogen. Since the Montreal Protocol began to tightly limit its use in the 1990s, the molecule’s concentrations in the atmosphere have been on a decline. Still, Solomon says the new study highlights the need for vigilance in monitoring carbon tetrachloride, CFCs, and other ozone-depleting substances that may have been phased out but can still linger for decades.
“We’ve gone through a big effort to get rid of these chemicals,” Solomon says. “Don’t we have an obligation to keep monitoring to make sure the atmosphere responds the way we think it should?”
This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the European Commission.
Inaugural Music Technology Research Showcase celebrates work of new graduate program’s initial students Associate Professor Anna Huang delivers the keynote address, “In Search of Human-AI Resonance,” to a capacity crowd.The MIT Music Technology and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program — launched in fall 2024 as a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering (SoE) — presented its inaugural MIT Music Technology Research Showcase on May 13. The event played to a standing room-only house in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall and featured diverse and captivating research presentations and music performances.
The celebratory occasion featured MTC’s first five enrollees (all of whom were previously MIT undergraduates), alongside several PhD students and faculty. Each scholar presented inspiring exemplars of artful engineering that reflected the broader and burgeoning music technology scene at MIT.
The 90-minute event exhibited a broad array of research projects, including a real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvising agent is about to play on a piano; a sound-art installation based on noisy network communication; a hip-hop dance circle where music is generated from dancing; and the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to identify the musical tunes that our brains are imagining.
“A new space for exploration and insights”
An interplay of technical presentation with live performance, the showcase began with remarks from SHASS Dean and professor of philosophy Agustín Rayo, SOE Dean and professor of chemical engineering Paula Hammond, and MTC Director and professor of the practice of music Eran Egozy.
Rayo began, “The goal of this program is simple — for MIT to lead the world in music technology theory and application,” adding “it’s not just about making music with technology; it’s also about working across disciplines to help better shape the future of expression in an AI-driven world, all while reflecting MIT at its best.”
Rayo noted the graduate program was made possible in part by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building in 2025, which provided new classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces, and a dedicated music technology lab. He also credited the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing for its support for the graduate program.
Hammond followed: “As those in this room already know, music and engineering share some common roots. Both rely on mathematical precision and are informed by defined structures, rhythms, and frequencies. Both demand hard work and technical know-how, paired with inspiration and imagination, to create something entirely new. Given those congruities, it’s no surprise that so many faculty, students, and staff members across MIT are also accomplished musicians and artists.”
She continued, “Our music program is a gem. Only at MIT could we bring the top technologists and the top musicians together to create unique opportunities for collaboration. Here we have brought together faculty and students who identify strongly with both music and engineering to form a new space for exploration and insights. It’s a strong example of the collaborative culture that defines the Institute.”
Egozy called the event a “harmonious hybrid of concert and symposium,” and recollected, “it’s a little mind-boggling to see what our students have achieved in just one short and fast-paced year. While we originally debated the trade-offs between a one-year and a two-year master’s program, I think this cohort really showed us that we can make huge strides in learning and research abilities in a concentrated period of time.”
Student research on display
One of those students is Claire Southard ’25, SM ’26, who developed a machine-learning model used to identify musical notes hidden in EEG signals.
Southard explains, “every year, musicians are diagnosed with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, or experience injuries that prevent them from controlling their hands and bodies in the ways required to play their instruments. Because of this, too many musicians are forced to stop doing what they love. My work explores one strategy to help such musicians perform again by translating the music they’re trying to play directly from their brain activity — bypassing the need for motor control altogether. To do this, I trained machine-learning models to predict the music a person is imagining from their brain activity measured using EEG, and many of the predicted pieces were found to be recognizable representations of what the user imagined. By designing a system that allows musicians to create music regardless of their physical abilities, I hope this work helps bring a more accessible future for music performance closer to reality.”
Before joining MTC, Southard was initially unaware of the breadth, scope, and magnitude of what the program could offer for further pursuing and realizing her interests. “The MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program taught me so much about the possibilities at the intersection of STEM and the arts," she says. "When I first started the program, I honestly wasn’t sure what counted as ‘music technology.’ Through classes, research, and conversations with faculty, guest speakers, and peers, I learned the field was far broader and more fascinating than I could have previously imagined.”
She continues, “coming from a background in neuro- and computer science, many of my undergraduate projects happened entirely on devices. But this program allowed me to encounter more hands-on experiences, from conducting audio recordings to building electronic musical instruments from scratch.”
Another MTC graduate, and student speaker at the 2026 SHASS Advanced Degree Ceremony, Mariano Salcedo ’25, SM ’26, presented a custom web application allowing anyone to create unique emergent visuals that are driven by real-time streaming music. To accomplish this effect, Salcedo built algorithms that leverage the complex visual behavior of self-organized systems as the means toward an aesthetically synergetic end.
In his Advanced Degree Ceremony oration, Salcedo expressed his gratitude and admiration for the passionate people that he’s met not only in MTC, but at MIT overall. In an appropriately compassionate mode, he empathetically opined, “I think what times like this call from us is to lead the way in human and humane-centered technology, which means we don’t only just ask what we can build, but we also ask who is it going to affect, who is not going to affect? Who does it benefit?”
Music technology thriving at MIT
Associate Professor Anna Huang SM ’08 of MTA and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, through SCC), a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and one of the world’s leading researchers in collaborative human-AI music-making, echoed both Southard and Salcedo’s sentiments through her keynote presentation, “In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interaction.” A compelling and intimately conversational address, her speech emphasized the importance of centering the human musician in all that is done relating to AI, while also making efforts to include all musics of the world in its discourse at every opportunity.
With many of her family members in the audience, Huang reflected, “I have the privilege of being in both MIT Music and EECS — an interdisciplinary, shared space. What does it mean to build music technology in this context? We’re surrounded by extremely talented musicians, so we take this co-design approach: We work with these musicians, we go into the studio, and every week we try something. And the technology grows with the creative process. We’re always trying to push both of these forward, and it’s always on the edge. It’s very, very rewarding. It’s where I feel most at home.”
Huang also explained how this practice sets the stage for a new Studies in Music Technology subject that she will be co-teaching in the fall with recently appointed Professor of Theater Arts Grisha Coleman. Class 21M.369/569 (Tuning Attention: Creative Practices in Movement, Sound, and AI) proposes that the study of sound and movement practices can inform how we build and envision computational systems, focusing particularly on our relationship to AIs. It will introduce students to a range of musical practices in improvisation and somatics by way of motion-capture technologies, critical interaction design, generative modeling, and algorithms for interpretability and learning through human feedback.
All considered, the future of the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program is bright. Egozy says MTC admitted 10 master’s students for the 2026-27 academic year from over 100 applicants. Unlike this year’s class, next year’s students will not only include recent MIT undergraduate alumni, but also new faces to campus.
“Widening the pool to graduates of other schools and institutions will bring an extraordinary wealth of perspectives and experiences to the program. Additionally, all three shared faculty between MTA and EECS — including Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01, and Huang — are inviting new Music Technology PhD students to their labs by way of EECS,” Egozy says.
Embodying its mission, MTC is proving to be a vibrant, multidisciplinary program that attracts many kinds of students with a variety of career objectives from wide-ranging backgrounds.
“Despite their diversity, our students all possess a central commonality,” Egozy says, “not just a shared love for music, but also a deep desire to augment that passion by way of technology in a very warmhearted, humanitarian way.”
List of projects
Rachel Loh, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Visualizing the Internal State of Music Models for Live Human-AI Improvisation”
Noble Harasha, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Modeling Subjectivity and Collective Sensory Perception as Noisy, Analog Communication in Feedback-Driven Networks”
Z Chen, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Generative Music as a Catalyst for Social Choreography”
Nithya Shikarpur: “The Moving Drone: A Live Improvisation in the Context of Hindustani Music with the Human Voice, Generative models, and Loops”
Mariano Salcedo, Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Cellular Automata for Interactive Music Visualization”
Claire Southard, John Piscitello Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Decoding of Imagined Music”
Stephen Brade, Suwan Kim, Valerie Chen: “Whale, Cello (there?): A Musical Dialog between Cello and a Real-time Diffusion Model Trained on Whale Songs”
Two MIT faculty members named 2026 Pew Biomedical ScholarsCell biologist Whitney Henry and immunologist Harikesh Wong will receive four years of flexible funding to advance early-career research on ferroptosis and immune decision-making.Whitney Henry and Harikesh Wong have been named 2026 Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the 21-member class of early-career researchers, which includes the two MIT scientists as well as two alumni, on June 16. Each scholar will receive four years of funding to pursue cutting-edge research into human health and disease. Xin Gu PhD ’22 of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Christina Tringides ’15 of Rice University were also selected as scholars.
Henry, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences and a faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, will use the Pew scholarship to examine how a stress-induced cell death program called ferroptosis contributes to injury and regeneration in the liver. Wong, assistant professor of biology at MIT and core member at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, will use his award to investigate how groups of immune cells reach a “communal decision” about whether to tolerate or attack a particular target.
Whitney Henry
Henry’s research centers on ferroptosis — an iron-dependent form of regulated cell death — and its role in shaping cell fate and tissue remodeling. Her lab investigates why some cells can withstand stress while others cross the threshold for ferroptosis, focusing on the molecular, metabolic, and tissue-level cues that shape ferroptosis vulnerability. The work draws on chemical biology, metabolomics, functional genomics, and in vivo models. By defining the mechanisms that govern ferroptosis susceptibility, Henry’s group aims not only to identify novel therapies that target the most dangerous subpopulations of cancer cells, those that are highly metastatic and resistant to conventional treatment, but also to advance understanding of diseases in which ferroptosis drives tissue injury, fibrosis, or impaired repair.
Harikesh Wong
Wong investigates how groups of cells organize into networks that collectively process information and control immune responses within tissues. These networks must continually balance the body’s need to protect itself against pathogens and tumors with the need to preserve healthy tissue function. Combining the tools of immunology with high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, computational modeling, and gene manipulation, his lab seeks to map, model, and manipulate the cell-cell interactions that govern these decisions within intact tissues, revealing how subtle changes in multicellular organization and communication can shift immune responses toward pathogen clearance and tolerance, or toward autoimmunity, chronic inflammation, and cancer.
Pew scholars are chosen from applicants nominated by leading academic institutions across the United States. This year’s class of 21 was selected from 211 nominees. The incoming scholars join a legacy of more than 1,000 scientists supported by the program since 1985. During their time as scholars, they will meet annually with fellow Pew-funded scientists to build connections across a wide variety of disciplines.
“Scientific discovery is moving at a rapid pace, and now more than ever we need curious and creative researchers leading the charge,” says Lee Niswander, a 1995 Pew scholar and chair of the program’s national advisory committee. “These new biomedical scholars are prepared to meet that challenge, and I look forward to watching their research unfold.”
Care in the midst of pressureAnantha P. Chandrakasan is “Committed to Caring” for redefining mentorship through presence and perspective.In the early months of a PhD program, everything can feel urgent. Ideas move quickly, expectations feel high, and timelines, especially initial deadlines, may become heavy. In those moments, Professor Anantha P. Chandrakasan is there for his students, armed with steady mentorship and clear guidance to help them regain perspective and move forward with confidence.
Appointed provost of MIT in 2025, Chandrakasan is a pioneering researcher in low-power electronics, integrated circuits, and energy-efficient system design within MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His work has shaped how modern devices — from mobile systems to large-scale computing platforms — manage energy consumption and performance. Spanning circuits and systems for sensing, communication, and machine learning, his research focuses on pushing the limits of efficiency. Students note that his scholarship is defined by rigor, precision, and a forward-thinking approach, and that the same principles carry through to his mentorship.
One of the 18 faculty members within the 2025–27 Committed to Caring cohort, Chandrakasan is recognized for a style that meets students not just at the level of their research, but at the level of their experience. His guidance works to ground students, balancing ambition with steadiness, and precision with perspective. Across his lab and the broader MIT community, he has become known for a simple but clear pattern: When pressure rises, he is there to help.
Interrupting the pressure cycle
One student recalls their first semester at the Institute as a blur of excitement, but also of mounting stress. Given the opportunity to contribute to a conference-bound project, they pushed hard to meet a January submission deadline.
“I poured myself into the work, but as the deadline approached, it became clear that the project was taking longer than expected,” remembers the student. “I began to … worry that I might not finish in time.”
When Chandrakasan noticed, his response was not to continue with the current unsustainable pace of research, but to recalibrate it — adding both perspective and a support structure to help ground the work.
He connected the student with a more senior lab member, creating a steady channel for both technical troubleshooting and day-to-day guidance. “This not only helped me overcome research challenges, but also created a natural environment for me to engage in discussions and build relationships with lab members,” the student reflected.
Within Chandrakasan’s research group, mentorship is never confined to one-on-one advising. He actively builds structures that allow students to learn from one another, pairing newer members with more experienced researchers and encouraging organic collaboration across projects.
These connections serve a dual purpose. They accelerate technical growth, but they also reduce the isolation that can accompany early-stage research. By embedding students within a broader support network, he ensures that they are never navigating unfamiliar challenges entirely on their own.
One nominator describes this emphasis on camaraderie as a defining feature of the lab: an environment where independence is cultivated, but never at the expense of connection.
Redefining what counts
In addition to creating this support structure, Chandrakasan also reframed the overwhelmed student’s situation. Rather than treating the conference deadline as definitive, he reminded the student that one missed milestone would not determine the trajectory of their PhD, or of their career as a whole. “His thoughtful words and calm demeanor helped me regain my balance, both emotionally and academically,” noted the student.
It was a small shift in framing, but a consequential one. The pressure that had once felt absolute became part of a much larger perspective. Armed with that reassurance, the student recovered footing and ultimately completed the submission.
While this particular story of looming deadlines and stress is one student’s experience, it is a relatable one for graduate students. Within academic spaces, it is easy for tangible milestones — papers, conferences, and results — to become the primary measure of progress. Chandrakasan does not dismiss their importance, but he does encourage a broader view.
“There will always be another opportunity,” he tells students. This principle serves as a consistent baseline for how to engage with the work. The goal is not to remove challenges, but to ensure that the work can endure through them.
Chandrakasan’s advising philosophy centers on calibration: of expectations, goals, and how students interact with their academic work. “My technical advising is direct, because I believe clarity is a form of care,” shares Chandrakasan. In his eyes, precise feedback is one of the most meaningful forms of support a mentor can offer.
While his style is often candid, it is never harsh — honest feedback is softened by sincerity. Students describe an approach that is highly attuned to the individual, with Chandrakasan compromising, showing empathy, and adapting his teaching style to fit their needs. When asked, Chandrakasan shares that his advising technique is “always personal … focused on drawing out each student’s strengths, rather than imposing a single template of success.”
Students are encouraged to arrive at their own conclusions, with Chandrakasan shifting the focus from short-term fixes to long-term capability. “I help in creating space for students to think deeply, develop their own perspectives, and arrive at their own solutions,” he explains. This strategy “builds both independence and confidence.”
His mentorship extends beyond immediate outcomes. It shapes how students come to understand their own potential, how they navigate difficulty, and how they, in turn, show up for others. In a field driven by innovation and speed, Chandrakasan’s approach offers something grounding: a model of mentorship where rigor and care are not competing priorities, but mutually reinforcing ones.
Reflecting on their time in Chandrakasan’s lab, his student shared that “I learned that real mentorship is not just about solving problems — it’s about understanding the person behind them.”
“Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” by MIT Architecture alumnus and researcher Alexandros Haridis, on view at the MIT Keller Gallery through June 30, examines 20th- and 21st-century efforts to transform computing into a medium for creative production and aesthetic judgment in architecture and the applied arts. Drawing on philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and design computation, the exhibition translates algorithms, theories, and machine-learning systems into physical installations and interactive visualizations.
Q: What inspired “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” and what questions does it explore?
A: The conceptual origins of “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” emerged from three intersecting lines of research.
First, while completing my PhD in design and computation in the MIT Department of Architecture around 2022, I observed in real time how advances in data-driven machine learning — systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion — were rapidly entering public discussions about creativity, aesthetic judgment, design, and even high-profile art auctions.
At the same time, my own research was already focused on aesthetic judgment and evaluation, and it became increasingly clear to me that many of the questions presented publicly as “new” in relation to AI actually have a much longer history across the 20th century. For example, in the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a foundational event for the field of AI, creation and evaluation processes were identified as one of seven key dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research should address.
Second, the exhibition was influenced by research in design computation and shape grammars that investigates relationships between human insight and computation through rule-based methods, rather than purely data-driven learning. More recent interpretative studies of aesthetic theories — drawing from figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and even John von Neumann — have been especially important to me. These studies examine whether theories of aesthetic value and comparison articulated in philosophical and literary texts may reveal possibilities or limitations in contemporary models of digital computation and AI in architecture and design.
Finally, the exhibition was motivated by the use of design, fabrication, and data visualization as methods for interpreting mathematical concepts, algorithms, and “black box” machine-learning systems. Across disciplines, researchers increasingly use reconstruction and visualization techniques to make computational systems more tangible and interpretable — from neural network visualization in computer science to software reconstruction and digital fabrication in architecture and curatorial practice.
Q: How do you translate research on computation and aesthetics into an exhibition?
A: The approach of the exhibition is to ask what exactly in a particular research paper or book captures its most salient idea, and then use design to interpret that idea in a visual, spatial, and experiential format. Drawing on design techniques such as software reconstruction, physical making, and data visualization, the exhibition takes written sources that are dense with algorithmic ideas, abstract concepts, and mathematical formulas, and translates them into stories in space that include interaction, material form, and digital visualization.
The exhibition itself is organized around five thematic areas: Aesthetic Measure, Aesthetic Guidelines, Algorithmic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Appropriation, and Aesthetic Novelty. Each theme functions as a selective “window” into a distinct computational approach to aesthetic judgment drawn from a specific publication — a book or research paper. The titles of these themes are derived from concepts central to each publication. For example, “measure” refers to mathematician George Birkhoff’s work in the 1930s to quantify aesthetic value mathematically, while “novelty” examines how the machine learning system AICAN judges generated images according to a theory in cognitive aesthetics that balances familiarity and deviation from known artistic styles.
Across all five cases, the key insight is that design itself can function as a method of interpretative translation — a way of making visible, tangible, and experiential what traditional academic scholarship in technical domains typically communicates only through words and word-like representational devices, such as scientific diagrams and tables.
Q: What questions are you hoping to explore next?
A: “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” is conceived both as a research exhibition and as an ongoing platform for investigating how computational systems participate in processes of aesthetic judgment, generation, and transformation across architecture and the applied arts.
One of the central questions of the exhibition — and one that researchers across architecture, design, and engineering are increasingly focusing on — is computational evaluation beyond purely performative or functional requirements. This applies to many different design spaces, whether buildings, structural forms, or everyday products. The exhibition’s case studies suggest that many of these questions long predate current interest in computing and AI, and have been approached through a range of computational and theoretical models of evaluation since at least the early 20th century.
At the same time, I’m increasingly interested in how these ideas can move into broader applications related to the built environment. In particular, I am interested in how research connected to “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” can help designers and engineers better understand how computation — whether rule-based or data-driven — can inform us about what contributes positively to human experience in relation to the spaces and objects people inhabit and use.
Finally, a direction I continue to explore is the methodological role of design itself as an interpretative device. Through software reconstruction, visualization, and physical making, the exhibition uses design to translate opaque computational systems into more legible, tangible, and experiential artifacts. More broadly, this opens questions not only about mechanizing “beauty” or “taste” (the traditional preoccupation of aesthetic formalism in the 20th century), but also about how traditional forms of research scholarship and communication may evolve through spatial, visual, and public-facing formats.
Graphene can hold multiple states of superconductivity, a new study findsWhat’s more, the superconducting states get stronger under conditions expected to kill them.The ordinary graphite in pencil lead is proving to be surprisingly multifaceted at the microscale.
In a study appearing today in the journal Nature, MIT researchers report that a certain microscopic structure found in natural graphite can host multiple superconducting states. Superconductivity is an electronic state of matter in which electrons pair up and glide through a material with zero resistance.
While there are thousands of materials that are known to be superconductors, it is rare for one material to host multiple forms of superconductivity.
The researchers discovered the multiple superconducting states in atomically thin exfoliations of graphite, known as graphene. Specifically, graphene is a single-atom-thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged precisely in a microscopic lattice. The team made its discoveries in samples of rhombohedral graphene, which is a natural structure within graphite consisting of a stack of four or five graphene layers.
Interestingly, the researchers found that several of the new superconducting states in rhombohedral graphene are able to persist in the presence of a magnetic field, which normally kills superconductivity.
And in a further surprise, these superconducting states even get stronger when exposed to a magnetic field.
Overall, the findings reveal a new family of unconventional superconducting states in one seemingly simple material.
“People might assume that this is a simple, boring carbon material,” says Long Ju, the Lawrence C. and Sarah W. Biedenharn Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. “But we can control this material by tuning certain experimental ‘knobs,’ such as electrical voltages. This is how a simple physical material can exhibit so many different superconducting properties.”
It’s still unclear exactly how each of the multiple superconducting states arise, or how they are able to persist under a magnetic field, when normally superconductivity should fade.
“From a fundamental physics point of view, it’s very exotic that a magnetic field doesn’t kill superconductivity, and instead it boosts it,” Ju says. “We have provided a lot of experimental results and provided the nutrition that people can absorb to try to think about what’s going on here.”
The study’s MIT co-authors include co-first authors Junseok Seo and Shenyong Ye, together with Tonghang Han, Zhenghan Wu, Wei Xu, Jixiang Yang, Emily Aitken, Prayoga Liong, Phatthanon Pattanakanvijit, Zach Hadjri, and Mingda Li. External collaborators are co-first author Armel Cotten and members of Dominik Zumbuhl’s group at the University of Basel in Switzerland, plus others at Florida State University, the University of Florida, Gainesville, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.
Natural steps
Graphene and other atomically thin, two-dimensional materials can exhibit unexpected electronic, magnetic, thermal, and physical properties. And when two or more sheets of graphene are stacked and twisted at precise orientations, the “magic-angle” structure can suddenly host weird and exotic phenomena.
Ju’s group has been probing the exceptional properties of graphene. But rather than artificially stacking and twisting layers, they have looked for interesting behavior in naturally occurring graphene structures. In recent years, they have unearthed surprising electronic properties in rhombohedral graphene. This particular configuration consists of graphene layers stacked on top of each other, each one slightly offset from the last, similar to the steps in a staircase.
Rhombohedral graphene can be found naturally in ordinary graphite. But to find it first requires exfoliating a block of graphite (usually with Scotch tape), then searching the exfoliated sample for the telltale staircase-like pattern, which researchers can then isolate for further experimentation.
Using this approach, Ju and his colleagues have been able to isolate and probe samples of four- and five-layer rhombohedral graphene. They have so far discovered that the structure can host a rare, “chiral” form of superconductivity, as well as fractional electron charge, among other behavior.
In the flow
For their new study, the team took a slightly different approach in studying rhombohedral graphene. Previously, they electrically “doped” their samples, progressively adding electrons as they passed a separate electric current into the material. They then measured the voltage, or essentially the force that pushes the current through the material, and looked for instances when the voltage dropped to zero, indicating that the current was passing through without resistance.
In this way, the team has observed superconductivity when adding electrons to rhombohedral graphene. So they wondered: What might happen if they did the opposite, and took electrons away?
In their new study, the team looked for signs of superconductivity as they carefully removed electrons from rhombohedral graphene, progressively lowering the material’s electron density, as they applied a separate, external electric current to measure the electrical resistance. In these experiments, they also applied external magnetic field along directions parallel and perpendicular to the graphene plane. These experiments were carried out in collaboration with Zumbuhl’s group in Switzerland, who provided access to a laboratory setup in which graphene samples could be exposed to high magnetic fields and ultracold temperatures.
In these experiments, the researchers found that at certain electron densities, four different superconducting states emerged. What’s more, three of the states persisted in the presence of a relatively high magnetic field.
Normally, magnets destroy superconductivity by severing the bond between the paired electrons gliding through the material.
But in Ju’s experiments, the team observed three superconducting states that survived in a magnetic field up to around 9 tesla, which is about 180,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. In these instances, the magnetic field they applied was in a parallel orientation with respect to the plane of the material. When they switched the magnetic field to a perpendicular orientation, they discovered another surprise: At a certain electron density, superconductivity not only persisted, but increased. The material was able to continue superconducting, at higher temperatures than predicted.
Every superconducting material has a critical temperature below which electrons can conduct without resistance, and above which superconductivity cannot persist. But the team found that, at a certain electron density, and in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field, superconductivity in rhombohedral graphene was able to survive beyond the material’s critical temperature that corresponds to zero magnetic field.
“The superconductivity actually is enhanced, as in, the transition temperature goes from 55 millikelvin to probably 90 millikelvin,” Ju explains. “At the same time, the material can take another 50 or 60 percent extra current before superconductivity gets destroyed. And that is very unusual.”
The researchers are unsure of what microscopic behavior is enabling multiple and unconventional superconducting states, though they propose one idea. Conventional superconductivity emerges when electrons pair up. These “Cooper pairs” consist of electrons with opposite spin, and it’s thought that a magnetic field can pull the spins out of their opposite configurations, and as a result, break up superconductivity.
Instead, the team proposes that perhaps in rhombohedral graphene, and at certain electron densities, electrons can pair up with aligned spins. Any magnetic field would still pull on the spins, but in the same direction, preserving their alignment, and their superconductivity.
The researchers acknowledge that the idea needs much more investigation, both experimentally and theoretically. For now, they see the results as a demonstration of what new and exotic phenomena can emerge in a seemingly simple material, with the right measurements and controls.
“We can control the simplest chemical and structural material— crystalline carbon— as part of the fun,” says lead author Junseok Seo, who is a graduate student in Ju’s group. “We’re not only dealing with what nature gives us, but we’re applying additional controls to change it to something that nature does not give us, but that can exist in the same material.”
This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Device fabrication was carried out, in part, at MIT.nano.
David Autor named head of the Department of EconomicsA faculty member since 1999, Autor is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and the work of the future.David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, has been named head of the Department of Economics, effective July 1.
“David is a world-class labor economist,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “He is also an individual of wisdom and insight. I look forward to welcoming him to the school’s leadership team.”
Autor’s scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes. He serves as faculty co-director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work.
“I’ve been at MIT since 1999, and I owe my career to the Institute, the department, and colleagues who are as kind as they are accomplished,” Autor says. “Stepping into this role is a chance to contribute to a place that has shaped me at every stage.”
Autor succeeds Jon Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics, who has served as department head since July 2023.
Autor says he “aims to build on the stellar standard set by its faculty and students while navigating budget tightening and a shifting political landscape.”
“Just as important, I want to lead the department toward the opportunities that advancing AI is opening in how we teach and what we research,” he adds.
Autor serves as co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Labor Studies Program. He earned a BA in psychology from Tufts University in 1989 and a PhD in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 1999.
Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship — the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, the Society for Progress Medal in 2021 — and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship, the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for excellence in teaching, the Undergraduate Economic Association Teaching Award, and the Faculty Appreciation Award from the MIT Technology and Policy Program.
In 2020, Autor received the Heinz 25th Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American workers.”
In 2023, Autor was one of two researchers across all scientific fields who was named a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist.
In 2024, Autor was one of five senior scholars selected by the Schmidt Sciences Foundation as an AI2050 Senior Fellow.
How data centers can better manage energy use A new study suggests flexibility in the timing of electricity consumption could lower consumer costs.The number of U.S. data centers is growing, largely to power artificial intelligence programs. That has led to concern about the environmental consequences of data centers — and their impact on the energy grid itself. What will happen if scores of new data centers come online?
A new study by MIT researchers indicates that the impact of data centers could vary significantly, depending on how their energy use is structured.
Specifically, if data centers move a significant portion of their energy consumption to non-peak hours, it might actually help lower average energy costs. The environmental impact, in terms of type of energy consumed, would differ by location, with some places likely seeing a greater buildout of renewables and others experiencing a relative increase in fossil fuel use.
“The key with data centers is: How can we add them to the network without adding a lot to our peak usage?” says Christopher Knittel, an economist in the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the study. “One way for data centers to do that — to add to average usage but not the peak usage — is if they provide some grid flexibility during those high-cost periods. And that’s what we’ve been interested in understanding.”
Specifically, the paper finds that a flexible arrangement for data-center energy consumption, compared to an inflexible one, would produce cost savings of up to 5 percent in Texas, 4 percent in the Mid-Atlantic region, and 2 percent in the western U.S. states. To achieve that, data centers would have to move more than 20 percent of their consumption — sometimes more like 50 percent — to non-peak hours.
The paper is titled “Flexible Data Centers Reduce Power System Costs But Can Increase Emissions,” and appears today in the journal iScience. The authors are Juan Ramon L. Senga, a postdoc in MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; Shen Wang, a postdoc in MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; and Knittel, who is the George P. Schultz Professor at MIT Sloan and the associate dean for climate and sustainability at MIT.
The 20 percent solution
The expansion of data centers has raised questions about additional stress for the U.S. grid, the global effects of increased fossil-fuel consumption, and the local environmental effects of data centers. The current study examines the first two of these issues.
To conduct the research, the scholars extensively simulated scenarios in which data centers expand, using the so-called “Gen X” model of the U.S. power grid, for a year’s worth of energy use.
The study focused on the grid systems in three areas: Texas, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the “Western Interconnect,” comprising the 11 large western states in the lower 48 states of the U.S. The researchers studied these regions because they collectively host most of the country’s data centers — about 82 percent of U.S. data centers by 2030, according to one analysis.
A bit counterintuitively, the researchers found that adding data centers could lower energy costs in some scenarios. Typically, about 60 percent of grid expenses are fixed costs, like power lines, while about 40 percent consists of energy costs. Adding data centers to the grid could, in effect, apportion the fixed costs over a higher volume of energy use.
“It’s really just math,” Knittel says.
But there is a catch. Lower costs might only happen if data centers increase their average consumption faster than their peak-hours consumption, when energy is most expensive. As it happens, most data centers do have flexibility built into their energy-use patterns, since they usually run at about 80 percent capacity.
In the study’s modeling, that flexibility often consists of shifting use from early-morning and early-evening peaks, to more midday energy consumption, when the energy load is lower and solar is at full capacity. The simulations show this makes a difference.
“There are two dimensions that data centers have to make decisions about,” Knittel says. “One is how much of their load in any one time period is flexible. And two, how many hours, plus or minus, can they move that computation?”
Pretty soon, real money
Additionally, data centers have different amounts of flexibility based on the types of AI-related computation they host. Data centers being used for AI training data tend to consume energy at a steady rate, but as a result could provide more flexibility for shifting power loads compared to inference data centers, which are used more for online search queries. In the latter case, consumption is driven more by end-user Internet habits.
Overall, Knittel emphasizes, the magnitude of cost savings suggested by the study, ranging from 2 percent to 7 percent, is significant.
“Three percent is a big number,” Knittel says. “When you’re talking about the grid, 3 percent or 6 percent doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you’re multiplying it by 100 billion dollars, it becomes real money.”
When it comes to environmental impact, the modeling finds that the projected level of data center growth by 2030 would be very significant in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. Compared to a world with no data center growth, the study finds those emissions would rise by 58 percent in Texas, 20 percent in the Mid-Atlantic region, and by 24 percent in the western U.S. That underscores the need to be strategic about data center consumption.
But the modeling also finds that the implications of data center buildout for clean-energy use vary by region. In Texas, where 54 percent of grid power is wind energy, having more data centers with flexible patterns of energy use could reduce emissions, by increasing demand for wind energy. The study finds that in this scenario, there could be 40 percent fewer CO2 emissions.
However, in the Mid-Atlantic region, where there is a reasonable amount of solar energy but relatively less wind power, more data centers with flexible consumption patterns could increase both renewable energy and fossil-fuel energy consumption. Here the modeling suggests an increase in CO2 emissions system-wide of 3 percent.
“When data centers provide some flexibility in that latter scenario, the data centers actually move hours to when sun and wind energy production is slowing, and that allows a coal plant to stay on,” Knittel observes. “So it doesn’t necessarily attract more renewable investment. It attracts more coal investment.”
“That’s why we have policy”
For any of this to happen, however, the data centers would have to implement the flexible energy-use schedules modeled in the study. And it’s not clear that companies using data centers would be motivated to do that. To Knittel, this suggests officials might have to craft regulations in this area.
“That’s why we have policy,” Knittel says.
More specifically, he adds, there is one big policy lever officials could use to achieve this goal: offering quicker initial hookups to the grid in return for time-of-use flexibility.
“One big concern about these data centers now is how long it takes for them to connect to the grid,” Knittel says. “One way to provide flexibility now is what’s called ‘connect and manage,’ which is, connecting you faster to the grid if you agree to provide flexibility. Tech firms would take that deal. They would rather connect a year earlier, and throttle down computation a few hours a day, than to have to wait. We do this with power plants too.”
Certainly, Knittel adds, as firms competing with each other, “Tech companies say they won’t provide flexibility alone. But if everyone in the industry has to, it’s okay.”
The current study is the first to examine the “end-to-end” implications of the centers for costs and emissions. The results, the scholars feel, bear further evaluation — and it is a topic they are continuing to model.
“Those are two dimensions I think we should all be considering here,” Knittel says. “The end result is really up to us, and up to policy.”
The research received support from the Future Energy Systems Center of the MIT Energy Initiative.
Antenna array could provide protected tactical satellite communications in low-Earth orbitThe prototype array uses a small, lightweight, low-power, and low-cost aperture.Preventing adversaries from interfering with communications is crucial to national security. Tactical satellite communications (SATCOM) focus on securing reliable communications channels against adversaries in contested environments. In support of this mission, a team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory is building a prototype antenna characterized by low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C).
Threats in contested environments — specifically proliferated low Earth orbit (pLEO), where satellites must be as low-SWaP as possible because of the high volume of satellites present — are signal jamming and signals intelligence. Mitigating these threats through methods such as changing the shape of antenna beams in real time so that the ground user's signals can't be interfered with, and preparing for future advanced capabilities, are key to ensuring that satellites stay in communication with users on the ground.
"Looking toward the future challenges of tactical SATCOM, there is a clear need for novel approaches to radio-frequency (RF) aperture designs that are scalable and low SWaP-C without sacrificing functionality," says Michael Craton, a technical staff member in Lincoln Laboratory's Tactical Satellite Communications Group. "That is, we want to think about ways we can achieve exquisite performance using less-expensive hardware. We want to anticipate future threats and have an idea about how to deal with them before they become a problem."
One way to tackle the challenge of proliferated interference and jamming is through adaptive antenna arrays. Unlike single-element antennas, arrays are made up of multiple antennas that work together to guide and shape energy to and from the array. Adaptive arrays can change beam states quickly (a technique called adaptive beamforming) and change them in real time, depending on conditions, to prevent interference in certain directions by placing nulls, or signals that interfere with others. However, adaptive arrays have high SWaP, making them difficult to operate in SWaP-constrained environments like pLEO.
To address this problem, the team developed the Hosted Nimble Beamforming Anti-Jam Reflectarray (HoNi BAJR), a scanning reflectarray antenna prototype with a surface made up of reflective elements that can be individually controlled. When a signal hits the surface of the reflectarray, individual elements reflect energy with some phase shift to control the beam that is formed so that it blocks interference. Because the elements are very simple, the array can be scaled and controlled easily. Reflectarrays are similar to phased arrays, which consist of multiple elements that can be electronically controlled for quick beam changes, but scanning reflectarrays reflect signals toward a separate feed antenna, which eliminates much of the design complexity in conventional antenna arrays.
Unlike phased arrays that require amplifiers for each antenna element, reflectarrays do not require amplifiers because signals are collected by the feed antenna and combined in free space; this lack of amplifiers for each element in the reflectarray lowers the SWaP required and helps with scalability, as the beamforming network does not have to be redesigned each time the size of the array is changed. A reflectarray uses much less power than a typical array, dropping the power consumption by about 95 percent.
The prototype HoNi BAJR reflectarray was designed for communications in a pLEO constellation with wide coverage across the horizon and can cater to low-power users in the presence of proliferated jamming. The array is sized to fit on a typical small satellite platform.
The HoNi BAJR team tested the array's beamforming capabilities at the laboratory's RF Systems Testing Facility, successfully demonstrating a high scan angle, which means the array can receive signals from a wide area. Their testing also showed that there is little loss in signal when synthesizing multipeak beams, or splitting the beam, indicating that reflectarrays can get signals to multiple users without information loss.
Suppressing interference (unwanted signals from equipment like cell phone towers or electrical devices) is also very important to ensuring the antenna works correctly. The HoNi BAJR team's work in this area is based on two programs funded through an internally administered R&D portfolio: Deployable Electronically Scanning Reflectarray (DESRa) and Phase Analog Beamforming (PhAB, which uses DESRa hardware). PhAB demonstrated that it was possible to adapt to nulls and mitigate signal jamming in real time. However, in the dynamic signal environment of HoNi BAJR, there may not be time to adapt these beams fast enough for the signal environment. The team innovated a solution: creating regions of interference suppression, instead of targeting individual points of interference, by shaping the side lobes of the beam. The technique faltered slightly in testing because of difficulty in controlling the side lobes, as they're sensitive to small signal changes. However, proper calibration (measuring effects from the instruments and the system to ensure the full signal received and transmitted by the antenna is accounted for) may help.
While key to ensuring a system works correctly, calibration is one of the biggest challenges of operating reflectarrays. Not much precedent exists for calibrating a scanning reflectarray, so the team is researching approaches. All aspects of the reflectarray (e.g., forming and shaping beams) will be improved by calibration, and full usage of the array will require a comprehensive understanding of calibration. Another major area the team is exploring is where reflectarrays can best be used.
"Designing hardware is always a challenge, but figuring out how to fit the technology into a complete and functional system that meets mission needs is the hardest part," Craton says. "We believe scanning reflectarrays have a lot of untapped potential for the missions we care about, but because they have not been used in this space before, a lot of gaps in functionality remain. We need to first build up capabilities for the things that we need to do."
Early studies show that reflectarrays can be used in situations where beams are scheduled, where there is proliferated interference in less-dynamic signal environments (or dynamic signal environments, if you can achieve good calibration), and on power-constrained platforms. Future work will focus on further exploring how reflectarrays can be used, improving calibration procedures, and refining beamforming capabilities.
Students from across the Northeast step inside MIT.nano’s cleanroomA hands-on boot camp teaches integrated photonics to community and four-year college students in the region.“Illuminating.” “Spectacular.” “Compelling.” This is how community college students described the two days they spent at MIT.nano learning about the complex tools inside the cleanroom and building and packaging their own functional photonic chips.
“Integrated photonics is an essential part of semiconductor packaging today,” says Anu Agarwal, principal research scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory at MIT. “But there is no single, standardized university curriculum for integrated electronics-photonics packaging. We need to create educational materials to teach this subject across the talent pipeline from K-12 and beyond, which is exactly what we’re doing at the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM) and MIT.nano.”
As leader of the Lab for Education and Application Prototypes (LEAP) facility located on MIT.nano’s fifth floor, Agarwal stresses the importance of hands-on learning when studying integrated photonics, the science of guiding and manipulating light on a semiconductor chip. Through the Northeast Consortia for Advanced Integrated Silicon Technologies (NCAIST) program, she’s bringing community and four-year college students to MIT.nano for experimental boot camps that teach how to use semiconductor tools for electronic-photonic packaging and testing.
“Having a workforce skilled in resource-efficient semiconductor manufacturing, including electronic-photonic packaging, is critical to maintain the exponential growth of the chip industry and build national security,” says Agarwal. “MIT.nano, through programs like NCAIST, are helping to train more people in STEM.”
Working closely with AIM Photonics, a U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Institute, NCAIST coordinates and accelerates the transition of technician education content and teaching methodologies from key AIM-affiliated U.S. universities to community, technical, and four-year colleges in the Northeast. Through NCAIST, in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Community College (MBCC) is paired with MIT, North Shore Community College (NSCC) with Stonehill College, and Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) with Western New England University.
“The NCAIST program offers a transformative opportunity for our community college students to experience hands-on training at MIT.nano’s LEAP facility,” says Marina Bograd, professor and chair of the engineering department at MassBay Community College. “For many of them, this is their first time stepping into a cleanroom or seeing semiconductor manufacturing up close. The experience helps open doors that might otherwise feel out of reach, builds confidence, and inspires our students to see themselves pursuing careers in emerging technologies.”
The most recent MIT.nano boot camp, held on May 20-21, expanded participation to include not only those from MBCC, but also students from NSCC, Stonehill College, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, where NCAIST is headquartered. Twelve students spent two full days at MIT.nano operating a die saw, die bonder, wire bonder, and flip chip tool to build and test a packaged chip.
“I found the combination of hands-on activities, lectures, and informal discussion with the MIT.nano team and fellow students fostered an awesome learning environment,” says Cari Caudill, a student at NSCC. “As a mechanical engineering student, I was most interested in packaging and the machines themselves, so I loved getting direct experience with the tools and discussing with our instructors how procedural and technological development has impacted precision, efficiency, and scalability in the semiconductor industry.”
"The NCAIST boot camp was an exciting and illuminating experience!” adds MassBay Community College student Wyatt Maurer. “I really appreciated getting the chance to work with semiconductor manufacturing tools and to learn about the future of photonics from leaders in the field.”
Students attended lectures on cleanroom safety by Kristofor Payer, assistant director of operations at MIT.nano; electronic-photonic packaging by Agarwal; and photonic integrated circuit sensing by Department of Materials Science and Engineering graduate student Lizzie Gower. They were also offered virtual reality (VR) simulation exercises by Sajan Saini, the director of education at IKIM, to help build intuition about photonic devices and semiconductor packaging tools. These VR simulations serve as a foundational tool to help students visualize photonic devices and complex tool mechanics, as well as run digital process steps and deepen their technical understanding. By bridging physical fabrication with advanced simulation resources, the LEAP students are mastering highly specialized manufacturing, assembly, and testing pipelines required to build the future of electronic-photonic integration.
“The experience at this boot camp not only strengthens our student technical skills, it helps them see themselves as future contributors to a rapidly evolving field,” says Mary Beth Steigerwald, professor and engineering department chair at North Shore Community College. “It also enriches their professional portfolios and gives them a stronger, more compelling story to share during internship and transfer interviews.”
The students will use this training to secure summer internships at hard technology companies. Several have also been accepted to four-year degree programs to continue their education in the fall.
Past participants are now the leaders of MIT’s dynaMIT ClubHow the program's biggest fans came full circle and took the helm.Every summer for the past 13 years, students in MIT’s club dynaMIT have taught STEM principles to Boston-area middle school students at no cost, all in an effort to inspire the next generation of innovators.
In August, dynaMIT will welcome two cohorts of budding scientists and engineers to campus. First, 40 middle schoolers in grades 6–7 will dive into hands-on STEM learning through creative activities like solar s'mores and paper rockets. The following week, another 40 students in grades 8–9 will join in, exploring innovative experiments that spark curiosity and creative problem-solving. Each day, a new topic is covered, exposing attendees to chemistry, machine learning, physics, math, biology, and earth and space science.
Several of the program's attendees have gone on to apply and be accepted to MIT, including the club’s co-director, Dominique Dang. When the Quincy, Massachusetts, native saw the club’s table at the Midway Fair, she knew she wanted to join to give back.
“I didn’t receive a lot of STEM exposure in middle school, but then I saw online about the STEM program offered by dynaMIT, and I was really interested. I had so much fun, and it introduced me to creating things, and not just reading about them in a textbook. I knew I wanted to be a scientist, but I didn’t know what type of science I wanted to study, so having dynaMIT expose me to a different STEM topic each day was a transformative experience,” says Dang, who is now studying computer science and molecular biology.
Megan Zhu, the club’s other co-director, was immediately drawn to the organization’s educational mission. A biology major with plans to pursue an MD/PhD program, Zhu is passionate about advancing science education and aspires to teach at the university level upon completing her degree.
“I happened to stop by the dynaMIT table at the club fair, and it seemed really cool. I spoke to a couple of the club leaders, and they talked about how they help support education in the Boston area. Education has always been something that I was passionate about in my hometown in Rapid City, South Dakota, and I wanted to emphasize giving back to the community,” says Zhu.
Lukeman Nouri, who grew up in Saugus, Massachusetts, attended dynaMIT as a sixth grader. “I barely knew what MIT was, or even what STEM meant, so I wasn't particularly excited to go. However, that changed after the very first day of the program! I remember extracting DNA from a strawberry, making elephant toothpaste, and gathering fingerprints from various surfaces. However, my biggest highlight was learning Scratch and creating my very first game,” says Nouri, who is majoring in computer science and engineering. “After dynaMIT, MIT became my dream college, and I spent the next six years learning more about STEM and MIT.”
Erick Liang, who grew up in Boston’s Chinatown and Roslindale neighborhoods and is now majoring in nuclear science and engineering and physics, had a similar experience after attending dynaMIT. “As a first-generation, low-income student, having a meaningful and engaging program like dynaMIT to participate in over the summer was really important for me. DynaMIT exposed me to different fields of science I had not encountered yet in elementary or middle school and helped spark my interest in STEM,” says Liang.
Zhu says this year they are adding a new activity related to climate change and clean water that they hope will create an interest in these two important areas. “This summer, one of our activities is called Sponge City. It’s about runoff water and clean, reusable water. We’ll have the students build a city that can withstand a storm. They will be given a budget and have to decide how to spend the resources after we pour water all over the tray containing their city — all in an effort to show them how important climate change and clean drinking water are.”
The club is also partnering with the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and will tour lab space and work on a fun experiment about cell heterogeneity and cancer tumor formation. Attendees will then be able to talk to scientists and ask them questions.
“I’m looking forward to giving this cohort the same great experience that I had six summers ago. DynaMIT was so much fun, and I learned so much from it that I feel a responsibility to help make it just as impactful for future students,” says Nouri.
Liang adds, “I am excited to return and help set up the plasma demo kits for the program’s physics day!”
“It’s a great full-circle moment,” says Dang. “That’s just one of the reasons why I joined the club.”
“Watching the students work on the activities is always the most rewarding part of the two weeks, and that makes the entire year of planning worth it,” says Zhu, adding, “the club is also an excellent community at MIT.”
Students interested in joining dynaMIT or volunteering for this summer’s program can find more information on the club’s website.
Listening for the echoes of black holesBy analyzing X-ray reverberations and other astrophysical data, Erin Kara seeks to understand the most extreme objects in the universe.Black holes are often misunderstood to be just that: dark and mysterious voids that are somehow akin to Alice in Wonderland’s mind-bending rabbit hole.
But rather than a tunnel of nothing, a black hole is actually something — and a lot of it. The densest objects in the universe, black holes exert tremendous gravitational pull, gathering in the surrounding fabric of space and time, and generating huge disks of matter that whirl toward a black hole before falling in, past the point of no return.
In recent years, as astronomers have been able to train more telescopes on the sky, for longer stretches of time, they have captured a surprising range of black hole behavior.
“It used to be that we didn’t have eyes on systems all the time,” says Erin Kara, an associate professor of physics at MIT. “Now we’re seeing that they can turn on and off at rates that are much faster than we ever thought possible. We see things are getting sucked in toward black holes faster than we thought, perhaps due to stars whipping around and getting trapped in a black hole’s accretion disk.”
Kara and her group in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research are at the forefront of black hole physics. She is using data from telescopes in space and on the ground to study the properties of black holes, especially supermassive black holes — the ultradense giants at the centers of galaxies. Supermassive black holes are the engines of galaxy formation. Kara, who recently earned tenure at MIT, seeks to connect the extreme physics of black holes with how galaxies such as our own Milky Way come to be.
“It’s amazing that we as humans can know anything about what’s happening billions of light years away,” Kara says. “There’s a lot of new open puzzles about supermassive black holes that I’m excited about.”
Early impact
Kara was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, as the youngest of four. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a doctor, so it felt only natural for Kara to follow their lead. She set out on a premed track at Barnard College of Columbia University. As part of the program that first year, she took an introductory physics class and was instantly drawn to the subject’s concrete, fundamental descriptions of the physical world, from the quantum to cosmic scales.
“Physics was always the class that explained things at the ground level,” Kara recalls. “And I thought, wow, this is cool. I have to keep going with this.”
In class, she kept asking questions and wanting to know more. Her professor, astronomer Reshmi Mukherjee, took note and invited Kara to join her research group as a summer intern. The team would be working on new data from a telescope that was readying for launch. That summer, in June 2008, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope into low-Earth orbit, with the purpose of surveying the sky for sources of gamma rays — high-energy radiation that is produced by black holes, neutron stars, and other extreme astrophysical objects.
When the telescope started sending back data, Mukherjee assigned Kara a project: to characterize two of the telescope’s unidentified gamma-ray signals. Both signals were bright, and the question was whether they came from nearby, within the Milky Way galaxy, or much further away. If the latter was the case, it would mean the sources were possibly quasars — a type of extremely active supermassive black hole that at the time was a rarity in astronomy observations.
Kara got to work on the data and soon confirmed that both sources were indeed quasars.
“It was a small discovery, but it felt awesome,” Kara says. “And I love that about astronomy, that there are so many unanswered questions, and even early on in your career, you can make an impact.”
Needless to say, Kara caught the astronomy bug, and soon opted to switch from premed to physics, though the new path was not always smooth. On Barnard’s all-women’s campus, introductory classes in physics were small, and professors were encouraging and approachable. In contrast, upper-level courses were held at Columbia, where Kara was one of a much larger, co-ed cohort.
“It’s a very unique experience to be with all women in a physics environment, and then to see how my feelings about my own abilities changed, just based on the environment,” Kara reflects. “I went to Columbia and all of a sudden felt like I couldn’t do this. All these guys were much more confident and outwardly understanding of the material. In the end, I did well there too. And that juxtaposition helped me gain confidence and know, yeah, I belong here.”
Black hole reverb
After graduating with a major in physics and a minor in art history, Kara went abroad, to the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. She earned a scholarship there to pursue a one-year master’s degree in physics, but she ended up staying to complete a PhD on a topic that was just starting to grow roots: black hole X-ray reverberation.
In 2009, her thesis advisor, Andy Fabian, and his team were looking through archival data from an X-ray telescope and noticed curious time delays in signals coming from around a black hole. They interpreted the signals as X-ray echoes, or reverberations. It was the first evidence of X-ray echoes around a black hole, and it helped to resolve a debate in the field over the source of the radiation.
Her advisor determined that the reverb was a result of X-rays generated from the black hole’s corona — a crown-shaped aura of high-energy radiation immediately surrounding the black hole — that then bounced, or reverberated, off the swirling disk of gas and dust that circles a black hole, known as an accretion disk.
“They had only found these echoes in one black hole. But the archive was full of data of these reverberation signals that no one had analyzed in this particular way,” Kara explains. “So I had my whole PhD to kind of play with this archive, and it felt very discovery-driven.”
Since that initial exploration, Kara has worked to advance the study of X-ray reverberation as a technique to map regions around black holes and other extreme astrophysical objects.
A pivotal disruption
After earning a PhD in physics, Kara returned to the U.S. for postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She intended to work on data from a new satellite, Hitomi — a Japanese mission that would detect far-off X-rays to help scientists map the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. After 40 days, the scientists lost control of the satellite, which ultimately began spinning uncontrollably and broke apart in orbit. Before it failed, the telescope sent back one clean signal.
“It got one really good observation, which was unlike any spectrum we had ever seen before,” Kara recalls.
The data confirmed that the satellite’s detector — a microcalorimeter that was developed at NASA — was sound. That technology is now at the heart of Hitomi’s successor, the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, which has been successfully taking data since its launch in 2023. Today, Kara leads a science group as part of the XRISM mission to analyze X-ray signals from supermassive black holes.
Back then, however, with the end of Hitomi, she had to pivot. She started working with a new group at NASA Goddard that was gearing up for the launch of another telescope — the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER. In 2017, the telescope, which was developed and built by MIT researchers, was launched and attached to the International Space Station, where it measured the timing of incoming X-rays from astrophysical sources in deep space.
The group Kara joined was analyzing NICER data for signs of tidal disruption events, which are instances when a black hole tears apart a nearby star. This was some of her earliest work on these dynamic sources, and she has since incorporated tidal disruption events — and data from NICER — as a main research area.
At the hub
In 2019, Kara accepted a junior faculty position in MIT’s Department of Physics — a decision that to her was a “no-brainer.”
“X-ray astronomy has its history at MIT,” Kara says. “Bruno Rossi, Hale Bradt, George Clark, Claude Canizares — it all started here. It was always a place that felt like a hub. And that was the draw.”
Today, she and her students regularly analyze data from various satellites and telescopes such as XRISM and NICER to better understand black holes and how they grow, evolve, and affect the galaxies around them. She continues to advance X-ray reverberation mapping, which has helped scientists map the extreme regions immediately surrounding a black hole. Her group is also studying signals from other extreme X-ray sources, including tidal disruption events, quasiperiodic eruptions, and galactic black hole outbursts.
Kara also plans to explore data from future observatories, including the Ultraviolet Transiet Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT), which will continuously scan the entire sky for hot, ultraviolet sources; and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a space telescope that will detect low-frequency gravitational waves from sources such as pairs of lopsided, David-and-Goliath black holes.
And she’s also found time for a bit of black hole fun: In 2022, Kara collaborated with educators and music anthropologists at MIT to convert a black hole’s X-ray echoes to audible sound. As a musician herself — she sings and plays the violin — she was curious how a black hole’s cosmic energy might “sound.” The effect was otherworldly, to say the least.
“One of the reasons that I love black holes is that they are very extreme, and feel very sci-fi crazy, and things don’t make sense, and physics breaks down around them. And at the same time, they’re super foundational to even why we’re here,” Kara says. “For reasons we don’t fully understand, the distribution of stars and gas and dust in a galaxy is dictated in part by the supermassive black hole at its center. Our sun is one of those stars. It’s all intertwined. And untangling some of that is what motivates me.”
MIT in the media: Exploring how curiosity-driven science is an essential ingredient in America’s success“Scientific American” showcases the history and future of America’s scientific engine, highlighting promising young scientists and icons at MIT and beyond.Over the past 80 years, America’s bold, sustained investment in scientific research, and the discoveries, ideas and innovations that flowed from it made America a world leader. The nation’s scientific leadership has been essential to our shared prosperity and national security, and delivered real benefits for all Americans.
On June 16, Scientific American released a special section, “The Young American Scientists,” which celebrates early-career professionals actively engaged in scientific research, and features commentary from MIT faculty on why they continue to be so devoted to curiosity-driven science, demonstrating how their hard work and dedication make Americans safer, healthier, and more prosperous. Among the section’s profiles are many MIT faculty, students, and alumni, who share their advice for young scientists and their reasons for optimism in uncertain times.
President Sally Kornbluth emphasizes the importance of curiosity-driven research, noting that discovery “is part of our American DNA and has yielded vast returns to the citizens of this country and the world.” She adds, “what’s needed is a rededication to public investment in American science. Even if I were not the leader of a premier scientific institution, this is what I’d say. Investing in American science is not a gamble; if you look back in time, there is no question about the benefits.”
Adds Institute Prof. Robert Langer: “What American science has done over the past 50, 100 years has been remarkable.”
Scientific American notes that at MIT, that commitment to discovery is reflected in initiatives such as Curiosity on a Mission and the Generative AI Impact Consortium, which are aimed at finding “solutions to real-world problems in a way that is beneficial to society.” “On one hand, we’re at a time, technologically, where things could not be more exciting [and] our science [could not be] more cutting-edge. At the same time, we’ve never seen a situation where people felt so uncertain about the continuity of science funding, particularly when it comes to the basic discovery science that fuels the economy and will fuel societal impact a decade or two from now,” says Kornbluth.
The first sparks
Witnessing invention can spark a lifelong fascination with science. After the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, Prof. Alan Lightman “became entranced with the idea of building a rocket” of his own. In his essay “My childhood in science,” Lightman describes how these early scientific memories and experiments have shaped him to be a well-rounded writer and physicist.
“Now more than ever, when much of the world, including the U.S., has lost its moral compass, leading to a dog-eat-dog mentality, we need science combined with literature, philosophy, history and art. We need to discover not only the physical world but also our own humanity,” writes Lightman.
Likewise, Prof. John Urschel, a former NFL player, emphasizes the importance of collaboration and having a wide range of interests.
“A lot of good research happens when people can draw on tools, techniques and insights from different areas, disciplines and even fields. I hope we can encourage promising young scientists to establish strong, broad backgrounds and to communicate frequently with those outside their particular areas,” says Urschel.
Invention and discovery
Scientific American highlights students and alumni looking to better the world by doing everything from investigating neurological disease to securing our energy future.
At MIT, Visiting Scientist Alice Stanton developed miBrain, a 3D tissue model of the human brain, to help scientists develop personalized treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Stanton has developed a miniature version of miBrain, a brain-on-a-chip, to better test therapeutics.
Stanton notes “the road to effective treatments is long and bumpy,” compounded by cuts to federal funding. “When we have a loved one who gets sick, we want a treatment—we want something to cure them. It doesn’t come out of thin air,” she explains.
Bob Mumgaard PhD ‘08, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems is working to commercialize fusion power. “Whether in areas such as fusion—or in drugs by design for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s or in [the creation of] materials we never thought possible—our ability to use new tools to tackle some of these big, meaty problems is super exciting,” Mumgaard emphasizes.
Graduate student Alex Zhang tackles context rot: the phenomenon when AI language models degrade as they produce more information. To solve this issue, Zhang develops recursive language models (RLMs) that enable the model to work with itself to reevaluate reasoning.
“The types of research that I want to work on are things that I think should be shared for the benefit of people in general,” says Zhang.
The benefits of scientific collaboration
What happens when scientific disciplines join forces at MIT?
Prof. Emery Brown highlighted the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (HEALS), noting that the effort brings together scientists and engineers from a variety of backgrounds to tackle the most pressing health challenges of our times.
Brown explains that with President Kornbluth’s support, HEALS encourages “faculty to look more deeply into solving health care problems. The enthusiasm for HEALS has been contagious across the campus.”
MIT alumna Lucy Jones PhD ‘81, who is known for her work advancing public safety during earthquakes and for developing the first American earthquake drill called the Great ShakeOut, shared the necessity of collaboration in developing scientific solutions for pressing real-world problems.
“Solutions have to be done in collaboration, which means spending time with policymakers,” says Jones.
Jones also shares how scientific advances in computing have helped make Americans around the country safer when the ground starts to shake.
“My first year in grad school, I was reading paper seismograms. Now everything is computerized. We used to do field deployments; now we have permanent networks. We’re starting to use fiber‑optic cables as seismometers,” says Jones. “Computers have changed everything, including science.”
The state of American science
Within the profiles, interviewees were asked what needs to change in American science right now. Many expressed concerns with federal funding.
“I’m fortunate to work with extraordinary students and postdocs, but the infrastructure that lets them do their best work is under real stress: funding instability at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, immigration uncertainty for international scientists and an erosion of public trust in expertise,” says Prof. Feng Zhang.
Zhang developed CRISPR-based genome editing tools, which could increase our understanding human diseases and lead to new treatments. “We can lose the lead rapidly if we do not protect our innovation ecosystem,” he says.
Positive developments include the progress Prof. Alan Guth has witnessed in cosmology.
“With new techniques, we’re able to unravel, to make sense out of, what we’re observing,” says Guth. “A lot of progress has been made on those lines, so in terms of the physics of the field, I think things are going great. But to me, the real problem is the prospects for future funding.”
Langer shares his faith in the durability and strength of America’s science and innovation ecosystem.
“I look at the history of American innovation and education over the past 250 years, and it’s been spectacular,” says Langer. “Plenty of times there’ve been setbacks. We’ve had world wars, you know, we’ve had depressions, and people keep persisting and keep learning. They keep discovering and they keep inventing. So that gives me a lot of cause for hope. This is not the worst time by any means.”
Summer 2026 recommended reading from MITEnjoy these recent titles from Institute faculty and staff.Summer is the perfect time to curl up with a good book — and MIT authors have had much to offer in the past year. The following titles represent a selection of books published in the past 12 months by MIT faculty and staff. In addition to links for each book from its publisher, the MIT Libraries has compiled a helpful list of the titles held in its collections.
Looking for more literary works from the MIT community? Enjoy our book lists from 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.
Happy reading!
Fiction and poetry
“We (the People of the United States)” (Penguin Books, 2026)
By Joshua Bennett, the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT and professor of literature
Bennett marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. with a book-length work of poetry about the country and some of its distinctive figures. The piece features remarkable people or inventions from each of the 50 states, meditating on their place in the nation’s cultural fabric.
“The Race for Daphne” (Finishing Line Press, 2026)
By Sarah C. Beckmann, communications and marketing associate in the MIT Media Lab
A poetry collection structured as a crew race exploring girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood through the experiences of a rower and writer. These poems subvert the historical dominance of male heroes by celebrating ordinary female heroism, while examining love, home, and what it means to be an American woman today.
“Jezelle: Thief of Forks” (Self-published, 2026)
By Scott Austin Tirrell, director of administration and finance in the Art, Technology, and Culture Program
Abandoned by her father and raised by the streets of Grafton Notch, Jezelle survives by trusting no one. When a strange magic awakens within her, it offers more than escape — it offers power. But in a city that preys on broken children, power makes her valuable, dangerous, and hunted. To claim the life stolen from her, Jezelle must decide what she is willing to become.
Science and Engineering
“Phenomenal Moments: Revealing the Hidden Science Around Us” (Candlewick Press, 2025)
By Felice Frankel, research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering
Enlisting readers to “be the scientist” through vivid fine-art photographs, science photographer Felice Frankel zooms in and out on beautiful and brilliant moments all around us to reveal the chemical, natural, or physical processes — from viscosity and venation to chlorophyll and capillary action — behind scientific phenomena.
“Syntax: A Cognitive Approach” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Edward A. F. Gibson, professor of brain and cognitive sciences
This book lays out the grammar of a language from the perspective of a cognitive scientist, outlining the components of language structure and the model of syntax that Gibson advocates: dependency grammar, in which a word is connected to another word via a dependency arc to form a larger compositional meaning. This formalism can explain numerous aspects of word order universals across languages.
“Birds Up Close: An Engineer Explores Their Hidden Wonders” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Lorna J. Gibson, professor post-tenure in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering
A renowned engineer and lifelong birder, Gibson explores the hidden microscopic structures and engineering principles that keep birds aloft and alive — how an egg forms, how a bird generates lift, how woodpeckers safely drill their holes, and much more. She also considers the longer view of birds in their habitats and natural history. Her up-close look at avian mysteries provides a perspective like no other, for the expert ornithologist and curious observer alike.
“Carbon Removal” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Howard J. Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative, and Niall Mac Dowell
In “Carbon Removal,” Herzog and MacDowell discuss how technology and policy can come together to help us reach “net-zero” climate targets. The authors explore the rapidly evolving world of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), presenting the technological pathways of enhancing the land sink, biomass-based carbon capture and storage, engineered removal methods, and ocean-based carbon removal. They also discuss barriers facing CDR as well as ethical implications of this process.
“Climate Change, Drinking Water Security, and Public Health: Global Challenges and Solutions” (Springer Nature, 2026)
Chapters by Libby Hsu, associate director of academics at MIT D-Lab
In her chapter, “Drinking Water Status Around the World and Its Effect on Health,” Hsu discusses the Earth’s water resources, which are found in a variety of settings. In her chapter, “Waterless and Low-Water Sanitation Technologies that Improve Quality of Life and Conserve Water Resources,” she shares her experience with sanitation challenges in the Global South and how that has reinforced the value of waterless and low-water sanitation technologies that are suitable for scaling around the world.
“A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines” (Penguin Random House, 2026)
By Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
In his latest book, Levenson searches for the origins of the most common arguments against vaccines: that they are unnatural; that they are more dangerous than the illnesses they claim to prevent; and that they are an affront to freedom. “A Pox on Fools” explores the human impulse to question and wonder — sometimes past the point at which the very act of questioning turns deadly.
“The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, Work, and Live” (Penguin Random House, 2025)
By Alan Lightman, professor of the practice of the humanities in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and Martin Rees
Lightman and Rees pull back the curtain on the field of science, revealing that scientists are driven by the same sense of curiosity, wonder, and responsibility toward a future that shapes us all. They guide us through the fascinating lives and minds of scientists around the world and throughout time, and provide an inside peek at what makes scientists tick — their daily lives, passions, and concerns about the societies they live in.
“Uncertainty in Climate Change Research: An Integrated Approach” (Springer Nature, 2025)
Chapter by Jennifer Morris, principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, and John Reilly, senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management
Understanding future emissions scenarios is essential for preparing for climate change. The chapter “Emissions and Concentration Scenarios” examines how socioeconomic uncertainty contributes to overall climate change projections, and identifies key drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. It reviews the history of emissions scenarios and compares various approaches, including IPCC methods and formal uncertainty analysis techniques. The chapter concludes with lessons learned from over 40 years of socioeconomic scenario development for climate research.
“The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction — and a Search for Relief” (Harper Collins, 2025)
By Tom Zeller Jr., managing editor of Undark, published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT
From blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as “clusters,” chronic head pain affects 40 percent of the population, many of them suffering in silence. Finally, “The Headache” reveals the science behind a group of disorders that is as much a curse as a cultural punchline, and leads to key insights into the nature of pain itself. Guided by his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches, Zeller’s journey into headache science is at once intimate and panoramic.
Culture, humanities, and social sciences
“The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time” (Little, Brown, and Company, 2026)
By Joshua Bennett, the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT and professor of literature
In this work, Bennett offers a series of profiles, carefully wrought to see how some prominent figures were able to flourish from childhood forward. He closely reads their works for indications about how they understood the shape of their own lives. In so doing, Bennett underscores the significance of the social settings that prodigious talents grow up in. He also offers reflections on his own career trajectory and encounters with these artists, driving home their influence and meaning.
“Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy” (Yale University Press, 2025)
By Francis J. Gavin, research affiliate of the MIT Security Studies Program
It seems obvious that we should use history to improve policy. If we have a good understanding of the past, it should enable better decisions in the present, especially in the highly consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. But how do we gain that knowledge? How should history be used? In this book, Gavin explains the many ways historical knowledge can help us understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us.
“The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration: A Preliminary Assessment” (Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2025)
Edited by Gary Gensler, professor of the practice of global economics and management and finance in the MIT Sloan School of Management; Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship and professor of global economics and management at MIT Sloan; Ugo Panizza; and Beatrice Weder di Mauro
How might the economic and geopolitical positions of the Trump administration affect growth, trade, investment, inflation, stability, and the role of the U.S. dollar? This volume offers evidence-based, expert analysis to help decision makers understand the impact of tariffs, breaks in global alliances, government downsizing, deregulation, threats to the rule of law, and more.
“The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble” (Princeton University Press, 2025)
By Malick W. Ghachem, professor of history
Many things account for Haiti’s modern troubles. A good perspective on them comes from going back in time to 1715 or so — and grappling with a far-flung narrative involving the French monarchy, a financial speculator named John Law, and a stock-market crash called the “Mississippi Bubble.” In "The Colony and the Company," Ghachem examines the economic transformations and multi-sided power struggles of that time.
“Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America’s Future Against a Rising China” (Cornell University Press, 2025)
By Charles L. Glaser, senior fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program
Many believe China’s ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure U.S. security. The real danger, Glaser contends, lies in East Asia’s territorial disputes, especially over Taiwan. To reduce the risk of war, Glaser makes a bold case for ending U.S. security commitments to Taiwan and carefully calibrating its policies on protecting South China Sea maritime features.
“Trade in War: Economic Cooperation Across Enemy Lines” (Cornell University Press, 2025)
By Mariya Grinberg, associate professor of political science and MIT Security Studies Program affiliate
“Trade in War” is an urgent, insightful study of a puzzling wartime phenomenon: states doing business with their enemies. To explain why states trade with their enemies, Grinberg examines the wartime commercial policies of major powers during the Crimean War, the two World Wars, and several post-1989 wars.
“Constructing Economic Nationalisms in Brazil and India” (Cambridge University Press, 2026)
By Jason Jackson, associate professor in political economy and urban planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Conventional approaches cite India’s leftist “socialism” and Brazil’s right-wing authoritarianism to explain why India resisted foreign direct investment (FDI) while Brazil welcomed foreign firms. However, this ignores puzzling industry-level variation: India restricted FDI in auto manufacturing but allowed multinationals in oil, while Brazil welcomed foreign auto companies but prohibited FDI in oil. This book argues that FDI policies were shaped by contrasting colonial experiences that generated distinct economic nationalisms and patterns of industrialization in both countries.
“Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India” (Harvard University Press, 2025)
By Jason Jackson, associate professor in political economy and urban planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Is foreign capital an agent of economic growth in developing countries or a vehicle of extraction? Examining how Indian elites wrestled with this question in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, Jackson argues that it reflects a false binary. Instead of simply choosing between domestic and foreign capital, Indian policymakers have long considered the business ethics of individual firms. Indian economic nationalism, in other words, has never been characterized by a straightforward preference for domestic over foreign capital.
“The Handbook of Social Protection: Evidence and New Directions for Low- and Middle-Income Countries” (MIT Press, 2026)
Edited by Benjamin A. Olken, the TEPCO Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, and Rema Hanna
Over the past several decades, social protection programs that provide financial assistance to the poor and insure against shocks for the vulnerable have become widespread in low- and middle-income countries. These programs can play a critical role in society. This book provides an overview of what we know about the differing aspects of social protection and highlights the open questions for research for the future.
“Argumentation: The Key Concepts” (Routledge, 2026)
By Edward Schiappa, the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
In this book, Schiappa delves into the identification and analysis of fallacies, the evaluation of evidence, and the crucial roles of context, audience adaptation, and argumentative style. It explores the ethical dimensions of argument, the impact of cognitive bias, and the influence of cultural and discourse communities.
“American Independence in verse” (Pentameter Press, 2025)
By Brad Skow, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
“American Independence in verse,” published by Pentameter Press, traces a story of America’s origins through a collection of vignettes featuring some well-known characters, like politician and orator Patrick Henry, alongside some lesser-known but no less important ones, like royalist and former chief justice of North Carolina Martin Howard. Each is rendered in blank verse, a nursery-style rhyme, or free verse.
“Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty” (Duke University Press, 2025)
By Delia Wendel, associate professor of urban studies and international development in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Wendel explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms “trauma heritage,” wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is made visible in public space to demand justice and recognition. Wendel argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South.
Technology and society
“Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution” (Princeton University Press, 2026)
By Dwaipayan Banerjee, associate professor of science, technology, and society
In this book, Banerjee examines India’s pursuit of technological self-sufficiency, and the global forces that prevailed against this vision. He describes why the nation is “the world’s leading provider of inexpensive outsourcing and offshoring services, yet enjoys minimal benefits from more profitable advances in research, manufacturing, and development.”
“Auditing AI” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Karrie G. Karahalios, professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab; Marc Aidinoff PhD ’22; Nathan Matias SM ’13, PhD ’17; Christian Sandvig; Alondra Nelson; Kristen Vaccaro; Esha Bhandari; Ellery Roberts Biddle; Lena Armstrong; Motahhare Eslami; and Danaé Metaxa
This book serves as a first-of-its-kind roadmap for auditing artificial intelligence systems to prevent decision-making failures in health care, policing, and employment. Using canonical examples of AI gone wrong — from misidentified facial recognition to biased hiring algorithms — this book explains why robust audits are essential and how they drive concrete policy and corporate change.
“Shape Computation: Fifty Years, 1972-2022” (Springer Nature, 2025)
Edited by Sotirios Kotsopoulos SM ’00, PhD ’05, a research affiliate in the Department of Architecture, with a chapter by Terry W. Knight, the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Design and Computation in the Department of Architecture
This book provides a panorama of “shape computation” and “shape grammars,” a computational theory that has, from its inception 50 years ago, been directed toward the “how” of design. Knight’s chapter, “How is that? Computing the Temporality of Drawing,” describes how process and time are key to studying, appreciating, designing, and making things. She notes that in creative production it is not only important to ask, “What is that?” but also “How is that?” — in other words, how did or how can a thing come to be? As a process carried out over time, computation offers a means for rethinking, representing, and elevating the “how” in designing and making activities.
“The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft” (Cornell University Press, 2025)
By Erik Lin-Greenberg, associate professor in the Department of Political Science
In “The Remote Revolution,” Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security — but not in ways one would expect. Leveraging diverse types of evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of U.S. and Israeli drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation.
“The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence” (Stanford University Press, 2025)
By Benjamin Mangrum, associate professor of literature
We often deal with our doubts and fears about computing through humor, whether reconciling ourselves to machines or critiquing them. In fact, this dynamic turns up throughout modern culture, in movies, television, fiction, and the theater. Mangrum analyzes this phenomenon in “The Comedy of Computation,” digging into several facets of modern culture and technology.
“Rubrique Technologie / Tech Section” (Printed Matter, 2026)
By Nick Montfort, professor of digital media in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and Patsy Baudoin
This work is based on a text generator that produces French and English news items that imagine some of the ways technology will impact us in the near future. Most of the generated news involves people getting struck by autonomous vehicles or even aircraft. Others describe labor disputes, hostile takeover attempts, inventions, and the termination of online services. What is imagined in “RT/TS” is not apocalyptic or discontinuous but actually features many of the same problems we face today; the methods of producing the texts are today’s as well.
“Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and professor of information technology in the MIT Media Lab
How can we build a flourishing society by using human nature to design technology rather than letting technology shape society? Pentland explores how cultural inventions — from civilizations to the Enlightenment — accelerated innovation and collective wisdom. He argues that understanding these key factors in cultural evolution is essential for solving global challenges like climate change and pandemics, and shows how AI and digital media can aid rather than replace human deliberation.
“Priority Technologies: Ensuring US Security and Shared Prosperity” (MIT Press, 2026)
Edited by Elisabeth B. Reynolds, professor of the practice of urban studies and planning, with a foreword by Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship and professor of global economics and management
A new world order is emerging, and within it, U.S. priorities are shifting. For the country to flourish as well as defend and secure its interests, it must build on its decades of experience in developing frontier technologies and globally competitive industries through investments into priority technologies for the 21st century. This volume presents an introduction to some of the key areas where the U.S. must lead in order to ensure both national and economic security: critical minerals, semiconductors, biomanufacturing, quantum computing, drones, and advanced manufacturing.
Education, work, finance, and social impact
“The Meritocracy Paradox: Where Talent Management Strategies Go Wrong and How to Fix Them” (Columbia University Press, 2025)
By Emilio J. Castilla, the NTU Professor of Management and professor of work and organization studies in the MIT Sloan School of Management
Organizations often hail meritocracy as a fair and efficient way to identify, advance, and reward talent. But efforts to create a level playing field can be held back by talent management systems that confer rewards based on individual performance evaluations. In practice, these merit-based systems “may actually reinforce or create advantages for certain groups,” Castilla contends.
“The Art of Monetary Policy: Lessons from Sun Tzu for Central Banks” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Kristin J. Forbes, the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and professor of global economics and management in the MIT Sloan School of Management
Central banks are navigating a world of higher debt, tightly interconnected markets, and rising geopolitical tensions. How might they respond effectively? In “The Art of Monetary Policy,” Forbes draws on the writings of Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu to suggest modern principles for central banks, including preparing for the next financial battle, establishing a strong tactical position, combining weapons and methods, and modifying and varying tactics to maintain flexibility.
“Launching from the Lab: Building a Deep-Tech Startup” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Lita Nelsen, former director of the MIT Technology Licensing Office, and Maureen Stancik Boyce, mentor for the MIT Sandbox program
“Launching from the Lab” provides a much-needed framework for new entrepreneurs who are founding companies based on “deep technology” — groundbreaking innovations rising from new discoveries in fundamental research. Nelsen and Stancik Boyce cover the steps to launch and fund such companies, beginning with emergence from the laboratory and acquiring intellectual property through the intensive research of customer needs, building a team, and raising capital.
“There’s Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work” (Hachette, 2025)
By Nelson Repenning, professor of management, and Donald Kieffer
The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole. The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important. In this book, Repenning and Kieffer describe the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design, which improves productivity, reduces costs, and increases efficiency, ensuring that all parts of a company can work in concert.
“Bayesian Entrepreneurship” (MIT Press, 2026)
Edited by Erin L. Scott, senior lecturer of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management in the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Scott Stern, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology and professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management at MIT Sloan
This edited volume introduces and explores the concept of Bayesian entrepreneurship, a novel framework for understanding entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty. It brings together contributions from leading scholars to examine how entrepreneurs form beliefs about opportunities, learn through experimentation, and make strategic decisions.
“Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures: 24 Steps to Build Solutions for People and the Planet” (Wiley, 2025)
By Ben Soltoff, entrepreneur in residence at MIT Sloan; Bill Aulet, Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice; Tod Hynes, senior lecturer of climate and energy ventures; Francis O’Sullivan, senior lecturer in technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management; and Libby Wayman, senior lecturer of climate and energy ventures
Climate and energy entrepreneurs face challenges that traditional startup playbooks don’t address. Their ventures can require massive capital and take years to reach market, all while striving to achieve a positive impact on people, planet, and profit. This book adapts the MIT-born “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” framework specifically for climate and energy ventures, recognizing that founders in this space need their own approach.
Arts and design, architecture, urban studies and planning
“Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City” (W.W. Norton, 2026)
By Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science
Nurturing health, hope, and community, gardeners in cities and suburbs are reclaiming lost commons, transforming vacant lots into vibrant plots, turning waste into compost, and recreating what was once the most productive agriculture in recorded human history. In a book with global scope, ranging from Estonia to Amsterdam and Washington, Brown contends that urban gardening has many positive spillover effects, from health and environmental benefits to community-building — apart from periods of pushback when others are trying to eliminate it.
“Small-Town Renaissance: Bridging Technology, Heritage, and Planning in Shrinking Italy” (Springer Nature, 2025)
Edited by Brent D. Ryan, vice provost and professor of urban design and public policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; Carmelo Ignaccolo PhD ’24; and Giovanna Fossa
This book explores the transformative power of digitization in rural regions — where technology isn’t just a tool, but a lifeline for local culture, economic resilience, and future development. Born from a unique research collaboration between the MIT and Politecnico di Milano, this book brings together scholarly work on shrinking towns, economic development, and digital innovation. The project tackled some of the most pressing challenges facing rural Italy — from population decline to economic stagnation — through the lens of digital transformation.
“Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture” (Park Books / University of Chicago Press, 2026)
By Rosalyn Shieh, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, and Troy Schaum
Based on the work and vision of their architecture firm Schaum/Shieh, this book shares what is said and what can be heard in a studio. So much of architectural thinking and knowledge is presented, formulated, and traded in spoken words: pinups, meetings, walkthroughs. Those exchanges inform this book, in which ideas and knowledge that are usually only spoken are made accessible to readers.
“Design Before Disaster: Japan’s Culture of Preparedness” (University of Virginia Press, 2026)
By Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor in the departments of Architecture and Urban Studies and Planning
Few countries have faced as many environmental disasters as Japan, which has endured typhoons, cyclones, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Japanese residents have responded to their precarious circumstances by developing a unique culture of disaster preparedness, equipping the island nation to plan for future emergencies and to greatly reduce their impact. Mazereeuw offers a detailed framework to design and prepare for anticipated disasters and describes effective interventions in urban landscape and architecture.
“Reconstruction as Violence in Assad’s Syria” (American University in Cairo Press, 2025)
Edited by Nasser Rabbat, professor of architecture and director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, and Deen Sharp, with a foreword by Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning
This book delves into the complex interplay of post-conflict reconstruction in Syria, challenging the traditionally held dichotomy between the end of violence and the commencement of rebuilding. The contributors to this volume — architects, urbanists, geographers, and historians — employ critical concepts such as urbicide, domicide, and “civilian crisis architecture” to argue against the conventional theoretical frameworks that support a neat separation of phases.
How architecture influences political activity In Ghana, semi-communal “compound houses” affect how much people vote and participate in political activity, new research shows.Could the precise architectural form of your residence influence how much you participate in politics?
A new study by MIT scholars finds this to be exactly the case — at least in Accra, Ghana, where many people live in semi-communal structures known as “compound houses,” often sharing kitchens, bathrooms, and common living-room spaces, while having private bedrooms.
The detailed study of homes in Ghana’s capital finds that residents of compound houses are more likely to vote, attend rallies, and take part in political campaigns, compared to people with more private forms of housing.
“The overarching pattern we find is that if you compare people who live in compound houses to residents of other housing types, like single-family homes or self-contained apartments, there is a pretty big difference in political actions,” says Noah Nathan, an MIT political scientist and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s results. “People seem to vote more, and there are more other types of political behavior, like going to rallies, participating in campaigns, and contacting politicians.”
While those differences could stem from factors other than housing, the highly granular study suggests the architecture itself really matters. The researchers examined the specific floor plans of compound houses and found variations in people’s political information and social connections — key factors that existing studies show predict political activity — that map to differences in where people live within compound houses.
“We show that those kinds of social relationships and exchanges of political information seem to vary systematically with people’s individual locations within the layouts of the buildings they live in,” says Nathan, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science. “That’s consistent with architectural design leading you to have different levels of political participation.”
The open-access paper, “Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Politics Is Embedded in Residential Design,” appears in the American Political Science Review. Nathan’s co-author is Paige Bollen PhD ’23, an assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University.
Compound effects
Compound houses are a common form of residence in Ghana, much of West Africa, and some other parts of the world. They tend to house lower-income people who construct them out of inexpensive local materials. Trying to understand their effects is part of taking seriously the idea that place, and space, influence how people live.
“Rather than just thinking of cities as big agglomerations of people, we should evaluate cities through their actual built forms and designs,” Nathan says. “Space affects politics because people interact with each other in space. It’s not just that people are near each other, but the designs force them to interact or talk in ways that affect how information is exchanged and how social networks form, and that can aggregate up into politics in terms of action and cooperation.”
To conduct the study, Nathan and Bollen used three forms of data to draw out the effects of compound houses on politics. Through pre-existing administrative and electoral data, they first show that polling stations in neighborhoods with a high proportion of compound houses have better electoral turnout than neighborhoods with fewer compound houses. And from existing national survey data, the researchers determined that residents of compound houses actively participate in politics more often.
The researchers then conducted an original research survey of 1,272 residents in 391 compound houses in 30 neighborhoods of Accra, combined with mapping that showed the layout of those compound houses and where the survey participants lived within each one. In this way, they showed the effects of compound houses more precisely: Living in parts of them with especially high exposure to other people actually increases the amount of social network ties people report, as well as the amount of political information they obtain.
Quantitatively, changes in the centrality of people’s locations within compound houses seem to make a bigger difference in political engagement than other fundamental non-housing factors, such as changes in employment or measures of socioeconomic status.
“We leverage that variation to show that even within compound houses, the people with more exposures to neighbors have different social network ties and different forms of information than neighbors who live in more private locations,” Nathan notes.
Encouraging participation
As the scholars discuss in the paper, the effects of architecture on civic involvement are hardly immutable, but likely depend very much on the type of political state in question.
“We think under different conditions, this kind of architecture could have different effects,” Nathan says. “If you live in an authoritarian regime with an active police state, inhabiting an architecture in which you’re constantly on display to your neighbors is probably going to have the exact opposite implications from what we find in the study.”
However, he adds, since Ghana has a generally healthy democracy and is not a repressive state, “In this context, where there are not such high costs to participating in politics, we think these effects are going to break in the direction of more political participation.”
The study itself is an outgrowth of long-running, overlapping research interests on the part of Nathan and Bollen. Nathan is currently developing a book project about urban form, architecture, and politics both in Ghana, where he has conducted research for many years, and in other cities across the African continent. Bollen conducted her PhD research at MIT on public spaces, interactions, and political dynamics in Ghana and South Africa; her advisor was MIT Professor Evan Lieberman.
Sociologists, management experts, architects, and planners have all studied the effects of building design on human behavior, but have often focused on issues such as workplace productivity. Some political scientists, including MIT Associate Professor Bernardo Zacka, have also highlighted the salience of architecture to politics. But few political scientists have undertaken quantitative empirical studies of the subject. If they do, Nathan thinks, the results might surprise some people.
“There’s a famous idea that cities can be anonymizing,” Nathan says. “I think that’s actually not true. When you go to urban Ghana, people know each other, and there is a great deal of social capital and social connections. And I think part of the reason is that many people live in architectures that are not anonymizing.”
Improving the speed and energy-efficiency of AI agentsA new system, known as Murakkab, optimizes the design and deployment of multistep workflows that power AI applications.Agentic workflows are artificial intelligence-powered software systems that chain together multiple models and external tools to tackle complicated tasks, like analyzing a video and answering questions about it.
But the way these highly fragmented systems are designed and deployed often causes inefficiencies that can lead to wasted computation, energy, and cost.
To improve efficiency, researchers from MIT and Microsoft developed an intelligent system that streamlines the process of designing agentic workflows and automatically optimizes how those workflows are implemented.
With this new method, a developer can describe what they want the agentic workflow to do in plain language, without needing to specify all the details of their application in advance.
The system automatically figures out the best models and tools to use, as well as the ideal hardware configuration and computational resource allocation when the workflow is executed by a cloud provider.
It adjusts those configurations on the fly based on each user’s priorities, such as minimizing costs or maximizing speed.
When tested on several agentic workloads, this new system reduced the number of computational units needed for deployment, significantly cutting energy requirements and costs compared to traditional approaches without hampering performance.
“Agentic workflows are getting very complicated and quickly becoming the backbone of what cloud providers are doing. Energy usage is a huge concern, so we need to be very careful about how efficient these workflows are. It is very easy to over-allocate resources, wasting energy and money. Enabling a cloud provider to intelligently make these workflows more resource-optimal is a win for everyone involved,” says Gohar Chaudhry, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this system.
He is joined on the paper by Adam Belay, an associate professor of EECS and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; senior author Ricardo Bianchini, technical fellow and corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure; and others at Microsoft Azure. The paper will be presented at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation.
A configuration conundrum
An agentic workflow is a system composed of several autonomous AI agents that collaboratively use various models and tools, like databases or Python programs, to dynamically complete a multi-step task, such data processing or code generation.
These workflows can serve as behind-the-scenes processes that power user-facing applications.
Typically, developers must hard-code all technical choices upfront. They need to define which AI agents, models, and tools to use, and the order in which to use them. They also must specify the hardware that runs the workflow and how to balance tradeoffs like speed versus cost.
This is especially challenging because agentic workflows bring together multiple black-box models and diverse tools, each with their own configuration options, which may be offered by different companies.
If a new AI model is released that would improve the application’s accuracy or efficiency, the developer would need to start from scratch to implement it.
“Even if you wanted to do all this manually, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to configure the workflow optimally because the space of possible configurations is so large,” Chaudhry says.
In addition, the cloud data center that deploys the application for customers can’t see inside the workflow to allocate its hardware resources in the most efficient manner at the time of the user’s request.
With this new system, called Murakkab (an Urdu word that means a composition of things), the researchers sought to optimize the entire agentic workflow process.
Dynamic decision-making
First, Murakkab enables developers to create an agentic workflow by describing their intent for the application in high-level terms, rather than detailing how the many components of that workflow should be combined.
For instance, a developer might describe a video Q&A application that extracts key frames, generates a transcript, and then answers user queries about the video.
“There are many ways to do this, and all these different models and tools have implications on how fast the application can finish the task,” he says.
Murakkab takes the developer’s straightforward specifications and automatically identifies the best existing models and tools to put together into the workflow.
It also determines which components need to run sequentially and which can be run in parallel to boost performance.
“The platform makes configuration decisions dynamically over time, so if a new model or GPU accelerator comes out tomorrow, the developer doesn’t need to worry about that,” he says.
When the cloud provider deploys that application for a customer, Murakkab optimizes the workflow by configuring its components to meet the user’s constraints, such as prioritizing accuracy while meeting a latency requirement.
It adaptively identifies ideal hardware allocations and deployment schedules to maximize efficiency in real time, then generates a workflow that is ready for the cloud provider to execute.
“Our system also gives cloud providers visibility into multiple workloads, so the provider can share computational resources in the most efficient manner while satisfying the constraints of users,” he says.
When tested on diverse agentic workflows for video Q&A and code generation, Murakkab met user requirements while using only about 35 percent of the computation required by other methods. It consumed only about 27 percent as much energy for less than 25 percent of the cost.
The dynamic nature of Murakkab also enables users to balance tradeoffs. In one instance, the system lowered energy consumption of an agentic workflow by more than an order of magnitude with only about a 2 percent drop in accuracy for the customer.
The system was also able to identify an unexpectedly ideal configuration for a model that selects video frames, optimizing performance for a video Q&A task. This type of optimization would be nearly impossible for a developer to do manually, Chaudhry says.
Next, the researchers plan to expand their system to more complex workflows and larger computing clusters while exploring opportunities to optimize new agentic applications.
“There is a lot of potential to make these workflows more resource-optimal so they consume far less energy, but we need to be thinking about this at the scale of major cloud platforms,” says Chaudhry.
This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
What happens when environmental change outpaces life’s ability to adapt?A new model links Earth’s mass extinctions to mismatches between rates of environmental change and biological adaptation.When an animal’s environment changes faster than the animal can adapt, its chances of survival can flat-line. The same is true for populations, and even entire species.
Now, scientists at MIT and the University of Leicester have found that this connection between evolutionary adaptation and the pace of environmental change holds up at the global scale as well — and can determine life’s susceptibility to mass extinction. The researchers developed a theoretical model of this phenomenon, which they present in a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters.
The team compared the model with available data from past major mass extinctions, including how fast the global environment changed at the time of each event. The model successfully predicted the severity of most mass extinctions in Earth’s history, or the fraction of life that was unable to adapt, and therefore went extinct.
Interestingly, the researchers found that the range of adaptation rates across animal groups is broadly similar to the range of rates at which the environment can change.
“What we’re beginning to see is a certain level of organization, and ways in which life behaves that are consistent with the ways in which the environment behaves,” says study author Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics and co-director of the Lorenz Center at MIT. “It may be that life has evolved so that its range of adaptabilities matches the range of stresses that it meets.”
Rothman’s study co-author is Sergei Petrovskii, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leicester in England.
A catastrophizing connection
The connection between extinction and environmental change is not new. In the late 18th century, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who is often referred to as the founding father of paleontology, was the first to propose the concept of “catastrophism.” He had discovered fossil bones near Paris that didn’t match any animal known to exist at the time. Cuvier concluded that the bones were from a group of giant mammals that existed at one time but was no longer around. He proposed, then, that an entire species could disappear, or go extinct, likely due to a widespread catastrophe.
“That itself was a major idea, that a species could go extinct,” Rothman says. “And he had suggested it was an environmental catastrophe that had caused it.”
The concept of catastrophism later gave way to the view that Earth’s history was shaped mainly by slow, gradual processes. But in the mid-20th century the American geologist Norman Newell revisited the problem. In seeking the cause of extinctions, he proposed what Rothman and Petrovskii call the “rate-mismatch” hypothesis, the notion that extinction occurs when the rate of environmental change is higher than the rate at which a species can evolve to adapt.
Biologists have since observed Newell’s hypothesis play out in many cases where changes in the environment have driven the extinction of individual species. Rothman and Petrovskii wondered: Could the hypothesis also apply at the global scale?
“We know that individual species go extinct when environmental change outpaces their ability to adapt,” Rothman notes. “But it hasn’t been clear whether this same idea applies at the scale of global extinction events.”
Finding a mismatch
For their new study, the researchers looked to test the rate mismatch hypothesis at the global scale. They wanted to see whether mass extinction events in history can be explained by a mismatch between the rate of global environmental change and the rate at which life around the world can adapt.
To do so, at least in theory, they would have to compare two sources of data: the rates at which the global environment has changed over time and the rates at which different groups of organisms adapt to environmental change. The first can be found in geological records, which scientists have used extensively to infer how the Earth’s climate changed through history. The second, however, is almost impossible to record.
“We’re talking about the rates at which organisms adapt to major environmental change at effectively geologic timescales, from thousands to millions of years,” Rothman says. “And that doesn’t lend itself to direct observation.”
In place of actual data, the researchers aimed to construct a general mathematical theory to describe the range of adaptation rates across animal groups around the world. In this context, “adaptation” refers to any change within a species, over time periods that are much longer than a generation, that enable the species to persist as its environment changes.
It is generally understood in evolutionary theory that a species can successfully adapt only when multiple conditions are met. For instance, there needs to be variation in the population, these variations must be heritable, some variations enable an organism to adapt better than others, and the organisms that adapt better should leave more offspring. If all these conditions are met, the entire species should be able to adapt to a given environmental change. However, if any one condition fails, the population will go extinct.
Rothman and Petrovskii recognized that in this case, a species’ probability of successfully adapting multiplies with every condition that it meets. And it turns out that this pattern can be described mathematically as a very simple, bell-shaped curve. Such a curve essentially describes what fraction of the world’s animals can adapt at given rates, from the slowest to the fastest adapters, and how this fraction changes nonlinearly with the rate of adaptation. This curve generally shows that most animal groups can adapt at intermediate rates, while fewer animal groups adapt at the slowest and fastest rates.
After they established this general pattern of adaptation rates, the researchers looked to see how this pattern compares to recorded rates of environmental change, and how these two rates match, or don’t match, at times of mass extinction.
To do so, they considered paleontological and geochemical data from 27 episodes over the last 450 million years where the carbon cycle experienced significant change — a measure that is generally understood to reflect global environmental change. They then compared rates of environmental change with the fraction of animal groups that went extinct during each episode — numbers that were established previously in a well-regarded study by paleobiologist John Alroy.
In the end, Rothman and Petrovskii observed that indeed, for almost every mass extinction event in the last 450 million years, there was a mismatch in the rates at which the environment changed and at which animals could adapt; mass extinctions occurred when a significant fraction of animals could not adapt fast enough to match the changing environment. Their results confirm that the rate mismatch hypothesis applies at the global scale.
What’s more, this mismatch in rates could predict the severity of extinction events, or the fraction of animal life that went extinct given the rate at which the environment changed.
In the case of the end-Permian extinction, it’s likely that the rapid acidification of the ocean outpaced organisms’ ability to evolve adequate protections, leading to the extinction of over 80 percent of the world’s marine species.
The team’s work focuses on applying the new model to past extinction events. But the work could also provide a framework for understanding modern extinction risk.
“Carbon dioxide levels in the ocean are increasing today at a rate which, when appropriately re-scaled, is similar to rates of carbon-cycle change that are just lower than those associated with major extinction events in the past,” Rothman says. “It suggests that modern environmental change may be approaching rates beyond which adaptation becomes increasingly difficult.”
This research is supported, in part, by Schmidt Sciences, LLC; the MIT Climate Grand Challenges; the U.S. National Science Foundation; the European Space Agency; and the London Mathematical Society.
Computer model could enable bridges and buildings that use less materialMIT researchers developed an approach for generating more buildable structures, bridging the gap between optimized design and real-world construction.In 2022, global production of construction materials accounted for more than 7 percent of total carbon emissions. But how many of those materials were truly necessary to build houses, buildings, and bridges?
A technique called topology optimization can design structures that reduce the amount of material used, in some cases by as much as 90 percent, which would represent a multi-gigaton reduction in building emissions. Unfortunately, topology optimization is mostly used by researchers for applications like 3D printing rather than by engineers designing at the scale of buildings and bridges.
That’s because topology optimization doesn’t create structures that can easily be built on time and budget, which are the things builders really care about.
Now MIT researchers have created a way to make topology optimization designs more buildable. Their framework, described in a new paper in Automation in Construction today, allows users to apply constraints to algorithmically generated structures to limit their complexity. For instance, the approach allows users to limit how many components meet at each point of their design and how small they want their smallest parts. It also builds on previous work by designing structures with multiple materials and taking into account materials’ properties to distribute load and specify part connections.
“There’s an interplay between the materials you’re using, the constructability of designs, and the optimization of the structure,” says senior author Josephine Carstensen, MIT’s Gilbert W. Winslow (1937) Career Development Professor in Civil Engineering. “You need to be able to address all three at the same time. That’s what we tried to do here.”
The researchers used their approach to design steel, wood, and multimaterial truss structures that support loads in buildings and bridges, showing the carbon emissions associated with materials changed significantly when different constraints were applied. They hope their framework will move topology optimization closer to being used in real-world construction.
“In the literature, there’s sometimes been a disconnect between the carbon savings you can achieve on a computer and the realistic carbon savings you can achieve for built structures — especially when it comes to design technologies like topology optimization,” Carstensen says. “The problem lies in the lack of constructability of designs. These designs have been perceived as too difficult to make with conventional methods, so they are never even attempted. That’s what is exciting about our approach: We can add constraints so that you will never be in a situation where the design that comes out is too hard to make.”
Joining Carstensen on the paper is first author and civil and environmental engineering PhD student Zane Schemmer.
More buildable designs
Computer-based topology optimization has been around for decades. It uses computer programs to optimally distribute material in a given space, for instance creating the strongest possible structures at the lowest weight. The resulting designs are often complex, spider web-like structures that would be a challenge for even the most capable engineers to build.
“A big question Josephine and I were asking is why isn’t industry using it?” Schemmer recalls. “What are the obstacles that prevent industry from designing things more efficiently, and how can we fill the gaps between research and real life?”
In recent years, several researchers have developed ways to make topology optimization easier to use. For their study, Schemmer and Carstensen wanted to bring those approaches together and add new capabilities, like creating designs that use multiple materials, which has been another challenge in the field.
“A big aspect of sustainability going forward will be not only using less material, but also implementing materials efficiently based on considerations like where you are in the world, your access to materials, and each of their associated carbon costs,” Schemmer says.
To build their framework, they used a class of equations called mixed integer algorithms that help make binary decisions about things like materials and connections.
“You can’t have a part that’s 72 percent timber and 28 percent steel,” Schemmer says. “Instead, it says, ‘This truss or cable is going to be made out of this,’ and then based on that decision, how do we make sure all of these connections meet their strength standards?”
The system’s decisions also take into account material properties. For instance, steel struts can withstand compressive loads, but steel cables cannot. The model also has more realistic modeling of how parts connect than previous approaches.
“In 3D printing, the way things come together is easy,” Carstensen says. “In construction, that’s not the case. If you’re building with timber there’s a certain rule set, versus steel has a different rule set.”
Users can also decide how complex they want their design to be by specifying the maximum number of connections at each joint and the minimum angle between connected components. The model also creates minimum size limits for parts, further improving its constructability.
“It’s tough to give a contractor these complex, intricate designs because it’s going to be super difficult to build,” Schemmer says. “A lot of times contractors won’t pick up a project like that to begin with.”
The researchers compared structures designed with their approach to structures designed with conventional topology optimization, showing dramatic differences in final designs that transformed how the structures would be built. Using the Lockport “Upside-Down Bridge” near Buffalo, New York, as an example, they applied individual constraints, like a minimum angle on part connections or minimum part sizes, to the bridge’s truss design, to better understand how each constraint impacted final designs.
Finally, they made truss designs that used wood only, steel only, and combined wood and steel, showing how different projects offered tradeoffs with respect to environmental impact and constructability.
“We saw how the system knew that you could design a bridge of pure steel, but that might not be best from a carbon standpoint,” Schemmer says. “Or you could design a bridge out of purely timber, but that might not be the strongest. But these materials can work together, so you use timber for the carbon savings and steel where you need extra strength, and there’s a balance you can find in these structures.”
From research to industry
The researchers say their approach is more computationally intensive than some others, but they were able to use a MacBook Pro to run the programs in their experiment, and they believe it’s practical for most civil engineering firms.
“It’s computationally a little tougher to solve, but there’s a lot of tools coming out nowadays that make these problems a lot more feasible,” Schemmer says. “This approach has been avoided by industry in the past, but now we think it’s a practical way to solve problems dealing with variable constraints.”
If users have more computational resources, the researchers say their approach could work with a long list of materials and far bigger structures than homes, small buildings, and bridges.
Moving forward, Carstensen says the team plans to build scaled-down structures designed by the model to further validate its predictions. They also want to add constraints to their model to make it even more seamless for civil engineers to use when designing the world’s infrastructure.
“As a structural engineer by training, I was never taught how to design for low-carbon,” Schemmer says. “To tackle a problem as big as climate change, addressing the built environment is a great place to start. One of the most tangible things we can do is work at the layer of construction, at the design stage, because that’s a fundamental step that we can control. There’s a lot of decisions we make early on that lead us to use extra material we don’t need.”
The work was funded by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design.
New chip could help tiny robots traverse complex environmentsResearchers combined an efficient algorithm with dedicated hardware to rapidly generate 3D maps for navigation using minimal memory and power.A new chip developed by MIT researchers could help tiny, low-power UAVs avoid obstacles as they zip around tight corners inside an industrial HVAC system to check for gas leaks.
The chip allows small autonomous robots and other battery-limited devices to construct detailed 3D maps of their environments in real-time using only about as much power as a single LED. A robot could use such a map to plan a collision-free path to reach its goal.
Typically, generating such thorough maps requires power-hungry systems and a great deal of memory to build and store 3D representations of the obstacles in a robot’s environment.
The MIT researchers took a different approach by combining an extremely efficient mapping algorithm with specialized hardware designed to accelerate its workload, which minimizes memory and power consumption.
This system-on-a-chip consumes only about 6 milliwatts of power, a fraction of the power required by other systems.
This low-power operation could also make the chip well-suited for lightweight augmented reality headsets that can be worn for extended periods, for applications like educational medical simulation or detailed repair and assembly work.
“This paper showcases a key example of how you can leverage co-design of the algorithm and hardware to really push energy efficiency. While there has been a lot of work looking into compact 3D maps, what stands out about this work is that it also ensures that the process to generate those maps is as efficient as possible. Our chip allows you to store very large maps in a very small space, and do it in a very energy efficient manner,” says Vivienne Sze, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and senior author of a paper on the chip.
She is joined on the paper by co-lead authors and MIT graduate students Zih-Sing Fu and Peter Zhi Xuan Li as well as Sertac Karaman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the director of LIDS. The work was recently presented at the IEEE Very Large-Scale Integrated Circuits Symposium.
A more compact map
For a robot, generating a 3D map that includes the obstacles in its environment usually demands a lot of power because it must store images captured by its camera, and process all the 3D pixels in each image multiple times.
Instead of representing the environment using 3D pixels, which are cubes called voxels, the MIT researchers utilized a technique that maps the obstacles in space using ellipsoid blobs called Gaussians.
The size, shape, and thickness of these ellipsoids can be smoothly adapted, so they match the shape of curved objects more efficiently than if one uses rigid, cube-shaped voxels.
Importantly, the map captures the obstacles and free space around the robot, and together these let the robot plan a safe, collision-free path. Mapping obstacles and free space with voxels typically consumes a lot of memory, which makes traditional methods power-hungry. Because Gaussians can flexibly fit the geometry, a single elongated ellipsoid can represent a region that would take many voxels, so occupied surfaces and free space are captured far more compactly.
For their new system-on-a-chip, called Gleanmer, the researchers employed an algorithm their lab developed called GMMap that efficiently generates a 3D map of the robot’s environment using Gaussians to represent obstacles.
With traditional approaches, a robot would need to load and process each depth image several times to adjust the size and shape of the ellipsoids. The system would usually construct Gaussians by comparing all the pixels in an image to each other. But the amount of memory and power needed to do this remains too high for many edge devices.
To solve this problem, the MIT researchers invented a technique that can generate highly accurate Gaussians from depth images with only one pass, after which they can discard the images, so the chip never has to store an entire image at once.
Instead of comparing each pixel to every other pixel in the 3D image, their algorithm assumes that nearby pixels belong in the same Gaussian, so it only needs to compare each pixel to its neighbors.
“At any point in time, we only need to store a few pixels in memory, which significantly reduces the memory footprint our algorithm requires,” Li says.
Leveraging co-design
But as the robot moves through the space, it usually sees the same object from different viewpoints. When it generates Gaussians, some will overlap because they represent the same object. This can make the 3D map too large to store on an edge device.
Fusing overlapping Gaussians makes the map more compact, but doing so typically requires the algorithm to process many raw pixels stored in memory. The researchers developed a novel technique to perform this fusion process directly on overlapping Gaussians, without needing to revisit the original pixels. Since Gaussians are more compact than pixels, this significantly reduces memory and power requirements.
The same principle runs through their algorithm — most computations operate directly on compact Gaussians rather than the original pixels, enabling energy efficiency.
The researchers exploit this principle to design a chip that keeps the Gaussians it is actively working on within small, fast on-chip memory right beside the computational units. This is only possible because the Gaussian map is so compact.
The Gaussians the robot needs to work on next are waiting in the on-chip memory units, so they don’t need to be fetched from more distant, power-hungry, off-chip storage.
“By having a dedicated memory that just stores the objects you’ve seen in the previous few frames, you can access the data much more efficiently,” Fu explains.
They tested the system-on-a-chip by reconstructing a range of diverse, pre-existing 3D environments. The chip can also reconstruct obstacles and free space directly from live data streamed from an iPhone camera.
Gleanmer generated detailed 3D maps in real-time while consuming about 6 milliwatts of power. It required only about 2.5 percent of the power that the best existing chip for map construction would need.
By reusing compact Gaussians along the path as it plans, the chip lets a robot chart a safe trajectory using only about 20 percent of the energy it would otherwise need.
“We reduce the memory consumption by making sure the algorithm is efficient. Then we accelerate the workload that is performed by that efficient algorithm, so in the end, our chip is as efficient as possible,” Li says.
The researchers plan to further improve energy efficiency by moving the processing units on the chip closer to the sensors that gather environmental data. They could also explore additional applications, such as the use of Gaussians to represent schematics. This could help AI systems reason about complex blueprints more efficiently.
“Real-time 3D mapping has been the missing piece for small autonomous systems. A drone inspecting a pipeline or a pair of AR glasses navigating a room both need to understand the space around them — instantly, continuously, and at almost no power cost. Gleanmer makes that possible for the first time in a chip you can hold between your fingers,” says Karaman.
This work is supported, in part, by the MIT-MathWorks Fellowship, Amazon, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Intel.
A better way to model the behavior of metal alloysMIT researchers’ approach captures subtle atomic patterns, improving predictions of material properties.Companies working at the frontier of aerospace, energy, and computing are constantly looking for new materials to improve performance. But in order to understand how those materials will actually behave once they’re inside rockets or on computer chips, companies first have to make the material and then test it. That’s because even the most powerful simulation techniques struggle to model the complex chemical arrangements in most of today’s solid materials. The problem adds costs and time to materials innovation.
Now a team of MIT researchers has created a way to accurately model the behavior of metals, regardless of the complexity of their chemical arrangement. At the center of the approach are machine-learning models that make simulations of materials faster and more accurate. The researchers improved those models by building training datasets that capture the diversity of atomic environments in chemically disordered materials.
In a new paper in Sciences Advances, the researchers showed their approach could be used to accurately predict material properties for a diverse group of metal alloys under a range of conditions. They also showed how the approach could be used to develop new materials, especially in scenarios where experimentation is expensive.
“The focus of the paper is metallic alloys, which is the field I work in, but this could be adapted to other types of materials, like semiconductors,” says senior author Rodrigo Freitas, MIT’s TDK Career Development Professor in Materials Science and Engineering. “This is not specific to any one application — you could use this approach to create new sustainable steels, new materials for aerospace, and more. That’s what makes this exciting.”
Joining Freitas on the paper are first author Killian Sheriff PhD ’26; MIT PhD students Daniel Xiao and Yifan Cao; and University of Sheffield Senior Lecturer Lewis R. Owen.
Modeling metals
Material properties are mostly determined by the internal arrangement of their chemical elements. Even if two materials have the same mix of chemical elements, different chemical arrangements can make the difference between a brittle material and one that deforms without breaking.
Capturing that distinction requires simulating materials atom by atom. To do that, researchers rely on models that describe how atoms interact with each other. Over the last two decades, machine learning has become the most accurate way to build those models. Such models work well when the chemical arrangements inside materials follow highly ordered patterns, but that’s not the case with most solid materials, whose atomic chemical arrangements are disordered and vary from one region to another.
“The real challenge in our field is modelling these chemically disordered phases,” Freitas says. “Chemical disorder means there’s a huge variety of local chemical environments, which is hard for the machine-learning model to learn. This is a problem because every single metal we use in practice is chemically disordered.”
The problem comes down to a lack of representative training data for those atom-by-atom simulations. The current leading approach for creating such data works by brute force, often requiring more than 100,000 hours of computation to create the training data for a single material. Even then, it does not transfer well when researchers change the material’s composition.
In previous work, Freitas’ group had developed a way to measure the chemical complexity of solid materials by analyzing the frequency and spacing of tiny groups of atoms. For this study, the researchers used that capability to build better training datasets. They used a mathematical approach known as information theory to generate training datasets that capture a wider variety of local chemical environments inside disordered materials. The method works by swapping out atoms from samples to reduce repetition and expose the model to chemical environments it might otherwise miss.
“We kept optimizing the training set so it captured as many different local environments as possible,” Freitas says. “If the same kind of environment showed up many times, we replaced redundant examples with ones the model hadn’t seen before. That makes the training set much more informative because each example adds something new.”
When trained on the researchers’ datasets, the models predicted material properties more accurately than models trained using random sampling or another popular sampling method.
“The starting point for all these atom-by-atom simulations is: Are you able to accurately describe the chemical bond between atoms?” Freitas explains. “If not, it can still teach you about materials in general, but it doesn’t tell you what will happen to specific materials in the real world. This approach makes the simulations high fidelity in terms of their chemistry, to better reflect what’s happening to materials.”
The researchers applied their technique to create machine-learning training datasets for a group of chemically diverse metal alloys. Using a set of machine-learning models, they showed the models trained on their datasets are more accurate than much larger models created by companies like Google and Microsoft.
“We got to a point where we were convinced it worked without using these expensive brute-force methods,” Freitas says. “I told Killian, ‘This is a good paper. But if you can show that simulations with these models can now accurately predict useful materials properties, then it becomes a very good paper.’ Killian took that to heart and tested this as widely as he could.”
Sheriff worked with Xiao and Cao to test the approach across different alloys and properties. The team also drew on Owen’s experimental data to compare the simulations against real measurements of atomic ordering in alloys.
From the lab to industry
The method works, in part, by capturing hidden patterns in the sample data. The researchers describe the patterns in the paper as “subtle energetic biases toward certain local chemical configurations.”
Those small energetic differences matter because they determine which phases form in an alloy, how those phases change with temperature and composition, and ultimately which properties the material will have. As one test, Daniel Xiao led simulations showing that the team’s models could predict phase diagrams that closely matched experimental data. Phase diagrams map which phases are stable across different temperatures and chemical compositions, and they are a central tool for designing and processing alloys.
“Phase diagrams are one of the main ways people connect materials modeling to real processing decisions,” Freitas says. “If you are welding, casting, or heat-treating an alloy, you need to know which phases are likely to form under different conditions. Our goal is to make these kinds of predictions accurate enough, and accessible enough, that they become part of how people design materials.”
The researchers are now using the approach to study how changing an alloy’s composition affects mechanical properties and radiation tolerance, with the goal of designing materials that remain strong and damage-tolerant in harsh environments. They are also working to make the method easier to use with the kinds of tools and workflows materials engineers already rely on.
“Industry isn’t going to change the way they do things if what you’re creating doesn’t fit into their existing operating procedures,” Freitas says. “The goal is to make these predictions useful in the places where materials decisions are actually made.”
The research was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
On June 9, The Boston Globe released its 2026 “Tech Power Players” list, recognizing 50 influential local leaders in technology and business across Massachusetts. The list includes eight MIT affiliates including President Sally Kornbluth, Prof. Daniela Rus (director of CSAIL), Prof. Regina Barzilay, Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang, Prof. Max Tegmark, Ana Bakshi (executive director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship), Katie Rae CEO and Managing Partner of Engine Ventures), and Senior Lecturer Brian Halligan, along with a number of MIT alumni.
In addition to recognizing individual leaders, the Power Players coverage highlights MIT’s research labs, its culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, industry connections, new AI initiatives, and the Institute’s deep commitment to maintaining Massachusetts’ technological leadership.
“Massachusetts can absolutely lead in this next wave,” says President Kornbluth, noting that the future is bright with burgeoning opportunities to advance technologies in fields from manufacturing, life and health sciences to quantum technologies and energy in service of Americans across the country.
Advancing AI and entrepreneurship
When it comes to AI, MIT is “working to drive artificial intelligence forward in sectors where the region is strongest, from biotechnology and robotics to defense and clean energy. It’s also trying to broaden entrepreneurship through a ‘dorm-to-startup’ push, creating a pipeline of support services — from hack-a-thons to venture funding — to help students to start companies between classes,” writes Robert Weisman for The Globe.
Looking ahead, The Globe highlights how MIT aims to remain a central driver of AI advancement within higher ed.
“President Sally Kornbluth is reinvigorating the school’s support of the local innovation ecosystem,” writes Aaron Pressman, noting how MIT is “unveiling new online classes dedicated to AI — with free entry-level classes for anyone — and encouraging more entrepreneurship on campus.”
MIT’s free, online AI courses could help local tech leaders in their challenge “to ensure people, not only corporations, benefit from the technology,” writes Pressman.
And when it comes to applying AI technologies to real-world problems, MIT aims to ensure the greater Boston area remains a leader.
“Some schools in Massachusetts, including MIT, are carving out a specialty in applied AI — sometimes called ‘AI+X’ — deploying the technology to help businesses, hospitals, and research institutions to supercharge productivity, innovation, and scientific breakthroughs,” explains Weisman.
Aman Narang ‘04, CEO of Toast, adds: “The superpower has always been the university system. The best thing Boston can do is keep these people around.”
MIT startups are a key driver of the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. To ensure the greater Boston area remains a hub for innovators and to respond to growing student interest, MIT is looking to build upon its existing entrepreneurship resources for students, including the more than 150 courses and 85 centers and programs dedicated to fostering an entrepreneurial community. Additionally, President Sally Kornbluth and Provost Anantha Chandrakasan recently formed the Committee on Accelerating Translation and Entrepreneurship (CATE) to explore anew how the Institute can best support, remove barriers to, and accelerate the movement of ideas from MIT’s research and innovative discoveries into new ventures.
Further, reflecting on the optimism surrounding the Greater Boston tech scene, The Globe describes how applications for The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s startup accelerator program have doubled from last year, and nearly one-fifth of MIT undergraduates — about 800 students — attended a recent startup career fair.
Innovating change beyond MIT
The simple worm could drive the future of AI. This might sound like a squishy premise, but that’s the idea behind MIT startup Liquid AI, which is developing AI models inspired by the brain structure of a simple worm and could significantly reduce AI energy consumption. Liquid AI’s models, “which can uncover financial fraud and pilot autonomous drones, require far less electricity to operate than large language models, saving energy and water, which is used to cool data centers,” Pressman explains.
The Globe highlights how Liquid AI recently signed a deal with Mercedes-Benz to incorporate its technology into the onboard systems of cars sold in North America.
To power new AI technologies – and ensure Americans across the country can have reliable and affordable energy sources – researchers at MIT and a number of alumni are also turning their attention to the future of energy.
In Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang’s lab, researchers are developing batteries that can store more electricity over longer periods, creating “more opportunities for wind, solar, and other clean energy sources.”
Weisman highlights how “Chiang’s lab and other MIT research centers are also working on innovations in microchips, critical minerals, fusion technology, and defense tech. All are examples of ‘tough tech’ projects combining science and engineering, which Chiang says ‘are in the sweet spot of the Boston ecosystem.’“
Soon, 80 MIT students will work as summer interns and employees at GE Vernova, thanks to the MIT-GE Vernova Climate and Energy Alliance, a collaboration aimed at advancing research and education that will accelerate the global energy transition.
GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik wanted his organization to “plug into the city’s innovation culture,” particularly the MIT campus and community. The company announced it would dedicate $50 million over five years to fund internships and research projects in which students and faculty work alongside GE Vernova engineers and technicians.
The most promising area for the Greater Boston tech scene
The Globe concludes by asking each Power Player what the most promising thing about the Greater Boston tech scene is right now.
For Rus, the answer is: “talent. Boston has the best AI researchers in the world, and they're producing genuinely new ideas, not incremental ones,” she explains.
When it comes to realizing the potential of fusion energy, Bob Mumgaard SM ’15, co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explains that he couldn’t have built the company anywhere but Massachusetts thanks to the region’s expertise in engineering, designing, and manufacturing hardware and equipment and access to university researchers.
“The ecosystem has the building blocks,” says Mumgaard. “Massachusetts is the strongest in the nation in innovation in energy.”
President Kornbluth points to quantum.
“There isn’t a more important technological field right now than quantum science and technology, and the Boston area has the greatest concentration of quantum talent anywhere in the world,” Kornbluth emphasizes.
“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 2026-27Ranking 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 laureateThe 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.
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.
How to create distinguishable states for quantum systemsResearchers 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.”
A tiny ingestible sensor can measure temperature from inside the bodyAfter 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 711th 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 CommunityExamples of actions MIT has taken since 2023 to address concerns of antisemitism
Student discipline process improvements
Apart from individual student discipline cases as described above, MIT conducted a holistic review of its student discipline process, which resulted in a number of policy and procedure changes, including:
Over the last couple years, MIT has experienced a significant decline in the number of reports of student misconduct arising out of allegations of antisemitism or other forms of bias based on religion or ethnic/national origin.
Courts have dismissed lawsuits claiming antisemitism at MIT
As a result of MIT’s actions, including specifically some of those described above, federal courts have dismissed claims of antisemitic harassment and discrimination asserted against MIT under Title VI. In doing so, the courts have acknowledged the escalating steps MIT has taken to promote a safe, inclusive community for its Jewish community members. For example, in a unanimous decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals holding that MIT satisfied its Title VI obligations, the Court noted:
Importantly, MIT took these steps to protect the MIT community even while the Court concluded that much of the campus protest activity at MIT amounted to legally protected expression and not a violation of Title VI:
2026 Quality of Life survey results
Jewish student sentiment has significantly improved and is now higher than the general MIT student population.
Below are data from the spring 2026 Quality of Life survey, a community-wide survey administered every two years to better understand the lives of faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars, and students. The data reflect responses from those who selected “Judaism” as their religion, alone or in part (respondents were able to select more than one religion).
Overall, how satisfied are you being a student at MIT?
(Percentages are a sum of respondents who selected “very satisfied” + “somewhat satisfied”)
Jewish Undergraduates:
2024: 87%
2026: 97% (compared to 86% for all undergraduate students)
Jewish Graduate Students:
2024: 78%
2026: 94% (compared to 88% for all graduate students)
I feel that I belong at MIT.
(Percentages are a sum of respondents who selected “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree”)
Jewish Undergraduates
2024: 83%
2026: 92% (compared to 80% for all undergraduate students)
Jewish Graduate Students
2024: 70%
2026: 79% (compared to 79% for all graduate students)
Notably, not a single Jewish undergraduate respondent in 2026 disagreed with the statement “I feel that I belong at MIT.”
Other resources
MIT Hillel: https://hillel.mit.edu/
Chabad at MIT: https://www.chabadmit.org/
Technology Review: "Long Before Hillel, Jews Found a Home at MIT" https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/22/1076876/long-before-hillel-jews-found-a-home-at-mit/
MIT News: "MIT-Kalaniyot program expands, with new cohort of scholars" https://news.mit.edu/2026/mit-kalaniyot-program-expands-new-cohort-of-scholars-0701
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 hesitancyThomas 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 PlanningAn 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.”
Would you return a favor? Scientists say it depends on the relationshipA 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 watersThe “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.
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero wins Kavli Prize in NanoscienceThe 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 interpretMIT 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 sustainableFounded 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 TechnologyThe 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 microparticlesThe 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 quasarWhen 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 electronicsBy 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-timeUsing 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.”