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.

A new short film from MIT Open Learning explores the origin, influence, and global reach of MIT OpenCourseWare, reflecting on its role in establishing MIT, in 2001, as the first higher education institution to make educational resources freely available to learners across the world.

Part of MIT Open Learning, MIT OpenCourseWare helped spark a global movement that continues to shape how knowledge is shared across the world. The film, titled “The Courage to Be Open: MIT OpenCourseWare and the Democratization of Knowledge,” captures both the vision behind this work and the lasting impact it has had on expanding access to learning at scale.

Video by MIT Open Learning | 15 minutes, 22 seconds

For many graduate students, waking up at noon after a 4 a.m. bedtime is a sign of a night well spent. For a group of MIT students, it was simply the start of their workday — timed not to the sun, but to the aurora.

Their goal was simple: to study plasma phenomena using the aurora borealis as a natural laboratory. The process, less so; working largely in darkness in Fairbanks, Alaska, the students conducted experiments in temperatures that dipped as low as -25 degrees Fahrenheit, using red headlamps for visibility. The sun set before 3 p.m., and even at its warmest, temperatures barely reached 20 F.

The aurora provides a rare opportunity to observe plasma behavior directly, as charged particles that interact with Earth’s magnetic field produce visible, large-scale structures in the night sky. As Fairbanks is situated beneath a region of especially frequent auroral activity, it is one of the most reliable places in the world to observe these phenomena, though the conditions come with real constraints. 

For one thing, the extreme cold directly impacted the instrumentation. “Our laptops went from full battery to nearly empty in 10 minutes because of the cold,” says Leonardo Corsaro, a PhD student in physics at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at MIT. “We were trying to transfer data as fast as possible before everything shut down; it was a race against time!”

The challenges extended beyond the cold itself. “The cold can be managed,” says Leon Nichols, a PhD student in physics at PSFC. “With good planning, you can stay comfy in -20 F. The real difficulty was movement when deploying cameras far away from the roads. Walking through thick snow can burn up to 900 calories in an hour. We used cross-country skis to access some of the more remote terrain that would have taken hours to reach otherwise.”

But the conditions were more than worth it: During their time in Alaska, the group witnessed the strongest solar storm in the past two decades, bringing the aurora to life in ways few will ever experience. “It felt like we were the only ones there,” Sydney Menne, a PhD student in nuclear science and engineering, recounts, “removed from the Earth and just entirely surrounded by the aurora, fully immersed in it.” 

The team was granted access to observation facilities at Poker Flat Research Range through the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Over the course of the trip, students deployed multiple all-sky camera systems across distances of up to 100 miles, enabling simultaneous observations of auroral structures from different locations. These cameras, which capture 360-degree images of the night sky, were paired with magnetometers to correlate visual auroral features with changes in Earth’s magnetic field. 

By combining spatially distributed imaging with magnetic field measurements, the team aimed to capture how auroral structures change across space, with the long-term goal of supporting three-dimensional reconstructions of the aurora. This year’s campaign also expanded the measurements beyond imaging, using muon detectors to explore possible correlations between visual auroral activity, magnetic field changes, and particle detections, offering a potential window into how high-energy particles in the upper atmosphere relate to visible auroral activity.

Despite decades of study, many aspects of the aurora remain poorly understood, and each observation offers an opportunity to better characterize the behavior of plasma in near-Earth space. The team also observed a pulsating aurora, a relatively rare phenomenon in which strips of light stretching across the sky blink on and off multiple times per second. By combining instruments not traditionally applied to these problems and deploying low-cost systems at scale, the team is exploring new approaches to studying these phenomena. Insights from these observations can help improve our understanding of space weather, including how solar activity affects satellites, communications systems, and power infrastructure on Earth.

For some participants, the experience reshaped how they think about plasma physics itself. Corsaro explains, “In my research, it is easy to associate these phenomena with colorful plots and simulations, losing touch with the physical process. Seeing structures in the aurora, electric currents and flows forming and shifting overhead, brought a sense of reality to those concepts, and served as a reminder that real plasmas are far less neat and intuitive than theory suggests.”

The experience is part of a broader effort. This group of students represented the third iteration of the Geophysical Plasma Observation Expedition (GPOE), a project involving MIT students from the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, along with collaborating departments, that sends a cohort to Fairbanks, Alaska, each year. Faculty members now provide support for the expedition, while continuity is maintained through its student-driven structure, with each cohort including a mix of returning and new participants. The expedition is organized and led entirely by students and operates on an intensive, compressed timeline. Students are responsible not only for data collection, but also for instrument design, site selection, logistics, and post-processing, completing a full research cycle within a matter of months.

This year’s cohort included graduate students Leonardo Corsaro and Leon Nichols of PSFC; Sydney Menne of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering; and Noah Wolfe and Oleksandra “Sasha” Lukina of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. The group was accompanied by Professor Matthew Evans, professor of physics at MIT, who is affiliated with the LIGO Laboratory and the Kavli Institute. 

“This is an opportunity to go from concept to data analysis in just a few months,” says John Ball, a PhD student in nuclear science and engineering at PSFC. “That kind of compressed scientific cycle is rare, especially in our field.”

The program itself has relatively recent and somewhat unusual origins. It began in 2023, when graduate student Shon Mackie, frustrated by the lack of hands-on plasma diagnostic opportunities, noticed the solar cycle was approaching its peak and saw an opportunity to study plasma phenomena more directly. He drafted a short proposal to PSFC leadership, and the response from then-Director Dennis Whyte was two lines: “Sounds cool, literally! PSFC will fund this.” 

Since its launch in 2023, GPOE has evolved from a single-camera effort into a multi-instrument, multi-site campaign with growing participation, with each cohort building on the work of previous years by refining instrumentation, expanding observational coverage, and improving data collection strategies. 

This hands-on, student-driven approach has also created opportunities to extend the experience beyond MIT. In 2024, the program expanded to include a new outreach collaboration with the MIT Museum and the MIT Nord Anglia Collaboration, bringing approximately 65 high school students from around 20 schools worldwide to MIT to help design and build components of the all-sky camera systems used in the field. Working within a set of technical constraints, students developed and tested designs, ultimately producing 13 cameras that were deployed during the Alaska expedition.

The program has also begun to produce results beyond the expedition itself. Students have presented their work at major conferences, including the American Geophysical Union, and published findings in peer-reviewed journals such as Earth and Space Science. The group’s low-cost all-sky camera and magnetometer design is now being adopted by other research teams and community science initiatives, extending its impact beyond MIT.

Beyond its scientific goals, participants emphasized the broader impact of the experience. 

“Standing outside at midnight in Alaska, staring up at sheets of glowing plasma stretching thousands of kilometers across the sky, really brings home just how small and delicate our own place in the universe is,” says Ball. 

As the program continues to grow, students hope to expand both its technical capabilities and its reach, including more permanent instrumentation and expanding outreach partnerships. For many involved, the expedition represents not just a research opportunity, but a reminder of the scale and immediacy of the phenomena they study.

“Science is an adventure,” Corsaro says. “This kind of work reminds you why you became a scientist in the first place.”

Trump officials are “absolutely, totally freaked” about the political symbolism of breaking Biden’s high gas price record.

More than two dozen groups urged the justices to stop states, cities and counties from suing to force fossil fuel producers to pay for climate change.

The SpaceX rocket is key to the billionaire's aspirations to commercialize the solar system by establishing orbiting data centers and other space industries.

Premiums continue to increase but at a lower rate than in recent years, AM Best says. Insurers are more selective about coverage.

The Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, which offers insurance companies reinsurance at prices generally lower than those in the private market, is legally obligated to provide up to $17 billion in coverage.

Fears over the volatility of oil and gas supply is invigorating a global push to switch to clean electricity.

The pledge to provide $100 billion to poorer countries was reached three years in a row.

The Science Based Targets initiative is now revising its standards to better serve companies seeking to cut their carbon footprint against a backdrop of waning enthusiasm for climate action.

Investors for Paris Compliance, also known as I4PC, said it believed “investor accountability has reached its limits.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02667-0

Author Correction: Atmospheric warming contributions from airborne microplastics and nanoplastics

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02661-6

International collaboration has facilitated a global ocean observing system, providing data to measure ocean heat content at a resolution that enables the tracking of climate change. This study looks at the contributing nations and the risks to the network under the current political and economic climate.

MIT economist Whitney Newey PhD ’83, the Ford Professor of Economics, emeritus, has received the 2026 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics.

The biennial Nemmers prizes from Northwestern University recognize top scholars for their lasting contributions to new knowledge, outstanding achievements, and the development of significant new modes of analysis.

The university cited Newey — whose research has focused on econometrics — for producing “a body of work that has shaped the field of semiparametric econometrics, guided both econometricians and empirical researchers over several decades, and helped lay the foundations for modern machine learning-based inference.”

Newey will interact with Northwestern faculty and students through programming scheduled to occur during the 2026-27 academic year. The prize also includes a $300,000 award.

“I am delighted, deeply honored, and very grateful,” says Newey of the honor. “I am thrilled to have worked on and now work on ideas and approaches that are important for modern, machine learning-based inference and modern empirical economics more generally, most of this with such capable collaborators. This prize will expedite this work.”

Newey has been a leading figure in econometric theory for more than four decades, shaping both research and training in the field. He has done pathbreaking work on variance estimation, nonparametric simultaneous equations, consumer surplus estimation with general heterogeneity, and debiased machine learning.

“My colleagues and I are thrilled to see Whitney’s incredible career recognized with this high honor,” says Jonathan Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics and head of the Department of Economics. “His research has given birth to many of the econometric methods that are now second nature to economists, and those of us in his orbit also know him as a source of sage, comprehensive, and generous advice. Whitney symbolizes, through both his pathbreaking research and his great generosity, what has made MIT economics so great for so many years.”

Newey is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He is also a fellow of the International Association of Applied Econometrics, of CEMP at Jinan University, and an international fellow of the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CEMMAP) at University College London. He earned a BA and a PhD in economics from Brigham Young University and MIT, respectively.

Newey was named a 2020 Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association. He has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and received a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He has served as co-editor of Econometrica — a journal produced by the Econometric Society — and as program co-chair for the World Congress of the Econometric Society. He has also served on the Econometric Society’s Executive Committee. He previously taught economics at Princeton University and at MIT, and also previously served as the head of MIT’s Department of Economics. He has been a visiting scholar, professor, and lecturer at institutions across the world.

Even in the primary visual cortex, a brain region named for its specialized role in processing basic features of what the eyes see, not every neuron ends up answering the call to process properties of visual input. Maybe that’s because each neuron receives a wide variety of inputs via thousands of circuit connections, or “synapses,” and has to opt to respond to the visual information versus something else. In a new study in mice, neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT reveal how neurons that perform visual processing bring order to this input to get the job done.

Neuroscientists are keenly interested in what inputs, from among so many choices, will compel neurons to participate in the brain’s computations and functions, says senior author Mriganka Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience in the Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Neurons ultimately participate in brain circuits by “firing” an electrical action potential.

“The configuration of inputs, the kind of organization, the assembly of neurons that modulate each other to generate an action potential is the essence of how brain circuits process information,” Sur says. “These (visual cortex) cells are a microcosm of this very profound and big picture of neuroscience.”

In the open-access study in iScience, led by postdoc Kyle Jenks, the research team achieved their findings by meticulously imaging how not only neurons’ cell bodies, but also their individual synapses, formed on protrusions known as dendritic spines, responded as mice viewed moving images. They did this imaging for not only visually responsive neurons, but also for unresponsive neurons that nevertheless have visually responsive spines. That allowed them to analyze many key properties that might influence where a particular synapse forms, and how it influences responses at the cell body.

“This pulls together a lot of things that have been looked at in isolation and looks at them in one collective paper,” Jenks says. “We can compare how the neuron and the spines on that neuron respond to the same stimuli, and we can do this for both visually responsive and unresponsive neurons.”

In visual cortex layer 2/3, Jenks and the team genetically engineered neurons such that their individual dendritic spines would glow when surges of calcium indicated increased activity by the synapses on the spines. The scientists did the same for the cell body, or “soma,” to keep track of how the cell responded and even signaled its overall responses back out to the synapses. This way, as the mice watched black and white gratings at varying angles drift by their eyes in different directions, the scientists could keep track of each spine’s and each cell’s overall response to that patterned visual input.

In all, they tracked 11 neurons that responded to the visual input and 11 others that seemingly ignored it. That enabled them to find several rules:

Distance from the soma matters: On cells that responded to visual input, the responses of individual spines were much more likely to correlate with the activity of the soma the closer the spine was to the soma. In the same vein, the soma’s signal back out to spines, which is believed to influence the spines’ alignment with the soma’s preferences, was more likely to be detectable closer to the soma than farther away. 

Local clustering: On neurons that responded to visual input, spines formed distinct little enclaves of correlated responses with each other. Specifically, spines within 5 microns (five one-millionths of a meter) acted in concert. But then, right outside that 5-micron boundary, spines were less likely than chance to join in that activity. Sur speculates that these isolated pockets of activity sharpened the response from each enclave.

“Apical” vs. “basal:” The neurons the team studied have two distinct kinds of dendrites. Apical dendrites, which are very long and protrude from the top, or “apex,” of the neuron, tend to get a wide variety of inputs from across the cortex. Basal dendrites, which are shorter and extend out from the bottom, typically get more raw visual input. While basal dendrites indeed received more visual input than apical dendrites overall, Jenks found that apical dendrites on visually responsive neurons had significantly more visually responsive spines than those on non-responsive neurons. And both types of dendrites equally obeyed the rules above about distance from the soma.

Orientation selectivity matters most: Jenks, Sur, and the team used statistical modeling to determine which of many factors (the stimulus selectivity, reliability of the response, a spine’s distance from the soma, apical versus basal, etc.) most explained how correlated a spine’s responsiveness was with that of the soma. By a wide margin, how selective a spine was to the orientation of its preferred grating was the most important single factor.

“Our results reveal that synaptic inputs to excitatory layer 2/3 neurons in mouse (visual cortex) are not randomly arranged, but organized and distributed in a manner that correlates with multiple factors including somatic responsiveness, somatic tuning, branch type, distance from the soma, local correlations, and stimulus selectivity,” the researchers wrote.

The team’s findings can help advance studies of vision in the brain in multiple ways, Jenks and Sur say. Certain genetic mutations that affect how neurons connect in circuits can affect visual cortex neurons and vision, Sur says. Documenting these rules provides researchers with a baseline to compare against when examining the effects of such mutations. Jenks adds that the findings could inform efforts to model how neurons integrate synaptic inputs in their computations.

In addition to Sur and Jenks, the paper’s other authors are Gregg Heller, Katya Tsimring, Kendyll Martin, Asrah Rizvi, and Jacque Pak Kan Ip.

The National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, and the Freedom Together Foundation provided support for the study.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has elected 120 members and 25 international members for 2026, including six MIT faculty members and 10 additional alumni. 

Among MIT professors, Bengt Holmström, Michale Fee, Gareth McKinley ’91, Keith Nelson, Fan Wang, and Catherine Wolfram ’96 were elected in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” 

Additional alumni who were elected include Christopher J. Chang PhD ’02 (Chemistry); Cynthia J. Ebinger SM ’86, PhD ’88 (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences); Andrew Gelman ’85, ’86 (Mathematics and Physics); Richard L. Greene ’60 (Physics); Chuan He PhD ’00 (Chemistry); Pardis C. Sabeti ’97 (Biology/Life Sciences); Robert J. Shiller SM ’68, PhD ’72 (Economics); Daniel M. Sigman PhD ’97 (EAPS); Eero Simoncelli SM ’88, PhD ’93 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science); and Salil P. Vadhan PhD ’99 (Mathematics).

Membership in the National Academy of Sciences is one of the highest honors a scientist can receive in their career. The NAS is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Bengt Holmström is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, emeritus. He received his doctoral degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1978 and held faculty positions at Northwestern University and Yale University before joining the MIT faculty in 1994 with a joint appointment in economics and management.

Holmström is best known for his foundational research on the theory of contracting and incentives, for which he received the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (together with Oliver Hart of Harvard University). His extensive contributions to contract theory as applied to the theory of the firm, corporate governance, and liquidity problems in financial crises have had wide-ranging impacts, while bringing contract theory into mainstream economic thought.

In addition to the Nobel, Holmström’s research has been recognized with the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics and the Grand Cross of the Order of the Lion of Finland. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the American Finance Association. Holmström is also an elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Michale S. Fee is the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor of Neuroscience, head of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), and investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. His research explores how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors. Using the zebra finch as a model system, Fee investigates the neural mechanisms underlying birdsong — a behavior that young birds learn from their fathers through trial and error, much as human infants learn to speak through babbling. His research extends far beyond birdsong — the neural circuits controlling birdsong learning are closely related to human brain circuits disrupted in Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. Insights from Fee’s research could reveal new clues to the causes and potential treatments of these complex brain disorders.

After receiving his BE with honors in engineering physics at the University of Michigan in 1985, Fee studied applied physics at Stanford University, where he carried out his PhD thesis work in the laboratory of Steven Chu. In 1992, he began working as a postdoc in David Kleinfeld’s lab in the Biological Computation Research Department at Bell Laboratories. Four years later, he became a permanent member of the technical staff at Bell Labs and began working on the mechanisms of vocal sequence generation in the songbird. In 2003, he became an investigator at the McGovern Institute and a faculty member in BCS. In 2021, he was appointed BCS department head, continuing the department’s tradition of being led by scientists whose exemplary work makes MIT a world leader in brain science. Fee is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of multiple undergraduate and graduate teaching awards at MIT.  

Gareth H. McKinley ’91 is the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, former associate head and interim head of the department, and co-founder of Cambridge Polymer Group. McKinley’s research interests include non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, microfluidics, extensional rheology, field-responsive materials, super-hydrophobicity, drag reduction, and the wetting of nanostructured surfaces. His work focuses on understanding the rheology of complex fluids such as surfactants, biomaterials, gels, and polymers, which are ubiquitous in foods and consumer products. 

McKinley has made outstanding contributions to viscoelastic fluid mechanics, understanding flow instabilities and stretching flows. His research group has developed novel instrumentation and customized rheological analysis techniques that have driven the field of rheology for complex and soft fluids. His instrumentation and testing algorithms, along with freely-distributed code for analyzing large amplitude oscillatory shear flow, and broad-band “chirp” rheometry, are used worldwide in industry and academia . 

McKinley is the author of over 390 technical publications. He has won the Publication Award of the Society of Rheology twice (2007 and 2022), as well as the 2021 Walters Award from J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. He was awarded the Bingham Medal of The Society of Rheology in 2013, the Gold Medal from the British Society of Rheology in 2014, and the G.I. Taylor Medal from the Society for Engineering Science in 2022. In 2019, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and was also inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Katholieke University of Leuven, and in 2024 became a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Sciences. In 2025, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also became a foreign fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.  

Keith A. Nelson, the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, earned his BS in chemistry from Stanford University. After completing his doctoral studies in physical chemistry, also at Stanford, he conducted postdoctoral research with John P. McTague at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1982, Nelson joined the MIT Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor.

His distinguished career has been recognized with numerous honors, including the William F. Meggers Award, the Bomem-Michelson Award, and the Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids. Research in the Nelson Group focuses on the time-resolved optical study and control of  collective transformations in condensed matter, using pulses of light in the THz, optical, and X-ray spectral ranges and laser-generated strain waves to drive the modes of motion through which these changes occur.

Fan Wang is a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, investigator at the McGovern Institute, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT. She investigates the neural circuits that govern the dynamic interactions between brain and body, exploring how the brain generates sensory perceptions and controls movement. Wang uses cutting-edge techniques including optogenetics, in vivo electrophysiology, and in vivo imaging to make discoveries with profound clinical implications.

By developing innovative tools to study how brain circuits work, Wang discovered distinct populations of neurons activated by anesthesia that can suppress pain without blocking sensation, and can calm anxiety by regulating automatic body functions like heart rate. She also identified the brain circuits controlling rhythmic movements essential for exploration and communication. Together, these findings reveal how emotion, physiology, movement, and consciousness are deeply interconnected.

Before coming to MIT, Wang obtained her PhD from Columbia University working with Richard Axel, and received her postdoctoral training at the University of California at San Francisco and Stanford University with Marc Tessier-Lavigne. She became a faculty member at Duke University in 2003, where she was later appointed Morris N. Broad Professor of Neurobiology. Wang became an investigator at the McGovern Institute and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in 2021. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of multiple undergraduate teaching and graduate mentorship awards at MIT.  

Catherine D. Wolfram ’96 is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and professor of applied economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before coming to MIT Sloan, Wolfram previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics at the U.S. Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley. Before leaving for government service, she was the program director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environment and Energy Economics Program and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. She received a PhD in economics from MIT in 1996 and an BA from Harvard in 1989.

Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the United States, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets, and the impact of privatization and market restructuring in the United States and United Kingdom. She is currently working on projects at the intersection of climate, energy, and trade, including work on carbon border adjustment mechanisms and oil market sanctions. Since March 2025, Wolfram has served on the COP30 President’s Council on Economics, Finance, and Climate, and has chaired a working group on climate coalitions.

This spring, six reporters from The Associated Press’ climate desk traveled from cities across the United States to work with students from the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. Students developed and pitched local climate stories, then, over a four-day intensive weekend, worked with visual journalists from the AP to report and produce their pieces. Articles cover a broad spectrum of environmental topics, ranging from area kelp harvests that are used to produce biofuels to efforts to restore cranberry bogs in environmentally friendly ways, and include visual elements, like photography and videography.

The four collaborative pieces include:

• “How a retired cranberry bog helped change the game for wetland restoration,” by Jamie Jiang and Julia Vaz
• “Planes and ships could run on kelp someday, but there are serious hurdles,” by Zoe Beketova and Ana Georgescu
• “Massachusetts is dumping sewage into waterways. Grassroots organizations are fighting back,” by Ashley D’Souza and Lucie McCormick
• “One of America’s oldest weather observatories shows people the science behind our climate,” by Laura Martin Agudelo and Alex Megerle

“This workshop was an intense few days that offered a unique opportunity for MIT journalists to get feedback while in the field, reporting. The students brought enthusiasm and passion to the reporting, heading out before the sun came up and working long into the nights over the weekend for stories in the Boston area and beyond,” says AP’s Climate Photo Editor Alyssa Goodman, the workshop’s lead organizer. “For the AP team members who participated, it was also a rewarding opportunity, allowing us to share our passion for climate storytelling while getting to know these students, watching them build strong stories and gain experiences that will help them as they continue in journalism.”

The collaboration is unique, even among journalism programs. The Associated Press is one of the most prestigious, longest-running news wire services in existence. Nearly 4 billion people worldwide come in contact with AP journalism every day. The publication has won 59 Pulitzer Prizes, including 36 in photojournalism.

MIT student reporters say that the opportunity to directly work with journalists from the AP’s climate team and have their own stories published has been a highlight of their time in the Graduate Program in Science Writing.

“It was great to be in the field with a reporter and photographer from the AP News team, learning directly from her as the reporting unfolded,” says Zoe Beketova, whose story focused on kelp biofuels. “That kind of expertise is difficult to get in a static classroom setting, and I think my team learned a lot.”

Ana Georgescu says that the experience of working with the AP team was “like stepping into a real newsroom.” Georgescu adds that coordinating with AP editors and reporting teams in real time and under tight deadlines provided valuable on-the-ground experience.

“What made the biggest difference for me was being in the field alongside an experienced photojournalist and seeing how they read a scene in practice,” she says. “We were able to get immediate feedback on how we directed subjects, which scenes we chose, and how we integrated photography into the reporting process. That kind of hands-on, in-the-moment experience was incredibly helpful, and it’s made me really excited to keep exploring climate stories, as well as the visual side of journalism.”

About 2 billion people — just under a quarter of the world’s population — lack regular access to clean drinking water. And roughly 800,000 people annually die from illnesses associated with unsanitary water.

Drinking water access is a fundamental problem for human and economic development. The U.N., for instance, highlighted the issue in its Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, an ambitious 17-point agenda that specified safe drinking water as a basic global aim.

Past research shows that democracies, in comparison to other forms of government, tend to be more successful at delivering this kind of public good, which benefits a large portion of the population. This is likely due to accountability measures that include elections, greater transparency, and more freedom in civil society.

But now a study led by an MIT professor shows that across nearly 100 countries with developing economies, that dynamic has become more complex in the 21st century. While democracies are slightly ahead of non-democracies when it comes to providing at least some water, they have been falling behind when it comes to ensuring that there is safe water on tap. 

“Among low- and middle-income countries, which have not done as well economically, we found there wasn’t really a big difference between democracies and non-democracies in the provision of what is called basic drinking water,” says MIT political scientist Evan Lieberman, co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “But for safe drinking water, we found, surprisingly, that democratic countries were becoming less good at extending access.” 

While the study does not pinpoint the precise reasons for this, it suggests a lens for viewing the problem. Democracies tend to be better at delivering visible public goods, the kinds of things citizens can literally see — like infrastructure that delivers water. But the difference between safe and unsafe water is not necessarily visible and obvious, so public officials may not be as responsive.

“This is likely a big part of the equation, that the invisibility of safe water makes it a less compelling public good for politicians,” says Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, and director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.

The paper, “Beyond the tap: The limited value of democracy for delivering universal safe water access in low- and middle-income countries,” is published in the journal World Development. The authors are Lieberman, and Naomi Tilles, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford University.

Seeing is believing

To conduct the study, the scholars analyzed drinking water data recorded by the World Health Organization/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. That provides information for basic availability to water, defined as access to an improved water source with no more than 30 minutes of collection time; and access to safe drinking water, defined as an improved water source that is available on premises, available when needed, and free from potentially disease-producing contaminants, which range from fecal matter to harmful chemicals.

Examining 96 low- and middle-income countries, the researchers looked at a variety of measures pertaining to its democratic or non-democratic features, and ran 39,000 regressions to see how the form of government related to its provision of water. Overall, Lieberman and Tilles found that democratic governance is modestly associated with an increase in the basic availability of water, compared to non-democracies. However, the effect is not particularly robust.

The good news is that between 2000 and 2024, 81 of the 90 countries with data available in both years made gains in safe drinking water access. However, democratic countries have been less successful than their non-democratic counterparts in advancing the goal of achieving universal access. 

“Moreover, the gap between democracies and non-democracies seems to be getting a little bit larger over time,” Lieberman observes. 

Because the study is focused on establishing the overall empirical situation, the scholars do not claim to have determined why this trend has been emerging. Many newer democracies have struggled to establish high-functioning governance in some regions, which may influence their overall results. 

More broadly, Lieberman suggests, visibility matters. Past scholarship has shown that democracies perform relatively well in delivering visible public goods, especially in countries with little information in the public sphere. Delivering water generates attention for politicians in a way that keeping water safe does not. 

“Politicians may figure out they should do things citizens like, to stay in office, such as bringing water to an area,” Lieberman says. “You can have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and people feel it really happened. But water quality is often invisible.

It’s a more difficult challenge to ensure safe water: You have to do testing, prevent people from polluting, and you may need to treat the water.”

In any case, Lieberman notes, “Given what we find, what is clear is that the incentives are not aligned under the current systems for advancing safe-water access within all democracies. That provides opportunities for human agency to create incentives for citizens, nongovernment agencies, and governments to do what is needed.” 

Development for all

Lieberman comes to the topic of water access as an expert on African politics. His most recent book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty” (Princeton University Press, 2022), examines the vicissitudes of South African democracy. In the book and in general, he suggests that democracy is the most viable path toward development with “dignity,” meaning economic growth accompanied by liberties and equal treatment under the law. 

“I think democracy provides dignified development, by granting people recognition and participation, and that’s an extremely valuable thing,” Lieberman says.

Still, when it comes to the performance of many countries with regard to safe water, he says, “I think we just need to be clear-eyed about real problems.”

In some countries, he suggests, the time horizon of elected officials may also be relatively short-term, and they may be more oriented toward simpler problems than water safety. At the same time, other members of society need to find ways to make water safety a bigger issue in the eyes of the public. 

“There are important lessons for democracies to learn, and citizens in civil society who are aware of this challenge need to figure out ways to get people to care about it, to recognize the connection between illness and unsafe water, and to use political campaigns to advance their longer-term interests,” Lieberman says.

Overall, he adds, “There is something intrinsically important about democratic government. Then the question becomes how to make it work better to deliver really important outcomes like safe water.”

A group used Anthropic’s Mythos AI model to help find a kernel memory corruption vulnerability and exploit on Apple’s M5.

News article.