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.

When you picture a worker at a retail store, you probably think of someone at a cash register or helping a customer. But employees also spend a lot of their time combing through stockrooms and shop floors, fulfilling requests or online orders and generally trying to keep track of all their inventory.

Keeping track of inventory takes so much time, in part, because retailers don’t always know where everything is located. That’s why when you ask a store associate to check if they have a shirt in your size, it may take them 20 minutes to get back to you.

Cartesian is helping retailers keep track of inventory with a technology invented at MIT. The system uses wireless signals from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to items to find their precise location in a store, from the stockroom to the shop floor.

Last year, Cartesian did a study with a retailer and found its platform delivered meaningful annual savings at the store level by streamlining inventory tracking, optimizing workflows, and improving customer experiences.

“The big problem we’re solving is that about 50 percent of working hours in retail stores go to managing inventory,” says co-founder Fadel Adib SM ’13, PhD ’17, an associate professor at MIT. “That is roughly a $15 billion problem in the U.S. alone. We use algorithms to decipher indoor locations using wireless signals. The core technology enables a new level of indoor localization.”

Cartesian is already deployed in more than 700 stores across 15 countries and is working with one of the world’s largest fashion groups, Inditex, which is the parent company to brands like ZARA, Pull&Bear, and Oysho.

Beyond retailers and warehouses, Cartesian’s platform could also improve indoor location tracking for manufacturers, logistics operators, and robotics companies.

“The broad vision for what we are doing is spatial AI,” says Adib. “Today, AI does extremely well in the digital world. Now it has to move into the physical world. That means allowing machines to perceive their environment in such a way that they can interact with it. That’s where spatial AI comes in and where Cartesian sits.”

From technology to product

Adib, who holds a joint appointment in MIT’s Media Lab and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been studying wireless signals at the Institute for more than 15 years, dating back to research during his master’s degree.

“My group today researches how to use wireless signals to sense the world in ways that were not possible before,” Adib says. “We develop the fundamental technology and then we build systems around them. Our goal is to see these systems deployed in the real world for impact.”

When Adib joined MIT’s faculty, the first project he worked on was indoor localization using RFID tags. Isaac Perper ’20, MEnG ’21 later joined his lab as a student, and together they developed machine-learning algorithms to process RFID data to translate them into location patterns, with an initial focus on helping robots locate RFIDs indoors.

In 2021, Adib went through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which challenges researchers to interview potential customers to find the right problems to solve with their technologies. That’s when he realized how big of a problem inventory management is for retailers.

Cartesian was officially founded by Adib and Perper in the beginning of 2023, after they received a small business award from the National Science Foundation. The pair worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to license patents from Adib’s lab. They also received support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service.

“Our goal was to reduce the cost of the technology to make it scalable,” Adib recalls. “Isaac focused on simplifying the product, leveraging progress in machine learning, and making it fast. It was a lot of iterating and testing early on.”

Retail workers spend much of their time locating items for a number of reasons. They might get an online order to fulfill, need to restock store shelves, or get a customer inquiry about items in the back.

Stores differ in how they organize their inventory. Most separate items by categories in specific shelves and bins then use barcodes or inventory systems that tend to get outdated fast.

“It’s a big problem for stores because customers may just leave before asking an employee to look for their size, or customers may get frustrated and leave if it takes too long,” Adib says. “The associate also wastes time looking for items they could spend doing higher-value work.”

Cartesian’s platform works with retailers’ existing handheld RFID readers, which store associates already use to manage inventory. Each store installs Cartesian’s software into their existing inventory apps or uses a custom app for employees to access directly.

“The RFID readers are how stores tell what’s in stock and what’s out of stock,” Perper says. “We figured out a way to leverage the same scans they’re already using with the reader, put the data they generate into our machine-learning algorithms, and generate maps of where all the items are.”

Customers can build analytics on top of Cartesian’s technology to keep track of inventory levels, show customers maps of where each item is located, and create other services.

“They use our location intelligence platform and build different products on top,” Adib says. “We can work with any device, any store, any type of RFID. It’s a simple interface. All the sophisticated location algorithms sit in the cloud.”

Beyond retail

Cartesian signed its first big contract in 2025 and soon expanded to several hundred stores. One of Cartesian’s advantages is its ability to quickly scale. Perper says they can add a store in about one minute. Cartesian’s team doesn’t even have to travel to a new store to turn on its system if it’s already working with the company.

“It’s as simple as flipping a switch, preparing the data, and sending it to our customers,” Perper says. “One of our first big bets was, ‘Can we build this entirely on existing hardware?’ That bet is starting to pay off.”

Cartesian’s models can also work with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, which the company plans to use with customers in other verticals.

“Right now, we’re focused on applications in retail, but this technology has a lot of value in manufacturing, warehouses, and other locations,” Adib says.

Cartesian’s team aims to be deployed in tens of thousands of stores over the next year and then begin expanding beyond retail into industries like manufacturing and robotics.

“What’s most exciting about Cartesian to me is we’ve built a lot of the technology foundation, and now that we have the fundamentals in place, we hope to build specific application layers,” Perper says. “Then we can ask customers in different verticals about their problems and apply our technology in different ways to solve it.”

Carbon capture is an important climate change mitigation strategy, but it faces technological barriers and can be energy-intensive and expensive. To help make necessary advances in this area, a team of MIT researchers, with support from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), are exploring energy-efficient and scalable alternatives to conventional carbon dioxide (CO2) capture methods. 

Conventional amine scrubbing, which is the current standard for CO2 capture, is energy-intensive and difficult to scale, limiting its impact despite the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and upgrade CO2 into valuable products. In a new article published in Nature Energy, MIT researchers — graduate students Fang-Yu Kuo of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Gi Hyun Byun of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE); Professor Betar Gallant of MechE; and former MCSC postdoctoral Impact Fellows Glen Junor and Akachukwu Obi — investigate a promising alternative to these conventional CO2 capture methods. Their findings could move the needle on achieving efficient and flexible carbon capture and removal.

In their paper, the team explores an alternative, electrochemically mediated CO2 capture (EMCC). This approach enables electrification of CO2 separation — driven ideally by renewables — but currently faces challenges, such as relying on sorbents that require highly reducing potentials, where oxygen reduction side reactions become significant. This can compromise both efficiency and long-term performance. To tackle this shortcoming of EMCC, the MIT team researched whether N-heterocyclic imines (NHIs) is a useful new class of EMCC sorbent.

“NHIs have shown promise in recent years as CO2 sorbents because of the ease of NHI molecular modifications for tuning basicity,” says Fang-Yu Kuo. “Our work translates these NHIs for the first time into the EMCC application space, and demonstrates that NHI-based sorbents can be modulated electrochemically for CO2 separation by a unique separation mechanism that avoids the need of applying highly reducing potentials.”

The team’s initial research establishes a novel bis(NHI) structure that can enable a theoretical CO2 modulation of two molecules per electron during cell operation. The initial published result also indicates that with further molecular engineering of bis(NHI) structures to strengthen CO2 binding affinity, the bis(NHI) could operate in more diverse electrolyte environments, opening new possibilities to optimize system performance in terms of electron efficiency, energy efficiency, and operational flexibility.

“A critical future direction of our work involves gaining deeper mechanistic insight into the stability and degradation pathways of the bis(NHI) radical cation,” says Kuo. “Understanding these pathways will inform the rational design of next-generation bis(NHI) molecules, enabling longer operational lifetimes and enhanced cycling durability for practical deployment.”

MIT, in collaboration with Georgia State University and a growing network of educational institutions, has announced expanded work under PATH (Pathways for AI Training and Hiring) — a multiyear initiative designed to scale effective, affordable, industry-aligned AI training for entry-level and current workers, with a particular focus on transforming community colleges into engines powering an AI-enabled workforce for the nation. 

“In the era of AI, economic opportunity and mobility will increasingly depend on whether people can develop practical, industry-relevant AI skill sets and mindsets, not just familiarity with tools,” says Cynthia Breazeal, principal investigator (PI) of PATH and professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. “That means combining hands-on, work-learn experiences with strong technical foundations and the responsible design, professional, and human skills that employers are looking for.”

To make that possible, the initiative is building state-based hubs anchored by research universities and community colleges. Each hub works with regional employers to design curricula that reflect local industry needs. The program also provides professional development for instructors and develops modular, open educational materials that institutions can adapt and share.

“Artificial intelligence is shaping every sector of the economy, and the United States will need far more people who understand how to build with these technologies and apply them responsibly,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “Through PATH, MIT RAISE is using our convening power to bring community colleges, industry, research universities, and government together to build human-centered AI pathways that lead to shared prosperity. When research universities contribute their expertise to expand access and economic mobility, we strengthen both the nation’s workforce and our collective capacity for innovation.”

Unlike many large-scale online training efforts, PATH emphasizes in-person, collaborative learning. Students work in teams to address real problems brought by industry collaborators. These projects mirror the kinds of challenges graduates will face in the workplace, helping them build technical skills alongside the judgment, communication, collaboration, and ethical awareness that employers increasingly value.

The initiative’s first two hubs launched earlier this year in Massachusetts and Georgia.

“As PIs for the Georgia PATH hub, we are very excited with the significant early momentum, with over 1,000 GSU students enrolled in PATH courses,” says Arun Rai, regents’ professor, Howard S. Starks Distinguished Chair, and director of the Center for Digital Innovation at Georgia State University (GSU), with Balasubramaniam Ramesh, regents’ professor and the George E. Smith Eminent Scholar’s Chair at GSU. “Our curriculum, co-designed with MIT RAISE and spanning AI foundations, data science, deep learning, and agentic AI systems, is now being shared with partner institutions including Georgia Gwinnett College, GSU Perimeter College, and Clark Atlanta University. By leveraging the University System of Georgia’s FinTech Academy to expand work-based learning opportunities, we are building a collaborative ecosystem that rapidly advances the state’s AI workforce capabilities and creates tangible, job-ready skills for our diverse student population.” 

GSU President Brian Blake says, “Our collaboration with MIT reflects a shared commitment to strengthening the nation’s AI talent pipeline. Georgia State University brings a distinctive strength to this effort — the ability to prepare students from all backgrounds for AI-enabled careers at scale. By combining academic rigor with strong industry partnerships and work-based learning, we are translating advances in AI into practical skills and expanding access to opportunities in this transformative era.”

In Massachusetts, students at Quinsigamond Community College are participating in Data Science in Action, a course that introduces AI-enabled data analysis and engineering. The class includes a hands-on Action Lab, modeled after experiential learning programs at the MIT Sloan School of Management. David Birnbach, lecturer at MIT Sloan, leads the design framework for the PATH Action Labs. Working with industry partners, students tackle real data challenges while building portfolio projects and professional connections. 

Beyond individual courses, PATH is building clearer pathways for students to turn AI learning into real job opportunities. Through industry-informed micro-credentials and a shared set of workforce skills, students will gain practical abilities that employers are actually looking for, along with the human skills needed to succeed at work, like communication, problem-solving, and collaboration. 

The MIT skills taxonomy team, led by Katerina Bagiati in collaboration with Professor Tom Malone from the MIT Sloan Center for Collective Intelligence, is mapping the skills and roles emerging in AI across fields such as financial technology (fintech), information technology, and business operations, with plans to expand into areas such as health care, manufacturing, and creative media. The goal is to help students build skills that are relevant, recognized, and directly connected to growing career paths.

The initiative is supported by a grant to MIT from Google.org, which is helping MIT and its collaborators build a multi-state network for AI workforce development.

“MIT’s PATH initiative offers a blueprint for expanding opportunity in the age of AI,” says Shanika Hope, director of Google.org. “By connecting research universities, community colleges, and industry partners, it helps translate innovation into real jobs and sustainable career pathways.”

PATH is led by Breazeal, who has brought together a cross-MIT team with expertise in AI literacy, workforce pedagogy, educator professional development, open education, research, and the future of work. Breazeal is a professor and director of the MIT RAISE Initiative. Eric Klopfer, director of the STEP Lab and co-director of the MIT RAISE Initiative, serves as a co-PI on this award. The GSU leadership team includes PIs Arun Rai and Balasubramaniam Ramesh.

When Sonya Atalay conducted her doctoral research, she studied pottery in Çatalhöyük, a remarkable ancient site in Turkey. It’s one of the world’s earliest known urban settlements, flourishing by at least 7000 B.C.E.

Yet even as Atalay was conducting field research and writing her doctoral thesis, she was scrutinizing standard archaeological practices, believing the discipline to be in need of an update. Indeed, it’s an issue she had been grappling with going back to her undergraduate days, when she first went to a dig site near Rome.

“When I started doing archaeological work, the local people were labor,” says Atalay, now a professor at MIT. “They came, they cleaned your clothes, they cleaned the dig house, they weren’t thought of as having important connections with the archaeology, and that really bothered me.” 

Surely, she believed, a culture producing the remarkable things worth studying is worth including in that research process, too. As she says, given “their place-based knowledge, it seemed like we should be talking to people about their heritage. They’re the ones who live on or near sites. I started thinking about what archaeology could look like if it included local communities in a meaningful way.” 

Atalay completed her dissertation while continuing to examine how researchers could alter their approach. She has since published articles and books about the subject, worked to introduce new research practices, and today, as an MIT professor, is a leader in the growing field of community-based archaeology, building partnerships between researchers and local residents.

Among other things, Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS), a National Science Foundation-backed project that helps train scholars and implement community-oriented work. She is convinced that community-oriented work creates better outcomes in many fields. 

“A community-based approach is highly applicable beyond archaeology and anthropology, outside of the social sciences,” Atalay says. “I think there’s a lot for engineers or designers or folks in a lot of different fields to learn by involving community members in the research process.”

Atalay joined MIT with tenure in 2024, where she is a professor in MIT’s Anthropology Section.

Roll me away

Atalay grew up in Michigan, not far from Detroit, where she was the first person from her family to go to college. Growing up, she hoped to be a physician. 

“I wanted to be a doctor. That’s what I thought I was going to do,” Atalay says. “I wanted to be a pediatrician.” 

But she also developed an interest in ancient history, something she can date to a precise moment. A 4th grade teacher named Barbara Eisman would give Atalay extra reading when Atalay would finish homework early. One day, Eisman produced a book about ancient Greece and Rome. 

“I remember thinking, this is amazing, discovering things I never knew existed,” Atalay says. “And that stuck with me.”

By the time Atalay enrolled at the University of Michigan, she was still planning to become a doctor. But as an undergraduate, she enjoyed taking archaeology electives to such an extent that she simply changed career paths. 

“I loved it and just got so into it,” Atalay says. And Michigan even provided opportunities for undergraduate fieldwork near Rome, although that meant Atalay had to dig deep to finance her first trip to an archaeological site. 

“I worked at a nightclub and put myself through college by bartending,” Atalay says. “I had a motorcycle, so I was tooling around Ann Arbor. Then I sold my motorcycle to buy the plane ticket to go to Rome so I could take part in the archaeological fieldwork.”

“Relationships are the task”

After graduating, Atalay was accepted into the graduate program for anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned an MA and then, in 2003, her PhD. While Atalay’s doctoral research focused on the ancient pottery at Çatalhöyük, she maintained a steady interest in helping archaeology evolve. 

And increasingly, she started drawing on her own observations about fieldwork in the U.S., too. Atalay is Native American, and she recognized the same patterns of exclusion and archaeological extraction being applied to the historical study of Native American societies. 

One additional influence in shaping Atalay’s thinking was the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by the U.S. federal government in 1990. It requires federal institutions to return human remains, sacred objects, and other cultural materials to Native Americans. Seeing the law enacted reinforced to Atalay that progress in this domain is possible. 

“The push for that act was really about Indigenous people standing up for sovereignty. To return what was wrongfully taken and to carry out research in an ethical way moving forward, there has to be trust and partnerships built,” Atalay says. While observing advocates trying to get NAGPRA passed, she adds, “I learned a lot from them.”

Over time, Atalay went on to serve multiple terms on the commission overseeing NAGPRA, first appointed by President George W. Bush and then President Barack Obama. Ultimately, her perspective has been fed by many sources, converging on similar themes.   

“I was really uncomfortable with how local people weren’t involved with studies of their own heritage,” Atalay says. “So I started thinking about what would it look like to truly partner with communities to plan and carry out research. And that’s how I started my first book, trying to set up a model for how to do ethical work in partnership with communities.”

That book, “Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities” was published by the University of California Press in 2012. In her work, Atalay has focused on a range of specific practices, from research development to fieldwork methods and protecting intellectual property rights for Indigenous people. But the starting point for any work, she emphasizes, is relationship-building and the creation of mutual trust. 

“I tell students, ‘Relationships are the task,’” Atalay says. “I know you want to get in there and carry out fieldwork, but the relationships are everything. Sitting down and talking and sharing life stories and developing trust. Those relationships move at the speed of trust. And that takes time to develop. That’s the key piece. And that’s going to lead to good research outcomes.”

Stronger together

After receiving her PhD, Atalay had postdocs at UC Berkeley as well as Stanford University, then joined the faculty at Indiana University. In 2012, Atalay moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining MIT two years ago.

Currently Atalay is working on multiple projects. As director of CBIKS, she is running an organization with eight research “hubs,” where nearly 100 affiliated scholars are working with over 50 Indigenous communities to establish partnerships that advance environmental, and scientific research projects. 

In some cases, the scholars are involved in familiar-seeming archaeological work, while other center projects involve topics such as enhancing salmon farming, clam cultivation, or returning native seeds from museums to tribes in the Southwest, where elders still retain knowledge for their appropriate use and care.

“Our team members across multiple disciplines are learning from each other,” Atalay says. “So archaeologists and heritage management scholars are talking to environmental scientists and team members who study seeds and agriculture.” The NSF sometimes refers to this as ”convergence science.” The center’s name uses the metaphor of braiding, to represent the ways different strands of knowledge can be woven together to form a sturdy whole.

“With braiding, each of the strands retains its integrity, and they’re stronger when they’re brought together,” says Atalay. She is also currently working on another book project, “Braiding Knowledges,” about how the community-based approach can enhance and strengthen research within universities; it is under contract with the University of Arizona Press. 

At MIT, Atalay adds, she is delighted by the range of students who have started taking her classes, begun thinking about applications to all kinds of projects, and who in turn may end up leading innovative, community-oriented projects of their own.

“I would encourage anyone, no matter what field they’re in, to think about working with a community,” Atalay says. “What we’re learning isn’t just about working with Indigenous communities. It’s applicable outside of anthropology, outside of the social sciences. There is a lot you can learn and contribute to society by carrying out research this way, in any number of fields.”

In 2026, the hype for artificial intelligence agents is louder than ever before. These semi-autonomous programs can “think” and execute well-defined tasks in areas like customer service and software development, typically using language models (LMs). But fields like medical diagnosis and scientific discovery require them to inquire about a vast range of solutions in uncertain environments, which LMs struggle with.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) peered deeper into LMs to understand their main issues in high-stakes settings. Their test: “Battleship,” a classic guessing game that’s helped cognitive scientists study how humans seek information. 

CSAIL and SEAS scholars added a twist by reframing the game around asking and answering natural language questions. In their “Collaborative Battleship” game, one participant is a “captain” who inquires about where hidden ships are, while their teammate plays the “spotter” by responding to those questions in real-time.

The researchers first had over 40 humans play the game together, collecting their questions and yes-no answers to build the “BattleshipQA” dataset. These results were a helpful point of comparison when the team tested state-of-the-art LMs (like GPT-5) and smaller models (like Llama 4 Scout) on their game. Without training the models beforehand, they found that top LMs can “beat” humans at “Battleship” — that is, complete the game in fewer turns — but smaller systems are far less rational.

The chief issue was that many models are simply not adept at coming up with useful questions. To get LMs to inquire in ways that reveal more information about hidden ships, the researchers gave each model a Monte Carlo inference strategy, which carefully measures the likelihood of different options being correct with each response. The result: AI models that can beat regular players at “Battleship,” regardless of scale.

Perhaps the most striking results were Llama 4 Scout’s gains. As a relatively small LM, it only beat humans 8 percent of the time. But with refinements to its inference strategy, the model reached a “Battleship” win rate of 82 percent versus humans. This careful and efficient style of asking questions also enabled the model to outpace a frontier model (GPT-5), while operating at around 1 percent of its cost.

On top of this improvement, the researchers shrank the gap between humans and LMs in answering questions. While GPT-5 was a reliable spotter that helped models finish games faster, smaller systems had a bad habit of giving the wrong answers about where ships were hidden. The models saw an accuracy boost of 15 percent on average when they began converting questions into code that explicitly tells them how to verify their answers (for example, having the model run a quick search of an area when asked if a ship was there). 

“Today’s language models are primarily optimized to answer complex queries, but it’s less clear whether they learn to ask good questions for themselves,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Gabriel Grand SM ’23, who is a lead author on a paper about the work. “Our work shows that asking informative questions depends on the ability to predict and simulate the world. We find that when we give agents access to a ‘world model,’ they ask better questions and make discoveries more efficiently.”

A sea change for LMs

The team’s first focus was getting LMs to ask better questions. By implementing Monte Carlo inference strategies, the LMs reason about potential guesses as individual particles. The ones that appear more valid with each answer from the spotter would be weighted more heavily, sort of like game balls that inflate or deflate each turn. With this more calculated, adaptive approach, the captain could make inquiries that extracted considerably more info from the spotter.

The scientists then turned to the widely used programming language Python to help out AI spotters. Each question the captain asked was automatically converted into an encoded command. For example, a question like, “Is there a ship in column one that spans two rows?” turns into instructions for the spotter LM to search the area in question and assess how wide the digital game piece is. By giving the model clear directions in a language it understands particularly well, each system gave correct answers considerably more often. The lightweight system GPT-4o-mini saw a nearly 30 percent performance bump, for instance, and even the large model Claude 4 Opus jumped about eight points.

“The field has seen a lot of success from ‘auto-formalization’ strategies, in which LMs generate code to verify their solutions,” says senior author Jacob Andreas, an MIT electrical engineering and computer science associate professor and CSAIL principal investigator. “What I find most exciting about this work is that it opens up the possibility of using these techniques to generate better solutions in the first place, by improving LMs’ exploration and information gathering capabilities. We are excited to scale this work up from scientific domains to applications like coding and mathematical problem-solving.”

Let’s play something else

But how would this approach fare in other board games? The team tested their newly equipped LMs at “Guess Who?”, where large and small models skillfully whittled down 100 options to correctly guess which hidden character had been chosen. Llama 4 Scout was successful 30 percent of the time, but after Grand and his colleagues’ tweaks, it completed the task on over 72 percent of its runs. Meanwhile, GPT-4o leapt from 62 percent to 90 percent. GPT-5 was the spotter in each game to ensure questions were answered as accurately as possible.

While LMs have made promising progress in both games, there’s room for improvement. For instance, the models still struggle to answer complex questions, compared to humans. OpenAI researcher, recent Harvard graduate, and coauthor Valerio Pepe adds that “GPT-5 can beat your average ‘Battleship’ player, and gets a hair better with our methods. However, expert players are still hard to beat for all models, unlike in chess, where even top players don’t succeed against AI systems.”

The researchers’ findings show that AI agents have untapped potential in “needle-in-a-haystack” discovery — navigating a massive space of options to find a rare solution to scientific challenges. While improved information-seeking skills would make them excellent research assistants with, say, identifying a compound’s molecular structure, the researchers caution that “Collaborative Battleship” is a somewhat simple test bed. They’d like to test LMs in more complex settings, where the systems have to consider far more options.

Grand also plans to have humans and AI models collaborate to study whether they work better together. The models might also benefit from a bit of fine-tuning on game simulations, and with more computing power, LMs would have more advanced inference capabilities to predict how a game will evolve. 

“As AI systems become more agentic, the hardest problems turn out to be social ones: tracking common ground, resolving misunderstandings, and adapting to different partners over time,” says Robert Hawkins, assistant professor of linguistics at Stanford University, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “This work elegantly captures these phenomena in a controlled collaborative setting, and makes a compelling case that the real bottleneck for AI agents isn’t just the calculation of optimal questions, but the pragmatic reasoning needed to make the most of their answers.”

Grand and Pepe wrote the paper with two CSAIL principal investigators: MIT Associate Professor Jacob Andreas and MIT Professor Joshua Tenenbaum. Their work was supported, in part, by the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the FinTechAI@CSAIL initiative, a Sloan Research Fellowship, Intel, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation. They showcased their paper as an oral presentation at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in April.

Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media, faculty director of the MIT Media Lab, and director of the Opera of the Future research group, will receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music and Dance in America — the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. 

As a composer and music tech pioneer, Machover has helped expand music’s possibilities for artists and audiences alike through his work in participatory opera, artificial intelligence, and creative technologies. He joins a roster of previous George Peabody Medal recipients that includes Stevie Wonder, Misty Copeland, Herbie Hancock, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Leonard Bernstein.

In the citation for the Peabody Medal, Peabody Institute Dean Fred Bronstein writes: “The breadth and depth of Tod Machover’s career — his work in participatory opera, as an educator and faculty director of the MIT Media Lab, his genuinely groundbreaking and prescient work at the intersection of music and technology, along with an overall and broad impact on the American music scene — make him an ideal recipient for the Peabody Medal … Machover continues to provide inspiration especially in the fast-evolving relationship between AI and the creative process. We are honored to welcome to campus a true pioneer and thought leader.”

Hailed as a “musical visionary” and “America’s most wired composer,” Machover is recognized as one of the most innovative composers active today. He is praised for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries and for developing technologies that expand music’s potential for everyone. 

Machover was the first director of musical research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM in Paris and was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. His work has been recognized by organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the French Culture Ministry.

The Peabody Institute, the first music conservatory in the United States, advances a dynamic model of the performing arts, empowering musicians and dancers from diverse backgrounds to create and perform at the highest level. As division of Johns Hopkins University, Peabody provides opportunities for interdisciplinary studies and is a leading voice at the intersection of art and education.

In the United States, children routinely receive an injectable form of the polio vaccine. This vaccine is very effective at preventing illness, but it doesn’t block transmission of the polio virus as well as the oral polio vaccine does.

Poliovirus is usually transmitted through contaminated food or water, so the GI tract is where the body is first exposed. Because the oral vaccine induces a mucosal immune response within the GI tract, it is much more effective at preventing infection and spread of the virus. However, there is a small chance that the oral vaccine can become infectious, so many countries have stopped using it.

Researchers at MIT have now come up with a way to modify the injectable vaccine so that it can also promote a mucosal immune response. This vaccine could help to achieve polio eradication while avoiding the risks of the oral polio vaccine.

“People who are vaccinated with the injectable vaccine are not getting sick, but they may be helping the virus circulate. Mucosal immunity could help lower that shedding and ideally eliminate it,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator in MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

The researchers’ new vaccine consists of the current injectable, inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), delivered with a nanoparticle-based adjuvant that helps steer immune cells to the mucosal lining of the intestine. In a study of rats, the researchers found that this vaccine produced a 20-fold increase in the type of antibodies needed for mucosal immunity, compared to IPV alone.

Jaklenec and Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Advances. MIT postdoc Behnaz Eshaghi is the lead author of the paper. 

Targeting polio

Polio, which can cause paralysis in severe cases, is now rare in most of the world due to extensive vaccination campaigns. The virus is highly contagious and is most commonly spread through consumption of food or water contaminated with the stool of an infected person.

Cases are occasionally seen in the United States and other countries, and the virus is endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While most of these cases are caused by the virus spreading among unvaccinated individuals, some cases may be due to the evolution of the live viruses used in the oral polio vaccine (OPV). These viruses are attenuated, meaning they are alive but weakened. In rare cases, they can mutate and evolve to become infectious again.

It’s also possible that wild poliovirus can be spread by people who have received the injected polio vaccine. These people would likely not experience any symptoms, but they could still shed the virus in their stool. Eventually, this could expose someone who isn’t vaccinated. Studies have shown that even in countries that with very high polio vaccination rates, the virus can be detected in wastewater.

To boost the chances of completely eradicating polio, it would be ideal to use a vaccine that cannot evolve to cause infection, like the current injectable IPV, and would also induce mucosal immunity, like the OPV. 

In hopes of achieving that, the MIT researchers teamed up with researchers at Harvard Medical School who have shown that using a derivative of vitamin A as a vaccine adjuvant can help stimulate immune cells to go to the GI tract.

That adjuvant, known as Am80, works well, but to generate a strong response, it needs to be injected for several days in a row, which is not feasible for most vaccine campaigns. 

To eliminate the need for repeated daily injections, the researchers set out to develop a nanoparticle formulation that would enable the adjuvant to be released slowly over several days. They tested several different types of nanoparticles and found that the one that worked best was a lipid nanoparticle (LNP).

“The purpose of the nanoparticle is making sure that we can engineer a platform with a sustained release of the cargo for a few days,” Eshaghi says. “That way we can overcome the bottleneck that for free administration of Am80 you need multiple daily injections.” 

Mucosal immunity

In tests in rats, the researchers delivered an injection of an inactivated polio vaccine, similar to the one that is now used in the United States, along with a separate injection of Am80 encapsulated in LNPs. After the first dose, boosters were given at four weeks and eight weeks.

After injection, the nanoparticles accumulate in the lymph nodes, where they interact with B and T cells that are also exposed to the polio vaccine. This interaction stimulates the B and T cells to produce two surface proteins that act as homing signals directing them to the GI tract.

The B cells also begin producing a type of antibodies called IgA, which protect body surfaces from infection by coating the mucosal membranes. In addition, the rats also produce IgG antibodies that circulate in the bloodstream, similar to the antibodies that are normally produced in response to the injected polio vaccine.

“IPV is a safe vaccine, but it cannot create mucosal immunity. OPV can create that mucosal response, but it is not as safe,” Eshaghi says. “By adding Am80 to lipid nanoparticle as an adjuvant, we are combining the safety of IPV with an adjuvant that can produce the mucosal immunity that normally you can only get with OPV.” 

The researchers now plan to test the vaccine in additional larger animal models, where they will inject the vaccine and adjuvant mixed together.

Using Am80 or other adjuvants to induce a mucosal response could also help researchers design improved vaccines for other pathogens that infect the GI tract, or for diseases that infect the lungs or reproductive tract. 

“You could potentially add it to any vaccine that’s injected,” Jaklenec says. “This particular work shows that cells can be directed to the gut and increase enteric mucosal immunity. Whether it works for the respiratory or vaginal mucosa is not yet clear.”

The research was funded by the Gates Foundation.

With help from a novel cross-linking molecule, MIT chemists have shown they can substantially improve the ballistic impact resistance of common polymers, including polystyrene and a type of rubber used to make shoe soles.

Polystyrene is a hard, glassy polymer that is used to make many types of plastic containers, such as bottles and mugs, as well as disposable cutlery. It is also found in coatings for electronic devices, and its foam form is the basis for Styrofoam and other lightweight packaging. (While sometimes labeled with recycling code No. 6, polystyrene is difficult to recycle and rarely collected for reuse in the U.S.)

To make the polymer more resistant to sudden impact, the MIT team added weak bonds scattered throughout the material as cross-links, which allows the material to dissipate energy much more effectively under deformations. When struck by a projectile, these weak bonds selectively break at the site of impact to open up pathways for enhanced energy absorption.

The researchers found that this approach can also fortify styrene-butadiene-styrene rubber, and they are now investigating whether it will also work for other types of polymers such as latex or the rubber that is used to make tires. 

“These cross-linkers can substantially increase the amount of energy that the material absorbs under ballistic impact. You can imagine many applications of that, especially if this could be generalized to other polymers,”says Jeremiah Johnson, the A. Thomas Geurtin Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Johnson and Keith Nelson, the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature. Former MIT postdocs Zhen Sang and Suong T. Nguyen and MIT graduate student Kwangwook Ko are the paper’s lead authors.

Tougher plastics

In a study published in 2023, Johnson and colleagues at MIT and Duke University showed that they could make polymers tougher using a counterintuitive strategy: adding weak cross-linkers that are distributed throughout a polymer network. These weak linkages, also called mechanophores, break under tearing conditions in a way that helps preserve the stronger bonds that bear the load, allowing the material to dissipate more energy.

“As a crack starts to propagate through the material, these mechanophores split in two, which helps to dissipate energy and redirect where the crack goes. That means you have to put in more energy to tear the material,” Johnson says. 

Unlike their previous study, which examined toughening under slow tearing conditions, the new Nature study aimed to develop mechanophore-enabled strategies for resisting rapid deformation, such as that caused by sudden impact. The researchers were especially interested in applying the strategy to some of the most widely used polymers, such as polystyrene.

To do that, they developed a way to directly incorporate mechanophores as cross-links into common polymers. Then, they used a system invented by Nelson — laser-induced microprojectile impact testing (LIPIT) — to study how the resulting polymers respond to projectile impacts. With this system, tiny projectiles — silica beads about 10 microns in diameter — are fired at the film at about 750 meters per second (more than 1,600 miles per hour). The amount of energy absorbed by the material can be calculated by measuring the change in the particle’s velocity before and after it passes through the film. 

“We first developed this method to study microparticle impact and penetration into bulk polymer samples, where we would monitor particle propagation through about 100 microns of material and analyze after impact how polymer morphology had changed,” Nelson says. “Our new measurements show how much additional information can be extracted from particle velocities before and after penetration through a thin layer. They also show deeply informative deformation patterns both during particle impact and afterward.”

This technique allowed the researchers to mimic the type of forces that might be seen in the real world when a plastic object is hit with another object, or when you drop your phone on the ground. In their experiments, the researchers showed that mechanophore cross-linked polystyrene was able to absorb substantially more energy from an impact than regular polystyrene.

“It turned out that the mechanophore leads to substantial increases in energy dissipation compared to both uncross-linked and conventionally cross-linked polystyrene, a behavior that had not been observed in related previous work,” Johnson says.

Absorbing impact

To figure out how the mechanophores help make polystyrene more impact resistant, the MIT team enlisted help from collaborators at MIT, Purdue University, Northwestern University, and Duke University. 

Through experiments and simulations, they found that when a high-speed particle strikes the material, it raises the temperature at the impact site high enough to form a mobile zone. In this zone, the mechanophore bonds are selectively broken under force, opening controlled pathways that better absorb the energy of impact while leaving the area beyond the impact site relatively unaffected and stable.

“What is particularly attractive about this approach is the ability to bestow these properties upon ‘off-the-shelf’ commodity plastics, both glassy and elastomeric, with minimal chemistry which makes it in principle quite scalable and relevant. This study combines an elegant approach while providing an in-depth mechanical analysis of the failure mechanism,” says Yoan Simon, an associate professor in the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the research.

The researchers also found that they could insert these mechanophores into styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS) rubber — which is used in shoe soles as well as asphalt and roofing materials — and observe a similar effect. They are now exploring whether this approach could also work with a related material, styrene-butadiene rubber, which is one of the major components of tires. 

If successful, this technology could yield longer-lasting tires and also cut down on the amount of microplastics generated when tires contact the road, which is estimated to account for at least 10 percent of the microplastics in the environment. 

“Materials with energy-absorbing mechanophores could one day help keep your vehicle's tires from blowing out on the highway or provide more protective cases for personal electronics,” says Katharine Covert, program director of the U.S. National Science Foundation Centers for Chemical Innovation, which invested in the team’s research. “This work really demonstrates how valuable new insights can be rapidly generated by bringing together researchers with different areas of expertise.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation Center for the Chemistry of Molecularly Optimized Networks, the U.S. Army Research Office through MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, a Schmidt Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports.

But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding. A company that invests in a state-of-the-art model might still receive inaccurate or incomplete information.

To fill this performance gap, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab developed a multifaceted resource for AI users that is specifically designed to teach vision-language models (VLMs) how to effectively interpret charts. 

They used a novel data generation method to build a state-of-the-art dataset that includes more than a million varied charts. The dataset also encodes many visual, linguistic, and numerical components of each chart image, which enable models to robustly reason about the information in a chart.

The researchers used this dataset, called ChartNet, to train a series of open-source VLMs.  Many of these smaller models significantly outperformed orders of magnitude larger, commercial models on tasks like data extraction and chart summarization.

By enabling open-source models to outperform their commercial counterparts, ChartNet could allow small firms with limited budgets to more readily utilize AI. The open-source dataset can be used to improve the capabilities of AI models for tasks like business trend analysis and scientific figure interpretation.

“We developed ChartNet to be a one-stop shop for chart understanding, covering basically anything that an AI model and a practitioner who is training that model might need. We hope our work motivates researchers to achieve state-of-the-art performance with smaller models that don’t require infinite amounts of computation,” says Jovana Kondic, an MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on ChartNet.

She is joined on the paper by many co-authors from MIT, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, and IBM Research, including Pengyuan Li, a research staff member at IBM Research; Dhiraj Joshi, a senior scientist at IBM Research; Isaac Sanchez, a software engineer at IBM Research; Aude Oliva, director of strategic industry engagement at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, MIT director of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, and a senior research scientist in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Rogerio Feris, a principal scientist and manager at the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab. The research will be presented at IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference.

A dataset bottleneck

Researchers have made great strides developing generative AI models that excel at natural language processing and reasoning about natural images. But less work has focused on interpreting complex multimodal data contained within charts, Kondic says.

Yet for large and small businesses in nearly every industry, chart understanding is a critical task.

“The finance industry thrives on charts. If vision-language models can extract information out of charts, like descriptions of trends, that facilitates a lot of workflows that happen downstream,” Joshi says.

The lack of high-quality training data is a major bottleneck holding back the development of VLMs that can accurately interpret charts. Many datasets contain limited chart images pulled from the internet and often lack the necessary scale and additional information to help a model interpret the underlying data.

“A vision-language model, unlike our brains, may need to see thousands of examples during training to reliably recognize something as a line chart,” Kondic says.

The researchers sought to overcome those shortcomings by generating synthetic data. Synthetic data are artificially generated by algorithms to mimic the statistical properties of actual data. 

The ChartNet dataset holds more a million high-quality chart images, along with the corresponding code used to generate each chart, a textual description, and a table that contains its numerical information. In addition, each datapoint includes question-and-answer pairs to teach the model how to correctly answer questions about the chart image.

“These additional modes of data guide the model to connect and align the different pieces of information that the chart image encodes,” Kondic says.

Data generation

To build ChartNet, the researchers created a two-step, synthetic data generation pipeline.

First, their automated system translates any pre-existing set of chart images into code. Then the system iteratively augments that code to change different aspects of each chart, such as chart type, data values, topic, colors, etc.

“We can start from a single chart that we use as a seed and come up with hundreds of augmentations of it. This is how we were able to build a dataset with more than a million diverse images,” Kondic explains.

They also incorporated an automated quality check process to ensure the synthetic data are high quality. This process verifies that the code is executable and rendered chart images are accurate and clean.

“We don’t want to just be generating diverse samples. We also want the information to be presented in a meaningful way,” she says.

ChartNet also includes a selection of chart datapoints annotated by human experts. This provides access to additional types of charts and supporting data that carry validity guarantees.

A practitioner could use the annotated data to fine-tune an existing VLM, further boosting performance for a specific application, Joshi adds.

The researchers tested ChartNet by training IBM’s Granite Vision series of models as well as several other open-source models of various sizes and evaluating them on various chart interpretation tasks. The dataset improved the accuracy of all models in chart reconstruction, chart data extraction, chart summarization, and chart question answering. 

With ChartNet, small open-source models consistently outperformed much larger  commercial models. 

“A lot of prior training datasets only focused on answering simple questions about a chart. We tried to go beyond that with ChartNet by generating data that support all aspects of robust chart understanding,” Kondic says.

In the future, the researchers plan to continue expanding ChartNet by incorporating data with added levels of complexity. They also want to draw on feedback from the research community. 

This research was funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab.

When a team of MIT students turned up at a national robotics tournament, their robot — aptly named Timbot — wouldn’t work. They’d been invited to demonstrate Timbot at the inaugural United States Governors Cup in Washington, D.C., a March Madness-like competition for high school robotics teams from all 50 states.

Troubleshooting on the fly is par for the course at robotics tournaments. Timbot had a few technical issues, mostly with Wi-Fi, so the team sat cross-legged on the floor and set to work. Meanwhile, high school students started gathering around and asking questions about wiring and subsystems. After about an hour, Timbot was up and running again, scooping up and throwing foam balls as it was designed to do.

“It actually turned into a great moment,” says first-year student Lily Sand. “We ended up tethering the robot with a long Ethernet cable, instead of using wireless, and a lot of students were like, ‘whoa, we do that too!’ It was a nice connection point.”

Leveraging a cultural touchstone for good

Connecting younger students to robotics is one of the MIT students’ goals as members of a new club, FIRSTxMIT, which launched at the beginning of the academic year. Members are all alumni of programs offered by FIRST Robotics (FIRST), a nonprofit that aims to inspire interest in STEM for K-12 students worldwide through team-based robotics programs and competitions.

FIRST has deep roots at MIT. Inventor Dean Kamen collaborated with the late MIT Professor Woodie Flowers, a pioneer in hands-on engineering design education, to establish the FIRST Robotics Competition in 1992. The competition was modeled after the novel robotics competition Flowers had developed for his iconic mechanical engineering class 2.70 (Introduction to Design), which is now 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing I).

Through FIRST, students learn about more than designing, building, and programming robots. The program emphasizes the ethos of “gracious professionalism,” a term coined by Flowers for high-quality work, respect, and cooperation, even in the context of competition. Students also build self-confidence, gain leadership experience, and hone communication skills, as well as technical expertise. 

Many FIRST alumni feel deep gratitude for the program and a strong desire to stay involved. Debbie Ang, co-founder of FIRSTxMIT, still mentors her high school’s team in New Hampshire. Yet, there are few FIRST alumni clubs at universities. Ang and co-founder Perry Han, also a sophomore, met in high school through FIRST and reconnected at MIT. “We noticed that FIRST was founded here, and yet there wasn’t anything organized on campus, even though we kept running into people who had done FIRST and still cared about the community,” she explains.

In fact, participation in FIRST is somewhat of a cultural touchstone among MIT students. MIT associate director of admissions Trinidad Carney, a liaison to FIRST Robotics, estimates that 15-20 percent of undergraduates have participated in the program.

Han and Ang collaborated with Carney to launch FIRSTxMIT, under the auspices of the Edgerton Center, to foster connections among the MIT FIRST community and provide a way for members to channel their passion for FIRST into outreach and public service. Their hunch about the untapped potential an alumni club was spot-on: the kickoff event drew 185 students, and there are about 200 on their Discord channel.

Sharing the “power of FIRST”

Now the club is off and running. They have hosted a gathering for New England FIRST alumni; collaborated with the Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Boston to launch a LEGO Robotics league; volunteered as judges at local competitions; and helped the MIT Admissions Office with outreach. Carney, who advises the club, says, “We’ve actually had other universities reach out to us to say, ‘How did MIT manage to launch a club that’s so successful and compelling?’”

One of the club’s most ambitious undertakings to date was building Timbot, in three days, during Independent Activities Period in January. Robot in 3 Days (Ri3D) is a collegiate challenge in which students build a FIRST Robotics Competition-level robot in 72 hours, a feat that would take about six weeks for a high school team. Experiential Robotics, a consortium that leverages an experiential robotics platform to promote engineering and public service, provided support for MIT’s Ri3D challenge and invited the team to act as STEM ambassadors at the Governors Cup.

In addition to the robotics competition, the two-day event brought together governors and leaders from government, education, industry, and others to underscore the crucial role that states play in supporting STEM education.

To that end, the FIRSTxMIT team demonstrated Timbot, chatted with high schoolers, staffed the MIT Admissions booth, and mingled with VIPs, sharing the value of project-based STEM enrichment opportunities like FIRST. “Having MIT students tell the story of the power of FIRST is incredibly compelling,” says Carney. “They can say: I did this in high school, it shaped who I am, and now I’m at MIT continuing to build and give back.”

A number of governors stopped by the MIT Admissions booth to chat with the students, including Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. “She talked about the importance of K-12 STEM education and was very supportive,” says Sand, FIRSTxMIT’s logistics coordinator. 

In addition to inspiring others, the MIT students drew inspiration themselves at the Governors Cup. Han recalls speaking to a state senator from Ohio, a former teacher and strong advocate for programs like FIRST. “It really showed me that, when you have people in government that are excited about STEM education, it can really go places.”

Building a better future

Looking forward, Han and Ang plan to take some time to further refine the club’s organization and future goals. Hands-on outreach figures prominently in their plans. “FIRST places a big focus on starting new teams, supporting underserved communities, and spreading awareness,” says Ang. “A lot of us feel that FIRST played a major role in shaping our academic and career paths, so we want to give that opportunity to others.”

“Part of our goal is, we want to put a robot in as many students’ hands as possible to kind of give them a sense that, STEM isn’t just reading the AP Physics C-Mechanics textbook,” Han adds. “It’s actually putting these ideas into practice and building something useful.”

They have no shortage of new ideas they are kicking around, as well. Han is particularly interested in advocating for students to earn Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program or class credit for projects like Ri3D, or for those in the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program to get leadership credit by mentoring a robotics team. He also wants to explore how to leverage FIRST alumni networks to help students with professional development.

Whatever path they take, Carney has no doubt they make an impact. She saw their potential on full display when they built Timbot.

“These students, many of whom hadn’t met before, came from all kinds of backgrounds: different schools, different regions, different life experiences,” she says. “But they worked together with respect, curiosity, and generosity. They’re collaborative, mission-driven, and passionate about making opportunities for others. They make MIT better, and they will make the future better.”

MIT engineers have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound. The design could one day provide a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.

The new device is designed as a small sticker that can be worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker send ultrasound pulses through the chest to stimulate the heart. The ultrasound waves trigger the opening of certain ion channels in heart cells, an effect the researchers amplified through genetic engineering. When the channels open, they let in calcium, which signals a heart cell to squeeze and beat. 

In experiments in the lab, the researchers applied ultrasound waves to engineered human cardiac cells and found that the pulses effectively maintained the cells’ healthy contractions. They also tested the ultrasound sticker on rats and found the device quickly, safely, and noninvasively corrected arrhythmias and restored normal, regular heart contractions. 

The team has fabricated a prototype that includes the ultrasound sticker (about the size of a postage stamp) and a small, pocket-sized device containing associated batteries and electronics. The same group previously demonstrated a sticker design that uses ultrasound to image deep organs and tissues. They now plan to combine the two approaches into one ultrasound sticker to simultaneously monitor and regulate the heart’s activity. 

“We believe you could one day have stickers on the body that could do long-term imaging deep in the body and also do stimulation for therapeutic effects, in a noninvasive closed-loop way,” says Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

Zhao and his colleagues, together with collaborators from Professor Qifa Zhou’s group at the University of Southern California (USC), have published their results in a study appearing today in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Chen Gong, together with Runze Li, Won Jun Song, and former postdocs Gengxi Lu, Shucong Li, and Hsiao-Chuan Liu. Other collaborators include researchers from Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and other groups at USC.

Sound genes

Today, around 3 million adults in the United States live with pacemakers. The small battery-powered devices are surgically implanted in a person’s chest, and act to deliver electrical impulses to regulate heart rate. Implantable pacemakers are a well-established and generally safe medical treatment that nonetheless comes with risks.

“Pacemakers are one of the most important and widely used human implants, and they have saved millions of lives,” the paper’s co-corresponding author, Gengxi Lu, says. “But they are invasive, and they make direct contact with the beating heart. The dream for many years has been noninvasive heart stimulation with ultrasound.” 

Ultrasound encompasses a range of acoustic waves that safely penetrates the body. Ultrasound waves reflect and resonate off structures in characteristic ways that allow technicians to resolve and image organs and tissues inside the body. Ultrasound can also be directed and focused to stimulate certain therapeutic effects, for instance in the brain, where scientists are exploring the use of ultrasound to treat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and other brain disorders. 

Scientists have also found that ultrasound can benefit the heart. Previous studies in animals have shown that focused ultrasound can safely activate heart cells, though the effect has been inconsistent and weak. 

Zhao and his colleagues looked to amplify ultrasound’s effects on the heart. In their new study, they applied sonogenetics, which is a relatively new approach that takes after optogenetics — a technique that involves genetically manipulating specific parts of a cell to respond to light. Similarly, sonogenetics aims to genetically engineer cells to respond to sound, including ultrasound. 

In their work to develop an ultrasound pacemaker, the team first looked to increase heart cells’ sensitivity to ultrasound, through sonogenetics. In the lab, they used standard practices to derive heart cells from embryonic stem cells, and then delivered a genetic alteration to the cells that increased their sensitivity to ultrasound. Specifically, the manipulation produced ion channels that opened more readily in response to ultrasound. 

“These channels can now ‘hear’ ultrasound better, and can open to let calcium in, which is what directly activates the cell and causes it to beat,” explains by the paper’s first author, Chen Gong. 

Sticker health

In experiments with sonogenetically engineered heart cells, the researchers found that when they exposed the cells to ultrasound, the cells beat in sync with the waves, unlike cells that were not genetically manipulated. 

In any clinical application of an ultrasound pacemaker, the team envisions that a patient could first receive a one-time injection, similar to a vaccine, that would act to genetically boost the sensitivity of cardiac cells to the pacemaker’s ultrasound waves. The injection would be a form of gene therapy — a treatment that is currently approved by the FDA to treat certain inherited conditions such as sickle cell disease and spinal muscular dystrophy.

“We think this step would be clinically translatable as a form of gene therapy that could enable noninvasive pacemakers,” Gong says.

The team then designed the core of the ultrasound pacemaker, in the form of a postage-stamp-sized sticker embedded with tiny ultrasound transducers. The sticky part of the device is made from a hydrogel material that Zhao’s group has refined over the years to adhere strongly to skin and many types of materials, while also allowing ultrasound waves to pass through without weakening. The transducers within the sticker can be tuned to generate ultrasound waves at specific frequencies. 

In experiments with rats, the researchers first administered a sonogenetic, ultrasound-boosting solution through their tails. They then adhered a miniature version of the pacemaker to the rats’ chests. When they turned the stickers on, they observed that the ultrasound quickly regulated the animals’ hearts. Some individuals with slow heart rates were brought up to a normal rate, while others with irregular heartbeats were steadied, keeping in sync with ultrasound’s “ticks.”

“We can now use low-intensity ultrasound to open ion channels in cells to have very effective heart pacing,” Gong says. “We are now making these stickers into smaller form factors, and more integrated, so they are easier to wear, more stable, and more accurate over a longer term.”

“In this paper, we demonstrated noninvasive pacemaking. However, we think this concept could be useful beyond just the heart,” Zhao says. “We believe you could one day have stickers over different parts of the body that could do long-term imaging, monitoring, and closed-loop therapeutic stimulation.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Opthamology from Research to Prevent Blindness, and the U.S. Department of War.

Balancing economic growth and environmental protection is not easy. Consider wetlands, which provide flood protection, aid water quality, and are linchpins of larger ecosystems. How can we best preserve wetlands while enhancing economic activity? 

According to a new study, one solution involves supplanting traditional conservation mandates, which require replacing affected wetlands locally, with tradeable offsets. Through this system, a developer can build on a wetland by purchasing credits representing an equivalent environmental value created by improving a wetland somewhere else in the same watershed, away from concentrated development. 

While this has largely been the approach of U.S. federal and state regulators since the mid-1990s, current regulations do not account for the flood protection benefits of wetlands. The new study finds a workable solution in an offset policy that also includes a locally varying tax on development, precisely to compensate for the increased flood risk it causes. 

In the lower 48 states of the U.S., wetlands are heavily concentrated in California and Florida, two high-population states. Through a highly granular look at Florida’s wetlands from 1995 to 2020, with a new scholarly methodology that carefully weighs local factors, the scholars estimate that development of wetlands led to $2.4 billion in net economic gains. Their alternate policy would have preserved most of these gains while also preventing about $1.6 billion in flood damage. 

“You’re retaining two-thirds of the private gains from trade,” says Daniel Aronoff PhD ’22, a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Economics and co-author of a newly published paper summarizing the study’s findings. “And the flood damages shrink by an order of magnitude, so only you’re incurring a small fraction of the flood damage while collecting that amount in increased tax revenue, which can subsidize the cost of restoration after flood damage has occurred.”

This system is neither a simple conservation mandate nor a free ride for developers. The scholars say it would provide a better way of balancing wetlands preservation and economic gains, while lowering flood risk.

“You could do this,” Aronoff says. “It’s an implementable thing. You could build a policy out of this.” 

The paper, “Conservation Priorities and Environmental Offsets: Markets for Florida Wetlands,” appears in the May issue of the American Economic Review. The authors are Aronoff, who is also a research associate at the Laboratory for Economic Analysis and Design at MIT and a research collaborator at the Digital Currency Initiative; and Will Rafey PhD ’20, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles.

No net loss — but more risk

Federal wetlands policy in the U.S. has been governed since the 1970s by a “no net loss” objective, meaning that development must be accompanied by approved actions to offset any loss of wetlands functionality. State laws have often mirrored this federal approach. The current rules work on a watershed level, enabling public and private developers to offset the impact of developing a wetland by purchasing offset credits from a “wetland mitigation bank” in the same watershed.

The researchers developed their study as an ambitious, data-rich project. They obtained comprehensive data on environmental offset credits issued, and transfers to developers from state and regional regulators; a record of offset prices from a private broker as well as state and county purchase records; maps detailing wetlands development and private property ownership; and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data on flood risk policies and claims. 

The scholars then built a detailed database of development from every wetland bank permit issued in Florida that included enhancements, land acquisition, estimated costs, and offset credit release schedules, as well as records of actual releases and sales over time. They used these data to build a dynamic model of the wetland offset market, from which they obtained their estimates of economic gains and flood risk costs.

Whereas other work has applied national data to wetlands analysis, this more granular approach allowed the scholars to conduct a locally focused examination of economic activity, floods, and policy specifically applying to Florida. 

“The functional form that has been used to estimate the relationship between wetlands and flood risk across all America is not compatible with data on wetlands and flooding in Florida,” Aronoff says. 

The study also underscores an important distinction in the kinds of offset policies that have previously been deployed. The first iteration of offset policy required a developer to restore wetlands adjacent to any wetlands area that is newly developed. A second iteration, the one still in use, allows developers to purchase offset credits — which might apply to wetlands that are not adjacent to the development in question. The latter carries with it greater risk of flood damage to developed property, as an equivalent amount of restored wetlands in a rural area will not serve as a flood buffer for as many structures. 

The proposed policy solution would levy a tax — either on offset sellers or buyers — that would equal the estimated increase in flood risk created by the development. 

“Going from the first policy iteration to the second iteration could have created a lot of value, because you have development taking place with wetlands created in the lowest-cost way,” Aronoff says. “But that gave rise to an externality: the flood risk. Because you’re creating flood risk by developing in urban areas with lots of buildings, while creating wetlands in rural areas without buildings around.”

Tuning the policy

Ultimately, that is why the empirical analysis developed by the economists shows a more optimal path using so-called Pigouvian taxes, named after 20th-century economist Arthur Pigou. These taxes add a levy when people create negative circumstances for society at large. Taxes to inhibit pollution, for instance, are Pigouvian. The modeling in the current study indicates the same concept would work effectively for wetlands policy. 

“Economics is about tradeoffs,” Aronoff says. “And this is a tradeoff. Flood risk is expensive — that’s a cost. But development creates value because it is only profitable to the extent that the end user desires it.”

Ultimately, the scholars think, implementing systems that balance factors will work better in the long run than many kinds of prohibitions on economic activity — or than allowing unrestricted activity without weighing the public good. 

“If you choose an absolute, you’re choosing one over the other in all instances,” Aronoff says. “And what is at the core of the outlook of an economist is to assume there’s a tradeoff, and the question is how do you negotiate that tradeoff in an optimal way. That’s what we are trying to get at here.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the George and Obie Schultz Fund. 

MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters. 

The system could enable the design of nimbler, more flexible small satellites, which could perform both fast, powerful maneuvers and slower, precise adjustments, depending on the mission and moment at hand.

The key to the new system is a special propellant that can power both chemical and electrical thrusters, which traditionally have required separate, bulky fuel sources. 

“If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Amelia Bruno, a former postdoc in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform.” 

Bruno is the lead author of a study appearing this week in the Journal of Propulsion and Power showing that a type of “green monopropellant” originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for use in chemical propulsion in space can also effectively power tiny “electrospray” thrusters. Electrospray thrusters are dime-sized rockets that use electric fields to charge up a liquid propellant’s particles, which are then shot into space as a thrust-generating spray.

Electrospray thrusters are extremely fuel-efficient and can perform slow and precise maneuvers, such as pushing a small spacecraft bit by bit through a long, interplanetary journey. Chemical thrusters, in contrast, require a large fuel supply to perform short and fast bursts, for instance to quickly ascend and descend, or speed up and slow down. 

Now that the MIT group has found a propellant that can fuel both chemical and electrospray thrusters, they see big potential for small spacecraft. The team is working with NASA to launch the Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission — a briefcase-sized CubeSat that will carry a chemical thruster and four electrospray thrusters, all fueled by a single propellant tank. The mission will be the first to test such a two-in-one propulsion system for small spacecraft. If it is successful, Bruno says the mission could pave the way for small satellites to explore beyond Earth’s orbit. 

“We could send CubeSats to Mars, or the asteroid belt, where they could make the journey slowly, using electrospray thrusters,” says study co-author Paulo Lozano, the Miguel Alemán Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “You could then use your chemical thrusters to quickly move to look at interesting features. You could have a lot more flexibility to do a lot more things.”

The study’s co-authors also include Matthew Corrado SM ’22, PhD ’26.

A sea of ions

Lozano’s group at MIT designs, fabricates, and tests electrospray thrusters for use in satellites that range from the size of a lunchbox to a small carry-on suitcase. Compared to conventional satellites, these microsatellites are significantly smaller and cheaper to launch into space.

But smaller spacecraft require smaller everything else, including propulsion systems. In that respect, electrospray thrusters are a good fit. The thrusters Lozano develops are about the size of a thumbnail. Each thruster sits atop a small reservoir of ionic liquid propellant. When the reservoir is connected to a battery, the battery supplies some amount of voltage that electrically charges a corresponding amount of ions in the liquid. The charged particles are then channeled out of the reservoir, through the thruster’s tips and into space as a thrust-inducing spray. 

Over the past decade, Lozano has tested many thruster designs, under varying conditions, and with various types of ionic liquid propellant — a fuel that is essentially made from salts that can remain in liquid form. 

“Ionic liquids are very stable and can even remain a liquid in space, which not a lot of materials can do,” Bruno says. “And it’s basically a sea of ions, which is why we base our technology around it, so we can pull those ions out into an electrospray.”

Bruno and Lozano have collaborated with the U.S. Air Force, which synthesized a new kind of ionic liquid propellant — the Advanced SpaceCraft Energetic Non-Toxic propellant (ASCENT) — which was being tested in chemical thrusters. Chemical thrusters are high-force propulsion systems typically associated with launching rockets and performing hard and fast maneuvers once in space. ASCENT was designed as a “green,” less toxic alternative to hydrazine, which has been the traditional fuel source for chemical propulsion and is extremely hazardous to handle. 

“ASCENT happens to be an ionic liquid mixture,” Bruno says. “And we said, hey, that’s the stuff we typically use. Theoretically, this should work. Let’s go figure out how.”

Spray and spin

In their new study, Bruno, Lozano, and Corrado tested the performance of electrospray thrusters that they fueled with ASCENT. Each thruster they used was attached to a small cube-shaped reservoir about the size of a Lego brick. They filled each reservoir with 1 gram of ASCENT, a liquid that has a viscosity similar to baby oil. They then attached a thruster to opposite sides of a CubeSat, which they set on a MagLev stand — a custom testbed that is designed to magnetically levitate a sample or device. The MagLev in Lozano’s lab is installed inside a large vacuum chamber, which the researchers can tune to mimic the conditions in space.

Over multiple experiments, the team remotely applied varying levels of voltage to activate the thrusters, which in turn produced a spray that spun the CubeSat around, like a floating, spinning top. The researchers measured the amount of thrust produced with each trial, and calculated ASCENT’s fuel efficiency as they ran the thrusters continuously over periods lasting up to 100 hours. 

In the end, they found that ASCENT was able to successfully fuel each electrospray thruster. What’s more, the propellant, which was originally intended for chemical propulsion, was just as efficient as other, conventional ionic liquids at propelling electric thrusters.

“Compared to our normal electrospray propellants, ASCENT can provide similar performance in terms of thrust,” Bruno says. “Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better.” 

Now that ASCENT has been proven to work in both chemical and electrical propulsion, she and Lozano say that a single tank of the fuel can be used to power both types of thrusters, all in a compact, two-in-one system that could fit within a small CubeSat. The team will test the idea with NASA’s Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission, which is scheduled to launch in November. 

“This will be the first time that a satellite will have a shared propellant tank,” says Lozano, who notes that in addition to long, exploratory interplanetary missions, small satellites equipped with both chemical and electrical propulsion could also be useful for missions closer to Earth, such as for weather and climate observations. 

“Say there’s a storm coming, and you’d want to deploy your constellation of small satellites to observe over one location,” he says. “You could choose to send them quickly or slowly depending on the nature of the observation. And the only way to do that is if you have two propulsion systems, which is now possible.”

This research is supported, in part, by NASA.

Within the past decade, biologists have discovered that one strategy cells use to keep their contents organized is a phenomenon known as phase separation. 

Similar to the way oil forms droplets that float in a vinegar solution, proteins inside cells can phase separate to form highly concentrated droplets that keep them organized within the cell. In a new study, MIT researchers have now shown that this droplet formation is critical for controlling the function of a class of enzymes called kinases.

The researchers found that condensing into droplets optimizes the biochemical conditions needed for kinases to catalyze reactions, allowing them to more rapidly activate cell signaling pathways. In some cases, droplet formation can even change which reactions the kinases perform. 

“Many biological molecules have this propensity to spontaneously separate. We were really interested in asking, if we have these kinases forming droplets, what is the consequence of that in the context of signaling?” says Lindsay Case, an assistant professor of biology at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Learning more about how these droplets form could help researchers design drugs that target kinases, some of which can be overactive in cancer cells.

“Understanding the chemistry of these compartments, and what molecules go into them and what molecules don’t go into them, could help us design drugs that better localize to their target of interest,” Case says.

Nicholas Lea, an MIT graduate student, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Cell Reports.

Forming droplets

Since her days as a graduate student, Case has been studying how the physical organization of molecules inside cells affects their function. As a postdoc, she began studying how phase separation might affect a signaling pathway that allows cells to sense when they’re attached to their environment, so they can respond appropriately. 

Some of the proteins in this pathway are kinases, which activate other proteins by adding phosphate groups to them. Kinases can also activate themselves through a process called autophosphorylation.

“Inside of the cell, you have these kinase molecules that are responsible for carrying a signal through the cell, and we know that the organization of these molecules changes. When the information is present, they’re organized in a different way than when the information is not present,” Case says. “We think that having the right molecules in the right place is incredibly important for the right biochemistry to occur.”

Phase separation is one of the methods that cells appear to use for this organization. The most familiar example of phase separation can be seen in a salad dressing, where oil forms droplets to minimize contact with water-based vinegar. Proteins can phase separate when they are highly concentrated, leading them to self-assemble into dense droplets floating in the cell’s cytoplasm.

Case hypothesized that this phase separation, which brings kinases together at a high density, might help cells to boost the enzymes’ activity because they are more likely to bump into and phosphorylate each other.

In this study, Case and Lea set out to test that hypothesis, focusing on an enzyme called focal adhesion kinase (FAK). This kinase, which becomes activated when cells attach to their surrounding environment, activates pro-growth and pro-survival signals. In cancer cells, this signaling pathway can go awry, allowing cells to proliferate even when they detach from their original locations.

Scientists already knew that when cells are properly attached to their environment, that adhesion signal causes FAK to accumulate at the cell membrane. In the new study, the MIT team mimicked that effect by overexpressing FAK in cells. These cells were floating freely in a solution, not attached to any surface. Even so, the high concentration of FAK caused the kinase to phase separate into droplets, which turned on the pro-growth signal.

“It was surprising that just by condensing this protein into a droplet, you can actually turn on a signaling pathway that should be turned off,” Case says. “If FAK concentration is too high, you’re always getting these droplets and you’re always signaling, regardless of what the receptors that are supposed to be controlling this are doing.” 

The findings suggest that in cancer cells, overexpression of FAK may lead to phase separation, which then helps to drive cancer progression and metastasis. 

“It may be that for some kinases, you’re not supposed to form these droplets in the cytoplasm because it leads to this always-on signal, and then the cells no longer listen to the information coming from the environment,” Case says.

Interfering with FAK’s ability to form droplets could offer a new strategy for cancer drug development, she says. 

Controlling reactions

The researchers also studied two other kinases, Mst2 and Abl. They found that these enzymes could also phase separate at high concentrations, and that this increased their activity. While phase separation of FAK in the cytoplasm may occur only in cancerous cells, for Mst2, it appears to be a strategy that healthy cells use to control a signaling pathway called Hippo, which promotes cell growth and survival.

Additionally, for both Mst2 and Abl, the researchers discovered that phase separation can lead the enzymes to phosphorylate additional targets, which may lead them to activate different signaling pathways.

“It’s not just that you’re getting faster phosphorylation, but in those cases, the patterns of what is actually getting phosphorylated were very different inside of the droplet compared to what might be happening in a non-droplet context,” Case says. “The kinase is able to phosphorylate amino acid residues beyond the set of canonical sites that have been described before.”

The researchers also found that when these droplets form, they attract high concentrations of ATP, the molecule that kinases use as a source of phosphate. This occurs because kinases tend to contain floppy sections containing many positively charged amino acids, which attract negatively charged ATP.

Using a machine-learning model, the researchers predicted that about 45 percent of the 500 kinases found in human cells would have the ability to form droplets like those seen in this study. Those kinases were also more likely to be highly positively charged, which could help them to recruit ATP into the droplets.

In future work, Case hopes to explore the possibility of designing drugs that could mimic ATP’s ability to be attracted into droplets within a cell, which could help reduce negative side effects of the drugs. 

“By localizing drugs to the compartment where your target localizes, that could reduce off-target effects by concentrating the drug with the target of interest and reducing interactions with other molecules,” Case says. 

The research was funded by a Searle Scholars Program Award, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Institutes of Health, the Royal G. and Mae H. Westaway Family Memorial Fund, and a David H. Koch Graduate Fellowship.

Cheered on by the greater MIT community, members of the Class of 2026 were honored this week for the hard work that earned them their newly minted MIT degrees.

The 2026 Commencement celebrations spanned three days filled with degree ceremonies, receptions, and reunions, at locations spread across campus. The weather ranged widely, but spirits remained high even as Wednesday’s sunny, selfie-perfect weather gave way to some rain later in the week.

Advanced Micro Devices chair and CEO Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94 gave the Commencement address at the OneMIT ceremony for all graduates, held Thursday. Undergraduates crossed the stage during their own ceremony on Friday, and throughout the three-day celebration, MIT’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing each held ceremonies to recognize their graduate students. Friday also kicked off a weekend of Tech Reunions.

As Institute Professor and School of Engineering Dean Paula Hammond told graduate students earning degrees from her school and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, “What makes MIT special isn’t just what happens underneath this dome. What makes MIT special is you.”

The following photo essay provides a snapshot of MIT Commencement activities throughout the week. (Additional recaps/photo collections are available for the School of Architecture and Planning, School of Engineering/MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences).

What distinguishes the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s Class of 2026? According to faculty and staff across the school, it’s their hearts.

“They’re big-hearted in the way they deal with each other, with their work, and with the world,” said Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P, in his opening remarks at the school’s 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony. As a nod to the class’s generosity, Sarkis announced the creation of the Class of 2026 Scholarship fund to help support incoming students.

“Education is a right, not a privilege, and this fellowship brings us closer to our goal of giving this right to every student and becoming tuition-free as a school,” said Sarkis.

The news was met with joyful and sustained applause.

The SA+P Class of 2026 represents graduates from each of the school’s departments: Architecture; Urban Studies and Planning; Media Arts and Sciences (MIT Media Lab); and the Center for Real Estate. The 206 graduates — including six with dual degrees — represent nearly every corner of the globe. Fifty-seven percent are from the United States, 10 percent are from China, and 5 percent are from India.

This year’s speaker was Alejandro Aravena, a celebrated Chilean architect whose credits include curating the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale “Reporting From the Front,” and being awarded the Pritzker Prize (2016), the most prestigious award in architecture — for which he currently serves as jury chair. Aravena leads the architectural firm ELEMENTAL, based in Santiago, Chile, with work that spans a variety of public and private projects developing novel approaches to community engagement shaping how architects and policymakers think about the built environment.

Sarkis said Aravena speaks eloquently to the breadth of fields represented in SA+P, and to the school’s values, “[from] the power of architecture and design to enable society to his innovative models of social housing to creative approaches to community engagement — be it in emergency planning after earthquakes, or in institutional buildings — and to putting architecture front and center in the discussions around the new constitution of Chile.” 

Addressing the students and their guests, Aravena shared a series of vignettes that illustrated a world at a “tipping point.” Will it land on the side of civilization, or barbarism?, he asked. One story was of his firm’s work on a project in Chile where his team encountered the “law of the jungle.” During a slum-upgrading project, two social workers from the Ministry of Housing were stalked on their way home by hired killers. With knives at their throats, they were warned never to return if they intended to interfere with the territorial power of organized crime. The message was clear: Come back, and your families will pay the price, he said. A more recent project — building a hospital for victims of sexual violence linked to the armed conflict in Colombia — had the architects questioning the level of violence that people inflict on each other.

If the “law of the jungle” was going to be the new normal, Aravena said, he needed to understand what that meant. Measuring the sizes of a prefrontal cortex — the brain’s command center that controls emotions, complex decision-making, and executive function — within the animal kingdom, humans have the largest capacity for emotions and behaviors.

“The history of humanity and the evolution of the human condition is connected,” he said. “It’s moving in the direction of the prefrontal cortex. Yet, somehow, we’re turning backwards.”

Aravena suggested the students use their newly acquired skills to work on projects that matter to others, and not to just themselves.  

“Leveling the playing field, having more people behaving and coexisting in a more even playground, is very bad news for predators,” said Aravena. “Try to use this knowledge and wisdom you have and the training you have received in common interests, and not in just the self. Let’s try to bring back decency. Let’s try to bring back kindness. Let’s try to bring back honoring the truth. And let’s join forces to make the coin fall on the most human possible side.

“Class of 2026, together, let’s make the prefrontal cortex great again,” Aravena concluded. 

“I’m originally from Moorestown, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. While my degree is in chemical engineering, I consider myself a materials scientist, and I’m passionate about using innovative materials to propel next-generation technologies. When I started my bachelor’s degree at Cornell University, I was introduced to polymers and nanotechnology and even got to partake in some meaningful industry experiences in the medical device field. While the work I did felt impactful, I felt like I lacked a sense of driving innovation, and so I decided to pursue a PhD at MIT.

My doctorate in Michael Strano’s lab has focused on a novel material at the intersection of polymers and nanomaterials. This material, called 2DPA-1, is like a combination of graphene, the strongest and most conductive material, with Kevlar, which is what makes up bulletproof vests. My thesis has been pivotal in establishing the characterization tools for this material so that future researchers can optimize its properties for different applications. Going forward, I’ve signed an offer letter with a startup that is making portable nuclear reactors for areas without stable grid electricity. I’ll work on various problems surrounding the materials that make up the reactors. 

I always knew that I wanted my dog, Vinny, to have a doctoral gown for graduation. He’s been with me throughout my entire PhD and has been a pivotal member of my research group, helping everyone by being cute and reducing their stress. I couldn’t find any specific vendors online, and I love learning crafts to make custom items (crochet, knitting, and embroidery to make my own clothes; bookbinding to make my own journals and my physical thesis; and pottery to make my own mugs and dishes), so I thought: Why not try to sew a gown for him? I watched and read a few tutorials, used the sewing machines at Metropolis, and hand-sewed the finishing touches. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and could keep working on it, but I know that Vinny looks cute regardless of what he wears. I am so delighted and grateful that Vinny was part of my ceremony. He’s been such a pivotal part of my PhD journey, and my life as a whole. I can’t imagine a finer end to my time at MIT!” 

—Michelle Quien PhD ’26, graduate of the Department of Chemical Engineering

After years of study and instruction, MIT’s Class of 2026 received one last piece of guidance this afternoon en route to picking up their diplomas and starting the next chapter of their lives.

“Run toward the hardest problems,” said Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, the chair and CEO of semiconductor powerhose Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the featured Commencement speaker at today’s OneMIT ceremony. “Hard problems really teach you what you’re capable of.”

Su’s career as one of the world’s leading technology executives has long been intertwined with MIT. She holds three degrees in electrical engineering from the Institute, along with another distinction: Building 12, home of the MIT.nano facility, was named after her in 2022. 

A central theme of Su’s address involved learning by taking on difficult challenges. At MIT, as she put it, she acquired “not the confidence that I would always know the answer, but the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer, I could figure it out.”

Speaking before a large and appreciative audience in MIT’s Killian Court, Su also urged MIT’s new class of graduates to lead purposeful lives, with a sense of the greater good and an eye toward addressing societal challenges. 

“The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools,” Su said. “It needs people who know what to use them for. People with a sense of purpose. Judgment. Courage.”

Science: Curiosity on a Mission

The OneMIT ceremony is an Institute-wide Commencement event with a featured speaker and other traditional elements. MIT’s Commencement week also includes specific ceremonies in which undergraduates, and graduate students in the Institute’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, walk across stage to receive their diplomas. 

After Su spoke, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth delivered a charge to the graduates, discussing the Institute’s core values, especially the ideas of excellence and curiosity. She also emphasized MIT’s role in making advances that benefit the nation and society at large, from medicine to energy, agriculture, and other areas of need. 

“A few of those values that will serve you wherever you go,” Kornbluth observed, while noting MIT’s commitment to “the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence” in its work. She observed that the Institute lives this ethos, by spurning legacy admissions and “back-door” admissions for donors’ families, among other merit-based practices.

“MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps,” Kornbluth said, offering that “curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel — and that fact is enormously important for our society as a whole.”

She added: “At MIT, we know that curiosity-driven science is the path to new knowledge,” Kornbluth said. “The kind that spawns world-changing innovations. Curiosity is the force that transforms deadly cancers into treatable conditions. That turns fusion energy from a dream to a reality. That uncovers new ways to grow more food using less of every resource.”

Indeed, Kornbluth emphasized, “We like to say that science is curiosity on a mission.”

“The responsibility to work with others”

MIT students earned a total of 1,165 undergraduate and 2,817 graduate degrees this academic year. 

The OneMIT ceremony began with the annual alumni parade, which has come to feature graduates from the 50th anniversary class. In this case the undergraduate class of 1976 had the honors, entering with processional entry music from the Killian Court Brass Ensemble, conducted by Kenneth Amis. 

In another annual component of the OneMIT ceremony, Thea Keith-Lucas, the Chaplain to the Institute, delivered the invocation. The Chorallaries of MIT sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at the outset of the event. Near the conclusion, they sang the school song, “In praise of MIT,” and another Institute anthem, “Take Me Back to Tech.”

By tradition, speakers at the OneMIT event also included Teddy Warner, president of MIT’s Graduate Student Council, and Heba Hussein, president of the undergraduate class of 2026.

“As MIT graduates, we have the responsibility to work with others to generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges,” Warner said. “We cannot solve global problems without global cooperation or with limited techniques. I implore everyone to apply the cooperative, interdisciplinary skills used every day at MIT to effect positive change in all areas of the global community.”

In her speech, Hussein reflected on the many ways her classmates supported each other during their time at MIT. “As we move forward, I urge you to continue to carry care,” Hussein said. “Care for our work, for each other, and for the people far beyond MIT whose lives are connected by what we choose to do.

Following the students’ remarks, Stephen DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, president of the MIT Alumni Association, issued a welcome to the new graduates. 

MIT: “Where I really learned to solve problems”

For her part, Su recounted that when she first came to campus, she was “pretty sure I was good at math.” Then, drawing laughs from the audience, she recalled stepping into two MIT first-year courses, 6.001 and 6.002. 

“Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math,” Su said. 

She stuck with it, and, as she told the crowd today, “Along the way, I started believing in myself. … What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor device physics.” Referring to MIT’s enduring motto of “mens et manus,” or “mind and hand,” Su underscored the importance of both thinking through problems and working to solve them in practical terms. 

“When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto,” Su said. “Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT so special. MIT teaches you to think deeply. But it also teaches you to build. To test ideas. To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work. And over time, you start believing that you can solve problems that once felt impossible. I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus.”

Su’s remarks specifically credited the mentorship of MIT electrical engineer Dimitri Antoniadis, one of her PhD advisors, who today is the Ray and Maria Stata Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in whose lab she worked as a doctoral candidate. 

“That was where I really learned how to solve problems,” Su said. 

After receiving her PhD from MIT, Su worked at Texas Instruments; IBM; and Freescale Semiconductor. In 2012, she joined AMD, which she has helped revitalize as a global leader in the semiconductor space. In 2014, she was named president and CEO of the company. Under her guidance, AMD has both grown and diversified its products, with expanding reach in high-performance computing, among other areas. 

Su has received many awards and honors in her career, including the IEEE’s Robert Noyce Medal in 2021; she was the first woman to be awarded the honor. 

In her remarks, Su referenced the many technology advances of recent decades, and noted the potential for new changes due to artificial intelligence. Su outlined her hope that AI can “accelerate discovery in every field,” including medicine and health care, suggesting it could help assemble more information than ever in valuable ways.

“This I think is the promise of AI at its best,” Su said. “It makes each of us more capable. Medicine. Science. Energy. Climate.”

At the same time, Su observed, “Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like.” Rather, she noted, people do: “For everything AI can do, AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It can’t make the hard judgments when the data is not there. It can’t take responsibility for the outcome. These are actually our responsibilities. And they matter more now than ever.”

“The commitment to act ethically”

In her charge to the graduates, Kornbluth also encouraged the MIT class of 2026 to  apply their knowledge and skills in socially beneficial, responsible ways.

“I mentioned excellence and curiosity, two of MIT’s core values,” Kornbluth said. “But I hope we also hold, together, another core value: the commitment to always act ethically, with integrity, and with consideration for our fellow human beings.”

She added: “I have no doubt that … with your uncommon talent, you can do it! And if you keep that goal in sight, I know you will do great things for the world. Congratulations — and warmest best wishes to all of you for a happy life and a fulfilling career.”

Below is the text of Lisa Su’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.

Good afternoon.

President Kornbluth, Chairman Gorenberg, trustees, faculty, families, friends … and most importantly, the MIT Class of 2026.

Congratulations.

You earned this. 

Standing here feels different than I expected.

I've given a lot of talks over the years … but this one is personal. And as Murphy’s Law would have it, I somehow managed to lose my voice this week … so please bear with me if my voice sounds a little rough.

I came to MIT in the fall of 1986. My parents dropped me off at Next House. I was 17 years old. Born in Taiwan, raised in Queens … and pretty sure I was good at math.

Then I walked into 6.001 and 6.002.

Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math.

I remember staring at those first problem sets thinking … man, these are super hard.

I had never really pulled all-nighters until freshman year …  it was a new experience, but it was a lot of fun doing it together with your classmates. 

MIT has this incredible way of pushing you further than you thought you could go.

You wrestled with the problem.

You blew up a circuit or two.

And then, somehow … the thing worked.

And suddenly, you realized you could build something real.

And, that’s when I started feeling like an engineer.

One of the best parts of MIT is UROP.

The opportunity, as an undergraduate, to work on real research.

That changed my life.

My first UROP was in Professor Hank Smith’s lab in Building 39 … making X-ray lithography mask blanks for a graduate student.

To be clear, at the time I had absolutely no idea what that actually meant.

But I got to put on my first bunny suit, walk into the clean room, and start building devices on little 2-inch wafers.

I learned very quickly to be careful because those wafers were delicate, and I definitely did not want to be responsible for breaking them.

I ran a bunch of experiments. Most of them didn’t work the way we expected. So, we adjusted. And tried again.

It was the coolest thing ever.

For the first time, I wasn’t just learning about technology in a classroom. I was part of a team trying to discover something new.

I remember thinking: wow, we can build things this small?

Things tiny enough to fit on a die the size of a coin … but powerful enough to change the world.

And that is when I fell in love with semiconductors.

Later, I had the privilege of working with Professor Dimitri Antoniadis, who became my PhD advisor.

That was where I really learned how to solve problems.

I remember spending weeks in the clean room fabricating devices, then bringing my wafers up to the test lab, only to discover they didn’t behave the way I expected at all.

So, I’d go back to Dimitri’s office, and we’d figure out what experiment we should try next.

Looking back, that was probably where I grew the most at MIT.

Because little by little, I went from a new grad student learning about the field…to someone doing original research and actually contributing something new to the field. 

And along the way, I started believing in myself.

Not the confidence that I would always know the answer.

But the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer yet…I could figure it out. 

What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor physics.

Mens et manus.

Mind and hand.

When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto.

Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT special.

MIT teaches you to think deeply.

But it also teaches you to build.

To test ideas.

To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work.

And over time, you start believing you can solve problems that once felt impossible.

I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus.

When I joined IBM, I found myself starting all over again.

IBM had hundreds of thousands of employees. I was 25 years old wondering how I could possibly make a difference in a company that big.

But I learned something important very quickly: engineering doesn’t care how old you are.

It cares whether your ideas work.

And one of my mentors told me something that I’ve never forgotten:   

Run toward the hardest problems.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. 

But over time, I realized this was the best advice I ever received.

Hard problems teach you what you're capable of. 

Fast forward a bit … 12 years ago, I got a chance to put that lesson to the test.

I had the opportunity to become CEO of AMD.

AMD had enormous potential, but the company had been through some tough years.

Some of my mentors thought taking the job was risky.

But for me, this was my dream job.

This was what I’d been training for all those years.

The opportunity to work at the bleeding edge of technology on problems that really mattered.

The first thing we had to figure out was what we wanted to be when we grew up.

We made a long-term bet that high-performance computing would be the most important technology of the future.

We gave our talented team the room to think big. 

Over the next several years, we built technology to enable the most powerful computers in the world.

And, through all of it, I used every skill that MIT ever taught me … And then some. 

I call it the engineer’s instinct. 

The ability to face what seemed like an unsolvable problem, break it down, and methodically work through it step by step.

But, at AMD, I learned something else. 

The engineer’s instinct is even more powerful when it becomes shared by a team. 

And the greatest satisfaction of my career has been bringing people together to do something more than any of us thought was possible.

Which brings me to today.

Over the last few decades, we’ve experienced several major technology shifts.

The internet changed how we communicate.

Mobile computing changed how we live.

Cloud computing changed how we work.

And now we are at the beginning of the AI wave.

To me, AI is different from those earlier technology waves. 

It is not just a tool that can help us do things faster. It is deeper than that. 

It has the potential to accelerate discovery in every field and help us solve problems we have never been able to solve before.

To make it personal, one of the areas that excites me most is medicine and healthcare. 

We’ve all experienced firsthand what it feels like when someone you love is sick.

And even with incredible doctors and the best care, you realize how hard it is for any one person to bring together all of the knowledge that exists in the world to help in that critical time of need. 

AI can help us change that. 

It can help doctors and researchers bring the world’s best expertise to each patient … and deliver care with the best chance of a successful outcome.

That is the promise of AI at its best.

It does not replace people.

It makes each of us more capable.

Medicine. 

Science. 

Energy. 

Climate. 

We may discover more in the next ten years than we have in the last thirty.

Now let me be clear. 

Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like. 

People do.

For all the promise of AI …

AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving.

It cannot make the hard judgment calls with imperfect information.

It cannot take responsibility for the outcome.

These are our responsibilities.

And they matter more now than ever. 

That is why this is such an extraordinary moment to graduate from MIT.

Because the world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools.

It needs people who know what to use them for.

People with a sense of purpose. 

Judgment.

Courage. 

People who look at a hard problem and say: I know this is important, and we can figure this out.

And that is exactly who you have become here. 

So here is what I want to leave you with.

I am fortunate in many ways.

I am fortunate to have great parents.

I received an extraordinary education.

I have had the chance to work with great people.

But I also believe I’ve been very lucky in my career.

When people ask me for career advice, I often tell them: work hard … but also understand that luck matters.

And, over time, I’ve come to believe that the best people find ways to make their luck.

Luck is not just being in the right place at the right time.

It is taking the risk to work on something hard. 

It is challenging yourself.

Choosing problems at the edge of what you know.

Surrounding yourself with people who make you better.

And believing that, yes … you can change the world.

So be ambitious about the problems you choose.

Run toward the hardest ones.

And trust your engineer’s instinct.

That is how you make your luck. 

I want to take a moment to acknowledge all the families and loved ones here in the audience today.

None of these graduates got here alone.

Thank you for believing in them, supporting them, and helping them reach this moment. 

This achievement belongs to you too. 

And to the Class of 2026…

Remember … somewhere in the years ahead, you’re going to walk into another room where you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.

You’ve done this before.

Go figure it out.

As one MITer to another … I am incredibly honored to be here with you today.

Congratulations, Class of 2026.