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.

The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) has the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced: more than 11 billion base pairs. That’s more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes.

It’s technically not a squid: “The vampire squid is a fascinating twig tenaciously hanging onto the cephalopod family tree. It’s neither a squid nor an octopus (nor a vampire), but rather the last, lone remnant of an ancient lineage whose other members have long since vanished.”

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered...

Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, an Institute Professor and MIT’s executive vice provost, has been named dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, effective Jan. 16. She will succeed Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who was appointed MIT’s provost in July.

Hammond, who was head of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 2015 to 2023, has also served as MIT’s vice provost for faculty. She will be the first woman to hold the role of dean of MIT’s School of Engineering.

“From the rigor and creativity of her scientific work to her outstanding record of service to the Institute, Paula Hammond represents the very best of MIT,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “Wise, thoughtful, down-to-earth, deeply curious, and steeped in MIT’s culture and values, Paula will be a highly effective leader for the School of Engineering. I’m delighted she accepted this new challenge.”

Hammond, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, has earned many accolades for her work developing polymers and nanomaterials that can be used for applications including drug delivery, regenerative medicine, noninvasive imaging, and battery technology.

Chandrakasan announced Hammond’s appointment today in an email to the MIT community, writing, “Ever since enrolling at MIT as an undergraduate, Paula has built a remarkable record of accomplishment in scholarship, teaching, and service. Faculty, staff, and students across the Institute praise her wisdom, selflessness, and kindness, especially when it comes to enabling others’ professional growth and success.”

“Paula is a scholar of extraordinary distinction. It is hard to overstate the value of the broad contributions she has made in her field, which have significantly expanded the frontiers of knowledge,” Chandrakasan told MIT News. “Any one of her many achievements could stand as the cornerstone of an outstanding academic career. In addition, her investment in mentoring the next generation of scholars and building community is unparalleled.”

Chandrakasan also thanked Professor Maria Yang, who has served as the school’s interim dean in recent months. “In a testament to her own longstanding contributions to the School of Engineering, Maria took on the deanship even while maintaining leadership roles with the Ideation Lab, D-Lab, and Morningside Academy for Design. For her excellent service and leadership, Maria deserves our deep appreciation,” he wrote to the community.

Building a sense of community

Throughout her career at MIT, Hammond has helped to create a supportive environment in which faculty and students can do their best work. As vice provost for faculty, a role Hammond assumed in 2023, she developed and oversaw new efforts to improve faculty recruitment and retention, mentoring, and professional development. Earlier this year, she took on additional responsibilities as executive vice provost, providing guidance and oversight for a number of Institute-wide initiatives.

As head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Hammond worked to strengthen the department’s sense of community and initiated a strategic planning process that led to more collaborative research between faculty members. Under her leadership, the department also launched a major review of its undergraduate curriculum and introduced more flexibility into the requirements for a chemical engineering degree.

Another major priority was ensuring that faculty had the support they needed to pursue new research goals. To help achieve that, she established and raised funds for a series of Faculty Research Innovation Fund grants for mid-career faculty who wanted to explore fresh directions.

“I really enjoyed enabling faculty to explore new areas, finding ways to resource them, making sure that they had the right mentoring early in their career and the ‘wind beneath their wings’ that they needed to get where they wanted to go,” she says. “That, to me, was extremely fulfilling.”

Before taking on her official administrative roles, Hammond served the Institute through her work chairing committees that contributed landmark reports on gender and race at MIT: the Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity and the Academic and Organizational Relationships Working Group.

In her new role as dean, Hammond plans to begin by consulting with faculty across the School of Engineering to learn more about their needs.

“I like to start with conversations,” she says. “I’m very excited about the idea of visiting each of the departments, finding out what’s on the minds of the faculty, and figuring out how we can meaningfully address their needs and continue to build and grow an excellent engineering program.”

One of her goals is to promote greater cross-disciplinarity in MIT’s curriculum, in part by encouraging and providing resources for faculty to develop more courses that bridge multiple departments.

“There are some barriers that exist between departments, because we all need to teach our core requirements,” she says. “I am very interested in collaborating with departments to think about how we can lower barriers to allow faculty to co-teach, or to perhaps look at different course structures that allow us to teach a core component and then have it branch to a more specialized component.”

She also hopes to guide MIT’s engineering departments in finding ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into their curriculum, and to give students greater opportunity for relevant hands-on experiences in engineering.

“I am particularly excited to build from the strong cross-disciplinary efforts and the key strategic initiatives that Anantha launched during his time as dean,” Hammond says. “I believe we have incredible opportunities to build off these critical areas at the interfaces of science, engineering, the humanities, arts, design, and policy, and to create new emergent fields. MIT should be the leader in providing educational foundations that prepare our students for a highly interdisciplinary and AI-enabled world, and a setting that enables our researchers and scholars to solve the most difficult and urgent problems of the world.”

A pioneer in nanotechnology

Hammond grew up in Detroit, where her father was a PhD biochemist who ran the health laboratories for the city of Detroit. Her mother founded a nursing school at Wayne County Community College, and both parents encouraged her interest in science. As an undergraduate at MIT, she majored in chemical engineering with a focus on polymer chemistry.

After graduating in 1984, Hammond spent two years working as a process engineer at Motorola, then earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Georgia Tech. She realized that she wanted to pursue a career in academia, and returned to MIT to earn a PhD in polymer science technology. After finishing her degree in 1993, she spent a year and a half as a postdoc at Harvard University before joining the MIT faculty in 1995.

She became a full professor in 2006, and in 2021, she was named an Institute Professor, the highest honor bestowed by MIT. In 2010, Hammond joined MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, where she leads a lab that is developing novel nanomaterials a variety of applications, with a primary focus on treatments and diagnostics for ovarian cancer.

Early in her career, Hammond developed a technique for generating functional thin-film materials by stacking layers of charged polymeric materials. This approach can be used to build polymers with highly controlled architectures by alternately exposing a surface to positively and negatively charged particles.

She has used this layer-by-layer assembly technique to build ultrathin batteries, fuel cell electrodes, and drug delivery nanoparticles that can be specifically targeted to cancer cells. These particles can be tailored to carry chemotherapy drugs such as cisplatin, immunotherapy agents, or nucleic acids such as messenger RNA.

In recognition of her pioneering research, Hammond was awarded the 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation. She was also the 2023-24 recipient of MIT’s Killian Award, which honors extraordinary professional achievements by an MIT faculty member. Her many other awards include the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry in 2024, the ACS Award in Polymer Science in 2018, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Charles M. A. Stine Award in Materials Engineering and Science in 2013, and the Ovarian Cancer Research Program Teal Innovator Award in 2013.

Hammond has also been honored for her dedication to teaching and mentoring. As a reflection of her excellence in those areas, she was awarded the Irwin Sizer Award for Significant Improvements to MIT Education, the Henry Hill Lecturer Award in 2002, and the Junior Bose Faculty Award in 2000. She also co-chaired the recent Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Advising and Mentoring, and has been selected as a “Committed to Caring” honoree for her work mentoring students and postdocs in her research group.

Hammond has served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, as well as the U.S. Secretary of Energy Scientific Advisory Board, the NIH Center for Scientific Review Advisory Council, and the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Additionally, she is one of a small group of scientists who have been elected to the National Academies of Engineering, Sciences, and Medicine.

A spray-on coating to keep power lines standing through an ice storm may not be the obvious fix for winter outages — but it’s exactly the kind of innovation that happens when MIT students tackle a sustainability challenge.

“The big threat to the power line network is winter icing that causes huge amounts of downed lines every year,” says Trevor Bormann, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and member of MITten, the winning team in the 2025 MADMEC innovation contest. Fixing those outages is hugely carbon-intensive, requiring diesel-powered equipment, replacement materials, and added energy use. And as households switch to electric heat pumps, the stakes of a prolonged outage rise.

To address the challenge, the team developed a specialized polymer coating that repels water and can be sprayed onto aluminum power lines. The coating contains nanofillers — particles hundreds of times smaller than a human hair — that give the surface a texture that makes water bead and drip off.

The effect is known as “superhydrophobicity,” says Shaan Jagani, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “And what that really means is water does not stay on the surface, and therefore water will not have the opportunity to nucleate down into ice.”

MITten — pronounced “mitten” — won the $10,000 first prize in the contest, hosted by DMSE on Nov. 10 at MIT, where audience presentations and poster sessions capped months of design and experimentation. Since 2007, MADMEC (the MIT and Dow Materials Engineering Contest), funded by Dow and Saint-Gobain, has given students a chance to tackle real-world sustainability challenges, with each team receiving $1,000 to build and test their projects. Judges evaluated the teams’ work from conception to prototype.

MADMEC winners have gone on to succeed in major innovation competitions such as MassChallenge, and at least six startups — including personal cooling wristband maker Embr and vehicle-motion-control company ClearMotion — trace their roots to the contest.

Cold inspiration

The idea for the MITten project came in part from Bormann’s experience growing up in South Dakota, where winter outages were common. His home was heated by natural gas, but if grid-reliant heat pumps had warmed it in negative-zero winter months, a days-long outage would have been “really rough.”

“I love the part of sustainability that is focused on developing all these new technologies for electricity generation and usage, but also the distribution side of it shouldn’t be neglected, either,” Bormann says. “It’s important for all those to be growing synergistically, and to be paying attention to all aspects of it.”

And there’s an opportunity to make distribution infrastructure more durable: An estimated 50,000 miles of new power lines are planned over the next decade in the northern United States, where icing is a serious risk.

To test their coating, the team built an icing chamber to simulate rain and freezing conditions, comparing coated versus uncoated aluminum samples at –10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit). They also dipped samples in liquid nitrogen to evaluate performance in extreme cold and simulated real-world stresses such as lines swaying in windstorms.

“We basically coated aluminum substrates and then bent them to demonstrate that the coating itself could accommodate very long strains,” Jagani says.

The team ran simulations to estimate that a typical outage affecting 20 percent of a region could cost about $7 million to repair. “But if you fully coat, say, 1,000 kilometers of line, you actually can save $1 million in just material costs,” says DMSE grad student Matthew Michalek. The team hopes to further refine the coating with more advanced materials and test them in a professional icing chamber.

Amber Velez, a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, stressed the parameters of the contest — working within a $1,000 budget.

“I feel we did quite good work with quite a lot of legitimacy, but I think moving on, there is a lot of space that we could have more play in,” she says. “We’ve definitely not hit the ceiling yet, and I think there’s a lot of room to keep growing.”

Compostable electrodes, microwavable ceramics

The second-place, $6,000 prize went to Electrodiligent, which is designing a biodegradable, compostable alternative to electrodes used for heart monitoring. Their prototype uses a cellulose paper backing and a conductive gel made from gelatin, glycerin, and sodium chloride to carry the electric signal.

Comparing electrocardiogram (ECG) results, the team found their electrodes performed similarly to the 3M Red Dot standard. “We’re very optimistic about this result,” says Ethan Frey, a DMSE graduate student.

The invention aims to cut into the 3.6 tons of medical waste produced each day, but judges noted that adhesive electrodes are almost always incinerated for health and safety reasons, making the intended application a tough fit.

“But there’s a whole host of other directions the team could go in,” says Mike Tarkanian, senior lecturer in DMSE and coordinator of MADMEC.

The $4,000 third prize went to Cerawave, a team made up of mostly undergraduates and a member the team jokingly called a “token grad student,” working to make ceramics in an ordinary kitchen microwave. Traditional ceramic manufacturing requires high-temperature kilns, a major source of energy use and carbon emissions. Cerawave added silicon carbide to their ceramic mix to help it absorb microwave energy and fuse into a durable final product.

“We threw it on the ground a few times, and it didn’t break,” says Merrill Chiang, a junior in DMSE, drawing laughs from the audience. The team now plans to refine their recipe and overall ceramic-making process so that hobbyists — and even users in environments like the International Space Station — could create ceramic parts “without buying really expensive furnaces.”

The power of student innovation

Although it didn’t earn a prize, the contest’s most futuristic project was ReForm Designs, which aims to make reusable children’s furniture — expensive and quickly outgrown — from modular blocks made of mycelium, the root-like, growth-driving part of a mushroom. The team showed they could successfully produce mycelium blocks, but slow growth and sensitivity to moisture and temperature meant they didn’t yet have full furniture pieces to show judges.

The project still impressed DMSE senior David Miller, who calls the blocks “really intriguing,” with potential applications beyond furniture in manufacturing, construction, and consumer products.

“They adapt to the way we consume products, where a lot of us use products for one, two, three years before we throw them out,” Miller says. “Their capacity to be fully biodegradable and molded into any shape fills the need for certain kinds of additive manufacturing that requires certain shapes, while also being extremely sustainable.”

While the contest has produced successful startups, Tarkanian says MADMEC’s original goal — giving students a chance to get their hands dirty and pursue their own ideas — is thriving 18 years on, especially at a time when research budgets are being cut and science is under scrutiny.

“It gives students an opportunity to make things that are real and impactful to society,” he says. “So when you can build a prototype and say, ‘This is going to save X millions of dollars or X million pounds of waste,’ that value is obvious to everyone.”

Attendee Jinsung Kim, a postdoc in mechanical engineering, echoed Tarkanian’s comments, emphasizing the space set aside for innovative thinking.

“MADMEC creates the rare environment where students can experiment boldly, validate ideas quickly, and translate core scientific principles into solutions with real societal impact. To move society forward, we have to keep pushing the boundaries of technology and fundamental science,” he says.

Generative AI and robotics are moving us ever closer to the day when we can ask for an object and have it created within a few minutes. In fact, MIT researchers have developed a speech-to-reality system, an AI-driven workflow that allows them to provide input to a robotic arm and “speak objects into existence,” creating things like furniture in as little as five minutes.  

With the speech-to-reality system, a robotic arm mounted on a table is able to receive spoken input from a human, such as “I want a simple stool,” and then construct the objects out of modular components. To date, the researchers have used the system to create stools, shelves, chairs, a small table, and even decorative items such as a dog statue.

“We’re connecting natural language processing, 3D generative AI, and robotic assembly,” says Alexander Htet Kyaw, an MIT graduate student and Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) fellow. “These are rapidly advancing areas of research that haven’t been brought together before in a way that you can actually make physical objects just from a simple speech prompt.”  

The idea started when Kyaw — a graduate student in the departments of Architecture and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science — took Professor Neil Gershenfeld’s course, “How to Make Almost Anything.” In that class, he built the speech-to-reality system. He continued working on the project at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), directed by Gershenfeld, collaborating with graduate students Se Hwan Jeon of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Miana Smith of CBA.

The speech-to-reality system begins with speech recognition that processes the user’s request using a large language model, followed by 3D generative AI that creates a digital mesh representation of the object, and a voxelization algorithm that breaks down the 3D mesh into assembly components.

After that, geometric processing modifies the AI-generated assembly to account for fabrication and physical constraints associated with the real world, such as the number of components, overhangs, and connectivity of the geometry. This is followed by creation of a feasible assembly sequence and automated path planning for the robotic arm to assemble physical objects from user prompts.

By leveraging natural language, the system makes design and manufacturing more accessible to people without expertise in 3D modeling or robotic programming. And, unlike 3D printing, which can take hours or days, this system builds within minutes.

“This project is an interface between humans, AI, and robots to co-create the world around us,” Kyaw says. “Imagine a scenario where you say ‘I want a chair,’ and within five minutes a physical chair materializes in front of you.”

The team has immediate plans to improve the weight-bearing capability of the furniture by changing the means of connecting the cubes from magnets to more robust connections. 

“We’ve also developed pipelines for converting voxel structures into feasible assembly sequences for small, distributed mobile robots, which could help translate this work to structures at any size scale,” Smith says.

The purpose of using modular components is to eliminate the waste that goes into making physical objects by disassembling and then reassembling them into something different, for instance turning a sofa into a bed when you no longer need the sofa.

Because Kyaw also has experience using gesture recognition and augmented reality to interact with robots in the fabrication process, he is currently working on incorporating both speech and gestural control into the speech-to-reality system.

Leaning into his memories of the replicator in the “Star Trek” franchise and the robots in the animated film “Big Hero 6,” Kyaw explains his vision.

“I want to increase access for people to make physical objects in a fast, accessible, and sustainable manner,” he says. “I’m working toward a future where the very essence of matter is truly in your control. One where reality can be generated on demand.”

The team presented their paper “Speech to Reality: On-Demand Production using Natural Language, 3D Generative AI, and Discrete Robotic Assembly” at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF ’25) held at MIT on Nov. 21. 

Both Rohit Karnik and Nathan Wilmers personify the type of mentorship that any student would be fortunate to receive — one rooted in intellectual rigor and grounded in humility, empathy, and personal support. They show that transformative academic guidance is not only about solving research problems, but about lifting up the people working on them.

Whether it’s Karnik’s quiet integrity and commitment to scientific ethics, or Wilmers’ steadfast encouragement of his students in the face of challenges, both professors cultivate spaces where students are not only empowered to grow as researchers, but affirmed as individuals. Their mentees describe feeling genuinely seen and supported; mentored not just in theory or technique, but in resilience. It’s this attention to the human element that leaves a lasting impact.

Professors Karnik and Wilmers are two of the 2023–25 Committed to Caring cohort who are cultivating confidence and craft across disciplines. For MIT graduate students, the Committed to Caring program recognizes those who go above and beyond.

Rohit Karnik: Rooted in rigor, guided by care

Rohit Karnik is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where he leads the Microfluidics and Nanofluidics Research Group and serves as director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). His research explores the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and systems. Applications of his work include the development of water filters, portable diagnostic tools, and sensors for environmental monitoring. 

Karnik is genuinely excited about his students’ ideas, and open to their various academic backgrounds. He validates students by respecting their research, encouraging them to pursue their interests, and showing enthusiasm for their exploration within mechanical engineering and beyond.

One student reflected on the manner in which Karnik helped them feel more confident in their academic journey. When a student from a non-engineering field joined the mechanical engineering graduate program, Karnik never viewed their background as a barrier to success. The student wrote, “from the start, he was enthusiastic about my interdisciplinarity and the perspective I could bring to the lab.”

He allowed the student to take remedial undergraduate classes to learn engineering basics, provided guidance on leveraging their previous academic background, and encouraged them to write grants and apply for fellowships that would support their interdisciplinary work. In addition to these concrete supports, Karnik also provided the student with the freedom to develop their own ideas, offering constructive, realistic feedback on what was attainable. 

“This transition took time, and Karnik honored that, prioritizing my growth in a completely new field over getting quick results,” the nominator reflected. Ultimately, Karnik’s mentorship, patience, and thoughtful encouragement led the student to excel in the engineering field.

Karnik encourages his advisees to explore their interests in mechanical engineering and beyond. This holistic approach extends beyond academics and into Karnik’s view of his students as whole individuals. One student wrote that he treats them as complete humans, with ambitions, aspirations, and passions worthy of his respect and consideration — and remains truly selfless in his commitment to their growth and success.

Karnik emphasizes that “it’s important to have dreams,” regularly encouraging his mentees to take advantage of opportunities that align with their goals and values. This sentiment is felt deeply by his students, with one nominator sharing that Karnik “encourag[ed] me to think broadly and holistically about my life, which has helped me structure and prioritize my time at MIT.”

Nathan Wilmers: Cultivating confidence, craft, and care

Nathan Wilmers is the Sarofim Family Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organizations at MIT Sloan School of Management. His research spans wage and earnings inequality, economic sociology, and the sociology of labor. He is also affiliated with the Institute for Work and Employment Research, and the Economic Sociology program at Sloan. Wilmers studies wage and earnings inequality, economic sociology, and the sociology of labor, bringing insights from economic sociology to the study of labor markets and the wage structure.

A remarkable mentor, Wilmers is known for guiding his students through different projects while also teaching them more broadly about the system of academia. As one nominator illustrates, “he … helped me learn the ‘tacit’ knowledge to understand how to write a paper,” while also emphasizing the learning process of the PhD as a whole, and never reprimanding any mistakes along the way. 

Students say that Wilmers “reassures us that making mistakes is a natural part of the learning process and encourages us to continuously check, identify, and rectify them.” He welcomes all questions without judgment, and generously invests his time and patience in teaching students.

Wilmers is a strong advocate for his students, both academically and personally. He emphasizes the importance of learning, growth, and practical experience, rather than solely focusing on scholarly achievements and goals. Students feel this care, describing “an environment that maximizes learning opportunities and fosters the development of skills,” allowing them to truly collaborate rather than simply aim for the “right” answers.

In addition to his role in the classroom and lab, Wilmers also provides informal guidance to advisees, imparting valuable knowledge about the academic system, emphasizing the significance of networking, and sharing insider information. 

“Nate’s down-to-earth nature is evident in his accessibility to students,” expressed one nominator, who wrote that “sometimes we can freely approach his office without an appointment and receive valuable advice on both work-related and personal matters.” Moreover, Wilmers prioritizes his advisees’ career advancement, dedicating a substantial amount of time to providing feedback on thesis projects, and even encouraging students to take a lead in publishing research.

True mentorship often lies in the patient, careful transmission of craft — the behind-the-scenes work that forms the backbone of rigorous research. “I care about the details,” says Wilmers, reflecting a philosophy shaped by his own graduate advisors. Wilmers’ mentors instilled in him a deep respect for the less-glamorous but essential elements of scholarly work: data cleaning, thoughtful analysis, and careful interpretation. These technical and analytical skills are where real learning happens, he believes. 

By modeling this approach with his own students, Wilmers creates a culture where precision and discipline are valued just as much as innovation. His mentorship is grounded in the belief that becoming a good researcher requires not just vision, but also an intimate understanding of process — of how ideas are sharpened through methodical practice, and how impact comes from doing the small things well. His thoughtful, detail-oriented mentorship leaves a lasting impression on his students.

A nominator acclaimed, “Nate’s strong enthusiasm for my research, coupled with his expressed confidence and affirmation of its value, served as a significant source of motivation for me to persistently pursue my ideas.”

Lost nationwide: $1.6 billion for building emergency shelters, treating drinking water and adapting to a changing climate.

But Gov. Kathy Hochul is holding off on creating a statewide cap-and-trade market, drawing criticism and a lawsuit from advocates.

Researchers reviewed reports from S&P 500 companies and found businesses often downplay climate pollution and revise them later.

The decision is a victory for landowners who oppose carbon injection beneath their property.

Brussels wants to dig up more critical minerals in the bloc but says "regulatory bottlenecks" are slowing things down.

A sequence of three tropical cyclones coincided with the regular northeast monsoon to deliver rainfall totals unseen in decades.

Global production of new plastic is set to increase by 52 percent, twice as much as waste management systems.

Swine fever can’t infect humans but is a major threat to pig farmers.

A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code.

There are some jobs human bodies just weren’t meant to do. Unloading trucks and shipping containers is a repetitive, grueling task — and a big reason warehouse injury rates are more than twice the national average.

The Pickle Robot Company wants its machines to do the heavy lifting. The company’s one-armed robots autonomously unload trailers, picking up boxes weighing up to 50 pounds and placing them onto onboard conveyor belts for warehouses of all types.

The company name, an homage to The Apple Computer Company, hints at the ambitions of founders AJ Meyer ’09, Ariana Eisenstein ’15, SM ’16, and Dan Paluska ’97, SM ’00. The founders want to make the company the technology leader for supply chain automation.

The company’s unloading robots combine generative AI and machine-learning algorithms with sensors, cameras, and machine-vision software to navigate new environments on day one and improve performance over time. Much of the company’s hardware is adapted from industrial partners. You may recognize the arm, for instance, from car manufacturing lines — though you may not have seen it in bright pickle-green.

The company is already working with customers like UPS, Ryobi Tools, and Yusen Logistics to take a load off warehouse workers, freeing them to solve other supply chain bottlenecks in the process.

“Humans are really good edge-case problem solvers, and robots are not,” Paluska says. “How can the robot, which is really good at the brute force, repetitive tasks, interact with humans to solve more problems? Human bodies and minds are so adaptable, the way we sense and respond to the environment is so adaptable, and robots aren’t going to replace that anytime soon. But there’s so much drudgery we can get rid of.”

Finding problems for robots

Meyer and Eisenstein majored in computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, but they didn’t work together until after graduation, when Meyer started the technology consultancy Leaf Labs, which specializes in building embedded computer systems for things like robots, cars, and satellites.

“A bunch of friends from MIT ran that shop,” Meyer recalls, noting it’s still running today. “Ari worked there, Dan consulted there, and we worked on some big projects. We were the primary software and digital design team behind Project Ara, a smartphone for Google, and we worked on a bunch of interesting government projects. It was really a lifestyle company for MIT kids. But 10 years go by, and we thought, ‘We didn’t get into this to do consulting. We got into this to do robots.’”

When Meyer graduated in 2009, problems like robot dexterity seemed insurmountable. By 2018, the rise of algorithmic approaches like neural networks had brought huge advances to robotic manipulation and navigation.

To figure out what problem to solve with robots, the founders talked to people in industries as diverse as agriculture, food prep, and hospitality. At some point, they started visiting logistics warehouses, bringing a stopwatch to see how long it took workers to complete different tasks.

“In 2018, we went to a UPS warehouse and watched 15 guys unloading trucks during a winter night shift,” Meyer recalls. “We spoke to everyone, and not a single person had worked there for more than 90 days. We asked, ‘Why not?’ They laughed at us. They said, ‘Have you tried to do this job before?’”

It turns out warehouse turnover is one of the industry’s biggest problems, limiting productivity as managers constantly grapple with hiring, onboarding, and training.

The founders raised a seed funding round and built robots that could sort boxes because it was an easier problem that allowed them to work with technology like grippers and barcode scanners. Their robots eventually worked, but the company wasn’t growing fast enough to be profitable. Worse yet, the founders were having trouble raising money.

“We were desperately low on funds,” Meyer recalls. “So we thought, ‘Why spend our last dollar on a warm-up task?’”

With money dwindling, the founders built a proof-of-concept robot that could unload trucks reliably for about 20 seconds at a time and posted a video of it on YouTube. Hundreds of potential customers reached out. The interest was enough to get investors back on board to keep the company alive.

The company piloted its first unloading system for a year with a customer in the desert of California, sparing human workers from unloading shipping containers that can reach temperatures up to 130 degrees in the summer. It has since scaled deployments with multiple customers and gained traction among third-party logistics centers across the U.S.

The company’s robotic arm is made by the German industrial robotics giant KUKA. The robots are mounted on a custom mobile base with an onboard computing systems so they can navigate to docks and adjust their positions inside trailers autonomously while lifting. The end of each arm features a suction gripper that clings to packages and moves them to the onboard conveyor belt.

The company’s robots can pick up boxes ranging in size from 5-inch cubes to 24-by-30 inch boxes. The robots can unload anywhere from 400 to 1,500 cases per hour depending on size and weight. The company fine tunes pre-trained generative AI models and uses a number of smaller models to ensure the robot runs smoothly in every setting.

The company is also developing a software platform it can integrate with third-party hardware, from humanoid robots to autonomous forklifts.

“Our immediate product roadmap is load and unload,” Meyer says. “But we’re also hoping to connect these third-party platforms. Other companies are also trying to connect robots. What does it mean for the robot unloading a truck to talk to the robot palletizing, or for the forklift to talk to the inventory drone? Can they do the job faster? I think there’s a big network coming in which we need to orchestrate the robots and the automation across the entire supply chain, from the mines to the factories to your front door.”

“Why not us?”

The Pickle Robot Company employs about 130 people in its office in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where a standard — if green — office gives way to a warehouse where its robots can be seen loading boxes onto conveyor belts alongside human workers and manufacturing lines.

This summer, Pickle will be ramping up production of a new version of its system, with further plans to begin designing a two-armed robot sometime after that.

“My supervisor at Leaf Labs once told me ‘No one knows what they’re doing, so why not us?’” Eisenstein says. “I carry that with me all the time. I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with so many talented, experienced people in my career. They all bring their own skill sets and understanding. That’s a massive opportunity — and it’s the only way something as hard as what we’re doing is going to work.”

Moving forward, the company sees many other robot-shaped problems for its machines.

“We didn’t start out by saying, ‘Let’s load and unload a truck,’” Meyers says. “We said, ‘What does it take to make a great robot business?’ Unloading trucks is the first chapter. Now we’ve built a platform to make the next robot that helps with more jobs, starting in logistics but then ultimately in manufacturing, retail, and hopefully the entire supply chain.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02511-x

We consider potential non-permanence of carbon removal not as an obstacle but as a feature to focus on the compensation for the short-term warming of methane emissions. This could re-open climate finance for nature-based solutions and provide an immediate reduction in temperature stress.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02502-y

Decarbonization of the tourism sector faces challenges of structural lock-ins. This Comment challenges the conventional narratives of green tourism and emphasizes to practice more transformative eco-friendly solutions rather than to consume less, with ecotourism as a promising alternative to encourage more low-carbon behaviour in daily life.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02517-5

Recent United Nations policymaking on international emissions trading fails to reconcile longstanding flaws that could jeopardize the integrity of these programmes. We call for urgent action by policymakers to safeguard the future of the Paris Agreement.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02487-8

Methane emissions have a large short-term impact on temperature, which can be potentially offset by nature-based solutions that provide temporary carbon storage. This research demonstrates such matching could minimize intertemporal welfare trade-offs and avoid various risks for permanent removal.