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.

Cisco Systems Case Has Major Implications for Global Human Rights

SAN FRANCISCO – U.S. technology companies should be legally accountable in U.S. courts for building tools that purposefully and actively facilitate human rights abuses by foreign governments, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in a brief filed Friday to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The brief filed in the case of Cisco Systems, Inc., et al., v. Doe I, et al. urges the high court to uphold the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit’s 2023 ruling that U.S. corporations can be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) – a law that lets noncitizens bring claims in U.S. federal court for international law violations – for taking actions in the U.S. that aided and abetted persecution and torture abroad. 

“This is not a case about a company that merely provided routers or other general-purpose technologies to a foreign government. It is about a company that purposefully and actively assisted in the persecution of a religious group,” the brief says. “There is a growing set of companies—including American companies—that provide surveillance technologies that are vulnerable to, and indeed are being used to, support gross human rights abuses. Because of this, the outcome of this case will have profound implications for millions of people who rely on digital technologies in their everyday lives, including to practice their religion.” 

The “Golden Shield” system that Cisco custom-built for the Chinese government was an essential component of persecution against the Falun Gong religious group—persecution that included online spying and tracking, detention, and torture. Victims reported that intercepted communications were used during torture sessions aimed at forcing them to renounce their religion. Falun Gong victims and their families sued Cisco in 2011 and a federal district judge dismissed the case in 2014. The case was delayed three times as the Supreme Court considered three prior ATS cases.   

The 9th Circuit appeals court – after proceedings including an amicus brief from EFF – reversed that lower decision, holding that U.S. corporations can be held liable under the ATS for aiding and abetting human rights abuses abroad. It also held that a company does not need to have the “purpose” to facilitate human rights abuses in order to be held liable; it only needs to have “knowledge” that its assistance helped in such abuses. It then held that the plaintiffs’ allegations showed that Cisco’s actions met both standards. The court also held that the fact that a technology has legitimate uses does not shield a company from liability for other uses that led to human rights abuses when the standards of international law are met. Taken cumulatively, Cisco’s actions in the U.S. were sufficient to allow the case to proceed, the 9th Circuit ruled.  

Cisco appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted review in January. The case, No. 24-856, is scheduled for argument on April 28. 

Cisco Systems is just one of many U.S. companies that make surveillance systems, spyware, and other products used by governments to violate people’s human rights. 

“This Court must not shut the courthouse door to victims of human rights abuses that are actively powered by American corporations,” the brief says. “In the digital age, repressive governments rarely act alone to violate human rights. They have accomplices—including technology companies that have the sophistication and technical know-how that those repressive governments lack.” 

For EFF’s amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court:  https://www.eff.org/document/2026-03-27-eff-amicus-brief-cisco-v-doe-scotus

For EFF’s Doe I v. Cisco case page: https://www.eff.org/cases/doe-i-v-cisco  

For the U.S. Supreme Court docket: https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-856.html  

 

Contact:  SophiaCopeSenior Staff Attorneysophia@eff.org CindyCohnExecutive Directorcindy@eff.org

The Hawaiian bobtail squid has bioluminescent bacteria.

Some oil and gas companies are working to lower climate-warming emissions, even if they aren’t saying much about it.

The International Finance Corp.’s investment in a Swedish startup aims to bring down operating costs for poor countries — especially in times of high oil prices.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum once described the carbon capture project as a “shining example of how industries can reduce emissions while investing in baseload generation.”

The Iran conflict is another reminder to diversify away from fossil fuels, the European Commission’s Teresa Ribera said during her Washington swing.

A clean power lobbying group wants to make Defense Department actions a litmus test for revived Capitol Hill talks.

Environmental groups hail a new law making it easier to install mangroves, oyster reefs and other nature-based coastal protection.

An Assembly proposal to reexamine the fundamentals of the state’s energy markets faces pushback from generators but garnered support from consumer advocates and a major utility.

The loss of ice has grave impacts on ecosystems and the people who live in the region. It’s also driving increased interest in new shipping routes and mining opportunities.

Despite the closures, total U.S. sustainable fund assets rose to $368 billion at the end of December from $344 billion a year earlier, according to Morningstar data.

A federal judge this month ordered the agency to take more steps toward restoring the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program.

The policy covers up to 4 million people in the coastal megacity of Lagos, Nigeria.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 27 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02606-z

Façade-integrated photovoltaics (FIPV) present a promising yet early-stage solution for mitigating building emissions. Combining global building datasets, climate projections and façade-scale simulations, researchers estimate that FIPV could deliver substantial economic and climate benefits.

As one of the first students in MIT’s new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program, Mariano Salcedo ’25 is researching the intersection between artificial intelligence and music visuals.

Specifically, his graduate research focuses on neural cellular automata (NCA), which merges classical cellular automata with machine learning techniques to grow images that can regenerate.

When paired with a stimulus like music, these images can “show” sounds in action.

“This approach enables anyone to create music-driven visuals while leveraging the expressive and sometimes unpredictable dynamics of self-organized systems,” Salcedo says. Through the web interface Salcedo has designed, users can adjust the relationship between the music’s energy and the NCA system to create unique visual performances using any music audio stream.

“I want the visuals to complement and elevate the listening experience,” he says.

Last year Salcedo, the Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation, earned a BS in artificial intelligence and decision making from MIT, where he explored signal processing in machine learning and how a classical understanding of signals can inform how we understand AI. Now he’s one of five master’s students in the Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program’s inaugural cohort.

The program, directed by professor of the practice in music technology Eran Egozy ’93, MNG ’95, is a collaboration between MIT Music and Theater Arts in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the School of Engineering. It invites practitioners to study, discover, and develop new computational approaches to music. It also includes a speaker series that exposes students and the broader MIT community to music industry professionals, artists, technologists, and other researchers.

Rigopulos ’92, SM ’94, is a video game designer, musician, and former CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, a company he co-founded with Egozy in 1995. Harmonix is now a part of Epic Games, where Rigopulos is the director of game development for music.

“MIT is where I was first able to pursue my passion for music technology decades ago, and that experience was the springboard for a long and fulfilling career,” says Rigopulos. “So, when MIT launched an advanced degree program in music technology, I was thrilled to fund a fellowship to help propel this exciting new program.”

Egozy is enthusiastic about Salcedo’s work and his commitment to further exploring its possibilities. “He is a beautiful example of a multidisciplinary researcher who thinks deeply about how to best use technology to enhance and expand human creativity,” he says.

Salcedo has been selected to deliver the student address at the 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony for the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “It’s an honor and it’s daunting,” he says. “It feels like a huge responsibility,” though one he’s eager to embrace. His selection also pleases Egozy. “I am super excited that Maraino was chosen to deliver this year’s keynote,” he enthuses.

Changing gears

Growing up in Mexico and Texas, Mariano Salcedo couldn’t readily indulge his passion for creating music. “There are no bands in Mexican public schools,” he says. While some families could pay for instruments and lessons, others like Salcedo’s were less fortunate.

“I’ve always loved music,” he continues. “I was a listener.”

Salcedo began his MIT journey as a mechanical engineering student, applying to MIT through the Questbridge program. “I heard if you like engineering and science that attending MIT would be a great choice,” he recalls. “Nerds are welcomed and embraced.” While he dutifully worked toward completing his MechE curriculum, music and technology came calling after a chance encounter with an LLM.

“I was introduced to an LLM chatbot and was blown away,” he recalls. “This was something that was speaking to me. I was both awed and frightened.” After his encounter with the chatbot, Salcedo switched his major from mechanical engineering to artificial intelligence and decision making.

“I basically started over after being two thirds of the way through the MechE curriculum,” he says. He learned about the possibilities available with AI but also confronted some of the challenges bedeviling researchers and developers including its potential power, ensuring its responsible use, human bias, limited access for people from underrepresented groups, and a lack of diversity among developers. He decided he might be able to change that picture.

“I thought one more person in the field could make a difference,” he says.

While completing his undergraduate studies, Salcedo’s love of music resurfaced. “I began DJ’ing at MIT and was hooked,” he says. While he hadn’t learned to play a traditional instrument, he discovered he could create engaging soundscapes with technology. “I bought a digital audio work station to help me make music,” he continues.

Egozy and Salcedo met in 2024 while Salcedo completed an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program rotation as a game developer in Egozy’s lab. “He was incredibly curious and has grown tremendously over a very short time period,” Egozy says. Egozy became an informal, though important, mentor to Salcedo. “He brings great energy and thoughtfulness to his work, and to supporting others in the [music technology and computation graduate] program,” Egozy notes.

Salcedo also took a class with Egozy, 21M.385/21M.585/6.4450 (Interactive Music Systems), which further fed his appetite for the creativity he craved while also allowing him to indulge his fascination with music’s possibilities. By taking advantage of courses in the HASS curriculum, he further developed his understanding of music theory and related technologies.

“I took a class with professor Leslie Tilley, 21M.240 (Critically Thinking in Music), which helped establish a valuable framework for understanding music making,” he says, “while a class like 6.3000 (Signal Processing) helped me connect intuition with science.”

Working across disciplines

While Salcedo is passionate about his music and his research, he’s also invested in building relationships with his fellow students. He’s a member of the fraternity Sigma Nu, where he says he “found a home and community.” He also took a MISTI trip to Chile in summer 2023, where he conducted music technology research. Salcedo praises the culture of camaraderie at MIT and is grateful for its influence on his work as a scholar. “MIT has taught me how to learn,” he says.

Professors encouraged him to present his research and findings. He presented his work — Artificial Dancing Intelligence: Neural Cellular Automata for Visual Performance of Music — at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in Singapore in January 2026.

Salcedo believes his research can potentially move beyond music visualization. “What if we could improve the ways we model self-organized systems?” he asks. “That is, systems like multicellular organisms, flocks of birds, or societies that interact locally but exhibit interesting behaviors.” Any system, Salcedo says, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Developing the technology used to design his application can potentially help answer important ethical questions regarding AI’s continued expansion and growth. The path to his work’s development is both daunting and lonely, but those challenges feed his work ethic.

“It’s intimidating to pursue this path when the academy is currently focused on LLMs,” he says. “But it’s also important to explain and explore the base technology before digging into more nuanced work, which can help audiences understand it better.” Knowing that he has the support of his professors helps Salcedo maintain excitement for his ideas. “They only ask that we ground our interests in research,” he says.

His investigations are impacting his work as a musician. “My music has gotten more interesting because of the classes I’m taking,” he says. He’s also interested in understanding whose music the academy and the world hears, exploring biases toward Western music in the canon and exploring how to reduce biases related to which kinds of music are valued.

“The work we do as technologists is far less subjective than we’re led to believe,” he believes.

Salcedo is especially grateful for the support he’s received during his time at MIT. “Program faculty encourage a variety of pursuits,” he says, “and ask us to advance our individual aims rather than focusing on theirs.” During his time in the graduate program, he notes with enthusiasm how often he’s been challenged to pursue his ideas.

Ultimately, Salcedo wants people to experience the joy he feels working at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. Music and technology impact nearly everyone. Inviting audiences into his laboratory as participants in the creative and research processes offers the same kind of satisfaction he gets from crafting a great beat or solving for a thorny technical challenge. Helping audiences understand his work’s value fuels his drive to succeed.

“I want users to feel movement and explore sounds and their impact more fully,” he says.

Proteins are far more than nutrients we track on a food label. Present in every cell of our bodies, they work like nature’s molecular machines. They walk, stretch, bend, and flex to do their jobs, pumping blood, fighting disease, building tissue, and many other jobs too small for the eye to see. Their power doesn’t come from shape alone, but from how they move. 

In recent years, artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to design entirely new protein structures not found in nature tailored for specific functions, such as binding to viruses, or mimicking the mechanical properties of silk for sustainable materials. But designing for structure alone is like building a car body without any control over how the engine performs. The subtle vibrations, shifts, and mechanical dynamics of a protein are just as critical to its functions as its form.

Now, MIT engineers have taken a major step toward closing the gap with the development of an AI model known as VibeGen. If vibe coding lets programmers describe what they want and then AI generates the software, VibeGen does the same for living molecules: specify the vibe — the pattern of motion you want — and the model writes the protein. 

The new model allows scientists to target how a protein flexes, vibrates, and shifts between shapes in response to its environment, opening a new frontier in the design of molecular mechanics. VibeGen builds on a series of advances from the Buehler lab in agentic AI for science — systems in which multiple AI models collaborate autonomously to solve problems too complex for any single model.

“The essence of life at fundamental molecular levels lies not just in structure, but in movement,” says Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor of Engineering in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. “Everything from protein folding to the deformation of materials under stress follows the fundamental laws of physics.”

Buehler and his former postdoc, Bo Ni, identified a critical need for what they call physics-aware AI: systems capable of reasoning about motion, not just snapshots of molecular structure. “AI must go beyond analyzing static forms to understanding how structure and motion are fundamentally intertwined,” Buehler adds.

The new approach, described in a paper March 24 in the journal Matter, uses generative AI to create proteins with tailor-made dynamics.

Training AI to think about motion 

The revolution in AI-driven protein science has been, overwhelmingly, a revolution in structure. Tools like AlphaFold solved the decades-old problem of predicting a protein’s three-dimensional shape. Existing generative models learned to design new shapes from scratch. But in focusing on the folded snapshot — the protein frozen in place — the field largely set aside the property that makes proteins work: their motion. “Structure prediction was such a grand challenge that it absorbed the field’s attention,” Buehler says. “But a protein’s shape is just one frame of a much longer film, and the design space extends through space and time, where structure sits on a much broader manifold.” Scientists could design a protein with a particular architecture. They couldn’t yet specify how that protein would move, flex, or vibrate once it was built.

VibeGen does something no protein design tool has done before. It inverts the traditional problem. Rather than asking, “What shape will this sequence produce?” it asks, “What sequence will make a protein move in exactly this way?”

To build VibeGen, Buehler and Ni turned to a class of AI diffusion models, the same underlying technology that powers AI image generators capable of creating realistic pictures from pure noise. In VibeGen’s case, the model starts with a random sequence of amino acids and refines it, step by step, until it converges on a sequence predicted to vibrate and flex in a targeted way.

The system works through two cooperating agents that design and challenge each other. A “designer” proposes candidate sequences aimed at a target motion profile. A “predictor” evaluates those candidates, asking whether they’ll actually move the way the designer intended. The two models iterate back and forth like an internal dialogue, until the design stabilizes into something that meets the goal. By specifying this vibrational fingerprint as the design input, VibeGen inverts the usual logic: dynamics becomes the blueprint, and structure follows.

“It’s a collaborative system,” Ni says. “The designer proposes, the predictor critiques, and the design improves through that tension.”

Most sequences VibeGen produces are entirely de novo, not borrowed from nature, not a variation on something evolution already made. To confirm the designs actually work, the team ran detailed physics-based molecular simulations, and the proteins behaved exactly as intended, flexing and vibrating in the patterns VibeGen had targeted.

One of the study’s most striking findings is that many different protein sequences and folds can satisfy the same vibrational target — a property the researchers call functional degeneracy. Where evolution converged on one solution, VibeGen reveals an entire family of alternatives: proteins with different structures and sequences that nonetheless move in the same way. “It suggests that nature explored only a fraction of what’s possible,” Buehler says. “For any given dynamic behavior, there may be a large, untapped space of viable designs."

A new frontier in molecular engineering

Controlling protein dynamics could have wide-ranging applications. In medicine, proteins that can change shape on cue hold enormous potential. Many therapeutic proteins work by binding to a target molecule — a virus, a cancer cell, a misfiring receptor. How well they bind often depends not just on their shape, but on how flexibly they can adapt to their target. A protein that is engineered with motion could grip more precisely, reduce unintended interactions, and ultimately become a safer, more effective drug.

In materials science, which is an area of Buehler’s research, mechanical properties at the molecular scale affect their performance. Biological materials like silk and collagen get their strength and resilience from the coordinated motion of their molecular building blocks. Designing proteins that are stiffer, flexible, or vibrate in a certain way could lead to new sustainable fibers, impact-resistant materials, or biodegradable alternatives to petroleum-based plastics.

Buehler envisions further possibilities: structural materials for buildings or vehicles incorporating protein-based components that heal themselves after mechanical stress, or that adjust in response to heavy load.

By enabling researchers to specify motion as a direct design parameter, VibeGen treats proteins less like static shapes and more like programmable mechanical devices. The advance bridges artificial intelligence, medicine, synthetic biology, and materials engineering — toward a future in which molecular machines can be designed with the same precision and intentionality as bridges, engines, or microchips.

“VibeGen can venture into uncharted territory, proposing protein designs beyond the repertoire of evolution, tailored purely to our specifications. It’s as if we’ve invented a new creative engine that designs molecular machines on demand,” Buehler adds.

The researchers plan to refine the model further and validate their designs in the lab. They also hope to integrate motion-aware design with other AI tools, building toward systems that can design proteins to be not just dynamic, but multifunctional; machines that sense their environment, respond to signals, and adapt in real-time.

The word “vibe” comes from vibration, and Buehler sees the connection as more than wordplay. “We've turned 'vibe' into a metaphor, a feeling, something subjective,” he says. “But for a protein, the vibe is the physics. It is the actual pattern of motion that determines what the molecule can do, the very machinery of life.”

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and MIT’s Generative AI Initiative. 

A new report from 404 Media sheds light on how automated license plate readers (ALPRs) could be used beyond the press releases and glossy marketing materials put out by law enforcement agencies and ALPR vendors. In December 2025, Georgia State Patrol ticketed a motorcyclist for holding a cell phone in his hand. According to the report, the ticket read, “CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND.” 

If you’re thinking that this sounds outside of the scope of what ALPRs are supposed to do, you’re right. In November 2025, Flock Safety, the maker of the ALPR in question, wrote a post about how they definitely are in compliance with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In this post, which highlighted what ALPRs are and what they are not, the company writes: “What it is not: Flock ALPR does not perform facial recognition, does not store biometrics, cannot be queried to find people, and is not used to enforce traffic violations.” (emphasis added)

Well, apparently their customers never got the memo and apparently the technology’s design does not explicitly prevent behavior the company officially and publicly disavows. 

Or at least this used to be the case: Flock now lists six different companies providing traffic enforcement technology on its “Partner program”  site. Public records also show that speed enforcement cameras have been connected to Flock's ALPR network. 

EFF and other privacy advocates have long warned about mission creep when it comes to surveillance infrastructure. Police often swear that a piece of technology will only be used in a particular set of circumstances or to fight only the most serious crimes only to utilize it to fight petty crimes or watch protests.  

We continue to urge cities, states, and even companies to end their relationship with Flock Safety because of the incompatibility between the mass surveillance it enables and its inability to protect civil liberties—including preventing mission creep.

The National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) has announced that MIT Director of Athletics G. Anthony Grant, head of the MIT Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation, is among 28 winners of the 2025-26 NACDA Athletic Director of the Year (ADOY) Award.

The ADOY Award highlights the efforts of athletics directors at all levels for their commitment and positive contributions to student-athletes, campuses, and their surrounding communities. Grant is currently in his sixth year at MIT, leading one of the most comprehensive Division III athletics programs in the country. In his role, he directs a department featuring 33 intercollegiate teams, including four Division I rowing programs, while providing opportunities for over 800 student-athletes.

MIT achieved remarkable success under Grant's leadership during the 2024-25 academic year, winning four NCAA championships. Women's swimming and diving captured the first national title in program history, while the women's cross country and track and field program swept all three NCAA championships in 2024-25, a historic first for an NCAA Division III women's program and the first MIT women's titles in cross country, as well as women's indoor and outdoor track and field. 

The year also saw MIT win 13 individual national champions, with 158 student-athletes earning All-American honors, 166 named All-Region, 227 named All-Conference, and 24 named CSC Academic All-America. Multiple head and assistant coaches claimed national, regional, and conference recognition. Nine teams claimed conference titles, while MIT earned seven NCAA/national top 10 finishes, as men's indoor track and field (7th), men's swimming and diving (9th) and men's lightweight crew joined the four national title winners.

Despite having begun his tenure at MIT just weeks prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, MIT has continued to excel and grow under Grant's leadership. The Engineers have won six NCAA team national championships, finishing in the top seven of the NACDA LEARFIELD Directors' Cup standings every year since MIT returned to play following the pandemic. Most recently, MIT finished sixth in the final LEARFIELD Directors' Cup standings for the 2024-25 academic year, marking the 10th time the Engineers finished in the top 10, while MIT captured the NEWMAC Women's Presidents Cup for the 10th straight season and 11th time overall in 2024-25.

Grant was instrumental in negotiating an exciting re-branding effort that included the transition of the team uniforms and other apparel to Nike, as he worked in conjunction with BSN Sports as the official apparel provider. He also increased fundraising efforts with a record-breaking year for annual gifts in 2022. To wit, Grant has overseen several key initiatives, including a record-breaking fundraising campaign and a $5 million renovation to the varsity athletics Sports Performance Center that reopened in 2024-25. Most recently, Grant announced a state-of-the-art facility upgrade and turf renovation of the Fran O'Brien Baseball Field and Briggs Softball Field, with work currently underway. 

In addition to the on- and off-field accomplishments of MIT's student-athletes and coaches, Grant has intentionally strengthened department culture by focusing on MIT's mission and shared values and behaviors, which were re-branded in 2020 under his leadership. Grant embodies an open-door leadership style, creating an environment where staff at all levels feel comfortable engaging with him. He values feedback and open communication, and fosters a supportive, respectful, and inclusive environment. He actively supports employee initiatives and has worked with student-athlete leaders to enhance the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee to improve real-time feedback collection and engagement at meetings. 

Grant came to MIT from Metropolitan State University of Denver, where he also served as the director of athletics. Prior to MSU Denver, Grant served as the interim director of athletics at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, where he also worked as associate director of athletics for seven years. In addition, Grant has served as the athletic academic coordinator at the University of Iowa. 

He earned his master's degree from Temple University in sport and recreation, along with a PhD in health and sport studies with a specialization in athletic administration from the University of Iowa. His leadership extends beyond MIT, as he is also involved with the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, the National Association of Division III Athletics Administrators (NADIIIAA), and the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association. Most recently, he was named to the NADIIIAA Board of Directors for 2025-26. 

The ADOY Award program is in its 28th year and has recognized a total of 633 deserving athletics directors to date. The award spans seven divisions (NCAA FBS, FCS, Division I-AAA, II, III, NAIA/Other Four-Year Institutions and Junior College/Community Colleges). Winners will be recognized in conjunction with the 61st Annual NACDA and Affiliates Convention at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the beginning of the Association-Wide Featured Session on Tuesday, June 9. Additional history surrounding the ADOY award, including a list of past winners, can be found here.

If your ISP can be liable for huge amounts of money for not terminating your access to the internet because of accusations that you—or someone in your household or college network—has committed copyright infringement, that is dangerous. We live in a world where high speed internet access is a necessity for participation in everyday life. That’s why liability for ISPs for their customers’ actions should not be expanded.

Last fall, EFF filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an expansive theory of secondary copyright liability that threatened to impose massive damages on internet service providers and other technology companies simply for offering widely used services. Yesterday, the Court agreed.

In Cox v. Sony, the Court reversed a Fourth Circuit decision that had upheld a billion-dollar verdict against internet provider Cox Communications. Writing for the majority, Justice Thomas explained that contributory liability is limited to two situations: when a defendant actively induces infringement, or when it provides a product or service that it knows is tailored for infringement.

This framework closely tracks the approach EFF urged in our amicus brief. As we explained, courts should look to patent law for guidance in defining the boundaries of secondary copyright liability. Patent law recognizes liability where a defendant actively induces infringement, or distributes a product knowing that it lacks substantial non-infringing uses. The Court’s opinion adopts that same basic structure.

EFF also emphasized the broader public interest at stake in preserving these limits. Expansive theories of secondary liability do not just affect large internet providers. They can chill innovation, threaten smaller technology companies, and undermine the development of general-purpose tools that millions of people rely on for lawful speech, creativity, education, and access to information. When liability turns on generalized knowledge that some users may infringe, service providers face pressure to over-police user activity or withdraw useful services altogether.

The Court also made clear that mere knowledge that some customers use a service to infringe is not enough. Copyright holders must show that the provider intended its service to be used for infringement. That intent can be established only through active inducement or by showing that the service is specifically designed for unlawful uses—not simply because the service provider failed to take affirmative steps to prevent infringement.

Applying this standard, the Court held that Cox could not be liable. There was no evidence that Cox encouraged or promoted infringement. The record instead showed that Cox implemented warning systems, suspended service, and in some cases terminated accounts in an effort to discourage unlawful activity.

Nor was Cox’s internet access service tailored to infringement. The Court emphasized that general-purpose internet connectivity is capable of substantial lawful uses. Treating the provision of such services as contributory infringement would improperly expand secondary liability beyond the limits recognized in prior Supreme Court decisions.

The Court also rejected the Fourth Circuit’s broader rule that supplying a service with knowledge it may be used to infringe is itself sufficient for liability. That theory conflicts with decades of precedent warning against imposing copyright liability based solely on knowledge or a failure to take additional preventive steps.

EFF is pleased with yesterday’s opinion. We will continue to advocate for the public’s ability to build, use, and innovate with new technologies.

Link to our amicus brief: 
https://www.eff.org/document/us-s-ct-cox-v-sony-eff-et-al-amicus-brief

Link to the opinion:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-171_bq7d.pdf

Related Cases: Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment