Myriam Heiman, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, will become the director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, effective July 1. She succeeds Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai, who is stepping down after leading the institute for 16 years.
Heiman, a molecular neurobiologist and geneticist, studies the neurodegenerative diseases of the brain’s basal ganglia, including Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Using cutting-edge techniques, including single-cell genomics and a powerful transcriptomic technique she helped invent, called translating ribosome affinity purification, she aims to understand the molecular changes that eventually lead to cell death in these diseases.
“Myriam is an extraordinary scientist, a proven leader within MIT, and a deeply caring and generous mentor. Her research to determine why specific brain cell types are particularly vulnerable to diseases such as Huntington’s has produced studies that are both deep in their insight and sweeping in their scope,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “I firmly believe that Myriam will be an excellent leader during the Picower Institute’s next chapter.”
“I am honored to take on this role to support the institute’s exceptional scientists and trainees as they pursue discoveries that deepen our understanding of the brain and improve human health,” says Heiman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS).
The Picower Institute is a community of 16 neuroscience labs dedicated to understanding the mechanisms that drive learning and memory and related functions such as cognition, emotion, perception, behavior, and consciousness. Institute neuroscientists explore the brain and nervous system at multiple scales, from genes and molecules to cells and synapses to circuits and systems, producing novel insights into how disruptions in these mechanisms can lead to developmental, psychiatric, or neurodegenerative disease.
Picower Professor Susumu Tonegawa founded the institute as a center in 1994 before a transformative gift from Barbara and Jeffry Picower enabled it to become an institute in 2002. Li-Huei Tsai has served as director since 2009, but announced in March that she would step down after more than 16 years to focus on her research.
Heiman joined the Picower Institute, BCS, and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in 2011, after completing her postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and a BA from Princeton University.
“Ever since joining the institute, Heiman’s research has been guided by the principle that fundamental understanding can lead to breakthroughs in addressing disease,” Tsai says. “Myriam has made it her mission to address these kinds of urgent questions in neuroscience.”
Heiman employs sophisticated DNA and RNA analysis technologies to gain detailed insights into how brain cell states change amid disease, revealing molecular pathways that contribute to the particular vulnerability of different cell types. In 2020, Heiman published the results of an innovative in vivo screening of every mouse gene’s impact on the survival of neurons in the brain, identifying hundreds necessary for sustaining neurons and highlighting a specific gene that promoted their resilience in the context of Huntington’s disease.
Other studies, both in mice and in postmortem human brain samples, have revealed errant immune responses in neurons and in the brain’s blood vessels that contribute to the disease’s progression. The latter finding arose in a 2022 paper, published with MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory colleague Manolis Kellis, that also provided the field one of the first cellular atlases of the brain’s vasculature.
Her research has also produced insights into other neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, including ALS and frontotemporal dementia. In 2024, together with Kellis, Heiman published a paper in Cell showing the diseases have remarkable overlaps at the cellular and molecular levels, revealing potential targets that could yield therapies applicable to both disorders. Heiman’s latest research is also producing new insights into substance use disorders and schizophrenia.
Her research program has garnered many awards. In 2021, Heiman became co-recipient of a National Institutes of Health Transformative Research Award, which “promotes cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approaches that could potentially create or challenge existing paradigms” as part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. The next year she also received a prestigious NIH R35 grant to find early triggers of disease progression.
Heiman is also a dedicated teacher and mentor. In 2017, she earned the Department of BCS award for excellence in graduate mentoring; and in 2020, she received the department’s award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. In 2024, she was named one of 23 faculty across MIT who are “committed to caring” — an award given out by MIT’s Office of Graduate Education to faculty members who have served as exceptional mentors to graduate students.
Beyond MIT, Heiman serves on editorial boards and the scientific advisory board of the nonprofit Huntington’s Disease Foundation, an organization that supports research aimed at finding treatments and a cure for Huntington’s and related disorders..
Heiman says she is looking forward to her new role in service to MIT by leading the Picower Institute.
“I approach this role with humility and enormous enthusiasm,” Heiman says. “The Picower Institute has an extraordinary legacy, and I’m eager to do everything I can to help support the next generation of transformative research.”
To study how chips really work, MIT researchers built their own operating systemA new kernel called Fractal gives researchers a cleaner view of what’s happening inside a processor, and has already surfaced previously unknown behavior in Apple’s M1.A new kernel, or core program within an operating system, gives researchers a cleaner view of what’s happening inside a processor. Called Fractal and developed at MIT, the kernel has already surfaced previously unknown behavior in Apple’s M1.
When security researchers want to understand what a modern processor is really doing with the kind of detail that determines whether attacks like Spectre and Meltdown are possible, they usually run their experiments on top of an operating system that was never built for the job. They open up macOS or Linux, patch the kernel by hand, and hope the modifications hold. The approach is unstable, hard to reproduce, and on Apple’s platforms, slated for deprecation.
A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) decided to build something different. Fractal, an operating system kernel written from the ground up, treats the hardware itself as the object of study. Its first major use, a deep look at branch predictors — a CPU’s way of guessing what code to run next, before it knows for certain, so it doesn’t have to waste time waiting to find out — inside Apple’s M1 processor, has already turned up findings that prior work missed, including the first evidence that a class of speculative attack known as “Phantom” affects Apple Silicon.
“We’re using hardware in ways it wasn’t designed for,” says Joseph Ravichandran, the MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) who led the project. “It’s not even obvious that this is a possible thing you could do with the hardware. But we found a way to pull all these different primitives off. It’s like a microscope. If you’ve got a hand magnifying glass, you can see a little bit. But if you had an electron microscope, now we’re really talking. That’s what Fractal is. The electron microscope of operating systems.”
A clean room for chip research
The core problem Fractal solves is one that researchers have worked around for years. Modern processors keep state in many internal structures: branch predictors, caches, translation lookaside buffers, and more. To study how those structures behave across the boundary between user code and kernel code, two domains the chip is supposed to keep isolated, researchers need to run nearly identical experiments on each side of that boundary. On a general-purpose operating system, that is very difficult. The system itself manages privilege levels, address spaces, and scheduling, and it injects its own activity into every measurement.
Fractal inverts the model. It boots directly on bare metal, with no other software running, and exposes primitives that let a single experiment switch privilege levels at runtime while executing the same instructions in the same address space. The team calls the underlying technique multi-privilege concurrency, and it relies on a new construct they introduced: the outer kernel thread, which sits inside a user process’s memory but executes with kernel privileges.
The result is an experimental setup with almost no background noise. Where measurements taken under macOS or Linux are blurred by interrupts, scheduler activity, and address-space management, Fractal produces flat baselines and clean signals.
What Fractal found on the M1
Apple’s M1 implements an ARM specification called CSV2, which is supposed to prevent code running in one privilege level from steering speculation in another. Using Fractal, the MIT team confirmed that the protection works for the execute stage of indirect branch prediction: a user-mode program cannot make the kernel speculatively execute a chosen target through the indirect branch predictor.
But the team also found something the chip’s designers may not have intended. The CPU still fetches the target into the instruction cache before the protection kicks in. That fetch is observable through a side channel, which means user code can still influence what the kernel pulls into its caches across the privilege boundary. The same pattern appeared between processes assigned different address space identifiers.
The team also produced the first evidence that Apple Silicon exhibits Phantom speculation, a class of misprediction previously demonstrated only on AMD and Intel processors. In Phantom, ordinary instructions, including a no-op, can be misinterpreted by the CPU as branches, triggering speculative behavior the program never asked for. On the M1, Fractal showed that Phantom fetches succeed across both privilege levels and address spaces, though the execute phase remains blocked.
A separate Fractal experiment overturned a finding from earlier work on the M1’s conditional branch predictor, which had reported that cross-privilege training worked on Apple’s performance cores, but not its efficiency cores. The Fractal team showed that the conditional branch predictor has no privilege isolation at all, on either core type, and that the earlier result was likely an artifact of macOS quietly migrating threads between cores during system calls.
“For us, it is a true independent variable,” Ravichandran says. “You change the privilege level, nothing else changes. The only thing that could explain whether the attack succeeds or not is the privilege level.”
A tool, not a one-off
Fractal supports x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V, and consists of more than 31,000 lines of code. The team designed it as infrastructure rather than as a single experiment, with familiar POSIX system calls, a C library, and ports of standard tools like vim, GCC, and the dash shell, so that researchers can move existing experiment code over with minimal friction.
The MIT team disclosed its M1 findings to Apple’s product security team. In an unusual reversal, Apple’s engineers also examined Fractal.
The longer-term ambition is bigger than any single result. Ravichandran wants Fractal to become to microarchitecture research what tools like QEMU and FFmpeg are to their fields: shared infrastructure that the whole community builds on.
“My hope is that our results as a community get significantly more reliable, significantly more accurate,” says Ravichadran. “With this reduced noise, this clarity, and this guarantee that you’re running on the right core, on the right system.”
“Fractal is a strong architecture contribution because it turns an often ad hoc microarchitectural reverse-engineering workflow into reusable research infrastructure,” says University of Southern California assistant professor Mengyuan Li, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “By reducing software noise and giving researchers tighter control across privilege boundaries, it makes difficult hardware experiments much easier to interpret.”
Ravichandran worked with Mengjia Yan, an MIT associate professor of EECS and CSAIL principal investigator, on the paper. Their work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and ACE, which is part of a program sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They presented their work at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco, California.
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. 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.”
The consequences of relying on AI for accurate newsMedia Lab study shows that, much like how GPS has weakened our navigation skills, AI can make us worse at detecting fake news.It’s no secret that the last few years have seen a massive explosion in the use of artificial intelligence for general information-gathering. An even more recent trend, though, is how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are increasingly being used for verifying and consuming news; reports from the Pew Research Center over the last year found that one-in-five U.S. teens regularly use LLMs to get their news, while one-in-four young adults have reported using them for that purpose at least once.
A new open-access study from the MIT Media Lab should give some of those users pause: Researchers found that, over the course of a month, participants who relied on AI systems to verify facts actually got worse at detecting misinformation on their own when their chatbots were taken away.
This phenomenon, which is often referred to as the “AI dependency paradox,” has been observed in a wide range of knowledge domains, like the 2025 study that found that doctors who used AI got worse at detecting cancer on their own. The dynamic mirrors broader tech trends around so-called “deskilling” (or “cognitive offloading”) that have been well-documented for decades, from calculators weakening our math skills to Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies impacting our natural sense of direction.
In the new Media Lab study, which tracked 67 people over four weeks as they evaluated news headline-image pairs, participants were 21 percent more accurate in detecting fake news when assisted by an AI chatbot during a session — confirming previous research out of the MIT Sloan School of Management demonstrating that AI can be an effective tool in reducing people’s beliefs in false information.
However, the study showed that a new wrinkle emerged when the AI was no longer present: By week four, participants’ unassisted performance on new news items declined by 15 percentage points compared to before the study started. (Roughly a quarter of all participants actually reported feeling that they were getting better at detection, even as their performance declined.)
Dunning-Kruger creeps in
“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs, but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence [of letters/words],” says MIT media arts and sciences (MAS) PhD student Anku Rani, co-lead author of a new paper about the research, alongside fellow MAS PhD student Valdemar Danry. “Many impressive behaviors emerge from scaling this, but it comes with real limitations, both in what the model can reliably generate and in its broader impact on the people using it.”
Qualitative analysis identified distinct behavioral patterns, with the team labeling one-fifth of all participants as "Dependency Developers” who gradually shifted from active self-reliance to passive acceptance of AI guidance.
In the post-experiment survey, one respondent explicitly acknowledged this transition, noting their passive role in the process. “While [the chatbots] did emphasize that you must check across multiple sources to make sure a story is true, they didn’t teach me much about exploring the context of the images themselves,” the participant said.
The research team said that these AI models are particularly vulnerable to mistakes in the midst of emotionally charged breaking news, as exhibited by the widespread misinformation that accompanied President Trump’s recent assassination attempt and major events during the Iranian war. (The authors also point out that the original human-created news content that’s used to train the AI models is increasingly unreliable and/or biased, further exacerbating the problem.)
The paper, which Danry and Rani presented at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, was co-authored by Assistant Professor Paul Pu Liang, Senior Research Scientist Andrew Lippman, and senior author Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.
The solution: Being a coach, not a crutch
The researchers say that the results of their project suggest that the specific way in which an AI interacts with a user determines whether its impact will be “as a coach, versus as a crutch.” The study found a clear distinction between conversational strategies that simply help in the moment and those that actually support active learning and skill development.
For the latter, the Media Lab team uncovered several strategies associated with stronger independent detection later on, even if the strategies initially slowed down performance during the interaction. This included the Socratic method of the AI asking guided questions, as well as so-called “deep probing,” where the system provides gently persuasive statements if the user appears to be veering away from the correct response.
“AIs that ‘tell’ by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, while those that ‘ask’ via Socratic questioning are better at engaging someone to actually learn how to discern the truth on their own,” says Danry. “But it’s very much a trade-off between speed and effort.”
Rani noted a few key limitations to the one-month study, from the small dataset of roughly 50 validated news items to the demographic focus on the United States and the United Kingdom. In the future, she says that the team hopes to do similar experiments with more geographically diverse cohorts, including low-resource communities, and is also eager to explore whether other multi-modal interaction strategies — like interacting with culturally adaptive digital twins instead of text-based chatbots — help people improve their abilities to detect misinformation.
At a higher level, the researchers hope that the project will be something that educators can examine as they develop teaching plans that incorporate AI tools into their school curricula.
“It’s especially important to raise awareness in our schools and academic communities about the shortcomings of using AI as learning tools,” says Maes. “People need to know that if they ‘delegate’ their thinking, they’re not going to get better at that particular brand of problem-solving. Ultimately, the ability to question and analyze information is important for everyone, because it empowers us to solve problems and form our own independent opinions about the world.”
Danry adds that the rapidly-evolving field of machine learning and deep learning will require continuous education on the benefits and drawbacks of LLMs.
“There’s a lot of work to do in making sure that we don’t just fully offload critical tasks that we want to be able to keep on doing to these models,” he says. “We need to develop a new kind of AI literacy.”
The research project was supported, in part, by the Media Lab Consortium, an MIT Tata Center Technology and Design Fellowship, and a Google PhD Fellowship in Human–Computer Interaction.
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.
Innovative projects explore ways to deal with extreme heatLow-cost personal cooling and emissions-free air conditioning among ideas studied with MIT’s Climate Project seed funding.When MIT mechanical engineering Professor Kripa Varanasi landed in New Delhi in the middle of the night in June 2024 to attend a conference, he found himself in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat.
“This was June, and it was crazy. It was so hot for the whole meeting that I never left the hotel,” with daytime temperatures nearing 122 F.
It didn’t used to be that way. “When I grew up in India, it was not like this,” Varanasi says. “That kind of inspired me.”
He found a way to begin tackling the issue through a grant from the MIT Climate Project that provided seed funding to develop a proof-of-concept prototype of a wearable personal cooling system. The grant was one of four that were part of a Critical Cooling initiative for which the Climate Project requested proposals last year. The projects, which received grants totaling $450,000, are now complete. All have showed promise, and are now exploring ways to further develop their concepts.
Another MIT researcher, Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, looked into the potential of subsurface wells with heat-absorbing materials to supply spaces with air far below peak ambient temperatures while using much less energy than evaporation-compression heat pumps. The aim would be to use such systems in both small apartment buildings and single-family homes in India and other parts of the Global South.
Meanwhile, Asegun Henry, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor in Thermodynamics, studied the use of an alternative approach to air conditioning to be more energy efficient and eliminate hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants that are potent greenhouse gases. His approach uses a cheap, widely abundant solid “caloric” material — rubber — to obtain a cooling effect, and then uses plain water as an efficient heat transfer fluid. The initial target market is single-family houses and apartment buildings, although larger systems could also serve data centers.
And Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering, addressed the tendency of existing air conditioning units being expensive and power hungry. They also use refrigerants that are far more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide — and the coolants are likely to leak out when the devices are ultimately disposed of, adding to their global warming contribution. To help address that, Chen’s approach is to use a completely different kind of chemical refrigerant that has no greenhouse impact.
Christoph Reinhart, the Terri and Alan Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate who leads MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab (SDL), championed the seed fund effort and served as faculty lead. “The term ‘critical cooling’ stems from a collaboration between SDL and Harvard’s Human Rights Entrepreneurs Clinic,” he says. “It is motivated by the fact that climate change increasingly causes heat fatalities, primarily among vulnerable populations, who lack access to active cooling. The impact that MIT can have by ‘cooling people, not spaces’ is enormous.” This vision led to the creation of the grant program, where each of the teams received funding for six months to see what they could do and explore really innovative approaches to the problem.
In collaboration with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), led on J-PAL’s side by Senior Policy Manager Andre Zollinger, the teams started with a workshop that brought together representatives from the World Bank, leaders from the Global South and industry, and engineers with ideas to suggest.
All of the teams made progress and most produced initial prototypes, says Liana Frey, a managing director at the MIT Climate Project, and an effort will be made to further develop and fund these ideas. “We’re continuing to look at different ways of proceeding with the work.”
One of these ways is through air conditioning. Worldwide, air conditioning is only available to about 8 percent of people — and that amount already contributes between 3 and 4 percent of global warming emissions — explains Chen. Meanwhile, the need for air conditioning and other ways of addressing extreme heat is steadily growing as the planet steadily warms up, and many of the people who will be most affected live in regions with limited access to reliable or affordable power and with high levels of poverty. The market for air conditioners is expected to triple or quadruple in coming years, he says, and their contribution to global warming will grow accordingly.
Chen says that he already had some ideas, but he hadn’t had a chance to test them out in experiments, which the grant enabled him to do. After building three prototypes and testing them out, he says, “I’m not at the stage where I can say that I know this will work.” But based on the experiments, he’d like to proceed to build a further prototype. If it works as well as expected, it would make a dramatic difference in air conditioning technology worldwide, including for the intensive cooling needs of new data centers.
Meanwhile, Varanasi’s way of looking at the problem was to consider individuals, not spaces. His devices work through the same principle as how an elephant uses its huge ears to dissipate heat and cool its blood.
The wearable device only consumes about 33 watts, he says, whereas a typical room air conditioner consumes around 1,000 watts. At U.S. material prices, the prototype device would cost about $20, he says, but if sourced with local material in India, he estimates it could be produced at a cost of less than $1 each.
Such garments could be bought in large quantities by the government and distributed to communities, where local entrepreneurs could set up charging stations to recharge the devices after a night’s wear, and other locals could set up businesses to manufacture the systems. The socks themselves would be washable, separately from the cooling material itself. This could enable people to at least get a good night’s sleep even in the extreme heat, he says.
The proof of concept he built used a simulated foot containing a heater, and measured the cooling effect. “We were able to keep it in the zone that we need for the body to stay cool,” he says. “So our initial prototype that we were able to build with this funding showed that this can become a viable solution.”
The same material could be used in other ways, such as to make sleeping bags with built-in cooling, he says. The raw material is widely available, but would be treated in a way that they developed. “It was a fundamental science bottleneck that we were able to overcome, which makes it possible.”
Varanasi says he is exploring various possibilities for how to develop his novel cooling material into a commercial product. “Ultimately, to make anything work, it has to be a business, otherwise good ideas can die,” he says. “It has to be a good business and a sustainable business.”
Luckily, there’s still support for advancing this work. “There are a lot of people interested in this heat-stress question,” says Frey. “It’s just becoming more and more urgent.”
MIT affiliates win 2026 Breakthrough, New Horizons prizesFaculty member Shu-Heng Shao, in addition to four MIT alumni, are honored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.A number of MIT affiliates were recently honored for their research by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
Stuart H. Orkin ’67 shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Swee Lay Thein for their research transforming sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia from incurable to treatable conditions through gene editing therapy. Their work identified the master switch controlling fetal hemoglobin, leading directly to the development of Casgevy – the first CRISPR-based medicine approved for any disease. Orkin, a graduate of the MIT Department of Biology, is currently a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
Shu-Heng Shao, assistant professor of physics at MIT and a researcher in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute, was recognized with a 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize. Shao shared the honor with Clay Córdova from the University of Chicago, Thomas Dumitrescu from the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yifan Wang PhD ’16 from New York University. The four were recognized for “discover[ing] and develop[ing] the theory of ‘generalized symmetries’ in quantum field theory.”
J. Colin Hill ’08 shared a New Horizons in Physics Prize with Dillon Brout, Mathew Madhavacheril, Maria Vincenzi, Daniel Scolnic, and W. L. Kimmy Wu for their results measuring the expansion and composition of the universe, with Hill’s focus on advancing analyses of data from the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
Hong Wang PhD ’19 received a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize for resolving or making advances on a family of notoriously difficult problems in harmonic analysis, a branch of mathematics that studies functions by decomposing them into fundamental components.
In addition, Bryan Traynor, a former student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Rosa Rademakers for discovering the most common genetic cause of both amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia.
Founded by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the Breakthrough Prizes recognize the world’s top scientists in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. The laureates were honored at a gala ceremony in Los Angeles on April 18.
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.
The crucial human component in computing and AIThe MIT Ethics of Computing Research Symposium brought together experts and researchers working at the heart of ethical and social impact in technology.On April 30, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative hosted a full-day research symposium examining how artificial intelligence is shaping the world and its implications for society.
The symposium included research talks by SERC’s latest seed grant recipients on topics such as air pollution forecasting and responsible computer vision deployment, panels on AI alignment and AI in education, and a keynote address by Jon Kleinberg PhD ’96, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. The event also featured a poster session, where student researchers showcased projects they worked on throughout the year as SERC Scholars.
“There is so much amazing research being done at MIT on how AI and computing can be forces for good that benefit humanity. It was inspiring to see so much community interest in all this cutting-edge work,” said Brian Hedden, co-associate dean of SERC and professor of philosophy, who holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).
“As computing and AI become increasingly embedded in nearly every dimension of society, SERC’s mission is to help ensure that ethical reflection and technical progress advance together,” said Nikos Trichakis, co-associate dean of SERC and the J.C. Penney Professor of Management. “This year’s symposium highlights the extraordinary range of work underway across MIT, and creates a forum for our community to engage deeply with the responsibilities that come with shaping the future of computing.”
Aligning AI with human values — and what values those might be
The challenges with AI alignment and moral meshing lie in the ethical questions of how to instill “human values” onto a very powerful and rapidly changing technology. Who makes the decision on what values and rationalities are included in an ethical framework? How does one account for distortion when translating these values from user to machine?
These questions, among others, were posed by Dylan Hadfield-Menell, associate professor of EECS, during a panel he moderated that brought together an interdisciplinary group of speakers.
Iason Gabriel, a philosopher and research scientist at Google DeepMind, used the example of a judge to illustrate his point. “You want a judge to have good character, but to still interpret the rules. A reasonable person, though not necessarily the best person who ever lived. When it comes to AI, it’s not appropriate to model it as perfect. AI should be doing what we tell it to do, while using its character to interpret according to our moral values.”
Bailey Flanigan, assistant professor of political science in a shared appointment with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in EECS, took this a step further. To her, the most important problem to AI alignment is “resolving fundamental questions on who is entitled to govern different types of AI systems in the first place.”
Joining Flanigan on the panel was Bernado Zacka, associate professor of political science. Given the momentum of AI and complex institutional designs, Zacka expressed, “one of the most urgent problems is understanding the wisdom contained in the systems we are replacing, and why they function the way they do.”
As deployment pressure increases, it can often feel like people are building the plane as they fly it, although the panelists overall seemed optimistic about the trajectory of AI alignment, emphasizing how crucial human components are to shaping these systems.
Offloading versus uplifting
As students across all levels of education begin to use AI, questions arise on whether there’s a way to ethically incorporate AI tools while maintaining academic accuracy and rigor. At a panel on AI and education, MIT faculty and Marta McAlister, the director of Gemini for Education, explored how AI is already being used in their classrooms and discussed ways it can support learning while remaining aligned with instructional and curricular goals.
Professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, co-chairs of MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, homed in on a central dilemma of whether AI is being used to offload work, rather than being used to help scaffold the concepts being taught.
Madden, faculty head of computer science in EECS and the MIT College of Computing Distinguished Professor, described the process of cognitive struggle, whereby learning is done through a series of trials and failures. He said, “students now, when they hit that wall, their first instinct is to ask AI. They don’t see this as excelling in this process, and they haven’t actually acquired the skill you’re assessing.” The question then becomes how instructors maintain the process of cognitive struggle so it provides just enough of a challenge to combat the urge to use AI.
Klopfer, who serves as director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and the Education Arcade at MIT, echoed similar sentiments, in that critical thinking is no longer becoming a crucial step in the output of the work. Regarding where to start in keeping material just challenging enough, Klopfer suggested examining the curriculum as a whole. “Some core content has to go. We keep adding, instead of parsing or pruning,” he said.
Moderator Justin Reich, director of the Teaching Systems Lab and an associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies Program/Writing, noted that while teens know that AI is bad, it doesn’t necessarily stop their AI usage. However, by inviting them into the discussion on how AI is implemented and incorporating a more reflective exchange with instructors, students could be more equipped to choose how they use these tools and why.
Regardless, AI tools and their implementation should not be treated as a one-size-fits-all policy. Pat Pataranutaporn, the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and head of the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, said, “AI is not just one thing. It can and should be designed differently to promote things like creativity and critical thinking. What we measure, and how, shouldn’t be about getting the answer right. We should think about it would really mean for a student to learn these days.”
Is mimicking human reasoning just as good as the real thing?
With a slide deck that included chess grandmasters and film references, Kleinberg’s keynote address, titled “AI’s Models of the World, and Ours,” evaluated instances where AI systems have inadvertently set us up to fail due to a mismatch between the system’s model of the world and ours.
To illustrate this point, Kleinberg used chess, where modern chess engines can compete at superhuman levels, but when paired with human partners, their strategies aren’t understandable or inferable to their human counterpart. These human handoffs would then lead to confusion. Kleinberg used the example of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” where Gandalf, a powerful wizard, entrusts a highly dangerous and important quest to a ragtag group of adventurers. For those familiar with the story, the group is unexpectedly left without Gandalf’s guidance, sending them into a temporary bout of very serious turmoil.
When the chess engine hands a turn over to its human partner, the human struggles to pick up on the predictive move pattern that the engine has been following up until this point. “The danger of human-algorithm teams is that when the human takes over, the algorithm knows what it wants to do next, but the human doesn’t,” explained Kleinberg.
These analogies showcase the differences in the ways AI understands a world — through predictive simulations, pattern recognition, and constraints — to mimic human reasoning versus the innate, embodied knowledge that comes with the human experience, and whether these systems truly understand the worlds in which they’re operating. But the question remains that if the game still results in a checkmate, does it matter?
How Artemis II livestreamed hi-def videos and images from the moon to EarthThis first use of laser communications on a crewed mission at lunar distance was a foundational step to establishing a high-speed internet in deep space.This April, humanity had front-row seats to space as the Artemis II Orion spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage of its historic journey around the moon over more than 250,000 miles back to Earth at speeds on par with those of home internet connections.
The livestreaming of high-definition videos and high-resolution photos of the moon and Earth was made possible through the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O). Developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the onboard O2O payload was the space end of a high-speed laser communications (lasercom) link.
This link reached Earth when Orion had a line of sight with primary optical ground stations located at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico and Caltech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility in California, or an experimental ground station at Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory.
Together with terrestrial networks, O2O formed an internet backbone between the Artemis II Orion spacecraft and the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas.
Toward a high-speed internet in space
"Our goal was to demonstrate O2O's operational utility for human spaceflight, extending the high-bandwidth connections that internet users enjoy on Earth to astronauts in deep space," says lead systems engineer Farzana Khatri, a senior staff member in Lincoln Laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "We not only demonstrated the first use of lasercom on a crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit, but also attracted massive public engagement as the astronauts shared multimedia from their journey in near-real time."
During the last missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early '70s, astronauts relied on radio-frequency systems to communicate. But radio waves can only carry so much data per second because of their low carrier frequency; the grainy, poor-quality video and images of the moon from that time speak to this limited bandwidth.
With its much higher carrier frequency, infrared laser light can transmit 10 to 100 times more data per second than can radio waves. The switch from Apollo-era radios to Artemis-era lasers is analogous to the move from dial-up to high-speed internet. And a high-speed internet is rapidly becoming a key requirement for NASA missions as they collect more high-resolution data and push humans farther into deep space.
Lasering in on unprecedented views
During the Artemis II mission, from April 1 to 11, O2O downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at speeds up to 260 megabits per second. This data trove contained never-before-seen views of the basins and craters on the far side of the moon, a crescent Earth setting behind the moon, a nearly hour-long total solar eclipse with other planets scattered across a star-filled sky, and flashes of light from tiny meteoroids striking the lunar surface.
"O2O was able to downlink all the data stored on multiple onboard cameras, allowing mission control to erase the memory cards and refill them with new photos and videos," explains Khatri. "For any space mission, scientists and spacecraft engineers are concerned that data not sent down during the mission can become corrupted or get destroyed. And, when the spacecraft capsule returns, downloading the data can sometimes take months. The lasercom capability provided by O2O ensured the data were preserved and immediately available for analysis."
O2O is based on the laboratory's R&D 100 Award–winning Modular, Agile, and Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT), which contains subassembly modules for pointing the laser beams, establishing a communications link with ground stations, and maintaining this link despite atmospheric conditions. MAScOT made its debut in space on the International Space Station in 2023, demonstrating NASA's first LEO user for their lasercom relay system.
Over the moon for O2O
Leading up to the launch of Artemis II, operations teams from the laboratory traveled to NASA's White Sands Test Facility and Mission Control Center (MCC) to conduct monthly maintenance on ground hardware and simulate different mission stages. During the 10-day mission, laboratory teams provided 24/7 coverage.
At mission control, one laboratory team, along with NASA Goddard colleagues, interfaced with a mission flight controller to command the O2O payload, coordinated with U.S. and Australian ground terminals to bring up the O2O physical link, assessed whether overall O2O mission requirements were being met, and analyzed data to ensure payload health and optimize performance. Another laboratory team oversaw subsystems of the optical ground terminal at White Sands, while staff at the laboratory's main campus in Massachusetts offered subject-matter expertise.
Initially, O2O had a scheduled operational window of one hour per day, with the onboard radio system set to downlink most data. However, mission operators found O2O so useful that they maximized its operational time as the mission progressed. On the fly, mission operators adjusted Orion's attitude — how the spacecraft is oriented in space — so that O2O could have line-of-sight access with the ground.
"One special aspect of this mission that enabled our technology to be so impactful was the flexibility built into the planning process to account for the fact that humans hadn't been to the moon in more than 50 years, and it would be the first time sending astronauts on Orion," says Bryan Robinson, leader of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "An established process for making real-time changes to the plan and the willingness of operators to try out this new technology had a huge impact, even for this short mission. This impact was tangible by everyone in mission operations and by the public watching from home."
With Artemis II completed, engineers, scientists, and mission specialists are analyzing mission data. Their analyses will provide insights into spacecraft and subsystem performance and moon geology, which will inform lunar landings and deep-space exploration. While the laboratory team is still processing O2O performance data, they believe the system could downlink at least 10 times more data by improving the efficiency of the downlink process and by addressing data-flow bottlenecks in space and ground networks.
The laboratory team is now evaluating how lasercom could support future moon plans for Artemis and Ignition. Aligning with the National Space Policy to secure U.S. leadership in space, Ignition is a recently announced initiative to establish a permanent lunar base with a sustainable human presence.
"Participating in this historic mission from the MCC and having O2O be useful, I couldn't have asked for anything more amazing in my career," Khatri says.
"When I came home, I was floored by the response of people who engaged with the mission while it was happening. Much of that engagement was enabled by the technology we developed. That's a rare moment in a career doing what we do," Robinson adds.
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.”
Developing innovative alternatives to conventional carbon capture methodsMIT researchers present a promising new approach to efficient, flexible carbon capture and removal.Carbon capture is an important climate change mitigation strategy, but it faces technological barriers and can be energy-intensive and expensive. To help make necessary advances in this area, a team of MIT researchers, with support from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), are exploring energy-efficient and scalable alternatives to conventional carbon dioxide (CO2) capture methods.
Conventional amine scrubbing, which is the current standard for CO2 capture, is energy-intensive and difficult to scale, limiting its impact despite the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and upgrade CO2 into valuable products. In a new article published in Nature Energy, MIT researchers — graduate students Fang-Yu Kuo of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Gi Hyun Byun of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE); Professor Betar Gallant of MechE; and former MCSC postdoctoral Impact Fellows Glen Junor and Akachukwu Obi — investigate a promising alternative to these conventional CO2 capture methods. Their findings could move the needle on achieving efficient and flexible carbon capture and removal.
In their paper, the team explores an alternative, electrochemically mediated CO2 capture (EMCC). This approach enables electrification of CO2 separation — driven ideally by renewables — but currently faces challenges, such as relying on sorbents that require highly reducing potentials, where oxygen reduction side reactions become significant. This can compromise both efficiency and long-term performance. To tackle this shortcoming of EMCC, the MIT team researched whether N-heterocyclic imines (NHIs) is a useful new class of EMCC sorbent.
“NHIs have shown promise in recent years as CO2 sorbents because of the ease of NHI molecular modifications for tuning basicity,” says Fang-Yu Kuo. “Our work translates these NHIs for the first time into the EMCC application space, and demonstrates that NHI-based sorbents can be modulated electrochemically for CO2 separation by a unique separation mechanism that avoids the need of applying highly reducing potentials.”
The team’s initial research establishes a novel bis(NHI) structure that can enable a theoretical CO2 modulation of two molecules per electron during cell operation. The initial published result also indicates that with further molecular engineering of bis(NHI) structures to strengthen CO2 binding affinity, the bis(NHI) could operate in more diverse electrolyte environments, opening new possibilities to optimize system performance in terms of electron efficiency, energy efficiency, and operational flexibility.
“A critical future direction of our work involves gaining deeper mechanistic insight into the stability and degradation pathways of the bis(NHI) radical cation,” says Kuo. “Understanding these pathways will inform the rational design of next-generation bis(NHI) molecules, enabling longer operational lifetimes and enhanced cycling durability for practical deployment.”
MIT, in collaboration with Georgia State University and a growing network of educational institutions, has announced expanded work under PATH (Pathways for AI Training and Hiring) — a multiyear initiative designed to scale effective, affordable, industry-aligned AI training for entry-level and current workers, with a particular focus on transforming community colleges into engines powering an AI-enabled workforce for the nation.
“In the era of AI, economic opportunity and mobility will increasingly depend on whether people can develop practical, industry-relevant AI skill sets and mindsets, not just familiarity with tools,” says Cynthia Breazeal, principal investigator (PI) of PATH and professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. “That means combining hands-on, work-learn experiences with strong technical foundations and the responsible design, professional, and human skills that employers are looking for.”
To make that possible, the initiative is building state-based hubs anchored by research universities and community colleges. Each hub works with regional employers to design curricula that reflect local industry needs. The program also provides professional development for instructors and develops modular, open educational materials that institutions can adapt and share.
“Artificial intelligence is shaping every sector of the economy, and the United States will need far more people who understand how to build with these technologies and apply them responsibly,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “Through PATH, MIT RAISE is using our convening power to bring community colleges, industry, research universities, and government together to build human-centered AI pathways that lead to shared prosperity. When research universities contribute their expertise to expand access and economic mobility, we strengthen both the nation’s workforce and our collective capacity for innovation.”
Unlike many large-scale online training efforts, PATH emphasizes in-person, collaborative learning. Students work in teams to address real problems brought by industry collaborators. These projects mirror the kinds of challenges graduates will face in the workplace, helping them build technical skills alongside the judgment, communication, collaboration, and ethical awareness that employers increasingly value.
The initiative’s first two hubs launched earlier this year in Massachusetts and Georgia.
“As PIs for the Georgia PATH hub, we are very excited with the significant early momentum, with over 1,000 GSU students enrolled in PATH courses,” says Arun Rai, regents’ professor, Howard S. Starks Distinguished Chair, and director of the Center for Digital Innovation at Georgia State University (GSU), with Balasubramaniam Ramesh, regents’ professor and the George E. Smith Eminent Scholar’s Chair at GSU. “Our curriculum, co-designed with MIT RAISE and spanning AI foundations, data science, deep learning, and agentic AI systems, is now being shared with partner institutions including Georgia Gwinnett College, GSU Perimeter College, and Clark Atlanta University. By leveraging the University System of Georgia’s FinTech Academy to expand work-based learning opportunities, we are building a collaborative ecosystem that rapidly advances the state’s AI workforce capabilities and creates tangible, job-ready skills for our diverse student population.”
GSU President Brian Blake says, “Our collaboration with MIT reflects a shared commitment to strengthening the nation’s AI talent pipeline. Georgia State University brings a distinctive strength to this effort — the ability to prepare students from all backgrounds for AI-enabled careers at scale. By combining academic rigor with strong industry partnerships and work-based learning, we are translating advances in AI into practical skills and expanding access to opportunities in this transformative era.”
In Massachusetts, students at Quinsigamond Community College are participating in Data Science in Action, a course that introduces AI-enabled data analysis and engineering. The class includes a hands-on Action Lab, modeled after experiential learning programs at the MIT Sloan School of Management. David Birnbach, lecturer at MIT Sloan, leads the design framework for the PATH Action Labs. Working with industry partners, students tackle real data challenges while building portfolio projects and professional connections.
Beyond individual courses, PATH is building clearer pathways for students to turn AI learning into real job opportunities. Through industry-informed micro-credentials and a shared set of workforce skills, students will gain practical abilities that employers are actually looking for, along with the human skills needed to succeed at work, like communication, problem-solving, and collaboration.
The MIT skills taxonomy team, led by Katerina Bagiati in collaboration with Professor Tom Malone from the MIT Sloan Center for Collective Intelligence, is mapping the skills and roles emerging in AI across fields such as financial technology (fintech), information technology, and business operations, with plans to expand into areas such as health care, manufacturing, and creative media. The goal is to help students build skills that are relevant, recognized, and directly connected to growing career paths.
The initiative is supported by a grant to MIT from Google.org, which is helping MIT and its collaborators build a multi-state network for AI workforce development.
“MIT’s PATH initiative offers a blueprint for expanding opportunity in the age of AI,” says Shanika Hope, director of Google.org. “By connecting research universities, community colleges, and industry partners, it helps translate innovation into real jobs and sustainable career pathways.”
PATH is led by Breazeal, who has brought together a cross-MIT team with expertise in AI literacy, workforce pedagogy, educator professional development, open education, research, and the future of work. Breazeal is a professor and director of the MIT RAISE Initiative. Eric Klopfer, director of the STEP Lab and co-director of the MIT RAISE Initiative, serves as a co-PI on this award. The GSU leadership team includes PIs Arun Rai and Balasubramaniam Ramesh.
Research from the ground upA leading innovator in community-based archaeology, Professor Sonya Atalay works to link local know-how with academic inquiry across the globe.When Sonya Atalay conducted her doctoral research, she studied pottery in Çatalhöyük, a remarkable ancient site in Turkey. It’s one of the world’s earliest known urban settlements, flourishing by at least 7000 B.C.E.
Yet even as Atalay was conducting field research and writing her doctoral thesis, she was scrutinizing standard archaeological practices, believing the discipline to be in need of an update. Indeed, it’s an issue she had been grappling with going back to her undergraduate days, when she first went to a dig site near Rome.
“When I started doing archaeological work, the local people were labor,” says Atalay, now a professor at MIT. “They came, they cleaned your clothes, they cleaned the dig house, they weren’t thought of as having important connections with the archaeology, and that really bothered me.”
Surely, she believed, a culture producing the remarkable things worth studying is worth including in that research process, too. As she says, given “their place-based knowledge, it seemed like we should be talking to people about their heritage. They’re the ones who live on or near sites. I started thinking about what archaeology could look like if it included local communities in a meaningful way.”
Atalay completed her dissertation while continuing to examine how researchers could alter their approach. She has since published articles and books about the subject, worked to introduce new research practices, and today, as an MIT professor, is a leader in the growing field of community-based archaeology, building partnerships between researchers and local residents.
Among other things, Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS), a National Science Foundation-backed project that helps train scholars and implement community-oriented work. She is convinced that community-oriented work creates better outcomes in many fields.
“A community-based approach is highly applicable beyond archaeology and anthropology, outside of the social sciences,” Atalay says. “I think there’s a lot for engineers or designers or folks in a lot of different fields to learn by involving community members in the research process.”
Atalay joined MIT with tenure in 2024, where she is a professor in MIT’s Anthropology Section.
Roll me away
Atalay grew up in Michigan, not far from Detroit, where she was the first person from her family to go to college. Growing up, she hoped to be a physician.
“I wanted to be a doctor. That’s what I thought I was going to do,” Atalay says. “I wanted to be a pediatrician.”
But she also developed an interest in ancient history, something she can date to a precise moment. A 4th grade teacher named Barbara Eisman would give Atalay extra reading when Atalay would finish homework early. One day, Eisman produced a book about ancient Greece and Rome.
“I remember thinking, this is amazing, discovering things I never knew existed,” Atalay says. “And that stuck with me.”
By the time Atalay enrolled at the University of Michigan, she was still planning to become a doctor. But as an undergraduate, she enjoyed taking archaeology electives to such an extent that she simply changed career paths.
“I loved it and just got so into it,” Atalay says. And Michigan even provided opportunities for undergraduate fieldwork near Rome, although that meant Atalay had to dig deep to finance her first trip to an archaeological site.
“I worked at a nightclub and put myself through college by bartending,” Atalay says. “I had a motorcycle, so I was tooling around Ann Arbor. Then I sold my motorcycle to buy the plane ticket to go to Rome so I could take part in the archaeological fieldwork.”
“Relationships are the task”
After graduating, Atalay was accepted into the graduate program for anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned an MA and then, in 2003, her PhD. While Atalay’s doctoral research focused on the ancient pottery at Çatalhöyük, she maintained a steady interest in helping archaeology evolve.
And increasingly, she started drawing on her own observations about fieldwork in the U.S., too. Atalay is Native American, and she recognized the same patterns of exclusion and archaeological extraction being applied to the historical study of Native American societies.
One additional influence in shaping Atalay’s thinking was the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by the U.S. federal government in 1990. It requires federal institutions to return human remains, sacred objects, and other cultural materials to Native Americans. Seeing the law enacted reinforced to Atalay that progress in this domain is possible.
“The push for that act was really about Indigenous people standing up for sovereignty. To return what was wrongfully taken and to carry out research in an ethical way moving forward, there has to be trust and partnerships built,” Atalay says. While observing advocates trying to get NAGPRA passed, she adds, “I learned a lot from them.”
Over time, Atalay went on to serve multiple terms on the commission overseeing NAGPRA, first appointed by President George W. Bush and then President Barack Obama. Ultimately, her perspective has been fed by many sources, converging on similar themes.
“I was really uncomfortable with how local people weren’t involved with studies of their own heritage,” Atalay says. “So I started thinking about what would it look like to truly partner with communities to plan and carry out research. And that’s how I started my first book, trying to set up a model for how to do ethical work in partnership with communities.”
That book, “Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities” was published by the University of California Press in 2012. In her work, Atalay has focused on a range of specific practices, from research development to fieldwork methods and protecting intellectual property rights for Indigenous people. But the starting point for any work, she emphasizes, is relationship-building and the creation of mutual trust.
“I tell students, ‘Relationships are the task,’” Atalay says. “I know you want to get in there and carry out fieldwork, but the relationships are everything. Sitting down and talking and sharing life stories and developing trust. Those relationships move at the speed of trust. And that takes time to develop. That’s the key piece. And that’s going to lead to good research outcomes.”
Stronger together
After receiving her PhD, Atalay had postdocs at UC Berkeley as well as Stanford University, then joined the faculty at Indiana University. In 2012, Atalay moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining MIT two years ago.
Currently Atalay is working on multiple projects. As director of CBIKS, she is running an organization with eight research “hubs,” where nearly 100 affiliated scholars are working with over 50 Indigenous communities to establish partnerships that advance environmental, and scientific research projects.
In some cases, the scholars are involved in familiar-seeming archaeological work, while other center projects involve topics such as enhancing salmon farming, clam cultivation, or returning native seeds from museums to tribes in the Southwest, where elders still retain knowledge for their appropriate use and care.
“Our team members across multiple disciplines are learning from each other,” Atalay says. “So archaeologists and heritage management scholars are talking to environmental scientists and team members who study seeds and agriculture.” The NSF sometimes refers to this as ”convergence science.” The center’s name uses the metaphor of braiding, to represent the ways different strands of knowledge can be woven together to form a sturdy whole.
“With braiding, each of the strands retains its integrity, and they’re stronger when they’re brought together,” says Atalay. She is also currently working on another book project, “Braiding Knowledges,” about how the community-based approach can enhance and strengthen research within universities; it is under contract with the University of Arizona Press.
At MIT, Atalay adds, she is delighted by the range of students who have started taking her classes, begun thinking about applications to all kinds of projects, and who in turn may end up leading innovative, community-oriented projects of their own.
“I would encourage anyone, no matter what field they’re in, to think about working with a community,” Atalay says. “What we’re learning isn’t just about working with Indigenous communities. It’s applicable outside of anthropology, outside of the social sciences. There is a lot you can learn and contribute to society by carrying out research this way, in any number of fields.”
Tod Machover receives George Peabody Medal for contributions to music and technologyThe George Peabody Medal is the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media, faculty director of the MIT Media Lab, and director of the Opera of the Future research group, will receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music and Dance in America — the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
As a composer and music tech pioneer, Machover has helped expand music’s possibilities for artists and audiences alike through his work in participatory opera, artificial intelligence, and creative technologies. He joins a roster of previous George Peabody Medal recipients that includes Stevie Wonder, Misty Copeland, Herbie Hancock, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Leonard Bernstein.
In the citation for the Peabody Medal, Peabody Institute Dean Fred Bronstein writes: “The breadth and depth of Tod Machover’s career — his work in participatory opera, as an educator and faculty director of the MIT Media Lab, his genuinely groundbreaking and prescient work at the intersection of music and technology, along with an overall and broad impact on the American music scene — make him an ideal recipient for the Peabody Medal … Machover continues to provide inspiration especially in the fast-evolving relationship between AI and the creative process. We are honored to welcome to campus a true pioneer and thought leader.”
Hailed as a “musical visionary” and “America’s most wired composer,” Machover is recognized as one of the most innovative composers active today. He is praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and for developing technologies that expand music’s potential for everyone.
Machover was the first director of musical research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM in Paris and was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. His work has been recognized by organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the French Culture Ministry.
The Peabody Institute, the first music conservatory in the United States, advances a dynamic model of the performing arts, empowering musicians and dancers from diverse backgrounds to create and perform at the highest level. As division of Johns Hopkins University, Peabody provides opportunities for interdisciplinary studies and is a leading voice at the intersection of art and education.
In the United States, children routinely receive an injectable form of the polio vaccine. This vaccine is very effective at preventing illness, but it doesn’t block transmission of the polio virus as well as the oral polio vaccine does.
Poliovirus is usually transmitted through contaminated food or water, so the GI tract is where the body is first exposed. Because the oral vaccine induces a mucosal immune response within the GI tract, it is much more effective at preventing infection and spread of the virus. However, there is a small chance that the oral vaccine can become infectious, so many countries have stopped using it.
Researchers at MIT have now come up with a way to modify the injectable vaccine so that it can also promote a mucosal immune response. This vaccine could help to achieve polio eradication while avoiding the risks of the oral polio vaccine.
“People who are vaccinated with the injectable vaccine are not getting sick, but they may be helping the virus circulate. Mucosal immunity could help lower that shedding and ideally eliminate it,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator in MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
The researchers’ new vaccine consists of the current injectable, inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), delivered with a nanoparticle-based adjuvant that helps steer immune cells to the mucosal lining of the intestine. In a study of rats, the researchers found that this vaccine produced a 20-fold increase in the type of antibodies needed for mucosal immunity, compared to IPV alone.
Jaklenec and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Advances. MIT postdoc Behnaz Eshaghi is the lead author of the paper.
Targeting polio
Polio, which can cause paralysis in severe cases, is now rare in most of the world due to extensive vaccination campaigns. The virus is highly contagious and is most commonly spread through consumption of food or water contaminated with the stool of an infected person.
Cases are occasionally seen in the United States and other countries, and the virus is endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While most of these cases are caused by the virus spreading among unvaccinated individuals, some cases may be due to the evolution of the live viruses used in the oral polio vaccine (OPV). These viruses are attenuated, meaning they are alive but weakened. In rare cases, they can mutate and evolve to become infectious again.
It’s also possible that wild poliovirus can be spread by people who have received the injected polio vaccine. These people would likely not experience any symptoms, but they could still shed the virus in their stool. Eventually, this could expose someone who isn’t vaccinated. Studies have shown that even in countries that with very high polio vaccination rates, the virus can be detected in wastewater.
To boost the chances of completely eradicating polio, it would be ideal to use a vaccine that cannot evolve to cause infection, like the current injectable IPV, and would also induce mucosal immunity, like the OPV.
In hopes of achieving that, the MIT researchers teamed up with researchers at Harvard Medical School who have shown that using a derivative of vitamin A as a vaccine adjuvant can help stimulate immune cells to go to the GI tract.
That adjuvant, known as Am80, works well, but to generate a strong response, it needs to be injected for several days in a row, which is not feasible for most vaccine campaigns.
To eliminate the need for repeated daily injections, the researchers set out to develop a nanoparticle formulation that would enable the adjuvant to be released slowly over several days. They tested several different types of nanoparticles and found that the one that worked best was a lipid nanoparticle (LNP).
“The purpose of the nanoparticle is making sure that we can engineer a platform with a sustained release of the cargo for a few days,” Eshaghi says. “That way we can overcome the bottleneck that for free administration of Am80 you need multiple daily injections.”
Mucosal immunity
In tests in rats, the researchers delivered an injection of an inactivated polio vaccine, similar to the one that is now used in the United States, along with a separate injection of Am80 encapsulated in LNPs. After the first dose, boosters were given at four weeks and eight weeks.
After injection, the nanoparticles accumulate in the lymph nodes, where they interact with B and T cells that are also exposed to the polio vaccine. This interaction stimulates the B and T cells to produce two surface proteins that act as homing signals directing them to the GI tract.
The B cells also begin producing a type of antibodies called IgA, which protect body surfaces from infection by coating the mucosal membranes. In addition, the rats also produce IgG antibodies that circulate in the bloodstream, similar to the antibodies that are normally produced in response to the injected polio vaccine.
“IPV is a safe vaccine, but it cannot create mucosal immunity. OPV can create that mucosal response, but it is not as safe,” Eshaghi says. “By adding Am80 to lipid nanoparticle as an adjuvant, we are combining the safety of IPV with an adjuvant that can produce the mucosal immunity that normally you can only get with OPV.”
The researchers now plan to test the vaccine in additional larger animal models, where they will inject the vaccine and adjuvant mixed together.
Using Am80 or other adjuvants to induce a mucosal response could also help researchers design improved vaccines for other pathogens that infect the GI tract, or for diseases that infect the lungs or reproductive tract.
“You could potentially add it to any vaccine that’s injected,” Jaklenec says. “This particular work shows that cells can be directed to the gut and increase enteric mucosal immunity. Whether it works for the respiratory or vaginal mucosa is not yet clear.”
The research was funded by the Gates Foundation.
MIT chemists design impact-resistant plasticsIntroducing weaker bonds into polystyrene and rubber helps these materials dissipate energy, making them more resistant to destructive forces.With help from a novel cross-linking molecule, MIT chemists have shown they can substantially improve the ballistic impact resistance of common polymers, including polystyrene and a type of rubber used to make shoe soles.
Polystyrene is a hard, glassy polymer that is used to make many types of plastic containers, such as bottles and mugs, as well as disposable cutlery. It is also found in coatings for electronic devices, and its foam form is the basis for Styrofoam and other lightweight packaging. (While sometimes labeled with recycling code No. 6, polystyrene is difficult to recycle and rarely collected for reuse in the U.S.)
To make the polymer more resistant to sudden impact, the MIT team added weak bonds scattered throughout the material as cross-links, which allows the material to dissipate energy much more effectively under deformations. When struck by a projectile, these weak bonds selectively break at the site of impact to open up pathways for enhanced energy absorption.
The researchers found that this approach can also fortify styrene-butadiene-styrene rubber, and they are now investigating whether it will also work for other types of polymers such as latex or the rubber that is used to make tires.
“These cross-linkers can substantially increase the amount of energy that the material absorbs under ballistic impact. You can imagine many applications of that, especially if this could be generalized to other polymers,”says Jeremiah Johnson, the A. Thomas Geurtin Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
Johnson and Keith Nelson, the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature. Former MIT postdocs Zhen Sang and Suong T. Nguyen and MIT graduate student Kwangwook Ko are the paper’s lead authors.
Tougher plastics
In a study published in 2023, Johnson and colleagues at MIT and Duke University showed that they could make polymers tougher using a counterintuitive strategy: adding weak cross-linkers that are distributed throughout a polymer network. These weak linkages, also called mechanophores, break under tearing conditions in a way that helps preserve the stronger bonds that bear the load, allowing the material to dissipate more energy.
“As a crack starts to propagate through the material, these mechanophores split in two, which helps to dissipate energy and redirect where the crack goes. That means you have to put in more energy to tear the material,” Johnson says.
Unlike their previous study, which examined toughening under slow tearing conditions, the new Nature study aimed to develop mechanophore-enabled strategies for resisting rapid deformation, such as that caused by sudden impact. The researchers were especially interested in applying the strategy to some of the most widely used polymers, such as polystyrene.
To do that, they developed a way to directly incorporate mechanophores as cross-links into common polymers. Then, they used a system invented by Nelson — laser-induced microprojectile impact testing (LIPIT) — to study how the resulting polymers respond to projectile impacts. With this system, tiny projectiles — silica beads about 10 microns in diameter — are fired at the film at about 750 meters per second (more than 1,600 miles per hour). The amount of energy absorbed by the material can be calculated by measuring the change in the particle’s velocity before and after it passes through the film.
“We first developed this method to study microparticle impact and penetration into bulk polymer samples, where we would monitor particle propagation through about 100 microns of material and analyze after impact how polymer morphology had changed,” Nelson says. “Our new measurements show how much additional information can be extracted from particle velocities before and after penetration through a thin layer. They also show deeply informative deformation patterns both during particle impact and afterward.”
This technique allowed the researchers to mimic the type of forces that might be seen in the real world when a plastic object is hit with another object, or when you drop your phone on the ground. In their experiments, the researchers showed that mechanophore cross-linked polystyrene was able to absorb substantially more energy from an impact than regular polystyrene.
“It turned out that the mechanophore leads to substantial increases in energy dissipation compared to both uncross-linked and conventionally cross-linked polystyrene, a behavior that had not been observed in related previous work,” Johnson says.
Absorbing impact
To figure out how the mechanophores help make polystyrene more impact resistant, the MIT team enlisted help from collaborators at MIT, Purdue University, Northwestern University, and Duke University.
Through experiments and simulations, they found that when a high-speed particle strikes the material, it raises the temperature at the impact site high enough to form a mobile zone. In this zone, the mechanophore bonds are selectively broken under force, opening controlled pathways that better absorb the energy of impact while leaving the area beyond the impact site relatively unaffected and stable.
“What is particularly attractive about this approach is the ability to bestow these properties upon ‘off-the-shelf’ commodity plastics, both glassy and elastomeric, with minimal chemistry which makes it in principle quite scalable and relevant. This study combines an elegant approach while providing an in-depth mechanical analysis of the failure mechanism,” says Yoan Simon, an associate professor in the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research.
The researchers also found that they could insert these mechanophores into styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS) rubber — which is used in shoe soles as well as asphalt and roofing materials — and observe a similar effect. They are now exploring whether this approach could also work with a related material, styrene-butadiene rubber, which is one of the major components of tires.
If successful, this technology could yield longer-lasting tires and also cut down on the amount of microplastics generated when tires contact the road, which is estimated to account for at least 10 percent of the microplastics in the environment.
“Materials with energy-absorbing mechanophores could one day help keep your vehicle's tires from blowing out on the highway or provide more protective cases for personal electronics,” says Katharine Covert, program director of the U.S. National Science Foundation Centers for Chemical Innovation, which invested in the team’s research. “This work really demonstrates how valuable new insights can be rapidly generated by bringing together researchers with different areas of expertise.”
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Center for the Chemistry of Molecularly Optimized Networks, the U.S. Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, a Schmidt Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
MIT researchers teach AI models to interpret chartsThe new ChartNet training dataset could improve the accuracy of vision-language models that help analyze business trends or interpret scientific figures.To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports.
But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding. A company that invests in a state-of-the-art model might still receive inaccurate or incomplete information.
To fill this performance gap, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab developed a multifaceted resource for AI users that is specifically designed to teach vision-language models (VLMs) how to effectively interpret charts.
They used a novel data generation method to build a state-of-the-art dataset that includes more than a million varied charts. The dataset also encodes many visual, linguistic, and numerical components of each chart image, which enable models to robustly reason about the information in a chart.
The researchers used this dataset, called ChartNet, to train a series of open-source VLMs. Many of these smaller models significantly outperformed orders of magnitude larger, commercial models on tasks like data extraction and chart summarization.
By enabling open-source models to outperform their commercial counterparts, ChartNet could allow small firms with limited budgets to more readily utilize AI. The open-source dataset can be used to improve the capabilities of AI models for tasks like business trend analysis and scientific figure interpretation.
“We developed ChartNet to be a one-stop shop for chart understanding, covering basically anything that an AI model and a practitioner who is training that model might need. We hope our work motivates researchers to achieve state-of-the-art performance with smaller models that don’t require infinite amounts of computation,” says Jovana Kondic, an MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on ChartNet.
She is joined on the paper by many co-authors from MIT, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, and IBM Research, including Pengyuan Li, a research staff member at IBM Research; Dhiraj Joshi, a senior scientist at IBM Research; Isaac Sanchez, a software engineer at IBM Research; Aude Oliva, director of strategic industry engagement at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, MIT director of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, and a senior research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Rogerio Feris, a principal scientist and manager at the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab. The research will be presented at IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference.
A dataset bottleneck
Researchers have made great strides developing generative AI models that excel at natural language processing and reasoning about natural images. But less work has focused on interpreting complex multimodal data contained within charts, Kondic says.
Yet for large and small businesses in nearly every industry, chart understanding is a critical task.
“The finance industry thrives on charts. If vision-language models can extract information out of charts, like descriptions of trends, that facilitates a lot of workflows that happen downstream,” Joshi says.
The lack of high-quality training data is a major bottleneck holding back the development of VLMs that can accurately interpret charts. Many datasets contain limited chart images pulled from the internet and often lack the necessary scale and additional information to help a model interpret the underlying data.
“A vision-language model, unlike our brains, may need to see thousands of examples during training to reliably recognize something as a line chart,” Kondic says.
The researchers sought to overcome those shortcomings by generating synthetic data. Synthetic data are artificially generated by algorithms to mimic the statistical properties of actual data.
The ChartNet dataset holds more a million high-quality chart images, along with the corresponding code used to generate each chart, a textual description, and a table that contains its numerical information. In addition, each datapoint includes question-and-answer pairs to teach the model how to correctly answer questions about the chart image.
“These additional modes of data guide the model to connect and align the different pieces of information that the chart image encodes,” Kondic says.
Data generation
To build ChartNet, the researchers created a two-step, synthetic data generation pipeline.
First, their automated system translates any pre-existing set of chart images into code. Then the system iteratively augments that code to change different aspects of each chart, such as chart type, data values, topic, colors, etc.
“We can start from a single chart that we use as a seed and come up with hundreds of augmentations of it. This is how we were able to build a dataset with more than a million diverse images,” Kondic explains.
They also incorporated an automated quality check process to ensure the synthetic data are high quality. This process verifies that the code is executable and rendered chart images are accurate and clean.
“We don’t want to just be generating diverse samples. We also want the information to be presented in a meaningful way,” she says.
ChartNet also includes a selection of chart datapoints annotated by human experts. This provides access to additional types of charts and supporting data that carry validity guarantees.
A practitioner could use the annotated data to fine-tune an existing VLM, further boosting performance for a specific application, Joshi adds.
The researchers tested ChartNet by training IBM’s Granite Vision series of models as well as several other open-source models of various sizes and evaluating them on various chart interpretation tasks. The dataset improved the accuracy of all models in chart reconstruction, chart data extraction, chart summarization, and chart question answering.
With ChartNet, small open-source models consistently outperformed much larger commercial models.
“A lot of prior training datasets only focused on answering simple questions about a chart. We tried to go beyond that with ChartNet by generating data that support all aspects of robust chart understanding,” Kondic says.
In the future, the researchers plan to continue expanding ChartNet by incorporating data with added levels of complexity. They also want to draw on feedback from the research community.
This research was funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab.
Ultrasound-based pacemaker noninvasively steadies the heartThe new design could offer a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.MIT engineers have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound. The design could one day provide a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.
The new device is designed as a small sticker that can be worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker send ultrasound pulses through the chest to stimulate the heart. The ultrasound waves trigger the opening of certain ion channels in heart cells, an effect the researchers amplified through genetic engineering. When the channels open, they let in calcium, which signals a heart cell to squeeze and beat.
In experiments in the lab, the researchers applied ultrasound waves to engineered human cardiac cells and found that the pulses effectively maintained the cells’ healthy contractions. They also tested the ultrasound sticker on rats and found the device quickly, safely, and noninvasively corrected arrhythmias and restored normal, regular heart contractions.
The team has fabricated a prototype that includes the ultrasound sticker (about the size of a postage stamp) and a small, pocket-sized device containing associated batteries and electronics. The same group previously demonstrated a sticker design that uses ultrasound to image deep organs and tissues. They now plan to combine the two approaches into one ultrasound sticker to simultaneously monitor and regulate the heart’s activity.
“We believe you could one day have stickers on the body that could do long-term imaging deep in the body and also do stimulation for therapeutic effects, in a noninvasive closed-loop way,” says Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.
Zhao and his colleagues, together with collaborators from Professor Qifa Zhou’s group at the University of Southern California (USC), have published their results in a study appearing today in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Chen Gong, together with Runze Li, Won Jun Song, and former postdocs Gengxi Lu, Shucong Li, and Hsiao-Chuan Liu. Other collaborators include researchers from Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and other groups at USC.
Sound genes
Today, around 3 million adults in the United States live with pacemakers. The small battery-powered devices are surgically implanted in a person’s chest, and act to deliver electrical impulses to regulate heart rate. Implantable pacemakers are a well-established and generally safe medical treatment that nonetheless comes with risks.
“Pacemakers are one of the most important and widely used human implants, and they have saved millions of lives,” the paper’s co-corresponding author, Gengxi Lu, says. “But they are invasive, and they make direct contact with the beating heart. The dream for many years has been noninvasive heart stimulation with ultrasound.”
Ultrasound encompasses a range of acoustic waves that safely penetrates the body. Ultrasound waves reflect and resonate off structures in characteristic ways that allow technicians to resolve and image organs and tissues inside the body. Ultrasound can also be directed and focused to stimulate certain therapeutic effects, for instance in the brain, where scientists are exploring the use of ultrasound to treat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and other brain disorders.
Scientists have also found that ultrasound can benefit the heart. Previous studies in animals have shown that focused ultrasound can safely activate heart cells, though the effect has been inconsistent and weak.
Zhao and his colleagues looked to amplify ultrasound’s effects on the heart. In their new study, they applied sonogenetics, which is a relatively new approach that takes after optogenetics — a technique that involves genetically manipulating specific parts of a cell to respond to light. Similarly, sonogenetics aims to genetically engineer cells to respond to sound, including ultrasound.
In their work to develop an ultrasound pacemaker, the team first looked to increase heart cells’ sensitivity to ultrasound, through sonogenetics. In the lab, they used standard practices to derive heart cells from embryonic stem cells, and then delivered a genetic alteration to the cells that increased their sensitivity to ultrasound. Specifically, the manipulation produced ion channels that opened more readily in response to ultrasound.
“These channels can now ‘hear’ ultrasound better, and can open to let calcium in, which is what directly activates the cell and causes it to beat,” explains by the paper’s first author, Chen Gong.
Sticker health
In experiments with sonogenetically engineered heart cells, the researchers found that when they exposed the cells to ultrasound, the cells beat in sync with the waves, unlike cells that were not genetically manipulated.
In any clinical application of an ultrasound pacemaker, the team envisions that a patient could first receive a one-time injection, similar to a vaccine, that would act to genetically boost the sensitivity of cardiac cells to the pacemaker’s ultrasound waves. The injection would be a form of gene therapy — a treatment that is currently approved by the FDA to treat certain inherited conditions such as sickle cell disease and spinal muscular dystrophy.
“We think this step would be clinically translatable as a form of gene therapy that could enable noninvasive pacemakers,” Gong says.
The team then designed the core of the ultrasound pacemaker, in the form of a postage-stamp-sized sticker embedded with tiny ultrasound transducers. The sticky part of the device is made from a hydrogel material that Zhao’s group has refined over the years to adhere strongly to skin and many types of materials, while also allowing ultrasound waves to pass through without weakening. The transducers within the sticker can be tuned to generate ultrasound waves at specific frequencies.
In experiments with rats, the researchers first administered a sonogenetic, ultrasound-boosting solution through their tails. They then adhered a miniature version of the pacemaker to the rats’ chests. When they turned the stickers on, they observed that the ultrasound quickly regulated the animals’ hearts. Some individuals with slow heart rates were brought up to a normal rate, while others with irregular heartbeats were steadied, keeping in sync with ultrasound’s “ticks.”
“We can now use low-intensity ultrasound to open ion channels in cells to have very effective heart pacing,” Gong says. “We are now making these stickers into smaller form factors, and more integrated, so they are easier to wear, more stable, and more accurate over a longer term.”
“In this paper, we demonstrated noninvasive pacemaking. However, we think this concept could be useful beyond just the heart,” Zhao says. “We believe you could one day have stickers over different parts of the body that could do long-term imaging, monitoring, and closed-loop therapeutic stimulation.”
This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Opthamology from Research to Prevent Blindness, and the U.S. Department of War.
A plan to preserve wetlands without stopping developmentStudy shows the tradeoff between conservation and growth is less stark with a locally adjusted policy featuring both tradeable offsets and taxes.Balancing economic growth and environmental protection is not easy. Consider wetlands, which provide flood protection, aid water quality, and are linchpins of larger ecosystems. How can we best preserve wetlands while enhancing economic activity?
According to a new study, one solution involves supplanting traditional conservation mandates, which require replacing affected wetlands locally, with tradeable offsets. Through this system, a developer can build on a wetland by purchasing credits representing an equivalent environmental value created by improving a wetland somewhere else in the same watershed, away from concentrated development.
While this has largely been the approach of U.S. federal and state regulators since the mid-1990s, current regulations do not account for the flood protection benefits of wetlands. The new study finds a workable solution in an offset policy that also includes a locally varying tax on development, precisely to compensate for the increased flood risk it causes.
In the lower 48 states of the U.S., wetlands are heavily concentrated in California and Florida, two high-population states. Through a highly granular look at Florida’s wetlands from 1995 to 2020, with a new scholarly methodology that carefully weighs local factors, the scholars estimate that development of wetlands led to $2.4 billion in net economic gains. Their alternate policy would have preserved most of these gains while also preventing about $1.6 billion in flood damage.
“You’re retaining two-thirds of the private gains from trade,” says Daniel Aronoff PhD ’22, a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Economics and co-author of a newly published paper summarizing the study’s findings. “And the flood damages shrink by an order of magnitude, so only you’re incurring a small fraction of the flood damage while collecting that amount in increased tax revenue, which can subsidize the cost of restoration after flood damage has occurred.”
This system is neither a simple conservation mandate nor a free ride for developers. The scholars say it would provide a better way of balancing wetlands preservation and economic gains, while lowering flood risk.
“You could do this,” Aronoff says. “It’s an implementable thing. You could build a policy out of this.”
The paper, “Conservation Priorities and Environmental Offsets: Markets for Florida Wetlands,” appears in the May issue of the American Economic Review. The authors are Aronoff, who is also a research associate at the Laboratory for Economic Analysis and Design at MIT and a research collaborator at the Digital Currency Initiative; and Will Rafey PhD ’20, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles.
No net loss — but more risk
Federal wetlands policy in the U.S. has been governed since the 1970s by a “no net loss” objective, meaning that development must be accompanied by approved actions to offset any loss of wetlands functionality. State laws have often mirrored this federal approach. The current rules work on a watershed level, enabling public and private developers to offset the impact of developing a wetland by purchasing offset credits from a “wetland mitigation bank” in the same watershed.
The researchers developed their study as an ambitious, data-rich project. They obtained comprehensive data on environmental offset credits issued, and transfers to developers from state and regional regulators; a record of offset prices from a private broker as well as state and county purchase records; maps detailing wetlands development and private property ownership; and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data on flood risk policies and claims.
The scholars then built a detailed database of development from every wetland bank permit issued in Florida that included enhancements, land acquisition, estimated costs, and offset credit release schedules, as well as records of actual releases and sales over time. They used these data to build a dynamic model of the wetland offset market, from which they obtained their estimates of economic gains and flood risk costs.
Whereas other work has applied national data to wetlands analysis, this more granular approach allowed the scholars to conduct a locally focused examination of economic activity, floods, and policy specifically applying to Florida.
“The functional form that has been used to estimate the relationship between wetlands and flood risk across all America is not compatible with data on wetlands and flooding in Florida,” Aronoff says.
The study also underscores an important distinction in the kinds of offset policies that have previously been deployed. The first iteration of offset policy required a developer to restore wetlands adjacent to any wetlands area that is newly developed. A second iteration, the one still in use, allows developers to purchase offset credits — which might apply to wetlands that are not adjacent to the development in question. The latter carries with it greater risk of flood damage to developed property, as an equivalent amount of restored wetlands in a rural area will not serve as a flood buffer for as many structures.
The proposed policy solution would levy a tax — either on offset sellers or buyers — that would equal the estimated increase in flood risk created by the development.
“Going from the first policy iteration to the second iteration could have created a lot of value, because you have development taking place with wetlands created in the lowest-cost way,” Aronoff says. “But that gave rise to an externality: the flood risk. Because you’re creating flood risk by developing in urban areas with lots of buildings, while creating wetlands in rural areas without buildings around.”
Tuning the policy
Ultimately, that is why the empirical analysis developed by the economists shows a more optimal path using so-called Pigouvian taxes, named after 20th-century economist Arthur Pigou. These taxes add a levy when people create negative circumstances for society at large. Taxes to inhibit pollution, for instance, are Pigouvian. The modeling in the current study indicates the same concept would work effectively for wetlands policy.
“Economics is about tradeoffs,” Aronoff says. “And this is a tradeoff. Flood risk is expensive — that’s a cost. But development creates value because it is only profitable to the extent that the end user desires it.”
Ultimately, the scholars think, implementing systems that balance factors will work better in the long run than many kinds of prohibitions on economic activity — or than allowing unrestricted activity without weighing the public good.
“If you choose an absolute, you’re choosing one over the other in all instances,” Aronoff says. “And what is at the core of the outlook of an economist is to assume there’s a tradeoff, and the question is how do you negotiate that tradeoff in an optimal way. That’s what we are trying to get at here.”
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the George and Obie Schultz Fund.
New propulsion system could make tiny satellites both fast and fuel-efficientFor satellites as small as a briefcase, getting around in space just got a whole lot easier.MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters.
The system could enable the design of nimbler, more flexible small satellites, which could perform both fast, powerful maneuvers and slower, precise adjustments, depending on the mission and moment at hand.
The key to the new system is a special propellant that can power both chemical and electrical thrusters, which traditionally have required separate, bulky fuel sources.
“If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Amelia Bruno, a former postdoc in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform.”
Bruno is the lead author of a study appearing this week in the Journal of Propulsion and Power showing that a type of “green monopropellant” originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for use in chemical propulsion in space can also effectively power tiny “electrospray” thrusters. Electrospray thrusters are dime-sized rockets that use electric fields to charge up a liquid propellant’s particles, which are then shot into space as a thrust-generating spray.
Electrospray thrusters are extremely fuel-efficient and can perform slow and precise maneuvers, such as pushing a small spacecraft bit by bit through a long, interplanetary journey. Chemical thrusters, in contrast, require a large fuel supply to perform short and fast bursts, for instance to quickly ascend and descend, or speed up and slow down.
Now that the MIT group has found a propellant that can fuel both chemical and electrospray thrusters, they see big potential for small spacecraft. The team is working with NASA to launch the Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission — a briefcase-sized CubeSat that will carry a chemical thruster and four electrospray thrusters, all fueled by a single propellant tank. The mission will be the first to test such a two-in-one propulsion system for small spacecraft. If it is successful, Bruno says the mission could pave the way for small satellites to explore beyond Earth’s orbit.
“We could send CubeSats to Mars, or the asteroid belt, where they could make the journey slowly, using electrospray thrusters,” says study co-author Paulo Lozano, the Miguel Alemán Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “You could then use your chemical thrusters to quickly move to look at interesting features. You could have a lot more flexibility to do a lot more things.”
The study’s co-authors also include Matthew Corrado SM ’22, PhD ’26.
A sea of ions
Lozano’s group at MIT designs, fabricates, and tests electrospray thrusters for use in satellites that range from the size of a lunchbox to a small carry-on suitcase. Compared to conventional satellites, these microsatellites are significantly smaller and cheaper to launch into space.
But smaller spacecraft require smaller everything else, including propulsion systems. In that respect, electrospray thrusters are a good fit. The thrusters Lozano develops are about the size of a thumbnail. Each thruster sits atop a small reservoir of ionic liquid propellant. When the reservoir is connected to a battery, the battery supplies some amount of voltage that electrically charges a corresponding amount of ions in the liquid. The charged particles are then channeled out of the reservoir, through the thruster’s tips and into space as a thrust-inducing spray.
Over the past decade, Lozano has tested many thruster designs, under varying conditions, and with various types of ionic liquid propellant — a fuel that is essentially made from salts that can remain in liquid form.
“Ionic liquids are very stable and can even remain a liquid in space, which not a lot of materials can do,” Bruno says. “And it’s basically a sea of ions, which is why we base our technology around it, so we can pull those ions out into an electrospray.”
Bruno and Lozano have collaborated with the U.S. Air Force, which synthesized a new kind of ionic liquid propellant — the Advanced SpaceCraft Energetic Non-Toxic propellant (ASCENT) — which was being tested in chemical thrusters. Chemical thrusters are high-force propulsion systems typically associated with launching rockets and performing hard and fast maneuvers once in space. ASCENT was designed as a “green,” less toxic alternative to hydrazine, which has been the traditional fuel source for chemical propulsion and is extremely hazardous to handle.
“ASCENT happens to be an ionic liquid mixture,” Bruno says. “And we said, hey, that’s the stuff we typically use. Theoretically, this should work. Let’s go figure out how.”
Spray and spin
In their new study, Bruno, Lozano, and Corrado tested the performance of electrospray thrusters that they fueled with ASCENT. Each thruster they used was attached to a small cube-shaped reservoir about the size of a Lego brick. They filled each reservoir with 1 gram of ASCENT, a liquid that has a viscosity similar to baby oil. They then attached a thruster to opposite sides of a CubeSat, which they set on a MagLev stand — a custom testbed that is designed to magnetically levitate a sample or device. The MagLev in Lozano’s lab is installed inside a large vacuum chamber, which the researchers can tune to mimic the conditions in space.
Over multiple experiments, the team remotely applied varying levels of voltage to activate the thrusters, which in turn produced a spray that spun the CubeSat around, like a floating, spinning top. The researchers measured the amount of thrust produced with each trial, and calculated ASCENT’s fuel efficiency as they ran the thrusters continuously over periods lasting up to 100 hours.
In the end, they found that ASCENT was able to successfully fuel each electrospray thruster. What’s more, the propellant, which was originally intended for chemical propulsion, was just as efficient as other, conventional ionic liquids at propelling electric thrusters.
“Compared to our normal electrospray propellants, ASCENT can provide similar performance in terms of thrust,” Bruno says. “Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better.”
Now that ASCENT has been proven to work in both chemical and electrical propulsion, she and Lozano say that a single tank of the fuel can be used to power both types of thrusters, all in a compact, two-in-one system that could fit within a small CubeSat. The team will test the idea with NASA’s Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission, which is scheduled to launch in November.
“This will be the first time that a satellite will have a shared propellant tank,” says Lozano, who notes that in addition to long, exploratory interplanetary missions, small satellites equipped with both chemical and electrical propulsion could also be useful for missions closer to Earth, such as for weather and climate observations.
“Say there’s a storm coming, and you’d want to deploy your constellation of small satellites to observe over one location,” he says. “You could choose to send them quickly or slowly depending on the nature of the observation. And the only way to do that is if you have two propulsion systems, which is now possible.”
This research is supported, in part, by NASA.
Enzymes that assemble into droplets can speed up cellular reactionsMIT biologists find highly concentrated droplets can help cells keep enzymes organized and control growth signals.Within the past decade, biologists have discovered that one strategy cells use to keep their contents organized is a phenomenon known as phase separation.
Similar to the way oil forms droplets that float in a vinegar solution, proteins inside cells can phase separate to form highly concentrated droplets that keep them organized within the cell. In a new study, MIT researchers have now shown that this droplet formation is critical for controlling the function of a class of enzymes called kinases.
The researchers found that condensing into droplets optimizes the biochemical conditions needed for kinases to catalyze reactions, allowing them to more rapidly activate cell signaling pathways. In some cases, droplet formation can even change which reactions the kinases perform.
“Many biological molecules have this propensity to spontaneously separate. We were really interested in asking, if we have these kinases forming droplets, what is the consequence of that in the context of signaling?” says Lindsay Case, an assistant professor of biology at MIT and the senior author of the study.
Learning more about how these droplets form could help researchers design drugs that target kinases, some of which can be overactive in cancer cells.
“Understanding the chemistry of these compartments, and what molecules go into them and what molecules don’t go into them, could help us design drugs that better localize to their target of interest,” Case says.
Nicholas Lea, an MIT graduate student, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Cell Reports.
Forming droplets
Since her days as a graduate student, Case has been studying how the physical organization of molecules inside cells affects their function. As a postdoc, she began studying how phase separation might affect a signaling pathway that allows cells to sense when they’re attached to their environment, so they can respond appropriately.
Some of the proteins in this pathway are kinases, which activate other proteins by adding phosphate groups to them. Kinases can also activate themselves through a process called autophosphorylation.
“Inside of the cell, you have these kinase molecules that are responsible for carrying a signal through the cell, and we know that the organization of these molecules changes. When the information is present, they’re organized in a different way than when the information is not present,” Case says. “We think that having the right molecules in the right place is incredibly important for the right biochemistry to occur.”
Phase separation is one of the methods that cells appear to use for this organization. The most familiar example of phase separation can be seen in a salad dressing, where oil forms droplets to minimize contact with water-based vinegar. Proteins can phase separate when they are highly concentrated, leading them to self-assemble into dense droplets floating in the cell’s cytoplasm.
Case hypothesized that this phase separation, which brings kinases together at a high density, might help cells to boost the enzymes’ activity because they are more likely to bump into and phosphorylate each other.
In this study, Case and Lea set out to test that hypothesis, focusing on an enzyme called focal adhesion kinase (FAK). This kinase, which becomes activated when cells attach to their surrounding environment, activates pro-growth and pro-survival signals. In cancer cells, this signaling pathway can go awry, allowing cells to proliferate even when they detach from their original locations.
Scientists already knew that when cells are properly attached to their environment, that adhesion signal causes FAK to accumulate at the cell membrane. In the new study, the MIT team mimicked that effect by overexpressing FAK in cells. These cells were floating freely in a solution, not attached to any surface. Even so, the high concentration of FAK caused the kinase to phase separate into droplets, which turned on the pro-growth signal.
“It was surprising that just by condensing this protein into a droplet, you can actually turn on a signaling pathway that should be turned off,” Case says. “If FAK concentration is too high, you’re always getting these droplets and you’re always signaling, regardless of what the receptors that are supposed to be controlling this are doing.”
The findings suggest that in cancer cells, overexpression of FAK may lead to phase separation, which then helps to drive cancer progression and metastasis.
“It may be that for some kinases, you’re not supposed to form these droplets in the cytoplasm because it leads to this always-on signal, and then the cells no longer listen to the information coming from the environment,” Case says.
Interfering with FAK’s ability to form droplets could offer a new strategy for cancer drug development, she says.
Controlling reactions
The researchers also studied two other kinases, Mst2 and Abl. They found that these enzymes could also phase separate at high concentrations, and that this increased their activity. While phase separation of FAK in the cytoplasm may occur only in cancerous cells, for Mst2, it appears to be a strategy that healthy cells use to control a signaling pathway called Hippo, which promotes cell growth and survival.
Additionally, for both Mst2 and Abl, the researchers discovered that phase separation can lead the enzymes to phosphorylate additional targets, which may lead them to activate different signaling pathways.
“It’s not just that you’re getting faster phosphorylation, but in those cases, the patterns of what is actually getting phosphorylated were very different inside of the droplet compared to what might be happening in a non-droplet context,” Case says. “The kinase is able to phosphorylate amino acid residues beyond the set of canonical sites that have been described before.”
The researchers also found that when these droplets form, they attract high concentrations of ATP, the molecule that kinases use as a source of phosphate. This occurs because kinases tend to contain floppy sections containing many positively charged amino acids, which attract negatively charged ATP.
Using a machine-learning model, the researchers predicted that about 45 percent of the 500 kinases found in human cells would have the ability to form droplets like those seen in this study. Those kinases were also more likely to be highly positively charged, which could help them to recruit ATP into the droplets.
In future work, Case hopes to explore the possibility of designing drugs that could mimic ATP’s ability to be attracted into droplets within a cell, which could help reduce negative side effects of the drugs.
“By localizing drugs to the compartment where your target localizes, that could reduce off-target effects by concentrating the drug with the target of interest and reducing interactions with other molecules,” Case says.
The research was funded by a Searle Scholars Program Award, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Institutes of Health, the Royal G. and Mae H. Westaway Family Memorial Fund, and a David H. Koch Graduate Fellowship.
Photos: The Class of 2026 turns the pageFamily, friends, at least one beloved pet celebrated with the new graduates during three joyful days of Commencement exercises.Cheered on by the greater MIT community, members of the Class of 2026 were honored this week for the hard work that earned them their newly minted MIT degrees.
The 2026 Commencement celebrations spanned three days filled with degree ceremonies, receptions, and reunions, at locations spread across campus. The weather ranged widely, but spirits remained high even as Wednesday’s sunny, selfie-perfect weather gave way to some rain later in the week.
Advanced Micro Devices chair and CEO Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94 gave the Commencement address at the OneMIT ceremony for all graduates, held Thursday. Undergraduates crossed the stage during their own ceremony on Friday, and throughout the three-day celebration, MIT’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing each held ceremonies to recognize their graduate students. Friday also kicked off a weekend of Tech Reunions.
As Institute Professor and School of Engineering Dean Paula Hammond told graduate students earning degrees from her school and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, “What makes MIT special isn’t just what happens underneath this dome. What makes MIT special is you.”
“What you learned at MIT belongs to you,” added Chancellor Melissa Nobles in her address to the undergraduates on Friday morning. “You already know how to build community and to find joy, and that will serve you well. You have the intellectual skills, the grit, and the compassion to weather instability and to help shape our future to make the world better.”
The following photo essay provides a snapshot of MIT Commencement activities throughout the week. (Additional recaps/photo collections are available for the School of Architecture and Planning, School of Engineering/MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences).
What distinguishes the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s Class of 2026? According to faculty and staff across the school, it’s their hearts.
“They’re big-hearted in the way they deal with each other, with their work, and with the world,” said Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, in his opening remarks at the school’s 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony. As a nod to the class’s generosity, Sarkis announced the creation of the Class of 2026 Scholarship fund to help support incoming students.
“Education is a right, not a privilege, and this fellowship brings us closer to our goal of giving this right to every student and becoming tuition-free as a school,” said Sarkis.
The news was met with joyful and sustained applause.
The SA+P Class of 2026 represents graduates from each of the school’s departments: Architecture; Urban Studies and Planning; Media Arts and Sciences (MIT Media Lab); and the Center for Real Estate. The 206 graduates — including six with dual degrees — represent nearly every corner of the globe. Fifty-seven percent are from the United States, 10 percent are from China, and 5 percent are from India.
This year’s speaker was Alejandro Aravena, a celebrated Chilean architect whose credits include curating the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale “Reporting From the Front,” and being awarded the Pritzker Prize (2016), the most prestigious award in architecture — for which he currently serves as jury chair. Aravena leads the architectural firm ELEMENTAL, based in Santiago, Chile, with work that spans a variety of public and private projects developing novel approaches to community engagement shaping how architects and policymakers think about the built environment.
Sarkis said Aravena speaks eloquently to the breadth of fields represented in SA+P, and to the school’s values, “[from] the power of architecture and design to enable society to his innovative models of social housing to creative approaches to community engagement — be it in emergency planning after earthquakes, or in institutional buildings — and to putting architecture front and center in the discussions around the new constitution of Chile.”
Addressing the students and their guests, Aravena shared a series of vignettes that illustrated a world at a “tipping point.” Will it land on the side of civilization, or barbarism?, he asked. One story was of his firm’s work on a project in Chile where his team encountered the “law of the jungle.” During a slum-upgrading project, two social workers from the Ministry of Housing were stalked on their way home by hired killers. With knives at their throats, they were warned never to return if they intended to interfere with the territorial power of organized crime. The message was clear: Come back, and your families will pay the price, he said. A more recent project — building a hospital for victims of sexual violence linked to the armed conflict in Colombia — had the architects questioning the level of violence that people inflict on each other.
If the “law of the jungle” was going to be the new normal, Aravena said, he needed to understand what that meant. Measuring the sizes of a prefrontal cortex — the brain’s command center that controls emotions, complex decision-making, and executive function — within the animal kingdom, humans have the largest capacity for emotions and behaviors.
“The history of humanity and the evolution of the human condition is connected,” he said. “It’s moving in the direction of the prefrontal cortex. Yet, somehow, we’re turning backwards.”
Aravena suggested the students use their newly acquired skills to work on projects that matter to others, and not to just themselves.
“Leveling the playing field, having more people behaving and coexisting in a more even playground, is very bad news for predators,” said Aravena. “Try to use this knowledge and wisdom you have and the training you have received in common interests, and not in just the self. Let’s try to bring back decency. Let’s try to bring back kindness. Let’s try to bring back honoring the truth. And let’s join forces to make the coin fall on the most human possible side.
“Class of 2026, together, let’s make the prefrontal cortex great again,” Aravena concluded.
Scene at MIT: A nanoscientist graduates with her very good boyVinny, an unofficial member of the Strano Lab at MIT, dressed up to celebrate Commencement alongside his human, Michelle Quien PhD ’26.“I’m originally from Moorestown, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. While my degree is in chemical engineering, I consider myself a materials scientist, and I’m passionate about using innovative materials to propel next-generation technologies. When I started my bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, I was introduced to polymers and nanotechnology and even got to partake in some meaningful industry experiences in the medical device field. While the work I did felt impactful, I felt like I lacked a sense of driving innovation, and so I decided to pursue a PhD at MIT.
My doctorate in Michael Strano’s lab has focused on a novel material at the intersection of polymers and nanomaterials. This material, called 2DPA-1, is like a combination of graphene, the strongest and most conductive material, and Kevlar, which is what makes up bulletproof vests. My thesis has been pivotal in establishing the characterization tools for this material so that future researchers can optimize its properties for different applications. Going forward, I’ve signed an offer letter with a startup that is making portable nuclear reactors for areas without stable grid electricity. I’ll work on various problems surrounding the materials that make up the reactors.
I always knew that I wanted my dog, Vinny, to have a doctoral gown for graduation. He’s been with me throughout my entire PhD and has been a pivotal member of my research group, helping everyone by being cute and reducing their stress. I couldn’t find any specific vendors online, and I love learning crafts to make custom items (crochet, knitting, and embroidery to make my own clothes; bookbinding to make my own journals and my physical thesis; and pottery to make my own mugs and dishes), so I thought: Why not try to sew a gown for him? I watched and read a few tutorials, used the sewing machines at Metropolis, and hand-sewed the finishing touches. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and could keep working on it, but I know that Vinny looks cute regardless of what he wears. I am so delighted and grateful that Vinny was part of my ceremony. He’s been such a pivotal part of my PhD journey, and my life as a whole. I can’t imagine a finer end to my time at MIT!”
—Michelle Quien PhD ’26, graduate of the Department of Chemical Engineering
At a spirited Commencement ceremony, the Class of 2026 is urged to “run toward the hardest problems” Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, Advanced Micro Devices CEO, tells graduates to apply “purpose, judgment, and courage” in their lives.After years of study and instruction, MIT’s Class of 2026 received one last piece of guidance this afternoon en route to picking up their diplomas and starting the next chapter of their lives.
“Run toward the hardest problems,” said Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, the chair and CEO of semiconductor powerhouse Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the featured Commencement speaker at today’s OneMIT ceremony. “Hard problems really teach you what you’re capable of.”
Su’s career as one of the world’s leading technology executives has long been intertwined with MIT. She holds three degrees in electrical engineering from the Institute, along with another distinction: Building 12, home of the MIT.nano facility, was named after her in 2022.
A central theme of Su’s address involved learning by taking on difficult challenges. At MIT, as she put it, she acquired “not the confidence that I would always know the answer, but the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer, I could figure it out.”
Speaking before a large and appreciative audience in MIT’s Killian Court, Su also urged MIT’s new class of graduates to lead purposeful lives, with a sense of the greater good and an eye toward addressing societal challenges.
“The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools,” Su said. “It needs people who know what to use them for. People with a sense of purpose. Judgment. Courage.”
Science: Curiosity on a Mission
The OneMIT ceremony is an Institute-wide Commencement event with a featured speaker and other traditional elements. MIT’s Commencement week also includes specific ceremonies in which undergraduates, and graduate students in the Institute’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, walk across stage to receive their diplomas.
After Su spoke, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth delivered a charge to the graduates, discussing the Institute’s core values, especially the ideas of excellence and curiosity. She also emphasized MIT’s role in making advances that benefit the nation and society at large, from medicine to energy, agriculture, and other areas of need.
“A few of those values that will serve you wherever you go,” Kornbluth observed, while noting MIT’s commitment to “the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence” in its work. She observed that the Institute lives this ethos, by spurning legacy admissions and “back-door” admissions for donors’ families, among other merit-based practices.
“MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps,” Kornbluth said, offering that “curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel — and that fact is enormously important for our society as a whole.”
She added: “At MIT, we know that curiosity-driven science is the path to new knowledge,” Kornbluth said. “The kind that spawns world-changing innovations. Curiosity is the force that transforms deadly cancers into treatable conditions. That turns fusion energy from a dream to a reality. That uncovers new ways to grow more food using less of every resource.”
Indeed, Kornbluth emphasized, “We like to say that science is curiosity on a mission.”
“The responsibility to work with others”
MIT students earned a total of 1,165 undergraduate and 2,817 graduate degrees this academic year. The OneMIT ceremony began with the annual alumni parade, which has come to feature graduates from the 50th anniversary class. In this case the undergraduate class of 1976 had the honors, entering with processional entry music from the Killian Court Brass Ensemble, conducted by Kenneth Amis.
In another annual component of the OneMIT ceremony, Thea Keith-Lucas, the Chaplain to the Institute, delivered the invocation. The Chorallaries of MIT sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at the outset of the event. Near the conclusion, they sang the school song, “In praise of MIT,” and another Institute anthem, “Take Me Back to Tech.”
By tradition, speakers at the OneMIT event also included Teddy Warner, president of MIT’s Graduate Student Council, and Heba Hussein, president of the undergraduate class of 2026.
“As MIT graduates, we have the responsibility to work with others to generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges,” Warner said. “We cannot solve global problems without global cooperation or with limited techniques. I implore everyone to apply the cooperative, interdisciplinary skills used every day at MIT to effect positive change in all areas of the global community.”
In her speech, Hussein reflected on the many ways her classmates supported each other during their time at MIT. “As we move forward, I urge you to continue to carry care,” Hussein said. “Care for our work, for each other, and for the people far beyond MIT whose lives are connected by what we choose to do.
Following the students’ remarks, Stephen DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, president of the MIT Alumni Association, issued a welcome to the new graduates.
MIT: “Where I really learned to solve problems”
For her part, Su recounted that when she first came to campus, she was “pretty sure I was good at math.” Then, drawing laughs from the audience, she recalled stepping into two MIT first-year courses, 6.001 and 6.002.
“Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math,” Su said.
She stuck with it, and, as she told the crowd today, “Along the way, I started believing in myself. … What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor device physics.” Referring to MIT’s enduring motto of “mens et manus,” or “mind and hand,” Su underscored the importance of both thinking through problems and working to solve them in practical terms.
“When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto,” Su said. “Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT so special. MIT teaches you to think deeply. But it also teaches you to build. To test ideas. To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work. And over time, you start believing that you can solve problems that once felt impossible. I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus.”
Su’s remarks specifically credited the mentorship of MIT electrical engineer Dimitri Antoniadis, one of her PhD advisors, who today is the Ray and Maria Stata Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in whose lab she worked as a doctoral candidate.
“That was where I really learned how to solve problems,” Su said.
After receiving her PhD from MIT, Su worked at Texas Instruments; IBM; and Freescale Semiconductor. In 2012, she joined AMD, which she has helped revitalize as a global leader in the semiconductor space. In 2014, she was named president and CEO of the company. Under her guidance, AMD has both grown and diversified its products, with expanding reach in high-performance computing, among other areas.
Su has received many awards and honors in her career, including the IEEE’s Robert Noyce Medal in 2021; she was the first woman to be awarded the honor.
In her remarks, Su referenced the many technology advances of recent decades, and noted the potential for new changes due to artificial intelligence. Su outlined her hope that AI can “accelerate discovery in every field,” including medicine and health care, suggesting it could help assemble more information than ever in valuable ways.
“This I think is the promise of AI at its best,” Su said. “It makes each of us more capable. Medicine. Science. Energy. Climate.”
At the same time, Su observed, “Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like.” Rather, she noted, people do: “For everything AI can do, AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It can’t make the hard judgments when the data is not there. It can’t take responsibility for the outcome. These are actually our responsibilities. And they matter more now than ever.”
“The commitment to act ethically”
In her charge to the graduates, Kornbluth also encouraged the MIT class of 2026 to apply their knowledge and skills in socially beneficial, responsible ways.
“I mentioned excellence and curiosity, two of MIT’s core values,” Kornbluth said. “But I hope we also hold, together, another core value: the commitment to always act ethically, with integrity, and with consideration for our fellow human beings.”
She added: “I have no doubt that … with your uncommon talent, you can do it! And if you keep that goal in sight, I know you will do great things for the world. Congratulations — and warmest best wishes to all of you for a happy life and a fulfilling career.”
Commencement address by Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94“Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like,” the chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices told the Class of 2026.Below is the text of Lisa Su’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.
Good afternoon.
President Kornbluth, Chairman Gorenberg, trustees, faculty, families, friends … and most importantly, the MIT Class of 2026.
Congratulations.
You earned this.
Standing here feels different than I expected.
I've given a lot of talks over the years … but this one is personal. And as Murphy’s Law would have it, I somehow managed to lose my voice this week … so please bear with me if my voice sounds a little rough.
I came to MIT in the fall of 1986. My parents dropped me off at Next House. I was 17 years old. Born in Taiwan, raised in Queens … and pretty sure I was good at math.
Then I walked into 6.001 and 6.002.
Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math.
I remember staring at those first problem sets thinking … man, these are super hard.
I had never really pulled all-nighters until freshman year … it was a new experience, but it was a lot of fun doing it together with your classmates.
MIT has this incredible way of pushing you further than you thought you could go.
You wrestled with the problem.
You blew up a circuit or two.
And then, somehow … the thing worked.
And suddenly, you realized you could build something real.
And, that’s when I started feeling like an engineer.
One of the best parts of MIT is UROP.
The opportunity, as an undergraduate, to work on real research.
That changed my life.
My first UROP was in Professor Hank Smith’s lab in Building 39 … making X-ray lithography mask blanks for a graduate student.
To be clear, at the time I had absolutely no idea what that actually meant.
But I got to put on my first bunny suit, walk into the clean room, and start building devices on little 2-inch wafers.
I learned very quickly to be careful because those wafers were delicate, and I definitely did not want to be responsible for breaking them.
I ran a bunch of experiments. Most of them didn’t work the way we expected. So, we adjusted. And tried again.
It was the coolest thing ever.
For the first time, I wasn’t just learning about technology in a classroom. I was part of a team trying to discover something new.
I remember thinking: wow, we can build things this small?
Things tiny enough to fit on a die the size of a coin … but powerful enough to change the world.
And that is when I fell in love with semiconductors.
Later, I had the privilege of working with Professor Dimitri Antoniadis, who became my PhD advisor.
That was where I really learned how to solve problems.
I remember spending weeks in the clean room fabricating devices, then bringing my wafers up to the test lab, only to discover they didn’t behave the way I expected at all.
So, I’d go back to Dimitri’s office, and we’d figure out what experiment we should try next.
Looking back, that was probably where I grew the most at MIT.
Because little by little, I went from a new grad student learning about the field…to someone doing original research and actually contributing something new to the field.
And along the way, I started believing in myself.
Not the confidence that I would always know the answer.
But the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer yet…I could figure it out.
What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor physics.
Mens et manus.
Mind and hand.
When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto.
Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT special.
MIT teaches you to think deeply.
But it also teaches you to build.
To test ideas.
To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work.
And over time, you start believing you can solve problems that once felt impossible.
I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus.
When I joined IBM, I found myself starting all over again.
IBM had hundreds of thousands of employees. I was 25 years old wondering how I could possibly make a difference in a company that big.
But I learned something important very quickly: engineering doesn’t care how old you are.
It cares whether your ideas work.
And one of my mentors told me something that I’ve never forgotten:
Run toward the hardest problems.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant.
But over time, I realized this was the best advice I ever received.
Hard problems teach you what you're capable of.
Fast forward a bit … 12 years ago, I got a chance to put that lesson to the test.
I had the opportunity to become CEO of AMD.
AMD had enormous potential, but the company had been through some tough years.
Some of my mentors thought taking the job was risky.
But for me, this was my dream job.
This was what I’d been training for all those years.
The opportunity to work at the bleeding edge of technology on problems that really mattered.
The first thing we had to figure out was what we wanted to be when we grew up.
We made a long-term bet that high-performance computing would be the most important technology of the future.
We gave our talented team the room to think big.
Over the next several years, we built technology to enable the most powerful computers in the world.
And, through all of it, I used every skill that MIT ever taught me … And then some.
I call it the engineer’s instinct.
The ability to face what seemed like an unsolvable problem, break it down, and methodically work through it step by step.
But, at AMD, I learned something else.
The engineer’s instinct is even more powerful when it becomes shared by a team.
And the greatest satisfaction of my career has been bringing people together to do something more than any of us thought was possible.
Which brings me to today.
Over the last few decades, we’ve experienced several major technology shifts.
The internet changed how we communicate.
Mobile computing changed how we live.
Cloud computing changed how we work.
And now we are at the beginning of the AI wave.
To me, AI is different from those earlier technology waves.
It is not just a tool that can help us do things faster. It is deeper than that.
It has the potential to accelerate discovery in every field and help us solve problems we have never been able to solve before.
To make it personal, one of the areas that excites me most is medicine and healthcare.
We’ve all experienced firsthand what it feels like when someone you love is sick.
And even with incredible doctors and the best care, you realize how hard it is for any one person to bring together all of the knowledge that exists in the world to help in that critical time of need.
AI can help us change that.
It can help doctors and researchers bring the world’s best expertise to each patient … and deliver care with the best chance of a successful outcome.
That is the promise of AI at its best.
It does not replace people.
It makes each of us more capable.
Medicine.
Science.
Energy.
Climate.
We may discover more in the next ten years than we have in the last thirty.
Now let me be clear.
Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like.
People do.
For all the promise of AI …
AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving.
It cannot make the hard judgment calls with imperfect information.
It cannot take responsibility for the outcome.
These are our responsibilities.
And they matter more now than ever.
That is why this is such an extraordinary moment to graduate from MIT.
Because the world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools.
It needs people who know what to use them for.
People with a sense of purpose.
Judgment.
Courage.
People who look at a hard problem and say: I know this is important, and we can figure this out.
And that is exactly who you have become here.
So here is what I want to leave you with.
I am fortunate in many ways.
I am fortunate to have great parents.
I received an extraordinary education.
I have had the chance to work with great people.
But I also believe I’ve been very lucky in my career.
When people ask me for career advice, I often tell them: work hard … but also understand that luck matters.
And, over time, I’ve come to believe that the best people find ways to make their luck.
Luck is not just being in the right place at the right time.
It is taking the risk to work on something hard.
It is challenging yourself.
Choosing problems at the edge of what you know.
Surrounding yourself with people who make you better.
And believing that, yes … you can change the world.
So be ambitious about the problems you choose.
Run toward the hardest ones.
And trust your engineer’s instinct.
That is how you make your luck.
I want to take a moment to acknowledge all the families and loved ones here in the audience today.
None of these graduates got here alone.
Thank you for believing in them, supporting them, and helping them reach this moment.
This achievement belongs to you too.
And to the Class of 2026…
Remember … somewhere in the years ahead, you’re going to walk into another room where you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.
You’ve done this before.
Go figure it out.
As one MITer to another … I am incredibly honored to be here with you today.
Congratulations, Class of 2026.
New laboratory at MIT aims to advance quantum research for the nationThe Quantum Systems Laboratory will catalyze quantum innovation and be open to government, academic, and industry researchers.On May 28, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced plans for a new laboratory to accelerate the development of next-generation quantum technologies that will enable Massachusetts to remain a national hub for quantum innovation.
Speaking at the Samberg Conference Center on campus, the leaders introduced the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a shared-use facility that will catalyze quantum development in the region and help keep America at the forefront of a technology seen as critical for a range of industries.
“Quantum technologies have the potential to drive transformative change in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration,” Kornbluth said. “Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent of anywhere in the world, so it has been clear to us for some time that if we could magnify all of that talent with the right facilities — a shared quantum toolbox — we could establish Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and help catalyze the next generation of quantum technologies.”
The Quantum Systems Laboratory will join a state-of-the-art quantum computer with the components needed to make it a scalable, practical technology for solving complex, real-world problems. Such components include peripheral hardware such as sensors and quantum interconnects, which are physical channels that transfer quantum information. Located at MIT’s Building 39, the facilities will be open to researchers both from and beyond MIT.
Thanks to a $25 million investment from the state, announced today, which will match a portion of the federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute is now in a position to move forward as early as this summer with construction on the QSL facility. The Commonwealth’s investment adds to MIT’s own financial commitment, as well as generous philanthropic support from Thomas Tull.
“This is good news for MIT, good news for Massachusetts, and frankly, good news for the world that we’re working together to make this happen,” Healey said. “The return on investment is clear: We know the Quantum Systems Laboratory will be a first-of-its-kind center for the shared study and development of quantum science and technology. It’s going to unleash the great power of scientists and innovators from around the state and across the world, and also be a place for collaboration, both for academic and commercial ventures. It will offer incredible opportunities for both scientific progress and economic growth. It’s a testament to MIT’s unrelenting, unyielding belief in the power of openness and collaboration to advance science.”
The new lab will be the physical home for the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT) announced by President Kornbluth in December. It also complements advanced facilities already used for quantum research at MIT, such as MIT.nano and MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s SQUILL foundry, both of which share the mission of democratizing access to world-class facilities. SQUILL and MIT.nano have already made a major impact on the quantum industry through research, startups, and new standards for creating and transmitting quantum information.
“I want to emphasize that just as MIT.nano is a facility for all, there will be many people from beyond MIT that come to use this equipment” at QSL, Kornbluth said. “This is a hub to make Massachusetts the center of the world for quantum. These resources are rare enough that we have to make sure they are available to our colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard, and beyond. Our plan is to mobilize all the talent in the area through this facility.”
Leading in quantum innovation is important for the prosperity and security of the country, but quantum research requires meticulously controlled environments. The new facilities will give scientists access to the cutting-edge quantum hardware and specialized experimental capabilities needed to achieve the full transformative potential of quantum science and engineering.
The new laboratory’s underlying mission is to return broad scientific, workforce, and economic benefit to the public.
For example, quantum technologies provide significant opportunities in the fields of life sciences and defense technologies, which are $50-billion contributors to the local economy, with dozens of startups working in the area. The new lab is designed to create new job opportunities in the form of academic research, startups, and more. Construction on the QSL facility alone is anticipated to create over 150 full-time, on-site jobs, plus another 75 to 100 jobs across the Commonwealth in supply chain and professional services supporting the project.
Startups from MIT are also a key driver of the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem; in 2015, Sloan Professors Edward Roberts and Fiona Murray published a report detailing how the Institute’s alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 30,000 active companies, employing 4.6 million people and generating annual global revenues of $1.9 trillion, a figure greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s 10th-largest economy, as of 2014. The QSL facility will provide the necessary equipment and facilities for startups working on quantum technologies, thereby strengthening the region’s innovation economy.
Sally Kornbluth’s charge to the Class of 2026MIT’s president asked graduates help the world understand the importance of curiosity — “our intellectual rocket fuel” — to society as a whole.Below is the text of President Sally Kornbluth’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.
Technically, as MIT’s president, it’s now my job to deliver a “charge” to the graduates.
But this year, I faced that assignment with a serious case of humility. You’re entering a world that I’m certain you’ll navigate better than I could.
So, for your “charge,” I decided to draw on a special resource: the collective wisdom of our alumni.
I talk with a lot of MIT graduates — around the world, across the country, on our faculty.
They each put it their own way. But nearly all of them talk about how MIT changed their lives. It wasn’t a subject they studied, or a skill they acquired. It was the whole MIT experience! Of living and working here, together, and of belonging to a community with our distinctive passions and values.
So, as you go out into the world, I want to emphasize a few of those values that will serve you wherever you go. The banners in Lobby 7 feature our whole MIT Values Statement. Let’s focus first on the two words at the top: Excellence and Curiosity.
Now, “excellence” is an easy thing to say. Most companies claim it. Probably every university too. But I have never seen a community live its commitment to excellence the way it’s done at MIT.
It’s easy to measure in the outward accomplishments of our faculty and graduates: the prizes, the discoveries, the inventions. The architecture and the industries. The companies and cures.
But you also feel it here, every day — when everyone you meet in the hallway wants to tell you about what they’re working on – and it just blows you away.
As members of this community, we strive to hold ourselves to “the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence.” Just as important, we inspire each other to reach for those standards too!
(As one timely metaphor: This week 400 of you apparently felt that earning a degree from MIT wasn’t hard enough – so you also had to jump out of a plane!)
As an institution, we support these standards of individual excellence with a systematic focus on merit. For instance: No legacy admissions. No back-door admissions for donors.
Because we value “potential over pedigree.”
A long-ago colleague had a sign in his office. It said, “If you take a lick of the lollipop of mediocrity, you will suck forever.”
Now, let me be clear — I’m talking about self-discipline, not self-regard.
In the work we do, a conscious commitment to excellence is not the same as arrogance.
In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.
The American poet Walt Whitman captured this idea. As he wrote,
“I like the scientific spirit — the holding off, the being sure, but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: This … keeps the way beyond open [and] … gives the whole man a chance to try over again.”
So I hope, wherever your life and work lead you, that you’ll strive to sustain our MIT standards of excellence.
And I also hope, in the spirit of Whitman, that you’ll “accept the risk of failing as a rung on the ladder of growth.” Because, in all the fields you’ve studied, the willingness to try, and fail, and try again is the golden path to breakthroughs!
Now, for curiosity.
A few months ago, I was interviewed by a journalist who understands the current challenges for higher education.
He described me as “inexplicably ebullient.”
(He doesn’t see me every day!)
But honestly, if I’m ebullient in leading this community, it’s entirely explicable!
MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps. Which describes our faculty, our staff, our alumni — and every one of you.
Feeding that curiosity is an incredible source of pleasure. You don’t need me to encourage you in this life-long feast!
But I do hope I can count on you to help the world understand that curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel — and that this fact is enormously important for our society as a whole.
At MIT, we know that curiosity-driven science is the path to new knowledge – the kind that spawns world-changing innovations.
Curiosity is the force that transforms deadly cancers into treatable conditions, that turns fusion energy from a dream to a reality, that uncovers new ways to grow more food using less of every resource.
We like to say that science is curiosity on a mission.
But we also know that the “curious” path to those deep discoveries can look like a wandering road.
(Years ago, after a long conversation about my PhD work, my own grandmother once asked, “Wait, you’re not trying to cure cancer in humans, you’re trying to give it to chickens?”)
Luckily, over eight decades, the United States had the foresight to see the value of discovery science. It invested public money with steady patience, knowing that the “practical payoff” could be 20, 30, 40 years away.
Today – as many of you know from experience in your own labs — US investment in curiosity-driven science is in sharp decline.
The tragedy here is that shrinking the pipeline of basic discovery research means choking off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and shrinking the supply of future scientists.
So I hope you will join in a great shared effort to sustain the work of scientific curiosity — on a mission to serve.
A final thought: Every one of you here possesses uncommon talent. And with great talent comes great responsibility.
I have no doubt that, like our alumni, you will be top-flight performers in your fields: Innovators. Engineers. Scientists. Doctors and designers. Entrepreneurs, investors and astronauts. Pioneers in whatever realm you chose.
I mentioned Excellence and Curiosity, two of MIT's core values.
But I hope we also hold, together, another core value — the commitment to always act ethically, with integrity, and with consideration for our fellow human beings.
After more than six decades on Earth, I know that living up to this standard requires constant reinforcement and awareness! You will face many temptations, and opportunities to lose focus on that north star.
And you simply have to resist.
I have no doubt that, with your uncommon talent, you can do it!
And if you keep that goal in sight, I know you will do great things for the world.
Congratulations — and warmest best wishes to you for a happy life and fulfilling career!
MIT researchers develop a low-cost technique to get lithium out of rocksThe low-temperature process could unlock cleaner lithium from America’s abundant hard rock while minimizing waste.Demand for lithium has surged in recent years as lithium-ion batteries power increasingly more of our world. And yet, even as places like the U.S., Europe, and Australia have abundant lithium resources within their borders, China dominates global lithium refining. The biggest hurdle to tapping into the U.S. and Australia’s lithium is getting it out of hard rock minerals in a form that is useful.
Extracting lithium from hard rock today is an energy- and waste-intensive process that is often far more expensive than getting lithium from brine water, which also has major environmental drawbacks. Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded.
Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. The process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts: not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica. After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so waste levels approach zero.
The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water.
A paper describing the process was published today in Science. The researchers have already begun commercializing the technology through an MIT spinout, Rock Zero.
“By 2040, we need to quadruple production of lithium globally, which amounts to hundreds of new lithium producing assets,” says author Camden Hunt, a former project manager in MIT’s Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry. “Hard rock is abundant; you can find it everywhere. But most hard rock refining is done in China. Our central thesis is if you can find an easier way to crack the rock, get lithium out, and make battery-grade lithium salts, you can change the lithium market. It aligns with the recent push to onshore production of critical minerals in the U.S.”
Joining Hunt on the paper are former MIT postdoc Benjamin Mowbray; PhD candidate Kalyn Fuelling; MIT undergraduate Jacqueline Prawira; Khashayar Jafari, a former senior research scientist at the MIT green cement spinout Sublime Systems; and Yet-Ming Chiang, MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.
From bathrooms to batteries
The research has its roots in a bathroom renovation. About 25 years ago, as Chiang made a trip to a hardware store to look for something that would turn clear glass blocks translucent, he stumbled on a glass etching cream that works by “eating away” at the surface of the glass. The active ingredient turned out to be ammonium fluoride.
More recently, as Chiang was brainstorming ways to chemically break apart the most abundant lithium-bearing mineral, spodumene, he thought back to that etching cream. Spodumene, like glass, consists mostly of silica. Conventional chemistry-based methods for extracting metals from ores preferentially dissolve more reactive elements and leave behind a silica-enriched residue because of the strength of silicon-oxygen bonds. By designing their process to use a mixture of water and ammonium fluoride, the researchers are able to dissolve silica first, reversing the process.
The researchers showed they could dissolve spodumene rock at room temperature, which represented a breakthrough over traditional processes requiring extreme heat. But it was still only the first step to a closed-loop system that produced useful materials.
“Dissolving silica is the hard part in mining,” Mowbray says. “The next question was how do we apply it to impactful mineral processing problems?”
The mineral spodumene is mainly made up of three components: lithium, aluminum, and silica. Mowbray and Hunt, who both have their PhDs in chemistry, began exploring ways to refine those components separately after they were broken apart in the ammonium fluoride solution.
First, the researchers isolated lithium fluoride, a useful input for common electrolyte materials used in batteries. Chiang, who has founded several battery companies over his multi-decade career at MIT, next asked the research team if they could isolate lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate, two lithium salts useful for making battery cathodes. The researchers went back to the lab and found they could make both by developing new processes, some of which involved adding carbon dioxide or sodium carbonate. Chiang tasked the research team with a similar challenge for the aluminum part of the rock, which was isolated using a high-temperature separation technique, and then silica, which was isolated by precipitation.
“First our goal was to produce these products, then there were additional steps of characterizing their purity and properties and making sure our products met the specifications for target markets,” Mowbray explains. “For the lithium salts, we identified the purity specifications for battery-grade lithium carbonate, the most widely used lithium salt. For the silica, we wanted it to be used as a cement additive, so we did cement reactivity tests and eventually created cubes of cement from it for strength testing using industrial methods. For aluminum, we targeted smelter-grade aluminum. If any product didn’t meet the target specs, you’d end up with a waste stream.”
The researchers then developed a process to reuse the ammonium fluoride and water that starts the reaction.
“We’re able to dissolve the rock with the spodumene in it, and that liberates all the elements, including the aluminum and lithium,” Chiang says. “The silica is in the solution, but on the way to making ammonium fluoride, ammonia gas also comes off. If that ammonia gas is then reapplied, it precipitates the silica again. That sequence gives us back the starting ammonium fluoride. That’s why it’s a circular process.”
The researchers successfully processed 17 different spodumene rock sources, showing its widespread applicability using rocks around the world.
“You’ve heard of nose-to-tail eating?” Chiang says. “We refer to this as nose-to-tail mining. Our researchers came to MIT to look for impactful problems to work on in sustainability. With their skill sets, it was just a matter of setting them loose on this problem. We went through all these steps, and for each one, I’d just say, ‘Can you do this next step?’ And a week or two later they’d say, ‘Okay, we’ve shown we can do that.’ That’s how this entire process got built.”
Scaling the process
Chiang further challenged his research team to evaluate the commercial feasibility of their new system.
“Once we had these core operations worked out, Yet encouraged us to do some math,” Mowbray explains. “Is there enough spodumene in the world to supply 100 terrawatt-hours of battery production? The follow up was: If you supply all the world’s batteries with this process, what are the volumes of the co-products? Do they match global commodity markets? Then we started looking at the cost of the reagents, the cost of the energy, equipment. We started gaining conviction that this could have a big impact.”
The work has special significance for Mowbray, who grew up in a historic mining town in rural British Columbia.
The researchers worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to spin out their company, Rock Zero, which is now located at The Engine and scaling up the system.
“We believe this approach is the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium not only out of hard rock, but period,” Chiang says. “That’s what’s motivating us to scale this. It will enable the energy transition through batteries that use lithium. This was one of the goals of The Climate Project at MIT — to work on projects that, within a short number of years, could transition from the lab to commercialization and impact.”
The work was supported, in part, by the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the MIT Climate Grant Challenges program, and the National Science Foundation. The work made use of MIT.nano facilities.
A new sensor could enable earlier detection of bladder cancerUsing a catheter coated with carbon nanotubes, researchers can detect biomarkers produced by cancer cells in the bladder.Every year, about 85,000 Americans are diagnosed with bladder cancer. While treatment is often successful, bladder cancer has one of the highest rates of recurrence of any cancer: Following treatment, about 50 percent of patients develop tumors again within the next five years. This makes it one of the most expensive cancers for society to treat.
MIT researchers have now developed a new way to regularly monitor those patients, which could enable regrowing tumors to be detected much earlier. Using a catheter coated with specialized nanosensors, the team showed that they could detect very low levels of a protein produced by bladder cancer cells and image their location in tissue.
The researchers calculate that this sensing approach is nearly 50,000 times more sensitive than urinalysis, an approach that has been used to monitor bladder cancer in patients. In an animal study, they showed that fluorescent signals produced by the sensors can be used to pinpoint the location of the tumor within the lining of the bladder, providing a chemical image.
“It’s like a camera for molecules instead of light,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “If you have a billion nanosensors in an array, you can use them to make a chemical image that helps you locate their source.”
Strano is the senior author of the study, which appears today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Wonjun Yim, a Schmidt Science postdoc, and Hohyung Kang, an MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper. Other authors include MIT graduate student Marco Machado, undergraduate student Maeve McGinnis, and postdoc Byungha Kang.
“Chemical images”
The new detection approach is based on carbon nanotubes — hollow, nanometer-thick cylinders made of carbon that naturally fluoresce when exposed to laser light. Over the past 10 years, Strano’s lab has shown that these nanotubes can be customized to sense different molecules by coating them with “synthetic antibodies” — polymers that can be designed to interact with a specific target.
When the target analytes are present, their interaction with the synthetic antibodies causes the carbon nanotubes to shift the wavelength or change the fluorescent intensity that they produce. Strano’s lab has previously developed about two dozen different sensors that can detect different targets, including hydrogen peroxide, riboflavin, and viral proteins.
For the new study, the researchers designed a sensor that could detect a protein known as nuclear matrix protein 22 (NMP-22), which is already FDA-approved for use as a biomarker for bladder cancer. NMP-22 can be detected in urine samples, but it is often significantly diluted, degraded, and cleared after secretion. This means that tumors can only be detected once they have reached more advanced stages.
To enable earlier detection, the MIT team sought a way to deploy their sensors inside the bladder, where they could detect NMP-22 near the tumor at locally elevated concentrations. The device they designed consists of a urinary catheter coated with nanotubes that can sense NMP-22. The catheter also contains a tiny device known as a ball lens, located within the tip of the catheter.
This lens rotates 360 degrees, emitting laser light and then absorbing the fluorescent light emitted by the nanosensors. By analyzing the color and location of these fluorescent signals, the researchers can map the location of any biomarker that is detected.
These chemical images can reveal not only whether the biomarker is present, but also the location of the cancerous cells.
“If you are scanning over a region of tissue, you would like to know not just that there is a signal indicating that a tumor is there, but also its location so that you can treat it or perform a biopsy,” Strano says. “Before an early-stage tumor breaks through the urothelium so that it’s visible, it’s under the surface but still emitting chemical signals that can be imaged. When a chemical hits the catheter, we don’t just detect its presence, but we collect a map that pinpoints its location.”
Tests in animal bladders showed that this type of detection can be 180 times more sensitive than performing a conventional urinalysis because it detects biomarkers directly where they are produced in the bladder, rather than measuring them later in dilute fluids such as urine, where their concentration is much lower. This high degree of sensitivity would allow the sensors to detect signals from a tumor as small as 16 square millimeters, the researchers say.
Earlier detection
Researchers in Strano’s lab are now working on designing a more compact version of their prototype imaging system, so that it could be used more easily at a doctor’s office. They also hope to incorporate their sensors into a type of catheter known as a cystoscope, which has a camera attached and is used to visualize tumors in the lining of the bladder.
Currently, patients who have been treated for bladder cancer undergo cystoscopy annually, or in some cases even more often, to monitor for cancer recurrence. The new MIT diagnostics should be able to detect recurring tumors earlier than cystoscopy, making them easier to treat and cutting down on the costs of treatment and monitoring, the researchers say.
“What we’re looking for is something that could be faster and more effective. It could be used right in a doctor’s office, and it could make that screening more efficient and less invasive, with much lower cost. The goal is to be able to detect potential tumors much earlier,” Strano says.
“This paper is exciting because it shows how diagnostics can be more effective when the sensor is brought to the individual,” says Daniel Heller, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, who was not involved in the research. “Strano and colleagues demonstrated that a carbon nanotube-based nanosensor technology can be used to monitor a cancer right where it is, improving the speed of cancer detection, and potentially enabling the improvement of cancer treatment.”
This approach could also be integrated with endoscopy to detect other types of cancer or other diseases, such as cardiovascular or gastrointestinal diseases, by swapping out the nanosensors attached to the catheter.
“The beauty of polymer chemistry is that if we understand the molecular structures of target biomarkers and the design principles of binding sites, we can develop new sensors tailored to different diseases,” Yim says. “You can imagine if these sensors were integrated onto the catheter, they could reveal invisible biomarkers that current endoscopic procedures miss, opening the door to detecting many other diseases in the future.”
The research was funded by the Bridge Project of the Koch Institute and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a Schmidt Science Fellowship, the MIT UROP Program, Mathworks Inc., and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Media Advisory: MIT to establish regional quantum hubWith $25 million investment from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, MIT to build a new shared-use facility to serve as a statewide quantum toolbox.Quantum technologies promise transformative changes in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration. But how do we ensure Massachusetts stays on the leading edge of our nation’s coming quantum leap? Doing so is vital to the prosperity and security of our Commonwealth and country, serving to protect and advance America’s technological leadership in a world that has been upended by geopolitical rivalries.
On Thursday, May 28, Governor Maura Healey joined President Sally Kornbluth at MIT to announce a new effort aimed at establishing Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and catalyzing next generation quantum technologies. MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a new shared-use facility that will serve as a quantum toolbox for the region, aimed at accelerating quantum research, innovation, and growth in this critical field.
The QSL seeks to be the first facility in the world to bring together state‑of‑the‑art quantum computers with quantum sensors and peripherals, joined by quantum interconnects (physical channels that transfer quantum information). The facility will provide researchers from MIT and other institutions hands‑on access to significant quantum hardware and specialized experimental capabilities that are necessary to achieve the full transformative potential of quantum science and engineering.
Thanks to a $25 million investment from the state, which will match a portion of the federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute is now in a position to move forward as early as this summer with construction on the QSL facility, positioning the region to dominate the next generation of quantum research, according to Institute officials. The Commonwealth’s investment adds to MIT’s own financial commitment, as well as generous philanthropic support from Thomas Tull.
“Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent anywhere in the world, working on a range of potential applications. Through the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we will help position Massachusetts to lead the next era of quantum technologies,” says Kornbluth. “This facility will serve those at the edges of our wildest imaginations in physics and quantum computing, yes. But it will also equip the talent in our region -- and ultimately, our nation -- to push our knowledge to new limits, and new innovations.”
The QSL will be located at Building 39 on the MIT campus and will serve as a multi-disciplinary quantum hub with modern experimental infrastructure. Because quantum research involves the creation and study of coherent phenomena in systems that are isolated from the rest of the universe, it must take place in a highly controlled environment. Work is already underway in Building 39, with significant investments by MIT, to upgrade the physical infrastructure for these unique demands. The state’s support will supercharge this work and allow for the transformation of the lab into a hub for scientists across the region working on next-generation quantum technologies, startup applications, defense and health tech, and more.
“Our region has unparalleled strengths in science-intensive innovations and tough tech breakthroughs that combine engineering, science, and computing,” notes Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost. “With the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we aim to arm Massachusetts with the compute power and integrated platforms needed to lead the coming era of quantum technologies.”
By the numbers
The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains. As a shared-use facility, the QSL is being developed with the underlying mission of returning broad scientific, workforce, and economic benefit to the public.
For example, quantum technologies provide significant opportunities in the fields of life sciences and defense technologies, which are $50 billion contributors to the Massachusetts economy, with dozens of startups working in the area. During a time of increased economic anxiety and labor market concerns, investing in foundational quantum facilities will infuse our region with new job opportunities, in academic research institutions, startups and more. Construction on the QSL facility alone is anticipated to create over 150 full-time, on-site construction jobs, plus another 75 to 100 jobs across the Commonwealth in supply chain and professional services supporting the project.
Startups from MIT are also a key driver of the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem; in 2015, Sloan Professors Edward Roberts and Fiona Murray published a report detailing how the Institute’s alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 30,000 active companies, employing 4.6 million people, and generating annual global revenues of $1.9 trillion, a figure greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s 10th-largest economy, as of 2014. The QSL facility will provide the necessary equipment and facilities for startups working on quantum technologies, thereby strengthening the region’s innovation economy.
“The new QSL will introduce modern experimental infrastructure to quantum research at MIT and beyond, allowing us to scale experiments and expand into critical domains in disciplines such as biology and chemistry, where we see enormous innovative potential,” explains Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research. “As the new physical home of the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT), the QSL will serve not only as an on-campus incubator, but more broadly, a regional hub to catalyze quantum innovation, growth, and investment in this critical R&D sector for the Commonwealth.”
One floor of the facility will allow for development of radio-frequency (RF) electronics for controlling and interfacing with quantum systems. The QSL will also support researchers in the creation of customized quantum experiments with advanced high-frequency packages, which are required to protect quantum data in real-world applications. The facility will also develop the associated THz electronics needed by advanced quantum systems.
A history of future-focused plays
Nearly a decade ago, MIT made a similarly big bet on nanotechnology, developing MIT.nano — a state-of-the-art, shared-use facility with more than 200 tools and instruments that support nanoscale discovery and innovation through imaging, fabrication, characterization, and prototyping. Set in the heart of campus in the Lisa T. Su Building, MIT.nano is home to a thriving research community, an industry consortium, and a startup accelerator. More than a fifth of the 1,500 users of MIT.nano come from outside of MIT, and half of the companies in its START.nano accelerator have had non-MIT founders.
The QSL will also complement the capabilities of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s SQUILL Foundry, a quantum fabrication hub for superconducting qubit systems that serves researchers across Massachusetts and the nation free of charge.
MIT Corporation elects 10 term members, two life members for 2026The term members will each serve five years on MIT’s board of trustees.The MIT Corporation — the Institute’s board of trustees — has elected 10 full-term members, who will serve five-year terms, and two life members. Corporation Chair Mark P. Gorenberg ’76 announced the election results today.
The full-term members are: Kate A. Bergeron, Elizabeth Choe, Kevin B. Churchwell, Stephen P. DeFalco, Bennett W. Golub, Pearl S. Huang, Steve Isakowitz, Adrianna C. Ma, Pamela Melroy, and Alex Morcos. The life members are Eran Broshy and Ray A. Rothrock. Gorenberg was also re-elected as Corporation chair.
David L. Fung ’85, the 2026-2027 president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT, will also join the Corporation as an ex officio member. He succeeds Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88.
As of July 1, 2026, the Corporation will consist of 75 distinguished leaders in education, science, engineering, and industry. Of those, 22 are life members and eight are ex officio. An additional 33 individuals are life members emeritus.
The 10 new term members are:
Kate A. Bergeron ’93, MBA ’13, vice president of hardware engineering at Apple, Inc.
Bergeron joined Apple in 2002 as a senior mechanical engineer and has served as vice president of hardware engineering since 2014. Previously, she was senior director for ecosystem products and technologies and senior director of Macintosh product design. Bergeron co-developed the course MIT D-Lab: Design for Scale, which she co-taught from 2013 to 2017. Earlier in her career, she worked as a mechanical engineer at EM Designs and at the Palo Alto Design Group (now Flextronics International Ltd.). She has regularly been named by Business Insider as one of the most powerful female engineers in the world and was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2022.
Elizabeth Choe ’13, PhD ’25, director of AI strategy for translational medicine at AstraZeneca
At AstraZeneca, Choe oversees the deployment of biomedical deep-learning models for cancer drug development and leads upskilling programs for biologists and clinicians. As an MIT PhD student, she worked on brain cancer therapies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she worked in digital media in several roles: leading MIT+K12 Videos, producing media for National Geographic and the National Institutes of Health, designing global online teacher training programs at the MIT Media Lab’s Learning Initiative, and serving as assistant director of communications in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Throughout her graduate studies, she was actively involved in campus leadership, serving as a graduate resident advisor and participating in the Graduate Student Council, the Presidential Search Committee, and other groups.
Kevin B. Churchwell ’83, CEO of Boston Children’s Hospital
At Boston Children’s Hospital, Churchwell leads an organization dedicated to advancing child health through clinical care, research and innovation, medical education, and community engagement. Since joining the hospital in 2013 as chief operating officer and executive vice president of health affairs, he led a transformation that significantly reduced safety events affecting patients and employees. Earlier, Churchwell served as CEO of Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington and CEO and executive director of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He is currently a professor of pediatric anesthesia and the Robert and Dana Smith Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School.
Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, executive chair of Creation Technologies
Before assuming his current role, DeFalco served as chairman and CEO at Creation Technologies, an electronics manufacturing services provider, for six years. Prior to that, he was a partner at Lindsay Goldberg Private Equity, following a role as president and CEO of Crane Currency. DeFalco has also held CEO roles at MDS, a global life sciences company; Senseonics, a diabetes care company, where he is still chairman; and PathoGenetix. He was also president of PerkinElmer Instruments, a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, and a product development leader at IBM.
Bennett W. Golub ’79, SM ’82, PhD ’84, co-founder of and senior advisor at BlackRock
In 1988, Golub was one of eight people to start the global asset management company BlackRock, Inc; he stepped down from his day-to-day activities in 2022 to assume a part-time role of senior policy advisor. Formerly, he served as chief risk officer with responsibilities that included investment, counterparty, technology, and operational risk, and he chaired BlackRock’s Enterprise Risk Management Committee. Beginning in 1995, he was co-head and founder of BlackRock Solutions, the company’s risk advisory business. He also served as the acting CEO of Trepp, LLC. and as vice president at The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse).
Pearl S. Huang ’80, CEO and president of Dunad Therapeutics, Inc.
Huang has decades of experience spanning the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, with oversight across early drug discovery and development, translational research, and alliance management. Prior to Dunad, she was CEO and president of Cygnal Therapeutics, founded by Flagship Pioneering, where she was also a venture partner. Earlier, she held leadership roles as senior vice president of therapeutic modalities at Roche; vice president and global head of discovery partnerships with academia at GSK; and vice president, oncology franchise integrator, at Merck. She was also a founder and acting chief scientific officer of Beigene.
Steve Isakowitz ’83, SM ’84, former CEO and president of the Aerospace Corporation
Throughout his career, Isakowitz has worked across the public and private sectors to advance U.S. leadership in space. At the Aerospace Corporation, he led a strategic transformation of the organization to address the rapid commercialization of the space sector, the emergence of space as a warfighting domain, and the need for faster, more agile technical execution. Before that, he held leadership positions as chief technology officer at Virgin Galactic, and later president of the company’s space ventures business; chief financial officer at the U.S. Department of Energy; and deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA. He also served in roles at the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Adrianna C. Ma ’95, MEng ’96, operating partner at Index Ventures
At Index Ventures, Ma oversees operations, facilitates the investment process, and is responsible for fundraising and capital partnering. Previously, she was a managing partner of the investment firm the Fremont Group, a managing director of General Atlantic, and a technology mergers and acquisitions banker at Morgan Stanley. At the Fremont Group, she oversaw a portfolio of actively managed funds, public securities, and private co-investments; chaired the investment committee; and assisted with Fremont’s direct private equity investments. During her 10 years at General Atlantic, she led investments in, and served on the boards of, growth-stage technology companies around the world. At Morgan Stanley, she focused on technology-related mergers and acquisitions.
Pamela Melroy SM ’84, president and managing partner of Melroy and Hollett Technology Partners
As deputy administrator of NASA, Melroy was responsible for laying the agency’s vision and representing NASA to the executive office of the president and others. Before retiring from the U.S. Air Force in 2007, she logged more than 6,000 flight hours as a co-pilot, aircraft commander, instructor pilot, and test pilot. She is a veteran of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and Operation Just Cause. As a NASA astronaut, Melroy served as pilot on two space shuttle missions and was the mission commander on a third. She later took on a number of leadership roles, including at Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Nova Systems, and as an advisor to the Australian Space Agency.
Alex Morcos ’97, ’98, MEng ’98, co-founder of Chaincode Labs
Morcos co-founded Hudson River Trading in 2002, where he spent 10 years helping to build the quantitative trading firm. In 2014, he and fellow co-founder Suhas Daftuar started Chaincode Labs, a research and development center for Bitcoin, with a focus on open-source software and education. Recently, he applied his interest in emerging technologies to help found Fulcrum Science, a public good initiative to use AI to accelerate scientific research.
The two new life members are:
Eran Broshy ’79, former CEO and chair of Syneos Health
Broshy has spent more than 35 years as a health care executive, building high-growth public and private health care businesses as CEO, board chair, director, strategist, and investor. He served for over a decade as CEO and chairman of Syneous Health (formerly inVentiv Health), taking the company public and turning it into the leading global provider of outsourced clinical and commercial services to pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Before that, he served as the CEO of the biotechnology platform company Coelacanth Corp, and as a managing partner at The Boston Consulting Group. Since 2010, Broshy has worked in private equity across the health care space globally.
Ray A. Rothrock SM ’78, partner emeritus at Venrock
A philanthropist, venture capitalist, and advocate for clean energy, Rothrock spent 25 years at the venture capital firm Venrock, focusing on early-stage investments related to information technology, cybersecurity, and energy. He served as chair of the National Venture Capital Association and as CEO of the cybersecurity technology startup RedSeal, and he previously held management positions at Sun Microsystems. Earlier in his career, Rothrock held various engineering positions at Yankee Atomic Electric, Exxon Minerals, and Sagus. Today, he is a venture partner with Shield Capital and advisor to numerous venture capital firms. He was a member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee, and in the last decade he co-produced several documentary films.
When doctors and scientists want to see inside a body, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful tool. MRI can noninvasively capture detailed images of the body’s muscles, organs, and bones. It can monitor blood flow to generate a map of brain activity. And with new sensors developed by bioengineers at MIT, MRI can track the kinds of molecules that make our brains and bodies work.
In the May 13 issue of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by Alan Jasanoff, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, reports on their new sensors, which can brighten or dim MRI signals in response to specific molecular targets. The probes are designed to amplify the effect that each target molecule has on MRI signal, dramatically improving sensitivity over previous small-molecule sensors. Jasanoff, who is also an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, says the approach his team used should enable the development of MRI sensors that detect neurotransmitters and other important molecules in the brain.
“We want to be able to measure distinct chemical signals like neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and metabolites as they fluctuate across the whole brain,” Jasanoff says. “These chemicals are important ingredients in neural computations, and we want to use the types of probes that we developed to detect these signals dynamically.”
Jasanoff explains that researchers have struggled to use MRI to sensitively detect small molecules in the brain because the amount of any given neurochemical is low. Sensors can be designed to change the brightness of an MRI signal in the presence of specific molecules — but it takes a lot of contrast agent to achieve this. If every molecule of contrast agent needs its own target molecule to activate it, low concentrations of the target molecule limit the sensors’ visibility in an MRI scan. “The signal change that you see in the imaging will be very modest,” Jasanoff says. “It won’t let us detect physiological events.”
The Jasanoff team’s new sensors, whose development was led by postdoc Sayani Das and graduate student Jacob Cyert Simon, overcome this problem. To generate a greater signal change in response to target molecules, the researchers designed probes in which a single target molecule impacts not one contrast agent, but many.
To achieve this, Das and Simon packaged an MRI contrast agent inside tiny sacs called liposomal nanoparticles. Each nanoparticle is packed with many molecules of gadolinium, a magnetic material that brightens the MRI signal that arises from hydrogen atoms in water. Inside their protective sacs, gadolinium has no effect on MRI signal, unless water molecules can easily get in and out.
Das and Simon built water channels into the walls of their gadolinium-filled nanoparticles, engineering them so that their opening depends on the presence or absence of a target molecule. When the channels open, more water enters and the gadolinium brightens the local MRI signal, lighting up that spot in a scan.
The researchers call their target-responsive sensors liposomal nanoparticle reporters, or LisNRs (pronounced “listeners”). They designed LisNRs that let water in only in the presence of their target molecule. The water channels in these nanoparticles stay blocked until they encounter their target, which can knock aside a channel-blocking bit of protein.
Once the channel blocker is displaced, water enters and MRI signal brightens. They also made LisNRs that dim the MRI signal in the presence of the molecule they are designed to detect. These have a channel that stays open until the target molecule comes along and blocks it, keeping water out. Jasanoff lab members Vinay Sharma, Samira Abozeid, and Gregory Thiabaud played key roles in understanding and optimizing these interactions, and collaborators in the laboratory of Masayuki Inoue at the University of Tokyo helped the group engineer channels with higher potency.
In experiments led by postdoc Miranda Dawson, Jasanoff’s team used their LisNRs to detect a molecule called biotin in the brains and bodies of living rats, illustrating the probe’s amplifying effects. “We showed that we could detect micromolar-scale levels of biotin with about tenfold greater sensitivity than we would have if we’d used a more conventional, one-to-one type sensing approach,” Jasanoff says. He adds that the team’s modeling suggests that with further development, they may be able to achieve even greater sensitivity gains.
The group showed that the new sensors can be delivered systemically, reaching various organs and spreading throughout the brain. This makes them promising tools for brain-wide imaging, as well as imaging targets in the peripheral nervous system or other tissues.
A next step will be engineering LisNRs that respond to the specific neurochemicals that Jasanoff and his team hope to study. “There are something like 100 neurochemicals in the brain that we’d love to detect, in principle,” he says. They’ll start with dopamine and glutamate — two important and relatively abundant molecules that mediate communications between neurons.
This research, including support for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students involved in the work, was funded, in part, by Lore Harp McGovern, the Yang Tan Collective at MIT, the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center at MIT, the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, and the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT.
Designing a career, on and off the track, at MITSenior Krystal Montgomery explored design courses to shape a career in web development. As a national champion in track, learning to balance athletics and academics was key to her success.You will never catch Krystal Montgomery running to class. Literally. She is that fast.
The MIT senior — a Course 6-3 (Computer Science and Engineering) major and Course 4 (Design) minor — was recently named the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference Women’s Track Athlete of the Week — for the second time. Montgomery ran a national top 10 time in the 800 meters at the Friar Invitational in Providence, Rhode Island, in April. Her time of 2:10.67 was the fastest Division III runner in the field, ranking her eighth nationally. She beat that time with a personal best (2:09.51) at the FIRE Meet hosted by Williams College in early May.
Montgomery also runs the 400 meters or 800 meters on the relay team; last year, she and her teammates were national champions in the 4x400m race, which helped MIT win its first NCAA Division III Outdoor National Championship.
Her success running at MIT was hard-fought. After a stellar undergraduate first year and earning a place at the NCAA Division III finals, she suffered an injury at the NCAA Division III Indoor Championships. Unable to compete at the start of her second year, the increasing demands of her coursework and interviewing for internships took a toll.
“Sophomore year was super tough, academically,” says Montgomery. “I think the mental load affected my athletic performance. I was thinking that I would quit after my sophomore year and just focus on school. Then I started dropping times and thought that maybe I could improve if I just stuck it out.”
What Montgomery found was a new way to focus on herself that positively impacted her work on and off the track.
“It’s definitely been a journey of learning how to be more mentally tough throughout the last four years,” she says. “I think that has kind of helped both my academic and athletic performances. My junior year was great. I just kept pushing myself and continued to drop my times. I kind of learned how to balance my life. I prioritized sleeping and eating and tried not to be too stressed about schoolwork so I could lock in on race day.”
Supporting creative energy
Montgomery says she was a “pretty crafty person” before attending MIT. The former president of her high school’s chapter of Girls Who Code, she knew she was going to major in computer science. It was her love for building, making, and creating that led her to explore design courses. In her first year, Montgomery took her first design class 4.021 (Design Studio: How to Design), with Paul Pettigrew.
“That was an amazing experience because I got to use the workshops and the labs in the architecture department,” she says. “It was just crazy to have all these materials at my fingertips that I could build with. I learned how to laser cut; spray paint; powder coat; and cut metal, wood, and fabric. I found it all really interesting, and what I made encouraged me to take more of these classes.”
Montgomery says she realized that pursuing her interest in design while majoring in computer science would allow her to foster her “creative energy” throughout her time at MIT.
In her junior year, Montgomery took class 4.031 (Design Studio: Objects and Interaction) with associate professor of the practice in architecture Marcelo Coelho. She enjoyed it so much she took another of Coelho’s courses, 4.043 (Design Studio: Interaction Intelligence) — twice.
The course provides a foundation in technical skills such as physical prototyping, coding, collecting data, and deploying neural network models. The end result is developing interactive prototypes that can be deployed and experienced by real users. Montgomery enjoyed the process of working with a new group of classmates and partnering to create a prototype in each class.
“[Coelho’s] classes have been a great combination of designing a physical object and learning how to code, which brought in my computer science background,” says Montgomery. “It gave me the opportunity to combine both fields creatively.”
Moving forward
Montgomery says she hasn’t fully wrapped her head around the fact that her time at MIT is ending. It’s all been good: friends, clubs, courses.
“My last two years, I chose to focus on memories instead of being stressed over a lot of things,” she says. “I feel like I chose each of the things I did intentionally, so I put my time in things that I’ll carry with me past college.”
Before Commencement, Montgomery will join her teammates in her final meet: the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships. At last year’s championships, Montgomery and her teammates took first place in the women’s 4x400m relay.
After Commencement, Montgomery will move to Austin, Texas to work as a software developer at Apple, and she will keep competing in track as an unattached athlete, potentially transitioning to marathons later in her career.
“I’ve seen a lot of post-grads from MIT continue to train and compete in track meets and perform even better than they did in college,” says Montgomery. “I don’t know when I’ll make the switch to longer-distance running. For now, the sweet spot is the 800 meters.”
Ten from MIT accept 2026 Fulbright awardsThis year, over half of MIT’s Fulbright applicants won awards. The current students and alumni will embark on research projects abroad in 2026-27.Ten MIT affiliates — including undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni — have accepted Fulbright grants to conduct research in countries across the world. Five other students declined their awards to pursue other opportunities, and another student is still deciding. In total, 16 of MIT’s 30 Fulbright applicants won awards this year.
Funded by the U.S. Department of State with annual appropriations from Congress, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers year-long opportunities for American-citizen students and recent alumni to conduct independent research, pursue graduate studies, or teach English in over 140 countries. This past February, MIT was recognized by the Fulbright Program as the nation’s No. 1 “Top Producing Institution” among special focus STEM universities.
MIT students and alumni interested in applying to the Fulbright U.S. Student Program should contact Julia Mongo, Fulbright program advisor, in the Distinguished Fellowships office in Career Advising and Professional Development.
Jessica Chomik-Morales SM ’25 earned her master’s in science writing at MIT, where she previously spent three years as a post-bac cognitive neuroscience researcher in the labs of professors Nancy Kanwisher and Laura Schulz. For her Fulbright in Spain, she will research the science of science communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s Center for Brain and Cognition in Barcelona. Her project will investigate how narrative features in science writing interact with reader characteristics to shape comprehension, trust, and engagement. Chomik-Morales is the creator, host, and producer of “Mi Última Neurona,” an MIT-sponsored Spanish-language neuroscience podcast that has featured more than 60 scientists from Latin America, the United States, and Spain. She is currently producing “Lab Notes on Love,” an audio miniseries for Scientific American. She is committed to making science communication more inclusive, empirically grounded, and emotionally resonant.
Stella Gassman will graduate this month with a BS in biological engineering and a concentration in women’s and gender studies. For her Fulbright year, she will conduct microbiology research at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. At MIT, Gassman researched the vaginal microbiome and mucosal membranes, with a particular focus on bacterial vaginosis. Important moments of her research journey included time at an MGH gynecology clinic and at the FRESH clinical trial site in South Africa, where she gained firsthand perspectives on the human context behind her laboratory samples. Gassman also interned at Pfizer Oncology, developing an in vivo tumor model to test preclinical compounds. She volunteered in the MGH Emergency Department and served on the Biological Engineering Undergraduate Board. After Fulbright, she hopes to attend medical school to bridge scientific discovery and human impact.
Chen Li SM ’25 graduated from MIT with a master’s in system design and management. She has developed generative artificial intelligence tools for patient engagement at Novo Nordisk in Copenhagen through MISTI Denmark and applied AI to help prevent gait freezing in Parkinson’s patients through the MIT–Mexico program. As a research assistant in the MIT Global Teamwork Lab, her thesis used large language models and statistical methods to build a 3D urban design platform to study teamwork behavior. She also served as a teaching assistant for data mining courses at MIT Sloan School of Management and the MicroMasters program. As a Fulbright Iceland-NSF Arctic Research Award recipient, Chen will explore how AI and systems thinking can be applied to support health and well-being in Arctic communities. She plans to pursue a PhD in information and systems science following her Fulbright experience.
Liam Moser will graduate this week with a PhD in geophysics from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences’ MIT-WHOI Joint Program. His research has focused on understanding the structure and dynamics of subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another, generating the Earth’s largest earthquakes and creating volcanic arcs. During his PhD, Moser helped found the annual MIT-WHOI Geophysics Retreat, promoting interconnectedness between MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). He also taught incoming graduate students in the MIT-WHOI Summer Math Review for five years, organizing the review for the final two years of his PhD. Moser was awarded a Fulbright Iceland-National Science Foundation Arctic Research Award for a postdoctoral fellowship at Reykjavík University, where he will use earthquake recordings to study the structure and dynamics of the Hengill volcano and geothermal area.
Lilia Ould-Hammou is a senior majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in controls, robotics, and instrumentation. As a recipient of the Fulbright U.S.-Korea Presidential STEM Initiative Award, she will conduct research at Seoul National University’s Wearable Robotics Laboratory. Her work will involve advancing adaptive exosuit control for balance recovery. She plans to improve her language skills while exploring Korea’s history and culture. At MIT, Ould-Hammou has worked in the d’Arbeloff Robotics Lab on soft modular robotic straps, served as a tutor in the MIT Women’s Technology Program, and competed as a thrower on the MIT track and field team. After her Fulbright fellowship, she will pursue a master’s degree in robotics at Johns Hopkins University.
Bryan Sperry ’23 graduated from MIT with dual bachelor’s degrees in physics and mechanical engineering, focusing on renewable energy systems. Since graduating, he has worked at VEIR as a systems integration engineer, designing superconducting power transmission lines. As a Fulbright Brazil grantee, he will study pathways to improve climate resilience and energy equity in urban power grids alongside the Cenergia Lab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. After Fulbright, he plans to enroll at Columbia University to complete a master’s in urban planning to continue working on urban disaster preparedness.
Sophie Thompson is a senior majoring in chemical engineering. For her Fulbright research in Sweden, she will test the performance of recycled carbon fiber composites at the Swedish School of Textiles in Boras. Thompson has researched natural fiber-reinforced composites for prosthetic socket use in low-resource environments with the Herr Lab in the MIT Media Lab, worked on immunoengineering technology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and interned at the textile recycling startup MacroCycle Technologies. She also completed a summer research internship at the Weizmann Institute in Israel through MISTI. She serves as captain on the MIT lightweight women’s rowing team, and has held leadership roles with the MIT chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, TEDxMIT, and MIT Hillel. After Fulbright, Thompson will pursue a PhD in molecular engineering at the University of Chicago.
Claire Underwood is a senior studying chemical-biological engineering. As a recipient of a Fulbright Portugal award, she will conduct research at the University of Minho in Guimaraes, studying high-throughput fabrication techniques for cell-embedded microtissues with applications in drug discovery. At MIT, Underwood worked in the Hammond and Olsen labs exploring interactions between biology and polymeric systems. For the past two years, she has focused on lipid nanoparticle drug delivery for cancer treatment, and is excited to continue investigating biomaterials and biomimetic systems. She was also a member of the varsity volleyball team and active in her sorority Alpha Phi, Cru, and Athletes in Action. After Fulbright, she will pursue a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sophie Vulpe is a senior majoring in physics and mathematics. Her Fulbright will take her to the Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) institute in Măgurele, Romania, where she will develop advanced data-processing algorithms for a new monoenergetic gamma ray spectrometer. She looks forward to strengthening her computational and experimental skills and connecting with her Romanian heritage. At MIT, Vulpe worked with Professor Mikhail Ivanov on characterizing black hole quasi-normal modes using tools from the mathematical field of representation theory. Passionate about expanding access to physics through education and outreach, she was co-president of the Undergraduate Women in Physics group, a mentor in the physics mentorship program, and a teaching assistant in the Experimental Study Group. She was also a member of Dancetroupe and the Musical Theater Guild. After Fulbright, Vulpe plans to pursue a PhD in physics.
Josephine Wang will graduate this month with a BS in computer science. For her Fulbright grant to Switzerland, she will conduct research at EPFL in Lausanne with the NeuroAI Lab. Her work will explore whether brain-inspired language models can develop functionally specialized clusters analogous to cortical organization, and how targeted disruptions to those clusters affect language-related behavior. At MIT, Wang’s research has focused on computational models of cognition, movement, and human behavior. She has most recently worked in the Seethapathi Motor Control Group, where she developed a computer vision pipeline for world-grounded pose estimation in children and examined how computational models can support pediatric gait analysis. Outside of research, Wang enjoys traveling, trying new cuisines, and learning French.
One stage at a timeAssociate Professor Sara Brown, an accomplished theater set designer, teaches MIT students to create and think visually.In a theater, the first thing the audience sees, and looks at the longest, is the stage. Even so, set design is something most of us know little about. Why does a set have its form and elements? How does it suit the performance?
Consider a set that designer and MIT Associate Professor Sara Brown created in 2015, when the Brooklyn of Academy of Music adapted the canonical Japanese Noh play “Hagoromo,” turning it into a chamber opera with dance.
Noh plays have a traditional structure and a crucial final transformation. In “Hagomoro,” an angel loses her cloak; a fisherman only reluctantly returns it, after the angel performs a ritual dance; the angel then ascends to the heavens. To focus on the main characters, Brown’s design featured three high walls surrounding center stage, with musicians and a chorus elevated behind them.
“That set was a framing device more than anything else,” says Brown, who is also associate head of MIT Theater Arts within the Music and Theater Arts Section. “It lifted the musicians to a different plane, almost a heavenly place, so we have a heaven-and-Earth contrast. It allows the dancers to be seen against a plain backdrop. I didn’t want to lose their bodies in a sea of other bodies.”
For a formal play structure, then, Brown created a formal setting, with vertical layering suggestive of its contents. The trickiest part was lighting: Brown worked with the lighting designer Clifton Taylor to cut vents in the high walls for more light, while a rigging structure allowed them to spotlight dancers.
“Solving for those things is what makes the design,” Brown says. “There’s an artistic idea that underbeds everything, and there are practical considerations, which are as important, to make the piece work the way you want.”
Brown has designed sets at many major venues, tackling everything from “Carmen” to “Death of a Salesman” and debut productions. She ranges broadly across theatrical genres, while teaching classes that get MIT students thinking visually, intellectually, and creatively.
“Every play you’re working on should have something you grab onto as a creative challenge,” Brown says. That challenge is a collective one; it involves working with directors, performers, and design teams focused on lighting, sound, media, and costumes.
“In theater-making, you have to work in a community,” Brown emphasizes. “You might bump up against some rough edges, but you develop strategies to work with everybody with dignity, and that’s important.”
For her extensive work and teaching, Brown received tenure at MIT last year.
Minnesota kind
Brown grew up in Minnesota, where her parents made sure the whole family grasped the value of humility.
That experience, says Brown, has given her “a voice I carry with me that channels my family. The worst thing you could be where I grew up was too big for your britches. So it’s a voice that says, ‘What are you doing and what is the value of this?’ Because of my upbringing and my family, it’s a kind voice, but it is a self-reflection I try to carry with me.”
Brown received her BA from Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, then earned an MFA from the University of Virginia. At MIT, she has successfully combined professional set design with classroom teaching.
When Brown agrees to design the set for a production, the first thing she does is read the work in question. Then she sits down with the director to talk about it.
“Usually I’ll talk to the director after my first read of the play,” Brown says, citing the influence of a prominent U.S. set designer, the late Skip Mercier. “He said the only thing he brings to the first meeting is a love of the play. That is a great approach. You come understanding the material, wanting to find something within it you love and are excited to work on. You’re not closed; you’re there to discover what you have in common.”
Indeed, Brown emphasizes how much she appreciates the collaborative aspects of theater. Inevitably, directors, designers, and actors will not agree on everything, but from sorting through those varying viewpoints, a production emerges.
“It’s about serving the whole instead of being your personal project,” Brown says. “There will always be tension, but the idea is that through that tension, something is going to result that will be better than anything you could do by yourself.”
Brown does have some creative tendencies that reappear across productions. She will often opt for simplicity and adaptability on stage. For a production of “Pride and Prejudice” in Hartford, Connecticut, Brown designed a circular space at the front of the stage, with a slightly elevated rear area containing a piano and columns, allowing the set to shift among the many social settings of the work.
Remarkably, another set Brown designed was actually used for two different plays running at the same time: “Death of a Salesman” and “Skeleton Crew,” a 2008 play about a closing auto plant in Detroit.
“A throughline in my work is that I gravitate to things that appear to have a simplicity and integrity or formalism, and then reveal different aspects of themselves, so they change over time,” Brown says. “But there is something essential in them. I’m drawn to simplicity, something without a lot of noise.”
“Where the good stuff is”
Still, Brown is always open to new challenges. She once designed the set for the contemporary play “The Lily’s Revenge,” which has five acts and requires the audience to move around in the theater.
“You have to figure out how to reconfigure the space in many different ways with the available materials and it has to feel like a big transformation,” Brown says. “Sometimes you’re working on things and don’t understand the totality of it [the production] until you step back and see it all together.”
Much as Brown works on a variety of theater projects, she also works with a variety of MIT students, from any given course of study, in the classroom.
“It’s everybody, which is great,” Brown says. “There are students who did high school theater and people who have never seen a play.”
While teaching classes in the theater arts program — which include classes on set design, the foundations of design, and drawing for designers — Brown has also served as a faculty advisor for MIT Morningside Academy of Design, an interdisciplinary hub for design on campus.
“There’s an underlying process of design that does unite disciplines,” Brown says. Consider set design and architecture, for instance:
“Sometimes in theater you’re trying to make spaces that actually express an inefficiency. You’re creating obstacles for people onstage,” Brown says. By contrast, architects might be trying to get people to flow efficiently through buildings. Still, she adds, “It’s the same process, with different results.” Besides, architects do try to design common spaces, whether atriums, lounges, or meeting rooms, where people stop and interact, mirroring set design to an extent.
In any case, Brown notes, when she is working with MIT students in design classes, she is often “reversing the idea that there’s something external you’re seeking that is the right answer, which I think they’re used to doing in other realms of education.”
Instead, in theater, whether it’s Brown’s own professional work, or a first-time design for a student, she says, “This is a process where you have to mine your interior life and think about what you want to bring out in this event that’s going to happen onstage. That can be scary, but that’s where the good stuff is.”
Featured video: MIT teachings, free to the worldA new film explores how the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare 25 years ago has helped to shape how knowledge is shared.A new short film from MIT Open Learning explores the origin, influence, and global reach of MIT OpenCourseWare, reflecting on its role in establishing MIT, in 2001, as the first higher education institution to make educational resources freely available to learners across the world.
Part of MIT Open Learning, MIT OpenCourseWare helped spark a global movement that continues to shape how knowledge is shared across the world. The film, titled “The Courage to Be Open: MIT OpenCourseWare and the Democratization of Knowledge,” captures both the vision behind this work and the lasting impact it has had on expanding access to learning at scale.
Video by MIT Open Learning | 15 minutes, 22 seconds
Some democracies are struggling to ensure safe drinking waterCountries with developing economies provide at least some public water, but safety may lag because it’s less visible, researchers say.About 2 billion people — just under a quarter of the world’s population — lack regular access to clean drinking water. And roughly 800,000 people annually die from illnesses associated with unsanitary water.
Drinking water access is a fundamental problem for human and economic development. The U.N., for instance, highlighted the issue in its Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, an ambitious 17-point agenda that specified safe drinking water as a basic global aim.
Past research shows that democracies, in comparison to other forms of government, tend to be more successful at delivering this kind of public good, which benefits a large portion of the population. This is likely due to accountability measures that include elections, greater transparency, and more freedom in civil society.
But now a study led by an MIT professor shows that across nearly 100 countries with developing economies, that dynamic has become more complex in the 21st century. While democracies are slightly ahead of non-democracies when it comes to providing at least some water, they have been falling behind when it comes to ensuring that there is safe water on tap.
“Among low- and middle-income countries, which have not done as well economically, we found there wasn’t really a big difference between democracies and non-democracies in the provision of what is called basic drinking water,” says MIT political scientist Evan Lieberman, co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “But for safe drinking water, we found, surprisingly, that democratic countries were becoming less good at extending access.”
While the study does not pinpoint the precise reasons for this, it suggests a lens for viewing the problem. Democracies tend to be better at delivering visible public goods, the kinds of things citizens can literally see — like infrastructure that delivers water. But the difference between safe and unsafe water is not necessarily visible and obvious, so public officials may not be as responsive.
“This is likely a big part of the equation, that the invisibility of safe water makes it a less compelling public good for politicians,” says Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, and director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.
The paper, “Beyond the tap: The limited value of democracy for delivering universal safe water access in low- and middle-income countries,” is published in the journal World Development. The authors are Lieberman, and Naomi Tilles, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford University.
Seeing is believing
To conduct the study, the scholars analyzed drinking water data recorded by the World Health Organization/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. That provides information for basic availability to water, defined as access to an improved water source with no more than 30 minutes of collection time; and access to safe drinking water, defined as an improved water source that is available on premises, available when needed, and free from potentially disease-producing contaminants, which range from fecal matter to harmful chemicals.
Examining 96 low- and middle-income countries, the researchers looked at a variety of measures pertaining to its democratic or non-democratic features, and ran 39,000 regressions to see how the form of government related to its provision of water. Overall, Lieberman and Tilles found that democratic governance is modestly associated with an increase in the basic availability of water, compared to non-democracies. However, the effect is not particularly robust.
The good news is that between 2000 and 2024, 81 of the 90 countries with data available in both years made gains in safe drinking water access. However, democratic countries have been less successful than their non-democratic counterparts in advancing the goal of achieving universal access.
“Moreover, the gap between democracies and non-democracies seems to be getting a little bit larger over time,” Lieberman observes.
Because the study is focused on establishing the overall empirical situation, the scholars do not claim to have determined why this trend has been emerging. Many newer democracies have struggled to establish high-functioning governance in some regions, which may influence their overall results.
More broadly, Lieberman suggests, visibility matters. Past scholarship has shown that democracies perform relatively well in delivering visible public goods, especially in countries with little information in the public sphere. Delivering water generates attention for politicians in a way that keeping water safe does not.
“Politicians may figure out they should do things citizens like, to stay in office, such as bringing water to an area,” Lieberman says. “You can have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and people feel it really happened. But water quality is often invisible.
It’s a more difficult challenge to ensure safe water: You have to do testing, prevent people from polluting, and you may need to treat the water.”
In any case, Lieberman notes, “Given what we find, what is clear is that the incentives are not aligned under the current systems for advancing safe-water access within all democracies. That provides opportunities for human agency to create incentives for citizens, nongovernment agencies, and governments to do what is needed.”
Development for all
Lieberman comes to the topic of water access as an expert on African politics. His most recent book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty” (Princeton University Press, 2022), examines the vicissitudes of South African democracy. In the book and in general, he suggests that democracy is the most viable path toward development with “dignity,” meaning economic growth accompanied by liberties and equal treatment under the law.
“I think democracy provides dignified development, by granting people recognition and participation, and that’s an extremely valuable thing,” Lieberman says.
Still, when it comes to the performance of many countries with regard to safe water, he says, “I think we just need to be clear-eyed about real problems.”
In some countries, he suggests, the time horizon of elected officials may also be relatively short-term, and they may be more oriented toward simpler problems than water safety. At the same time, other members of society need to find ways to make water safety a bigger issue in the eyes of the public.
“There are important lessons for democracies to learn, and citizens in civil society who are aware of this challenge need to figure out ways to get people to care about it, to recognize the connection between illness and unsafe water, and to use political campaigns to advance their longer-term interests,” Lieberman says.
Overall, he adds, “There is something intrinsically important about democratic government. Then the question becomes how to make it work better to deliver really important outcomes like safe water.”
Technology usually creates jobs for young, skilled workers. Will AI do the same?A new study of the postwar U.S. shows which kinds of workers historically filled new tech-enabled jobs.At any given time, technology does two things to employment: It replaces traditional jobs, and it creates new lines of work. Machines replace farmers, but enable, say, aeronautical engineers to exist. So, if tech creates new jobs, who gets them? How well do they pay? How long do new jobs remain new, before they become just another common task any worker can do?
A new study of U.S. employment led by MIT labor economist David Autor sheds light on all these matters. In the postwar U.S., as Autor and his colleagues show in granular detail, new forms of work have tended to benefit college graduates under 30 more than anyone else.
“We had never before seen exactly who is doing new work,” Autor says. “It’s done more by young and educated people, in urban settings.”
The study also contains a powerful large-scale insight: A lot of innovation-based new work is driven by demand. Government-backed expansion of research and manufacturing in the 1940s, in response to World War II, accounted for a huge amount of new work, and new forms of expertise.
“This says that wherever we make new investments, we end up getting new specializations,” Autor says. “If you create a large-scale activity, there’s always going to be an opportunity for new specialized knowledge that’s relevant for it. We thought that was exciting to see.”
The paper, “What Makes New Work Different from More Work?” is forthcoming in the Annual Review of Economics. The authors are Autor; Caroline Chin, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Economics; Anna M. Salomons, a professor at Tilburg University’s Department of Economics and Utrecht University’s School of Economics; and Bryan Seegmiller PhD ’22, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
And yes, learning about new work, and the kinds of workers who obtain it, might be relevant to the spread of artificial intelligence — although, in Autor’s estimation, it is too soon to tell just how AI will affect the workplace.
“People are really worried that AI-based automation is going to erode specific tasks more rapidly,” Autor observes. “Eroding tasks is not the same thing as eroding jobs, since many jobs involve a lot of tasks. But we’re all saying: Where is the new work going to come from? It’s so important, and we know little about it. We don’t know what it will be, what it will look like, and who will be able to do it.”
“If everyone is an expert, then no one is an expert”
The four co-authors also collaborated on a previous major study of new work, published in 2024, which found that about six out of 10 jobs in the U.S. from 1940 to 2018 were in new specialties that had only developed broadly since 1940. The new study extends that line of research by looking more precisely at who fills the new lines of work.
To do that, the researchers used U.S. Census Bureau data from 1940 through 1950, as well as the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2011 to 2023. In the first case, because Census Bureau records become wholly public after about 70 years, the scholars could examine individual-level data about occupations, salaries, and more, and could track the same workers as they changed jobs between the 1940 and 1950 Census enumerations.
Through a collaborative research arrangement with the U.S. Census Bureau, the authors also gained secure access to person-level ACS records. These data allowed them to analyze the earnings, education, and other demographic characteristics of workers in new occupational specialties — and to compare them with workers in longstanding ones.
New work, Autor observes, is always tied to new forms of expertise. At first, this expertise is scarce; over time, it may become more common. In any case, expertise is often linked to new forms of technology.
“It requires mastering some capability,” Autor says. “What makes labor valuable is not simply the ability to do stuff, but specialized knowledge. And that often differentiates high-paid work from low-paid work.” Moreover, he adds, “It has to be scarce. If everyone is an expert, then no one is an expert.”
By examining the census data, the scholars found that back in 1950, about 7 percent of employees had jobs in types of work that had emerged since 1930. More recently, about 18 percent of workers in the 2011-2023 period were in lines of work introduced since 1970. (That happens to be roughly the same portion of new jobs per decade, although Autor does not think this is a hard-and-fast trend.)
In these time periods, new work has emerged more often in urban areas, with people under 30 benefitting more than any other age category. Getting a job in a line of new work seems to have a lasting effect: People employed in new work in 1940 were 2.5 times as likely to be in new work in 1950, compared to the general population. College graduates were 2.9 percentage points more likely than high school graduates to be engaged in new work.
New work also has a wage premium, that is, better salaries on aggregate than in already-existing forms of work. Yet as the study shows, that wage premium also fades over time, as the particular expertise in many forms of new work becomes much more widely grasped.
“The scarcity value erodes,” Autor says. “It becomes common knowledge. It itself gets automated. New work gets old.”
After all, Autor points out, driving a car was once a scarce form of expertise. For that matter, so was being able to use word-processing programs such as WordPerfect or Microsoft Word, well into the 1990s. After a while, though, being able to handle word-processing tools became the most elementary part of using a computer.
Back to AI for a minute
Studying who gets new jobs led the scholars to striking conclusions about how new work is created. Examining county-level data from the World War II era, when the federal government was backing new manufacturing in public-private partnerships throughout the U.S., the study shows that counties with new factories had more new work, and that 85 to 90 percent of new work from 1940 to 1950 was technology-driven.
In this sense there was a great deal of demand-driven innovation at the time. Today, public discourse about innovation often focuses on the supply side, namely, the innovators and entrepreneurs trying to create new products. But the study shows that the demand side can significantly influence innovative activity.
“Technology is not like, ‘Eureka!’ where it just happens,” Autor says. “Innovation is a purposive activity. And innovation is cumulative. If you get far enough, it will have its own momentum. But if you don’t, it’ll never get there.”
Which brings us back to AI, the topic so many people are focused on in 2026. Will AI create good new jobs, or will it take work away? Well, it likely depends how we implement it, Autor thinks. Consider the massive health care sector, where there could be a lot of types of tech-driven new work, if people are interested in creating jobs.
“There are different ways we could use AI in health care,” Autor says. “One is just to automate people’s jobs away. The other is to allow people with different levels of expertise to do different tasks. I would say the latter is more socially beneficial. But it’s not clear that is where the market will go.”
On the other hand, maybe with government-driven demand in various forms, AI could get applied in ways that end up boosting health care-sector productivity, creating new jobs as a result.
“More than half the dollars in health care in the U.S. are public dollars,” Autor observes. “We have a lot of leverage there, we can push things in that direction. There are different ways to use this.”
This research was supported, in part, by the Hewlett Foundation, the Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellows Program, the NOMIS Foundation, the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellowship, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, and Instituut Gak.
Building AI models that understand chemical principlesConnor Coley works at the interface of chemistry and machine learning, to discover and design new drug compounds.Among all of the possible chemical compounds, it’s estimated that between 1020 and 1060 may hold potential as small-molecule drugs.
Evaluating each of those compounds experimentally would be far too time-consuming for chemists. So, in recent years, researchers have begun using artificial intelligence to help identify compounds that could make good drug candidates.
One of those researchers is MIT Associate Professor Connor Coley PhD ’19, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor with shared appointments in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. His research straddles the line between chemical engineering and computer science, as he develops and deploys computational models to analyze vast numbers of possible chemical compounds, design new compounds, and predict reaction pathways that could generate those compounds.
“It’s a very general approach that could be applied to any application of organic molecules, but the primary application that we think about is small-molecule drug discovery,” he says.
The intersection of AI and science
Coley’s interest in science runs in the family. In fact, he says, his family includes more scientists than non-scientists, including his father, a radiologist; his mother, who earned a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry before going to the MIT Sloan School of Management; and his grandmother, a math professor.
As a high school student in Dublin, Ohio, Coley participated in Science Olympiad competitions and graduated from high school at the age of 16. He then headed to Caltech, where he chose chemical engineering as a major because it offered a way to combine his interests in science and math.
During his undergraduate years, he also pursued an interest in computer science, working in a structural biology lab using the Fortran programming language to help solve the crystal structure of proteins. After graduating from Caltech, he decided to keep going in chemical engineering and came to MIT in 2014 to start a PhD.
Advised by professors Klavs Jensen and William Green, Coley worked on ways to optimize automated chemical reactions. His work focused on combining machine learning and cheminformatics — the application of computation methods to analyze chemical data — to plan reaction pathways that could make new drug molecules. He also worked on designing hardware that could be used to perform those reactions automatically.
Part of that work was done through a DARPA-funded program called Make-It, which was focused on using machine learning and data science to improve the synthesis of medicines and other useful compounds from simple building blocks.
“That was my real entry point into thinking about cheminformatics, thinking about machine learning, and thinking about how we can use models to understand how different chemicals can be made and what reactions are possible,” Coley says.
Coley began applying for faculty jobs while still a graduate student, and accepted an offer from MIT at age 25. He received a mix of advice for and against taking a job at the same school where he went to graduate school, and eventually decided that a position at MIT was too enticing to turn down.
“MIT is a very special place in terms of the resources and the fluidity across departments. MIT seemed to be doing a really good job supporting the intersection of AI and science, and it was a vibrant ecosystem to stay in,” he says. “The caliber of students, the enthusiasm of the students, and just the incredible strength of collaborations definitely outweighed any potential concerns of staying in the same place.”
Chemistry intuition
Coley deferred the faculty position for one year to do a postdoc at the Broad Institute, where he sought more experience in chemical biology and drug discovery. There, he worked on ways to identify small molecules, from billions of candidates in DNA-encoded libraries, that might have binding interactions with mutated proteins associated with diseases.
After returning to MIT in 2020, he built his lab group with the mission of deploying AI not only to synthesize existing compounds with therapeutic potential, but also to design new molecules with desirable properties and new ways to make them. Over the past few years, his lab has developed a variety of computational approaches to tackle those goals.
“We try to think about how to best pair a challenge in chemistry with a potential computational solution. And often that pairing motivates the development of new methods,” Coley says. One model his lab has developed, known as ShEPhERD, was trained to evaluate potential new drug molecules based on how they will interact with target proteins, based on the drug molecules’ three-dimensional shapes. This model is now being used by pharmaceutical companies to help them discover new drugs.
“We’re trying to give more of a medicinal chemistry intuition to the generative model, so the model is aware of the right criteria and considerations,” Coley says.
In another project, Coley’s lab developed a generative AI model called FlowER, which can be used to predict the reaction products that will result from combining different chemical inputs.
In designing that model, the researchers built in an understanding of fundamental physical principles, such as the law of conservation of mass. They also compelled the model to consider the feasibility of the intermediate steps that need to take place on the pathway from reactants to products. These constraints, the researchers found, improved the accuracy of the model’s predictions.
“Thinking about those intermediate steps, the mechanisms involved, and how the reaction evolves is something that chemists do very naturally. It’s how chemistry is taught, but it’s not something that models inherently think about,” Coley says. “We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure that our machine-learning models are grounded in an understanding of reaction mechanisms, in the same way an expert chemist would be.”
Students in his lab also work on many different areas related to the optimization of chemical reactions, including computer-aided structure elucidation, laboratory automation, and optimal experimental design.
“Through these many different research threads, we hope to advance the frontier of AI in chemistry,” Coley says.
New research enables a robot to chart a better courseBy rapidly generating a smooth path plan that cuts travel time and avoids obstacles, the open-source “MIGHTY” system could streamline disaster recovery and parcel delivery.In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors.
But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.
Researchers from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania developed a new trajectory-planning system that tackles both challenges at once. Their technique enables a UAV to react to obstacles in milliseconds while staying on a smooth flight path that minimizes travel time.
Their system uses a new mathematical formulation that ensures the robot travels safely to its destination along a feasible path, and that is less computationally intensive than other techniques. In this way, it generates smoother trajectories faster than state-of-the-art methods.
The trajectory planner is also efficient enough for real-time flight using only the robot’s onboard computer and sensors.
Named MIGHTY, the open-source system does not require proprietary software packages that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It could be more readily deployed in a wider variety of real-world settings.
In addition to search-and-rescue, MIGHTY could be utilized in applications like last-mile delivery in urban spaces, where UAVs need to avoid buildings, wires, and people, or in industrial inspection of complex structures, such as wind turbines.
“MIGHTY achieves comparable or better performance using only open-source tools, which means any researcher, student, or company — anywhere in the world — can use it freely. By removing this cost barrier, MIGHTY helps democratize high-performance trajectory planning and opens the door for a much broader community to build on this work,” says Kota Kondo, an aeronautics and astronautics graduate student and lead author of a paper on this trajectory planner.
Kondo is joined on the paper by Yuwei Wu, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; Vijay Kumar, a professor at UPenn; and senior author Jonathan P. How, a Ford professor of aeronautics and astronautics and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Aerospace Controls Laboratory (ACL) at MIT. The research appears in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
Overcoming trade-offs
When Kondo was a child, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident occurred following the Great East Japan Earthquake. With school cancelled, Kondo was stuck at home and watched the news every day as workers explored and secured the reactor site. Some workers still had to enter hazardous areas to contain the damage and assess the situation, exposing them to high doses of radioactive material.
“I became passionate about creating autonomous robots that can go into these dynamic and dangerous situations, then come back and report to humans who stay out of harm’s way,” Kondo says.
This task requires a strong trajectory planner, which is software that decides the path a robot should follow to safely get from point A to point B.
But many existing systems force tradeoffs that limit performance.
While some commercial systems can rapidly generate smooth trajectories, they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Open-source alternatives often underperform compared to commercial solvers or are difficult to use.
With MIGHTY, Kondo and his colleagues developed an open-source system that produces high-quality, smooth trajectories while reacting to obstacles in real-time, and which runs fast enough for flight using only onboard components.
To do this, they overcame a key challenge that limits many open-source systems.
These methods usually estimate how long it will take the robot to get from point A to point B as a first step. From that fixed estimation of travel time, the planner finds the best path to reach the destination.
While using a fixed travel time allows the planner to rapidly generate a trajectory, it has drawbacks. For one, if the UAV must go far out of its way to avoid obstacles, it could be forced to crank up the speed to meet the fixed travel-time budget. This makes it harder to avoid sudden hazards.
A MIGHTY method
Instead, MIGHTY uses a mathematical technique, called a Hermite spline, that optimizes the travel time and flight path together, in a single step, to form a smooth trajectory that can be precisely controlled.
“Optimizing the spatial and temporal components together gets us better results, but now the optimization becomes so much bigger that it is harder to solve in a feasible amount of time,” Kondo says.
The researchers used a clever technique to reduce this computational overhead.
Instead of generating a trajectory from scratch each time, MIGHTY makes an initial guess of a trajectory. Then it refines the trajectory through an iterative optimization, using a map of the scene generated by the UAV’s lidar sensors.
“We can make a decent guess of what the trajectory should be, which is a lot faster than generating the entire thing from nothing,” Kondo says.
This enables MIGHTY to react in real-time to unknown obstacles while keeping the trajectory smooth and minimizing travel time. The system utilizes the UAV’s onboard components, which is important for applications where a robot might travel far from a base station.
In simulated experiments, MIGHTY needed only about 90 percent of the computation time required by state-of-the-art methods, while safely reaching its destination about 15 percent faster than these approaches.
When they tested the system on real robots, it reached a speed of 6.7 meters per second while avoiding every obstacle that appeared in its path.
“With MIGHTY, everything is integrated in one piece. It doesn’t need to talk to any other piece of software to get a solution. This helps us be even faster than some of the commercial solvers,” Kondo says.
In the future, the researchers want to enhance MIGHTY so it can be used to control multiple robots at once and conduct more flight experiments in challenging environments. They hope to continue improving the open-source system based on user feedback.
“MIGHTY makes an important contribution to agile robot navigation by revisiting the trajectory representation itself. Hermite splines have already been successfully used in visual simultaneous localization and mapping, and it is nice to see their advantages now being exploited for trajectory planning in mobile robots. By enabling joint optimization of path geometry, timing, velocity, and acceleration while retaining local control of the trajectory, MIGHTY gives robots more freedom to compute fast, dynamically feasible motions in cluttered environments,” says Davide Scaramuzza, professor and director of the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, who was not involved with this research.
This research was funded, in part, by the United States Army Research Laboratory and the Defense Science and Technology Agency in Singapore.
Startup making reusable emergency housing wins MIT $100K competitionUplift Microhome’s modular housing units can provide their own power and water, for faster deployments.A startup making emergency housing cheaper and faster to deploy won this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition on May 12.
Uplift Microhome is building reusable, modular housing units to provide housing on demand to people affected by natural disasters and other emergencies. Each of the company’s homes has its own batteries and water reservoir, allowing them to quickly be transported and placed off-grid.
“Every year, millions of Americans are displaced by natural disasters,” said co-founder Charlie Nitschelm, who is in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program, earning a master’s in engineering and an MBA. “If they're lucky, they can stay with friends or family. If they’re not so lucky, they could end up in a homeless shelter. But disasters aren’t just two-week problems. It takes months, sometimes years, to get back to what life was like before. Bottom line: We lack dignified and affordable housing after disasters.”
Uplift Microhome was one of seven teams chosen to pitch at the final event, which took place inside a packed Kresge Auditorium. Each team got five minutes to pitch their startups before a few minutes of questioning from judges.
This year’s competition started in April with more than 80 applications. The program’s judges selected 16 teams to compete in the semifinal before whittling that number down to the finalist teams for Tuesday’s event.
“This competition isn’t just about one big night,” $100K managing director and MIT Sloan School of Management student Celine Christory said. “It’s a year-long journey for our organizers and students. It kicks off with the ‘Pitch’ event in December, moves to ‘Accelerate’ in March, and culminates in the ‘Launch’ event.”
In the pitch that won the $100,000 Danny Lewin Grand Prize, Nitschelm said it takes an average of four months for the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to deploy single-use housing after a disaster. That’s because these homes require power and utilities in addition to extensive foundation preparation.
“As a result, less than 1 percent of survivors actually receive a physical home,” Nitschelm said. “The rest get a check and are told to go figure it out. This isn’t just our opinion. The Department of Homeland Security audited FEMA and recommended providing a cost-effective housing alternative that allows disaster survivors to stay close to their home.”
Uplift’s homes can be transported on the back of a tractor trailer and deployed using a standard forklift. In addition to its battery and water reservoir, the homes feature self-leveling bases that allow them to be deployed on uneven terrain.
“That dramatically simplifies delivery, installation, and deactivation to the point where you can economically recover, refurbish, and redeploy the unit,” says co-founder Trevor O’Leary, a student at Harvard Business School.
The company has already built a home and believes it can manufacture each unit at a cost similar to the cheapest tractor trailer while delivering housing in hours. The company expects the marginal cost of reusing each unit to be an order of magnitude less expensive than current solutions. Down the line, it plans to deploy homes to combat housing insecurity, for seasonal workers and during construction projects. It plans to manufacture its homes in the United States.
The second-place $50,000 David T. Morgenthaler Founder’s Prize was awarded to the startup Mohan, which is using generative artificial intelligence to map the Earth’s subsurface in three dimensions. The company is deploying its technology to help mining companies decide where to drill, starting by targeting copper deposits.
“Everyone is talking about AI and chips, but no one is talking about what they sit on: copper,” said co-founder Hongze Bo, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “Every cable, GPU, and data center depends on copper. By 2030, we’re going to be 4 million tons of copper short. But we don't know where the next deposit is. Today we just drill and hope.”
The core of Mohan’s technology is a diffusion AI model that iteratively removes noise from subsurface data to create underground scans. The company also develops its own subsurface data.
“We built a full, 3D subsurface model using generative AI,” explained Bo. “It’s the same technology behind [image generation tools] Sora and Midjourney.”
The third place $5,000 prize went to Iceberg Systems, which is using autonomous AI agents to predict how risk cascades across the economy. The company invented a new class of AI systems at MIT that coordinates millions of AIs to simulate how risks emerge through interaction. It has been working with the Department of Energy.
“Iceberg simulates behaviors across millions of market participants, from brokers to consumers to institutions, to simulate and predict how shocks cascade through their interactions and create systemic risk in the economy,” says co-founder and MIT PhD student Ayush Chopra.
The $5,000 Audience Choice Prize went to Pixology, an agentic AI platform that creates on-brand, sponsor-ready sports content to help monetize live moments.
The other finalists that presented at this year’s event were:
The $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is one of MIT’s annual flagship entrepreneurial events. It began more than 30 years ago when a group of students, along with the late Ed Roberts, who was the founder and chair of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, decided to start a startup pitch competition.
The prize started at $10,000 then grew to $50,000 before reaching today’s $100,000 grand prize. Past participants include HubSpot, Akamai, and Lightmatter.
In addition to the prizes, teams received mentorship from venture capitalists, serial entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and attorneys; funding for prototypes; business plan feedback; and more.
3Q: Why science is curiosity on a missionVP for Communications Alfred Ironside describes how a new initiative from MIT seeks to remind Americans of the value and power of curiosity-driven research.This week, MIT launches a new initiative — titled Science Is Curiosity on a Mission — to make the case for the long-horizon, curiosity-driven science that has powered generations of American innovation. Through stories of scientists pursuing open-ended questions, the project highlights how fundamental discovery research sparks advances in medicine, technology, national security, and economic growth.
MIT News spoke with Alfred Ironside, the Institute’s vice president for communications, about what inspired the effort, what’s at stake for the U.S. research enterprise, and why curiosity remains one of America’s greatest strengths.
Q: What is “Science Is Curiosity on a Mission,” and why launch it now?
A: Science has been under threat for some time now, and public investment in discovery science has been flagging. We want to remind people in Washington and across the country what curiosity-driven science is all about, and why it matters so much in our individual lives and in the life of the country.
Science begins with curiosity — someone asking a question and refusing to let it go. History’s most important discoveries did not begin with a commercial objective or a guaranteed outcome. They began because someone wanted to understand how the world works. Think Ben Franklin and his kite: This drive to discover goes back to the beginnings of the United States.
That’s the story we want to tell, but in today’s terms. We’re spotlighting researchers whose years-long pursuit of core questions has seeded breakthroughs that have changed lives for the better.
We’re launching this storytelling initiative now because public investment is declining, and in all the debates about funding what’s gotten lost is an appreciation for the incredible gifts of curiosity-driven discovery science.
Over generations, the United States became the world’s scientific leader by investing in research of this kind, especially at universities, where long-term scientific undertakings have time and space to thrive. In turn, those investments have created an extraordinary pipeline of innovation, the envy of the world.
When public investment in basic science falters, the long-term losses start right away — and cascade. Labs close. Young scientists leave the field. Entire avenues of discovery go unexplored. Those losses are not always immediately visible, but eventually we feel them through what’s missing: treatments that never arrive, industries that never emerge, talent that migrates elsewhere.
Other countries understand this. They’re watching us stumble — and they’re growing their research investments aggressively. America’s scientific leadership has been built over decades — and maintaining it requires similar commitment.
It’s important to note that while this initiative to tell the story of discovery science was sparked at MIT, it is not about MIT. We want to spotlight university-based scientists across the country whose work is critical in advancing discovery, educating talent, and fueling innovation that benefits all of us.
Q: Why emphasize the idea of “curiosity”?
A: We start with curiosity for two reasons. First, it’s a human experience we’ve all had, so everyone can relate to it. Everyone knows the feeling of just wanting to know why something happens or how something works. Second, it’s the essential fuel that drives discovery science.
There’s sometimes a tendency to talk about science in terms of outputs: breakthroughs, startups, commercial applications. Those things matter enormously, but they usually come much later. The beginning is more human. It’s someone wondering why something behaves the way it does, or whether a seemingly impossible problem might have an answer.
Some of the most transformative breakthroughs arose from questions that once appeared disconnected from practical use. MRI technology grew from research on atomic nuclei. The foundations of immunotherapy came from scientists trying to understand how the immune system works. GPS depends on what was once viewed as purely theoretical physics.
Curiosity fuels scientific discovery by pushing people to keep pursuing deep questions because they simply need to know: How does the brain work? How does cancer start? What is the universe made of?
That’s why the second half of the phrase matters: “on a mission.” University researchers are not indulging in idle speculation. They are pursuing knowledge to expand our understanding — and that new knowledge can be the key to startling new solutions.
Universities are uniquely important environments for this work. They bring together people from different disciplines and backgrounds who challenge assumptions and generate new questions. That concentration of talent and openness is extraordinarily productive.
After World War II, the American research university system became one of the most successful engines of discovery in human history. Public investment in university research has helped produce new medicines, computing technologies, communications networks, energy systems, and entire industries that shape modern life.
This effort aims to reconnect all of us with that story.
Q: What’s at stake if the U.S. fails to sustain support for basic research?
A: What’s at stake is not just scientific leadership, but the future pace of American innovation and opportunity.
The innovation pipeline operates across long time horizons. The discoveries powering today’s companies and medical treatments often crystallized 10, 20, or 30 years ago. The breakthroughs that will define the 2040s and 2050s are being explored in laboratories right now.
Basic research is the foundation of that pipeline, and private-sector innovation depends on it. Private investment plays a critical role, but it naturally gravitates toward projects with clearer commercial returns. Public funding supports the earliest, highest-risk stages of inquiry, where outcomes are uncertain but the potential benefit to society is enormous.
If that pipeline dries up, the consequences are stark. Fewer discoveries lead to fewer technologies, startups, and industries. We also risk losing scientific talent to countries that are watching our shifting national priorities — and making larger and more sustained investments in advancing science.
At the same time, there is enormous reason for optimism. The American scientific enterprise remains one of the great achievements of the modern era. It has delivered extraordinary gains in health, prosperity, and quality of life. Millions of people are alive today because of advances rooted in publicly supported research.
This system was built through sustained national commitment across generations. The question now is whether the country will continue investing in curiosity, discovery, and the people pursuing the new knowledge that will allow us to solve the intractable problems of tomorrow.
When curiosity is given room to run, the results can be life-changing for us all.
Elazer Edelman receives the 2026-2027 Killian AwardThe professor of medical engineering and science is honored for medical research that has led to better treatments for cardiovascular disease.Elazer R. Edelman ’78, SM ’79, PhD ’84, an engineer and cardiologist who helped develop cardiovascular stents that have been used by more than 100 million people, has been named the recipient of the 2026-2027 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award.
The award committee recognized Edelman, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, for his work at the interface of engineering, science, and medicine. In addition to his work on stents, he has made significant contributions to tissue engineering and to deciphering the fundamental biological processes underling cardiovascular disease.
A member of the MIT faculty for more than 30 years, Edelman is renowned as a teacher and mentor. He is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a critical care cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and he served as director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science from 2018 to 2024.
“He is a clinician of the highest order who has touched the lives of many, a teacher of greatest passion who has mentored hundreds and taught thousands, and an engineer whose work has reached around the globe,” states the award citation, which was presented at today’s faculty meeting by Xuanhe Zhao, chair of the Killian Award Selection Committee and a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
The Killian Award was established in 1971 to recognize outstanding professional contributions by MIT faculty members. It is the highest honor that the faculty can give to one of its members.
“It’s deeply meaningful that your colleagues think enough of you to want to recognize your life’s work. This is an incredibly awe-inspiring group, and for them to feel that way is a truly special honor,” Edelman told MIT News after learning that he had been selected for the award.
Edelman, who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, got his first MIT experience as a high school student, taking classes as part of the Institute’s High School Studies Program. That experience led him to apply to MIT, where he earned two bachelor’s degrees, in applied biology and electrical engineering and computer science, followed by a master’s in bioelectrical engineering and a PhD in medical engineering and medical physics. He also earned an MD from Harvard Medical School through the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
As a graduate student, Edelman was one of the first students to join the lab of Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT. Working with Langer, he developed mathematical approaches to guide the design of controlled drug-delivery systems.
“Bob opened my eyes to what it really means to use MIT science to make the world a better place,” Edelman says.
Early in his career, Edelman brought a scientist’s eye to one of medicine’s most urgent clinical challenges: how to address diseased blood vessels without provoking further injury. His studies of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of atherosclerosis and vascular healing — work that continues to this day — coupled with fundamental insights from engineering and physics, helped enable the optimization of bare-metal stents and the development of drug-eluting stents.
Roughly 90 percent of the more than 100 million stents implanted worldwide now release drugs through principles his work helped define and advance, saving countless lives and improving quality of life for patients around the globe.
Edelman’s work reflects a continuing cycle of discovery: Basic insights in biology shaped transformative medical technologies, and the challenges posed by those technologies, in turn, continue to push biology, science, technology, and engineering together toward new discoveries and clinical advances.
“His landmark work on the cellular mechanisms underlying atherosclerosis and on the biology of cell-material interfaces established the scientific foundations that transformed bare-metal cardiovascular stents from a promising mechanical concept into a biologically informed and clinically transformative therapy with enduring legacy — paving the way for a cascade of innovations that changed the landscape of medicine,” the award committee wrote.
More recently, Edelman’s lab has designed novel heart valves and other innovative approaches to mechanical organ support.
During his tenure as the director of IMES, he led an MIT-wide effort to provide personal protective equipment to health care workers and emergency responders in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“One of the things I’m most proud of is working with many people at MIT in the Covid response. At the height of Covid, we were supplying 23 percent of all PPE throughout New England,” he says. “Every single person who could possibly contribute contributed.”
As director of MIT’s Center for Clinical Translational Research and faculty lead for the Hood Pediatric Innovation Hub, he is now working to help clinical research thrive at MIT and to address the inequities in technology access for society’s most vulnerable population — children.
Throughout his career, Edelman has devoted himself to mentoring students and trainees.
“I’m really proud of what our students have accomplished, not only scientifically, but on a personal level, and not only with me, but everything they’ve done afterwards. The greatness of a place like MIT is that you enable people to grow beyond their potential. That’s really the extraordinary thing about our community,” he says.
In recognition of his scientific achievements, Edelman has been elected a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, the Association of University Cardiologists, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Engineering.
“The Selection Committee is delighted to have this opportunity to honor Professor Elazer Edelman for his exceptional contributions to medical engineering and science, to MIT, and to the world,” the award citation concludes.
Researchers “reprogram” materials by quickly rearranging their atoms A new method for precisely moving columns of individual atoms within a material could give rise to exotic quantum properties.It’s been 37 years since scientists first demonstrated the ability to move single atoms, suggesting the possibility of designing materials atom by atom to customize their properties. Today there are several techniques that allow researchers to move individual atoms in order to give materials exotic quantum properties and improve our understanding of quantum behavior.
But existing techniques can only move atoms across the surface of materials in two dimensions. Most also require painstakingly slow processes and high-vacuum, ultracold lab conditions.
Now a team of researchers at MIT, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and other institutions has created a way to precisely move tens of thousands of individual atoms within a material in minutes at room temperature. The approach uses a set of algorithms to carefully position an electron beam at specific locations of a material, then scan the beam to drive atomic motions.
“The results demonstrate the ability to deterministically move atoms repeatedly within a material’s 3D atomic lattice,” says MIT Research Scientist Julian Klein, who conceived of and directed the project. “We can reprogram materials to create defects at will, realizing entirely artificial states of matter not found in nature with a wide range of potential applications, including sensing, optical, and magnetic technologies. There are so many opportunities enabled by these techniques.”
“It’s like a photocopier that can create columns of identical atomic defects,” says Frances Ross, MIT’s TDK Professor in Materials Science and Engineering. “It’s especially useful because you can move a few atoms to form defects, and do it again and again to build atomic arrangements in three dimensions that have tunable functions in a system that is more robust because the defects exist beneath the surface.”
In a Nature paper appearing today, the researchers described their approach and how they used it to create more than 40,000 quantum defects in a crystalline semiconductor material.
The researchers say the approach offers a new way to study quantum behavior in materials. It could also one day lead to improvements in systems that leverage quantum defects, like quantum computers, dense magnetic memory, atomic-scale logic devices, and more.
Joining Klein and Ross on the paper are Kevin Roccapriore and Andrew Lupini, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Mads Weile, a former MIT visiting student; Sergii Grytsiuk, a former Radbound University researcher; Malte Rösner, a professor at Bielefeld University in Germany; Zdenek Sofer, a professor at the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague in the Czeck Republic; Dimitar Pashov, a research associate at King’s College London; and Mark van Schilfgaarde and Swagata Acharya, researchers at the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
Designing matter
In a now-famous 1989 demonstration, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to arrange 35 atoms on the surface of a chilled crystal to spell out “IBM.” It was the first time atoms had been precisely positioned, and an important milestone. The approach enabled scientists to engineer specific defects, such as atom-sized vacancies and surface atoms in crystalline materials, leading to major advances in quantum science. But placing those 35 atoms had taken researchers many hours, if not days.
In parallel with those developments, researchers also developed two additional approaches for manipulating atoms in a vacuum, using optical tweezers to trap neutral atoms and oscillating electric fields to trap ions.
While those approaches have enabled remarkable progress, they remain limited to either surfaces or highly controlled experimental systems. Another factor limiting the design of materials for applications such as quantum computers is the inability of atomic manipulation techniques to move atoms in three dimensions: The patterns are created on the surface of a material, where they are exposed to the environment and cannot survive outside tightly controlled laboratory settings.
Engineering usable materials with custom quantum properties would require researchers to rearrange many more atoms, preferably on the interior of materials. The MIT researchers demonstrated that capability in their Nature study.
“We were trying to improve the number of atoms we could move in a reasonable length of time,” Ross explains. “You want to place the atoms close to each other so they can interact, and you want to have a lot of them arranged as you’d like — thousands or millions of atoms in specific locations you’ve chosen. That’s been challenging with existing techniques.”
The researchers used high-performance microscopes at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory for their work. Their new technique uses a sophisticated set of algorithms to direct an electron beam at a target atom with a precision of a few picometers (one trillionth of a meter). The beam does a tight loop to help zero in on its target, then sends a beam of electrons through the material in a carefully designed oscillating path, spending about a second at each location.
“We developed algorithms that allow us to quickly obtain information on where the beam is in the material,” Klein explains. “The trick is to use very few electrons in the process of getting that information, so the whole process is fast and does not unintentionally damage your crystal. It took many years to develop these algorithms and determine the minimum required information needed to infer where the atoms are located with the highest precision.”
The motion of the beam as it delivers electrons, an oscillating path devised by the researchers, pushes entire columns of atoms to new locations the way you might swipe a screen on your phone.
In their experiments, the researchers used this approach to direct the movement of columns of chromium atoms in a stable semiconductor material, chromium sulfide bromide, using a crystal about 13 nanometers thick. The beam created atom-sized vacancies in the material, each vacancy paired with the displaced atom, that they calculated would give the crystal exotic quantum properties.
To show how well their approach scaled, the researchers created over 40,000 defects in about 40 minutes, creating vacancies and interstitials across different distances and in different patterns, calculating that different atomic arrangements should give rise to different quantum mechanical properties.
“Each of these defects has certain ways to interact with its neighbors,” Ross says. “If you place them in a pattern, you could essentially simulate the interactions between the electrons within a molecule, so the whole electronic structure of that molecule can, in a sense, be mapped onto a pattern that you can write into a solid material.”
Probing quantum systems
The success of the approach was likely aided by the way chromium binds within the semiconductor, which has a unique electronic structure. The researchers are further investigating other crystals in which this might work, though they suspect it will be applicable to a diverse range of materials.
In the materials where it works, the approach has several advantages over existing techniques.
“Moving atoms within solids enables the creation of quantum properties in materials that are stable in the air outside of vacuum conditions,” Klein explains. “And this approach is also scalable to many atomic manipulations, so moving thousands or millions of atoms to create artificial structures would represent completely new physics. We’d like to study those systems.”
The researchers say their technique lays the foundation for a new class of programable matter, which could aid the development of a range of stable quantum devices.
“This is a way of accessing physical phenomena that involve a lot of atoms placed in a certain specified arrangement, and can’t be done by self-assembly,” Ross says. “You can create individually tuned atomic arrangements, and you can have so many of them, each arranged exactly how you like over areas that are tens and hundreds of nanometers. That leads to collective physics we are excited to explore.”
The work was supported, in part, by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.