Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

New paper: “Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the ‘Going Dark’ Debate“:

Abstract: This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Governments around the world have proposed, and in some cases enacted, laws limiting E2EE for law enforcement and national security purposes.

This Article explains the underlying technologies and market developments for a law and policy audience to assess those proposals critically. The Article proceeds in three parts tracking three rounds of the Going Dark Debate. Round 1 covers the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, when U.S. export controls on strong encryption ultimately fell in 1999. Round 2 covers the period roughly 2010 to 2015, when encryption-in-transit became widespread but lawful access remained available through cloud providers, giving rise to what the authors called a “golden age of surveillance” rather than a period of going dark. Round 3 addresses the current debate over E2EE, where no entity between sender and recipient can read the plaintext...

A Senate committee approved nominee Cameron Hamilton on Wednesday. But the full Senate might not act until after August recess.

GE Vernova saw its orders for gas turbines double in the second quarter.

Embracing solar engineering research that could help reduce global warming might also provide a temporary lifeline for fossil fuels, a former Trump adviser said.

Last month, the same judge ruled against the agency for canceling a $3B climate grant program.

With a single number, a new publicly available tracker scores — and highlights — the little-known climate pollution from data centers.

Water infrastructure company Kubota is buying atmospheric water harvesters made by AirJoule LLC to be initially deployed in California and Texas.

The excess mortality was the highest from any heat wave since 2003.

A record-dry winter and extreme heat — and decades of overuse, chronic drought and climate change — are threatening to pummel the lake to near historic lows.

The recent outages highlight the struggles of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria to keep decades-old facilities running and, in some cases, show an acute shortfall of fuels.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 23 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02718-6

The magnitude and distribution of CO2 emissions from river transport are poorly constrained. This study finds that global CO2 emissions from inland vessels were about one-quarter of total vessel emissions, and that emissions were concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, related to economic activity.

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post.

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

The Border Search Exception Meets Your Phone

The Fourth Amendment requires that government searches of persons or property be reasonable, which usually means obtaining a warrant based on probable cause from a judge.

But a warrantless search can still be reasonable if it falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, including the exception that allows officers to search your belongings at the border. The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports, given the government’s interests in controlling who and what may enter the country.

Historically, courts have categorized border searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects as “routine” and thus reasonable even if conducted without any suspicion that the traveler has engaged in wrongdoing; courts have also held that more invasive “nonroutine” searches, such as certain body searches and searches that damage property, require reasonable suspicion.

But a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.

The Supreme Court addressed cell phone privacy in Riley v. California (2014), holding that the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement did not apply to cell phones, thereby generally requiring a warrant for phone searches, at least at the interior of the country. The court recognized the unprecedented privacy interests people have in their cell phones and how even brief manual searches can reveal the “sum of an individual’s private life,” including our political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexuality, and more. Accordingly, the Supreme Court held that because electronic device searches bear “little resemblance” to searches of bags or physical containers, they should be evaluated differently.

Following Riley, the Fourth Circuit considered two border device search cases involving forensic searches, in which border officers used external software to extract and analyze a device’s data.

In U.S. v. Kolsuz (2018), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic search of a cell phone at the border “must be considered a nonroutine border search, requiring some measure of individualized suspicion” of a transnational offense, but the court declined to decide whether the standard is only reasonable suspicion or instead a probable cause warrant.

Then in U.S. v. Aigbekaen (2019), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic device search at the border in support of a purely domestic law enforcement investigation requires a warrant. The court also reiterated the general Kolsuz rule for a forensic border-related device search: the “Government must have individualized suspicion of an offense that bears some nexus to the border search exception's purposes of protecting national security, collecting duties, blocking the entry of unwanted persons, or disrupting efforts to export or import contraband.”

In Belmonte Cardozo, manual searches were finally before the court.

A Disappointing Decision

Jose Belmonte Cardozo was already on the U.S. government’s radar when he traveled from Bolivia to the U.S. and was met by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer at Washington Dulles International Airport. The officer manually searched his cell phone and found child sexual abuse material (CSAM), considered “digital contraband,” leading to Belmonte Cardozo’s arrest and criminal prosecution.

At issue on appeal was what standard should apply to manual device searches at the border. The Fourth Circuit held that, unlike forensic searches, manual searches are “routine” and thus reasonable under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant or individualized suspicion.

The court’s holding hinged on four differences between manual and forensic searches: (1) in a manual search, a person does the searching, not a machine; (2) a manual search’s breadth depends on the officer’s time and energy, while forensic searches are comprehensive; (3) manual searches reveal only what a user can typically access, while forensic searches can uncover deleted files, cached fragments, metadata, and more; and (4) manual searches are subject to an officer’s fading memory or imperfect notes, while forensic searches create a permanent copy.

But in identifying these technical differences, the court never explains why they justify a lower standard for manual searches.

The Fourth Circuit’s holding is problematic because, as we argued in our amicus brief, manual searches reach the same categories of data as forensic searches—data that can reveal highly personal aspects of our identities and our lives. It does not matter if a search is conducted by an agent’s thumbs or by software: the end result is equally as invasive, therefore all device searches should fall under the warrant requirement, or at least the same Fourth Amendment standard.

The court repeatedly emphasized that the search here lasted only two minutes, suggesting that the time-limited search was not privacy-invasive. But an individual’s privacy interests in their personal data don’t change based on how their phone is searched or how long. Scrolling for two minutes through someone’s personal text messages or photos is an invasion of privacy that may reveal intimate details about the person even in that short period of time.

Moreover, as devices’ native search functions improve, manual searches can surface personal information in seconds through keyword searches, even for photos, where it might have taken an hour of scrolling to find the same information, further showing that a time-limited search is not necessarily less privacy-invasive. What matters is not the breadth of the search itself, but the unprecedented (and growing) breadth of data on our phones.

A Silver Lining

There’s one silver lining: by relying on the fact that the search lasted two minutes, the Fourth Circuit left open the possibility that lengthier manual searches could trigger heightened suspicion requirements. But until a clear line is drawn, border officers within the Fourth Circuit’s jurisdiction can use manual searches to sidestep heightened Fourth Amendment standards that would otherwise apply. In the meantime, EFF will keep fighting against extraordinarily invasive warrantless, suspicionless device earches at the border, and for robust privacy standards to protect our most personal data.

As a Massachusetts Boys Soccer Player of the Year and an All-American in high school, Dilin Meloni had choices when it came to college. He came to MIT because he knew he wanted to be an Engineer (on the field) and an engineer (off) after he read a paper from the Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a junior at Needham High School. 

In mid-June, Meloni, a rising senior studying nuclear science and engineering and physics, took time from his summer internship at Commonwealth Fusion Systems to discuss his role as an attacking midfielder for the Engineers, his work with the Student Athlete Advisory Council, and more.  

Q: How does being an athlete affect your experience at MIT?

A: MIT has a huge social experience people don’t really understand from the outside. A lot of it is driven by our athletic communities. 

For example, MIT was very open and welcoming when I first got here. Especially for fall athletes; when you get here, it’s all there in the first two weeks. Athletics help you meet students who are very much like yourself: people who come to MIT for academics but who have also dedicated so much of their lives to a sport that it’s a major part of them. I think this common ground makes it a lot easier to meet people and find connections you might have a harder time finding if you're not an athlete.

And it still drives how I live. My fraternity is made up of pretty much the entire soccer team now, plus people from the football team, the swimming team, and some track athletes. We have some non-athletes as well. 

But the nice part is it doesn’t have to be everything you do — and it never is, because everybody has their academic work.

Q: Are these two parts of your life — athletic and academic — separate, or integrated?

A: Maybe it’s because of my major and what I’m interested in, but I just don’t find a lot of overlap. I’m a Course 22 and Course 8 double-major, and you don’t find a ton of varsity athletes in nuclear engineering or physics, unfortunately. But I’m trying to change that — the new players coming in, I try to convince them these are good paths to take.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time playing club soccer, and my academics were in a much smaller sphere. Here, I get access to every single part of the MIT ecosystem. I’m able to spend time in my lab with people who come from very diverse backgrounds, and they don’t really play sports. Or they don’t anymore. 

And at the end of the day, I can go back and hang out with my friends on the team. It’s a privilege to be a part of all these different groups. I’m not just siloed.

Q: Describe the Student Athletics Advisory Committee (SAAC). How do you represent the needs of all 33 varsity sports?

A: Thirty-three teams is a lot of teams. … Last summer we reached out to all the coaches and athletes before the preseason to ask for their ideas. They know where the pain points are, so we encouraged them to think about what changes they wanted. Then the co-president and I met with all of them in smaller groups and came up with a list. 

The main idea is that there’s overlap on the issues that pertain to all student-athletes, such as the quality of the food, preseason planning, or the new Sports Performance Facility — every varsity student athlete needs access to that space, so it matters how access and time are allocated. 

Or it might be something more specific. There are seven teams that play on the major turf fields. If you’re a swimmer, you’re probably not going to care much about the soccer fields, but you do share the pool with the water polo team. We also discuss things like NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] legislation and how the school wants to approach it.

The nice part is, it’s pretty informal. I know a lot of student athletes. If I want to get in touch with someone from the track team, I don’t have to hunt them down. I could probably just find them in class. Or I text my friends and ask, “Hey, how was the food today?”

Q: How did you get involved? 

A: I started going my freshman year. My coach suggested that we send some younger players, so I went with the captain at the time. 

Student governance has always been important to me. When I was in high school, I was part of my town’s school committee and the larger school committees for Massachusetts. Students have lots of opinions, and there are lots of issues, even at a place like MIT. But if no one takes on the role, nothing’s going to happen. That’s just always how I viewed it — if there’s an area where you can make some change, why not go do it yourself?

Q: What’s the hardest part of the job?

A: The difficult part can be communicating realistic standards between administrators and student athletes, because students are going to ask for more than they’re going to get — which is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, student athletes are aware that we have to share fields. But all these teams always want to be out there. They want to have priority. They want continuous access to facilities so they can train and get better as a team.

In these meetings I’ve come to understand fully that there’s a cost associated with everything, and some things can be difficult, logistically. So finding compromises when it comes to field time, or food, or whatever it may be — I end up explaining a lot. This is how the school works. You can’t just demand everything. We try to meet in the middle as much as possible. Students get it.

But on the flip side, I need to make sure we are voicing student athletes’ needs and ideas for how to improve our experience, because if you’re enjoying your student-athlete experience, you're going to get more out of the school as well. 

Varsity athletes feel sometimes that they are an underrepresented or unloved group. If you’re trying to have a soccer practice and there are people running on the track, or if you kick a ball over the fence and someone steals it, or if you’re trying to book an off-season practice and a student club already booked the field — all these things can be frustrating.

A big part of SAAC is voicing complaints, but also understanding the compromises — and that we can work together to try and find the best middle ground.

Q: Do you think it’s working?

A: Definitely. DAPER and Student Life staff have been willing to talk, and listen, and overhaul how they do things. With such a large portion of the student body being athletes, this is really important to them. They’re now asking me and the co-president for input on other realms of student life, too. I think this year was really a tipping point.

Obviously, it’s a privilege to come to this school, but if you’re here you still need to be heard. At the end of the day, people are always going to find things to nitpick. Yes, there are things to improve on; it’s never going to be perfect. But as long as we have this communication channel open, I think we can make small changes that’ll lead to big changes eventually.

Dimitri Bertsekas PhD ’71, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Emeritus Professor in Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and the Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, died on June 3 at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts. He was 83 years old. 

Over the course of his career, Bertsekas’ research spanned, and had a definitive influence upon, several fields, including optimization, control, large-scale computation, reinforcement learning, and artificial intelligence. He served as a consultant to various private companies; an editor for several scientific journals; the founder of a publishing company, Athena Scientific; and chief scientific advisor of Bayforest Technologies, a London-based quantitative investment company. However, his most lasting impact may have come through his prolific authorship and co-authorship of over 20 highly influential books, monographs, and textbooks, and through his vast network of students, mentees, friends, and collaborators.

Bertsekas earned his undergraduate degree at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, before obtaining his MS in electrical engineering at George Washington University in 1969, and his PhD in system science at MIT in 1971. He began his faculty career at Stanford University, where he spent three years, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent five more before returning to MIT in 1979. He would stay with MIT’s Department of EECS until 2019, at which point he became a full-time faculty member at Arizona State University at Tempe. Along the way, Bertsekas taught, advised, and mentored students who would eventually become his colleagues at all four institutions. 

“Dimitri played a defining role in my career,” says Asu Ozdaglar, department head of EECS at MIT. “I decided to change my research focus after taking his nonlinear optimization class. The conceptual clarity and the mathematical rigor he has brought to every topic, combined with his ability to connect theory to important problems established a foundation that has continued to inform my scholarly work in the years to follow.” Another former MIT student, Jinane Abounadi, now executive director of the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, still remembers Bertsekas’ tutelage as a highlight of her time as a student at MIT: “I feel so fortunate to have had Dimitri as my professor and advisor. I had the opportunity to learn about optimization, dynamic programming, and neuro-dynamic programming from a true master.” 

A former student at the University of Illinois, Steven E. Shreve remembers being impressed by Bertsekas’ course on nonlinear optimization and asking if Bertsekas would consider becoming his PhD advisor. “Rather than answering my question directly, Dimitri gave me a preliminary draft of his manuscript, which eventually became his book 'Dynamic Programming and Stochastic Control,' and asked me to proofread it,” remembers Shreve, now Orion Hoch University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. “From this manuscript, I learned the theory of dynamic programming and mastered many important special cases. Talking with Dimitri as I read, I received one-on-one instruction. When the book finally appeared, Dimitri generously acknowledged my participation, as if I had done him a favor, rather than the other way around.” The gambit was typical of Bertsekas’ understated approach to mentorship; after the first successful collaboration, Bertsekas arranged a research fellowship for Shreve and challenged him to solve a fundamental question in dynamic programming. “I needed to learn a good deal of set theory to even think about the question he asked,” remembers Shreve, whose work on the problem was combined with Bertsekas’ notes to create their co-authored book “Stochastic Optimal Control: The Discrete Time Case.” 

“Working with Dimitri on [that book] is how I learned to write,” says Shreve. “I learned from Dimitri that if you want to be recognized for your research, you must present it so others want to read it, and I learned how to do that.” 

The clarity and elegance of Bertsekas’ explanatory style would become his educational hallmark. “Everyone recognized Dimitri’s great talents as a writer, but he went far beyond that, organizing entire subjects into something that was understandable and a well-organized totality,” says Robert Gallager, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at MIT, who co-authored a 1987 book with Bertsekas entitled “Data Networks.” “The field was changing rapidly then, with a factor-of-two decrease every two years in computation costs, and with optical fiber on the horizon for transmission. Dimitri and I each understood only parts of this field, with the rest a fast-moving learning experience. Dimitri was the ideal partner in this, able to quickly translate hard concepts into simple but accurate explanations and able to combine my knowledge with his into an understandable whole.” 

Bertsekas’ close colleague in LIDS, Munther Dahleh, remembers, “what always struck me was that, through his writing, one could almost hear Dimitri speaking directly to the reader. His intuition, clarity of thought, and distinctive perspective come through beautifully in his books. They reflect not only his profound technical contributions, but also his passion for teaching and his desire to help others understand the subject at a deep level. … In particular, his joint book with John Tsitsiklis on neuro-dynamic programming is a tour de force. It anticipated and helped define many of the ideas that later became central to reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic programming.” 

Tsitsiklis himself remembers the co-writing process with Bertsekas fondly: “For Dimitri, research was a creative form, combining craftsmanship and the creativity that we usually call art.” The definition of art and its practice was a subject of great fascination for Bertsekas, and one that he explored at length in his 2025 essay, “Academia, Art, and Life,” an attempt to meaningfully categorize creative work into three broadly descriptive roles — technician, craftsman, and artist — and to explore the overlaps between the three types of practice. Beyond his clear and lucid writing, Bertsekas was known for his strong graphic eye, a talent which he put to good use not only developing illustrations for all his textbooks, but in taking memorable and artistically inspired photographs of his worldwide travels. 

Longtime collaborator and friend David Castañón, now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University, remembers Bertsekas as a true Renaissance man who drew inspiration from countless sources: “Dimitri had an insatiable curiosity for algorithmic ideas, both theory and practice. Many of these ideas were inspired by new technologies (parallel computers, reinforcement learning, chess-playing algorithms) ... Whenever we met, Dimitri would introduce new concepts of interest; we would work out theoretical details, design and conduct numerical experiments, and generate results. Then, Dimitri’s artistic talents would take over: designing graphics to illustrate concepts, typesetting text and figures for the papers to be completed. He had a rare gift for generating concise explanations of complex concepts. These talents led to his publishing company Athena Scientific, where Dimitri and his coauthors generated elegant pedagogical volumes with broad appeal.” Tsitsiklis agrees, noting, “for Dimitri, [research] was about discovering meaning, to uncover the 'right' way to view a subject, enrich it, and convey it in a crystal-clear manner through his prolific writings.” 

Many of the 20-plus books either authored or co-authored by Bertsekas were adopted for use as textbooks at MIT in subjects including data networks, nonlinear programming, dynamic programming, network optimization, parallel and distributed computation, neuro-dynamic programming, convex analysis and optimization, probability, and reinforcement learning. Stephen Boyd, Samsung Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford, testifies to the great impact of Bertsekas’ collected works: “generations of researchers in optimization, control, and many related areas learned these topics from Dimitri’s exquisitely clear and beautifully written text books. I was one of them; indeed, I went into these fields in no small part because of Dimitri’s books, and his influence has been with me the whole time.”

That influence can be measured by the sheer number of awards and honors Bertsekas accumulated over the course of his career, including the INFORMS 1997 Prize for Research Excellence in the Interface Between Operations Research and Computer Science for Neuro-Dynamic Programming, the 2001 ACC John R. Ragazzini Education Award, the 2009 INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the 2014 ACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award for “contributions to the foundations of deterministic and stochastic optimization-based methods in systems and control,” the 2014 Khachiyan Prize for Life-Time Accomplishments in Optimization, the SIAM/MOS 2015 George B. Dantzig Prize, and the 2022 IEEE Control Systems Award. Together with his coauthor John Tsitsiklis, he was awarded the 2018 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize for the contributions of the research monographs “Parallel and Distributed Computation” and “Neuro-Dynamic Programming.” In 2001, Bertsekas was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering for “pioneering contributions to fundamental research, practice and education of optimization/control theory.”

However, a more personal measure of Bertsekas’ impact can be taken by the warmth and affection with which his friends, co-workers, and former students uniformly remember him. Co-author John Tsitsiklis wrote, “I was most fortunate to be one of his apprentices, and to have lived his warmth and friendship.” His former student at MIT, Angelia Nedich, later became Bertsekas’ colleague at Arizona State University. She remembers: “Dimitri was an exceptional mind, a gifted soul that shed light for us seekers, but at the same time he was very humble as he enjoyed simple moments of life, a sip of good coffee, a bite of flavorful food, or a glass of spicy margarita on our road trips in Southwest. That is how I love to remember him.”

Former student Benjamin Van Roy, now a professor at Stanford, wrote about the transformation of Bertsekas from authority figure to friend (and the subject of friendly teasing). “I recall the intimidating comments of more senior PhD students as I began my own PhD journey in LIDS. Some referred to Dimitri as an “immortal.” Another comment I recall fondly — and often reminded Dimitri about — was: “Professor Bertsekas is a very handsome man!” Their bond continued long after Van Roy’s graduation. “Dimitri was a treasure to humanity: one of the great scholars of our time, a Renaissance man, and a phenomenal role model. I was privileged to be among the many he mentored, and even more privileged to count him as a longtime friend.” Yuchao Li, a postdoc mentored by Bertsekas at Arizona State University, remembers his mentor as an almost inexhaustible source of both inspiration and support: “For me, Professor Bertsekas was like a loving father, full of infinite wisdom. … He seemed to know everything, yet he remained deeply humble and open-minded. He was always eager to help, even at the slightest sign of difficulty in my life. He instilled in me a lasting faith in the very best qualities of human beings, and I will strive to carry that faith forward.”

Bertsekas was preceded in death by his son Costas. He is survived by his wife Joanna Bertsekas (née Palashas); his son Telis Bertsekas and his wife Wendy Bertsekas; and three grandchildren, Melina, Alexandros, and Leonidas. 

Harrowing story of an identity theft victim.

Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email address. But the real story here is how, for many of us, the security of most of our accounts hangs on the security of our email accounts.

The House Education and Workforce Committee approved the legislation along party lines.

Manufacturers and green groups have already challenged the Trump administration’s decision to give industries five more years to phase out potent greenhouse gases.

The groups allege the Trump administration illegally ended a $7 billion Biden-era residential solar program.

The decision could have implications for a separate but related fight over the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants.